RIP Boat Brain

For the last couple of years, maybe once a year, I would write a post about the wooden boat I was building.? I finished that boat last year and have been fishing with it for two seasons now.? This post is about the black box (aka flight recorder) I built to track everything I do with the boat using Raspberry Pi, some logic boards, 3 small LCD screens, GPS receiver, a bunch of LEDs and switches, Python, and Django. I called it my Boat Brain

Even for recreational anglers, consistently finding fish means keeping track of all sorts of data, so I set out to build a ‘black box’ to automatically collect everything I could think of and store it online. It would track my movements for the whole trip, the GPS coordinates where I caught fish, air temp, water temp, air pressure, weather forecast, battery voltages, as well as other vitals, and upload it to the Internet. Then someone could go to the website I built and see the data in real time.

I actually accomplished this.??

I had it working, and fishing buddy of mine was going to help me 3D print some pieces to make the housing a bit better and then making some final (simple) modifications and I fried it.?

In detail, it worked like this:

After the hardware boots, 2 programs would load and run.? The main program that does all the work and a second program that is a hardware monitor (heartbeat). This heart program will detect if the main program stopped and then would reboot the hardware so that the main program can restart and pick up where it left off.

I’m always looking to improve my fishing process, everything from how long it takes me to prep the boat (before leaving home) or how long it takes me to launch the boat (when I get to the lake). With this in mind I build the hardware and wrote the software so that the boat brain would collect all the data and time that it would take me to progress through the 10 stages of fishing.?

Where I could I automated the trigger between stages, but also had buttons for backup.? For example, since it has a GPS receiver, as soon as I left the geo fence of my driveway the boat brain would know I completed stage one (left home), also if it wasn’t connected to my home Wi-Fi, another trigger that I left the house and stage one was completed.? When I got to the ramp at my favorite lake it knew stage two was over (traveling to the lake) and I was entering stage three (at the ramp) because the program knew the geo fence of my favorite lake ramp.? However, if I went to a new lake for the first time the program would not recognize the geo fence of that boat ramp, so I needed to include buttons to manually trigger the end of many stages.

Once on the water, the program would collect data in a repeating loop and, using my mobile phone for an internet connection, continuously collect data such as: GPS location, air temp, water temp, air pressure, and battery levels and upload it to a MySQL database on a hosted web server I built with Django.

When I started building the hardware It looked like this. Mostly just buttons.

Then, as needs arose, I added additional features

those features include:

• LEDS to provide rudimentary feedback
• additional buttons (toggle instead of momentary)
• GPS receiver
• atmospheric air pressure sensor (right side)
• a charger connection(top) for its internal Lithium Ion battery (top)
• two connections (top) for battery monitoring
• HDMI and USB connections (hidden in above image) for troubleshooting when I couldn't remote/shell in

Lastly I added 3 small LCD screens to provide better feedback then the simple LEDs. This includes

• stage number and the name,
• current GPS coordinates
• basic environmentals: temperature and air pressure

The data the box collected was written to an online server and displayed on a web page, the data was relatively easy to display in tables, in maps was a challenge.

The mapping of the GPS coordinates was the most challenging part (and the most fun). I estimate there is about a 30 second lag between where the box is physically at and when its displayable on the web page.

So two weeks ago, I was making what what I thought were the final hardware changes; adding a second I/O expander (PCF8575) and tying in the 3 battery inputs to the A/D (ADS1115) and then, all of a sudden, it wouldn’t boot.? I disconnected everything from the main board (Raspberry Pi 3 model B) and the board is dead. Right now it looks like this:

All the code is safe on the SD card (and GitHub) and I’ve started building a new enclosure, this time using 1010 aluminum extrusion, hopefully in time for the 2025 pre-spawn