As the Raspberry Pi in its numerous kinds continues to flow into the wild by the thousands, it’s fascinating to see its user base expand outside beyond the hacker neighborhoods. One group of people who have actually likewise started taking a taste to it is sailing lovers. [James Conger] is one such sailor, and he developed his own AIS made it possible for chart plotter for a fraction of the cost of comparable industrial units.

Automatic Recognition System (AIS) is a GPS tracking system that utilizes transponders to transfer a ship’s position data to other ships or receiver stations in an area. This is utilized for crash avoidance and by authorities (and hobbyists) to watch on shipping traffic, and permit stricken vessels to be found easily. [James]’ Do It Yourself chart plotter overlays the received AIS information over marine charts on a great huge display. A Raspberry Pi 3B , AIS Receiver Hat, USB GPS dongle and a comprises the core of the system. The entire setup cost about $350 The Pi runs OpenCPN, an open source chart plotter and navigation software package that [John] says is rivals most business software. As the majority of Pi users will know the SD card is typically a weak spot, so it’s most likely worth having a backup SD card with all the software application already installed just in case it stops working throughout a trip.

We’ve seen AIS receiver stations built utilizing the RTL-SDR, along with a number of projects around the AIS equivalent in air travel, ADS-B Take a look at [John]’s video after the break.