The goal of SailBits is to tell a story about how technology and sailing work together, to share ideas about projects, and help others learn from the experience.
I have decided to move to a power boat after years of sailing. The decision was a hard one, but also an exciting one as it will enable more projects and testing on a bigger platform.
Setting up the MikroTik Groove to boost WiFi on your boat can be daunting. With a few quick steps you can get the Groove up and running quickly on your network.
Due to weight and features, I decided to convert my sailboat power system to LiFePO4. This article covers the design which settled on Victron components.
Since as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten motion sick on airplanes, in cars, and on boats. I have tried many different solutions to help reduce how sick I get, and the one that has worked for 15+ years for me reliably and easily is the ReliefBand.
Grace came with a factory prop when I purchased her – it was OK, but after 3 years of using that prop, I felt that I could get better speed and potentially other benefits.
In the last year I have had a number of issues with items in or on Grace’s mast. During a recent trip to Blake Island, the anchor light stopped working, and that was the last straw. It was time to dig deeper into fixing all of the issues.
I’ve written a lot about my boat network, and in particular, Peplink products that offer a ton of functionality and features. For the last 6 months, I have been playing with configurations and hardware that cost less, but still provide flexibility and features that more expensive solutions offer.
For years I have had a dedicated linux machine on my sailboats centered around remote monitoring and stats gathering. I have a fairly well developed set of tools from SignalK, Zabbix, Grafana and others that help keep an eye on the boat while I am on board, and away. I have been using a Raspberry Pi computer to enable this, but in the last few months it has proven to be too underpowered to keep up. My search began for a better solution…
This last week I took Grace out on the water twice after a ton of winter projects. The first time was a beautiful, warm day with wind and real sailing. The second time was the rainiest April day on record in 22 years in Seattle, and turned out quite a bit different.
For the last year or so, I have wanted to build a community focused on marine electronics, networking and technology on boats. In recent discussions with my industry peers at Panbo, I realized they were updating their site, and we thought it would be great to collaborate on a dedicated community forum for this purpose.