"If you imagine it's possible, someone else is already trying to doing it, or has already done it." The Installer.
This was how I left my musing on the fictitious open source Celestronic M1 chart plotter system. I wasn't aware at the time how extensive the efforts were by an ever increasing cabal to build these types of systems. My screen display was photoshopped, the ones below are real.
Another aspect of the Celestronic story was to illustrate how tentative marine electronics manufacturers have been in adopting new technologies, although this has certainly improved over just the past few years. It seems with each technological advancement the buying public endorses, the rest of the herd immediately follows. Raymarine introduced the e7d with both WiFi, and blue tooth, and now who doesn't have this capability? But WiFi, and Bluetooth had been laying around for many years before its adoption into marine electronics world.
This all started with a somewhat cryptic comment left on the Celestronic post by "Practical Pirate." "Check out Freeboard at 42.co.nz." I did, and this is Robert Huitema's approach to an open source hardware/software navigation system, "The Freeboard Project".
