BoatBuddy Turns a Raspberry Pi and GPS Breakout Into a Fully-Featured Offline Boat Cockpit System
Built around a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ or better plus an Adafruit GPS breakout, BoatBuddy packs in the features without sinking the budget.
Pseudonymous maker "Andy arm358" has put together an open source Raspberry Pi-powered cockpit display system for boaters, offering everything from navigation to tide tables as a web app accessible from any smartphone or tablet via Wi-Fi: BoatBuddy.
"I made this cockpit/boat display as a way for me to view my location, speed, and tide tables while out on the water," Andy explains. "Self-hosted directly from the Pi — no internet connection required! All you have to do is connect to the network, navigate to boatbuddy.live, and your display is ready for you on your smartphone."
The software's feature list is impressive: It offers a navigational map with location and optional history, heading, depths, buoys, and recommended track; a speedometer based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data; a tide table with high and low tides for the next eight periods; and a Bluetooth receiver, so you can hook the hardware up to an amplifier and stream your favorite tunes.
Speaking of hardware, the project is designed to be low-cost: BoatBuddy runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, Raspberry Pi 4, or Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — the latter lacking the analog audio output requires for the Bluetooth streaming functionality but otherwise compatible — with an Adafruit GPS breakout soldered to protoboard or wiring to link it to the Raspberry Pi's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
"Any Raspberry Pi less powerful [than these] is not recommended," Andy notes, "due to the overhead of the data smoothing algorithm."
Andy has indicated that it would be possible to expand the system to include throttle control via the unused pins of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO header, but notes that he won't be adding such functionality himself: "I do not want that kind of liability," he writes.
Full details, along with a pre-generated microSD card image and manual installation instructions, are available on the project's GitHub repository under an unspecified open source license; additional information is available in Andy's Reddit thread.