For years, I’ve been operating a Raspberry Pi with an ADS-B receiver to trace and submit details about close by airplanes to a number of web sites which mixture the information. It’s neat to see what airplanes my little Pi can see. And whereas ADS-B is turning into necessary in airplanes. boats have their very personal system known as AIS. It supplies a lot of the identical knowledge — place, monitor, pace, boat sort/identify, and so on. Nevertheless, there haven’t been that many simply accessible AIS trackers to play with. Now the dAISy FeatherWing and dAISy Mini AIS Receiver (heh, see what they did there with the identify?) can be found and designed to be straightforward to combine into new or present tasks.
Whether or not you merely wish to see what boats are in your space, or you’ve got a necessity to trace particular automobiles in an space (say, as a ship rental firm), you possibly can rapidly arrange and customise AIS reception with these boards. They’ve glorious dual-channel AIS receivers that help all official AIS frequencies, in addition to a low-noise amplifier front-end to assist enhance weak alerts. They output knowledge in a regular NMEA format (anybody aware of GPS may have seen NMEA earlier than). The format known as NMEA AIVDS and is extensively documented.
The complete board will be managed by way of I2C, and NMEA knowledge will be learn from a UART at 38400 baud. Alternatively, all knowledge will be learn out over I2C, which is likely to be quicker relying in your software. And the boards are fairly power-efficient — even with the LNA working, they devour effectively underneath 100mA. With the LNA disabled, it will get all the best way all the way down to 35mA, which at 3.3V is just 115mW! Fairly good for a top quality RF receiver. The documentation for each boards appears to be like glorious, which is at all times a great signal that the designer cares in regards to the finish consumer!
The FeatherWing is, after all, utterly appropriate with Adafruit’s line of Feather boards. The dAISy Mini is an analogous dimension, however with customary 0.1″ headers, or alternatively a JST-GH connector appropriate with many flight controllers, in case you wish to obtain AIS out of your drone!
