Turning a new page in Maryland

[dan104]

Hi all I am a 71-year-old software engineer, trained in aerospace. So basically, a senior nerd. I work full time in the cyber world and after flirting with the ideal for years in Sept I bought a ’77 Columbia 8.7 which was in great shape just outside of Annapolis. Prior to that I had been crew for friends back in my 40’s. Prior to the buy I went through US Sailing certification courses and while on a class I meet a guy who had just bought his boat off of Craigslist at great price so I started looking. Within 3 weeks I bought a Cal 31 project boat, cleaned it up and realized it would take 6 months to get it ready to travel, so bought the Columbia and sold the Cal (it sold in less than 8 hours after listing).

My son and I have been out almost every weekend on the Chesapeake Bay, every trip we learn something new but even single handing her is easy, not too big but very comfortable. Come summer I plan to cruise the bay one overnight weekend at a time.


BTW: I built a RaspberryPi based chart plotter that displays on a 15" screen and runs off a cellphone recharge battery (15 hrs at a charge) and am linking it to the autohelm tiller to make single handing smoother.

[Cotemar]

Welcome aboard the CF dan104.
You really know how to have fun and its sounds like your brilliant also.

[tkeithlu]

That's one way around chartplotter problems - build your own. Welcome. Now, If I could just persuade you to write the code to get OpenCPN to tile print charts.....

[dan104]

I am using OpenCPN as a base, this weekend I am writing a background service to upload the logs when it see's a wifi connection it knows (there is one in the Marina). So when I am docking my sail for the day gets posted to my servers @ home.

Next up is either SeaTalk or Nea 0183 The Pi has built in Wifi and a 422/485 interface bd is less that $20 so I might go that way. The objective is to collect wind dir/speed, GPS speed/dir to see how I am doing sails wise.

I started doing analytic on my house when I built is 8 years ago and now I have live data on heating/cooling that has been tuned to drive the geo system and keep the house just right for the least $'s. It is online @ Pat and Dan's New Home @ 217 Stonington Road if your interest. (Also boat pics can be found there also if you look around