Steve Mitchell, has his own site:
SeaBits
He seems to have some some good perspectives on this. I have not used his services and don’t know him personally. He’s on Trawler Forum.
Jim
Thanks Jim! I am here often depending on how many stupidly expensive/complex projects I have gotten myself into.
I've tried adapting a lot of home IoT stuff on the boat, and it works somewhat for some things, but in general sucks for a number of reasons. The primary reasons it has failed for me have been it's lack of marine-grade protection, reliance on higher speed "always on" internet connections, and assumptions of homes vs. boats.
That being said, I have used SmartThings to do
automation of heaters and a lot more, but most of the automation I do now is taking marine grade systems and trying to connect them with other systems so that there is data being shared everywhere, and then try layering automation on top of that.
The more interesting things have been with taking that data from those standalone systems, shoving it into SignalK, and then using other systems like InfluxDB and Grafana to graph it, alert on it, and send messages to other systems to do something there.
Of course I have the usual integrations so I can yell at a speaker and turn lights on and off, get temperatures and weather forecasts, and more. But those only work with a good internet connection. Even with my extensive internet systems, even a small passage across Puget Sound will result in some section, even if only for 5 minutes, where things are disconnected. IoT and automation stuff really, really does not like that. Its also very disconcerting to have no ability to turn on/off lights if they rely on that.
Where I have spent the majority of my time is just in visibility and data collection. I have everything that could be networked or connected, and then some, connected. I want to be able to see it from anywhere, on any device. Having all of that data then do something to the boat is where I am very cautious - it has to be very reliable, marine-grade, and tested to work before I'm going to trust it with, say, my bilge pump or switching on/off a load that could cause a fire.
Anyone taken a look at the Vesper Cortex that is coming out later in 2020?
I'm supposed to get a beta unit at some point. Sounds like final approvals and such are still happening with the various agencies. Vesper posted somewhere (I forget) that they expect customer units to ship in March 2020.