First of all , sorry for my bad english ...
The boats are very different from each other, as are the styles of the captains who lead them: there is the loner, the regatta man and who enjoy the journey without considering speed at all. This does not mean that having a reference, and therefore a diagram of how our boat proceeds according to the weather conditions, allows us to better plan our routes with more safety.
What I propose is the use of a free software Sailboat Polar Chart Builder very easy to use which, with the help of your onboard GPS (or Water sensor if present) and your wind station, will record the boat's performance for you and compile a file with the polar of the boat (CSV) to be used in other planning software or you can print your polar chart to always have it at hand.
At the moment the software is released in BETA version completely free of charge and therefore all your feedback is more than appreciated.
note: The data displayed in the image are not true as they are obtained from a simulation.
How does it work.
Sailboat Polar Chart Builder collect the data coming from a connection (TCP) on which the NMEA messages travel by taking the important ones in order to plot the polar chart which are:
WIMWV - this type of message contains the intensity and direction of the wind data relative to boat.
GPRMC - the message contains data relating to speed and position of the boat.
What you need to do is connect to a TCP server that can provide such data (for example an outgoing connection from OpenCPN) and begin collecting data from the boat for a long enough period to be able to have the amount of information necessary to create a detailed polar chart of the boat.
Requirements
At the moment the software has been tested to work only on the Windows 10/11 operating system and does not require any particular performance from the PC.
In the future, a Mobile App could be created that does the same job but more affordable for everyone.
Tutorial. How to use.
The first thing to do is to have software that provides wind and gps data, in this tutorial we will use OpenCPN.
First of all, let's create an outgoing connection from OpenCPN where we will publish all the NMEA messages and therefore also the messages coming from our wind and GPS station:
It is important to enter the IP 0.0.0.0 in the network address which indicates to openCPN that it must be a Server to which our software will have to connect.
Once this is done we can start our software and configure the connection to our server:
In box 1 shown in the image above we must put the IP address of our server (e.g. where OpenCPN resides), if our software runs on the same machine we can write localhost and in the Port Number field we will put the same port number used by the our server (eg 10112) at this point we can click on the Connect button which, if all goes well, will change its wording to Disconnect (see first image). We are now ready to receive the data we need.
Box 2 of the image above shows the section where the acquisition of data arriving from the instruments is managed.
First of all we choose the interval with which these data are collected, too small interval can collect data too quickly respect to variations of navigation conditions, a good compromise is to set 60 to 120 seconds as an interval for each acquisition, if you provide for long periods of navigation this value can also be set much higher.
Once the interval has been set, we can press the START button to start the acquisition and if everything works as it should, the "Number of measures" counter should begin to increase its value. It is important that the acquisitions are stopped when you intend to moor, anchor or in general not to use the sails of the boat.
Also from box 2 it is possible, through the SAVE, LOAD and RESET buttons, respectively
save the "raw" data acquired on a file and then resume the measurements at another time,
load the previously saved acquisitions to be able to integrate them with the new ones arriving from the server,
reset and then delete all the acquired data that the software keeps in memory.
When we have a considerable number of data: that is, when we have acquired data of the boat in all speeds and for different wind intensities we can proceed (in box 3 of the image) to the data analysis to build our graph and our file csv with polars.
We first proceed in choosing the intervals between one wind speed and another and immediately afterwards it is possible to generate the graph through the CALCULATE button.
Here you have 2 possible choices:
print the graph obtained through the PRINT button
or create the file with the polars in CSV format that you can use with your planning software: one above all qtVlm.
Before using the file it is necessary to look at its content, if inside there are values marked as null then it will be necessary to integrate by making other detections or alternatively add manually the missing values.
04/01/23 New release
In addition to fixing some bugs, here are some of the new features:
- It is now possible to expand the application to full screen with the consequent enlargement of the polar graph for better consultation.
- Texts have been introduced that describe the connection/disconnection and data acquisition status more clearly.
Installation
Download the software from this link:
Those who do not have a DropBox account can still download the file by clicking at the top left on DOWNLOAD always on the link page above.
Unzip compressed file into a folder with everything you need to run the software inside.
Run the PolarChartGUI.exe file.
For any info / help or bug report you can contact me on the email alemassimo[@]yahoo.it ( remove [ ])
Fair wind!
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