SailView 2009 Introduction
What is it?
SailView 2009 is a set of applications designed to improve your sailing
performance.
What does it do?
SailView's functionality is divided into three distinct categories,
each represent by one of three major software components.
The first component is LIVE. In the simplest terms, LIVE acts as your boat's dashboard. A dashboard capable of displaying as many as 30 distinct performance related values, all of which can be configured to look the way YOU decide.
With the right data LIVE is capable of providing real time performance against Polars, course data as well as wind and current history for as much as the last 2.5 hours.
The second component is ANALYZE. While on the water you can log all the data LIVE collects, once you've collected the data you can use ANALYZE to sort, filter, plot and report on the data. With the correct filters you can even have ANALYZE produce polar charts based on your sailing session! And you're not limited to what ANALYZE provides, all of the data can be exported in a number of formats including formats that your favorite spread sheet program can read.
The third component is REPLAY. REPLAY does just that. It takes the data you collect on the water and lets you see what happened in a fully interactive 3D world. And you're not limited to just the data you collect, if your friends and competitors collect data you can replay theirs with yours!
How does it work?
Using the National Marine Electronics Associations (NMEA) 0183 industry standard protocol we connect to and read data from your instrumentation.
Nearly all major instrument manufactures provide a NMEA 0183 compatible interface that you can connect to a standard RS-232 (or via an inexpensive RS-232 to USB) port on a laptop.
A lot of effort has gone into making SailView as hardware independent as possible. If your instruments output NMEA 0183 compliant data we can listen to it.
The minimum data we need is GPS position and speed over ground data. To fully utilize all the features you need to collect the following NMEA data:
- GPRMC -position and velocity
- HCHDG -heading data
- WIMDA -weather and true wind data
- WIMWV -apparent wind
- VWVHW -speed over water (for current calculations)
- YXXDR -pitch and roll data
- SDDBK -depth below keel
- SDDBS/T -depth below surface(transducer)
- YCMTW -water temperature
The good thing news is as you add instruments the functionality is already part of the software.
Why would I want it?
We hope that's obvious but here are just a couple reasons:
- Are you performing to your polars? Want immediate, live feedback?
- Don't have polars and want to establish a baseline?
- Was that a lift, a header or a pressure change? You can use the GPS position/change in boat heading but that tells you how you reacted to the wind a couple seconds ago, not what the wind is doing right now!
- Am I getting everything I can out this new genoa?
- Did those tuning changes help?
- We're in our start sequence! Which end is favored, by how much and which tack?
- Can we foot and still make the mark?
- High and slow or low and fast?
- What's the wind been doing over the past hour and are win in phase?
You get the idea....