For years, I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi with an ADS-B receiver to track and submit information about nearby airplanes to multiple websites which aggregate the data. It’s neat to see what airplanes my little Pi can see. And while ADS-B is becoming mandatory in airplanes. boats have their very own system called AIS. It provides much of the same data — position, track, speed, boat type/name, etc. However, there haven’t been that many easily accessible AIS trackers to play with. Now the dAISy FeatherWing and dAISy Mini AIS Receiver (heh, see what they did there with the name?) are available and designed to be easy to integrate into new or existing projects.
Whether you simply want to see what boats are in your area, or you have a need to track specific vehicles in an area (say, as a boat rental company), you can quickly set up and customize AIS reception with these boards. They have excellent dual-channel AIS receivers that support all official AIS frequencies, as well as a low-noise amplifier front-end to help boost weak signals. They output data in a standard NMEA format (anyone familiar with GPS will have seen NMEA before). The format is called NMEA AIVDS and is extensively documented.
The entire board can be controlled via I2C, and NMEA data can be read from a UART at 38400 baud. Alternatively, all data can be read out over I2C, which might be faster depending on your application. And the boards are quite power-efficient — even with the LNA operating, they consume well under 100mA. With the LNA disabled, it gets all the way down to 35mA, which at 3.3V is only 115mW! Pretty good for a quality RF receiver. The documentation for both boards looks excellent, which is always a good sign that the designer cares about the end user!
The FeatherWing is, of course, completely compatible with Adafruit’s line of Feather boards. The dAISy Mini is a similar size, but with standard 0.1″ headers, or alternatively a JST-GH connector compatible with many flight controllers, in case you want to receive AIS from your drone!
