Thursday, November 19, 2015

Monitor the Boat, remotely

With a FONA connected on the Raspberry PI (where the NMEA Console is running), you can remotely monitor what's going on.
Sending a '?' returns the menu, all subsequent available commands are 1 or 2 character long.

The feature has been implemented - as usual - as a UserExit. This UserExit is in the Desktop repo, the FONA Java interface is here.
Add the following parameter to the command line:
 -ue:olivsoftdesktopuserexits.FONAUserExit

Just by sending an SMS, you can retrieve the data read by the Raspberry PI on board, like True Wind Speed, Battery Voltage, Air and Water Temperature, etc, all you need is a smart phone that can send and receive SMSs.

That sounds promising...

This assumes that the boat is docked in a place where there is SMS coverage, of course. I'm working on an Internet version, with a Particle Photon, or an ESP8266...