Other people's work that this boat runs on. Every tool, chart source and database we actually use, sorted honestly — what's free and open, what's free data, and what's free only up to a point.
Looking for our links? They're on Contact.
The software running this boat — all of it free, all of it yours to change
Our Signal K server's own dashboard.
The open marine data standard. Reads NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000 and more, and turns the lot into one set of names anything can ask for. The keystone of the whole setup.
OpenPlotter Settings, running on the boat's Pi.
Raspberry Pi distribution that installs Signal K, OpenCPN and the rest in an afternoon instead of a month.
Navigation and weather routing. Genuinely free, and seriously capable — it will even draw a radar from a mayara server.
The Node-RED editor, with an example flow that is not ours.
Automation you build by dragging boxes and joining them with lines. Each box does one thing — watch a value, compare it to a number, send a message, switch a relay — and you wire the output of one into the input of the next. The chain you draw is called a flow, and it runs the moment you hit Deploy.
In practice that means "if the bilge pump runs more than three times in an hour, send me a message" is about four boxes and twenty minutes, with no code and nothing to compile.
It talks to Signal K, so every value on the boat is available to it. Victron ship it pre-installed in Venus OS Large, with their own set of boxes for Victron gear — so a GX device can do this without a separate computer at all.
Honest disclaimer: we haven't gone deep into Node-RED yet. It's installed, we've poked at it, and we can see exactly what it's for — but the automation on Exodus is mostly scripts so far. It's on the list, and when we've actually built something with it there'll be a write-up.
Kees Verruijt's NMEA 2000 database, reverse engineered from scratch and given away. Everything else stands on it.
Puts marine radar onto open software. The reason our Quantum draws on a Raspberry Pi.
Venus OS, the software on Victron's GX devices, is open source. (The firmware inside the chargers and inverters is not.) Venus OS Large adds Node-RED and Signal K straight onto the GX device.
Turns a cheap SDR dongle into an AIS receiver. Free targets on your own screen, no subscription. If you already have a main AIS transponder you do not need the dongle at all.
Chart plotter in a browser, built on Signal K. Routes, waypoints, anchor alarm — and a radar panel now too.
Open-source sonar hardware. Schematics and board files published, raw echo data out the other end.
The group chat, and the code
Everything technical here is one boat's experience, and some of it will be wrong.
If you spot a discrepancy, know better than us on something, want to add to a project, or just want to talk about any of it — there's a group chat. No gatekeeping, no subscriber requirement. Turn up and join in.
We'd rather be corrected than confidently wrong, and the whole point of writing this down is so other people can build on it.
The group chat. Corrections, questions, source files, and people working on the same problems. Open to anyone.
The radar and sonar displays, the BMS readers, the power grid page and the internet AIS script, so you can run them on your own boat instead of rebuilding them. Available on request for now.
What runs the offline brain aboard
Runs a language model on your own hardware. Free, open, and no connection needed once the model is downloaded.
The open-weights model we run locally. Free to download and free to use offline.
OpenAI's speech recognition, open sourced. Runs entirely on your own machine — no key, no per-minute charge, no audio leaving the boat. faster-whisper is the quick one; whisper.cpp is the one that''ll run on a Pi.
Open-source text to speech. Fast enough for real time on a Raspberry Pi, and the voices are genuinely good. This is how the boat talks back.
How the boat reaches us and we reach the boat. Bots are free to create and free to run — and you make one by talking to another bot called BotFather.
Public, government and crowd-sourced — no account, no fee
The World Health Organization's medical guide for seafarers, third edition. A free PDF, and the reference everything else medical aboard is built on.
Every US electronic navigational chart, free. The same data the commercial apps repackage and sell you.
Predictions and live station data for every US tide station, with an open API.
Inland electronic navigational charts for the rivers and waterways NOAA doesn't cover.
Pilot charts, sailing directions, light lists. The pilot charts are how you plan an ocean crossing by season.
Live wind, wave height and sea temperature from buoys offshore. Real observations, not a model.
Marine forecasts, GRIB data and warnings, free and with an open API.
Bathymetry, lidar, shoreline and imagery datasets. Enormous, and all free.
Crowd-sourced bathymetry. Soundings from boats like this one turned into charts anyone can use — and you can contribute your own.
Free GRIB weather files for the common models, and it plugs straight into OpenCPN.
Raw GFS model output, straight from the source. This is the data most GRIB services repackage.
GRIBs delivered by email — which is the only thing that works on a satellite or SSB link offshore. Request by email to [email protected].
Free
Usable without paying, better if you do
Share your AIS feed and get the global network back in exchange. Free, but only if you contribute data.
The AIS map everyone knows. Free to look at, paid for history, coverage and detail.
Personal weather stations worldwide, including plenty on docks. Free to read, free to contribute your own.
