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douwefokkema / AutoTrackRaymarine_pi

Follow a route on OpenCPN using a Raymarine Evolution pilot
GNU General Public License v3.0
14 stars 6 forks source link

Basic OpenCPN User Manual - Nmea 2000 Autopilots #43

Open rgleason opened 5 months ago

rgleason commented 5 months ago

Douwe, can you please review this page and advise regarding any textual changes, removals, additions that are needed? This is discussing a somewhat generic setup, and perhaps we should also have links to all of the Nmea2000 autopilots to help the user.

Your thoughts about this section would be very helpful. Thanks.

https://opencpn.org/wiki/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=opencpn:manual_basic:set_options:connections:autopilot

dwynalda commented 5 months ago

I've been meaning to comment on this plugin for some time. I've now been using the plugin in Windows for 6200 miles (more on than off) and it has made my travels so much better. I always watch to see if my many charts agree with the route it's taking and I, of course, create the routes using tools before each day. We have traveled the Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Tombigbee, Gulf Intracoastal, crossed the Gulf of Mexico (twice) once to Clearwater and once to Marathon Key. We have since traveled the Intracoastal from Florida to the Chesapeake, down Delaware Bay, up the New Jersey coast, through Nee York City, down the Long Island Sound and back, and up the Hudson River and part way through the Erie Canal. We've used it extensively and it's made the travel so much better...

It took some tweaking to get the plugin dialed in but now it follows routes at 8-12mph very well, wanders very little and makes my day much more enjoyable so I can do other things while keeping a general eye on all of the instruments. Great plugin. Better I think in my config than the chart plotters integrate with the autopilot....

Thanks for building this. It's awesome.

I've also used the raspberry pi version on a pi4 and it functioned but I find the windows version of opencpn to be better. The Linux UI over vnc is a bit challenged (even though the plugin works). I might try the pi again when I get back to Michigan using a pi 5.

douwefokkema commented 5 months ago

Rick, I feel your text covers an potentially broad subject very well. It is hard to improve your text without making it long and complex, I would keep it as it is. Broadening the subject to other autopilots than Raymarine would mean adding new plugins, or may be better generalize the the existing AutoTrackRaymarine for other pilots. But this would mean deciphering the internal commands of these pilots, which can only be done by someone having such a pilot. I think we just have to wait until some hacker will dive into this.