Sailor Jim Offers a Tour of a Raspberry Pi-Powered Boat, Driven by the Bareboat Necessities OS

Semi-pseudonymous YouTuber and sailor "jimdinthed" has showcased a Raspberry Pi-powered boat-board computer designed to offer navigation and autopilot functionality — running a custom Linux-based operating system dubbed Bareboat Necessities OS.

"[I use] a Raspberry Pi computer on a sailboat," Jim explains in the introduction to the walkthrough video, "which gives me a free chart plotter with powerful navigation capabilities. [I also use] Pypilot Auto Pilot software and hardware, which does an amazing job of steering the boat."

The use of a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer aboard boats, whether for navigation, piloting, communications, or simple entertainment, is nothing new. Typically, however, it relies on roll-your-own software, meaning plenty of trial and error and no two solutions ever being quite the same — making troubleshooting and community solution sharing a challenge.

Jim's variant is different, thanks to a project designed to take the guesswork out of deploying a Raspberry Pi on a boat: Bareboat Necessities OS. "Bareboat Necessities Operating System […] bundles all [the] needed software and so much more into a single package you can download for free to an SD card," Jim explains.

More properly termed BBN Marine Linux OS for Raspberry Pi 4 the operating system, which started life as a fork of Frederic Guilbault's LysMarine, is designed specifically for the requirements of a boat computer — complete with built-in support for a range of marine radios, sensor integration, a touchscreen-friendly user interface, and more.

"With BBN OS you can build a central boat computer meeting your needs," project maintainer Mikhail Grushinskiy explains. "All on [the] low power consuming Raspberry Pi with [the] flexibility of adding countless choices of sensors to talk to all boat systems, Internet, local Wi-Fi, cameras, NMEA network, and a system able to decode marine radio protocols. BBN OS is free and open source. It is based on commonly used community supported open source projects such as SignalK, PyPilot, OpenCPN, and others."

Jim's full walkthrough of his own BBN OS computer is now available on YouTube; BBN Os itself is available to download from the official website as a 2.8GB compressed SD card image; its installation scripts are published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.