December 18, 2020  Cloud Service is Released

A free service to support our Ethernet and Wi-Fi products offers online tracks visualization, live regatta tracking, unlimited data storage, data sharing and export.

Cloud Service with tracks

The Cloud Service was introduced at the end of 2019 as an "online backup" for sailing data gathered by our NMEA 2000 gateways and routers. If an internet connection is accessible, data can be automatically uploaded to the cloud, and user can get access from home to download a fishing track, or spreadsheet with weather conditions, etc.

Some users monitor their vessels in the marina or at anchorage. Uploaded data contains not only position and depth, but also wind speed, atmospheric pressure, state of digital switching equipment, tanks, battery charge and current, and engine data (see the full list here).

After a year of testing, we are proud to release it. It does not require any subscription, it is totally free. You only need to purchase one of our gateways (NMEA 2000 Wi-Fi Gateway, NMEA 2000 Ethernet Gateway) or routers (NMEA 2000 Wi-Fi Router) to use it.

Displaying of Tracks

This is the main feature of the release. In the lower left corner, the slider can rewind the timeline, and clicking on the clock arrows rewinds the timeline to the start, middle or end of the next or previous track.

The Service loads the last 1000 points for each vessel to view online (you can export all your data in GPX format to see your tracks on PC, or upload to chart plotter or other web service). In the top right corner, you can opt to display each track's points; clicking to the point opens the popup with the vessel name and time of the point. To view all data associated with the point, you should position a vessel on it using slider and click on the vessel icon (as shown in the picture in the header of the article). The vessel's popup content is updating during playback.

Track's point pop-up

Figure 1. Track's point pop-up

To replay the track, rewind it to the start and click "Play" in the lower right corner. It is recommended to enter full screen mode with the help of the button in the left top corner under + and — buttons. We created the demo with 3 vessels, which are sailing at the same time, but actually the number of vessels in an account or on the "secret page" with shared vessels is unlimited. The playback speed depends on map scale.

Sharing and Regatta Tracking

The next great feature is sharing and re-sharing. You can share vessels by "secret URL" or to person (who has an account, which is free even if you don't have any of our products). In the second case, you can allow a person to re-share your vessel's data to another person or by secret URL. Re-shared boat cannot be re-shared again (only 2 levels of "friends"). When the owner reduces the time interval of the share, re-shares will be reduced according to the new settings. When the owner removes the "Allow re-share" flag, all re-shares are deleted.

This feature supports sharing all boats in a regatta committee account, and they can re-share boats to a single page (and limit the time by regatta time) to allow all participants to see the race in real time or to replay the race later. They can even re-share boats multiple times to get different races on different pages. And, of course, the data can be exported in spreadsheet format (.CSV) or as tracks (.GPX) to analyze or view your data on PC.

If you are a regatta organizer, we are interested in offering our products with a bulk discount to get the data of real races and analyze your user experience. We have no limitations on data storage, etc. If all devices are linked to your account (or shared before the race), you will easily be able to check the setup and vessel's equipment before the race online. Wi-Fi devices can be configured for use with a mobile access point placed on the committee's boat, and all data will be gathered at the start and finish, even at a distance.

What's Next?

The limitation of 1000 points per vessel in the online viewer will be removed in the next version. We are also working on online reports and alerts. The data collected contains the state of digital switching equipment, and clear that user should be able to specify that Channel #1 of Bank #1 is the bilge pump and receive an email with an alert when the SOG is about zero and the bilge pump is working. Or to receive an alert when the engine's revolutions are too high, so you can call your renters.

Future versions of firmware will have more data sets, to choose one which is more suitable for your boat. We are thinking about some paid functions for fleet management, but all existing functionality will remain free of charge, and it will be implemented at the end of 2021 or at 2022.

Click here to see the demo with three vessels. To learn more about Cloud Service, please, visit: https://cloud.yachtd.com/

 

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