Sailboat Guidance System

The Sailboat Guidance System is a Ruby gem for managing an autonomous, robotic sailboat. As it stands, it is quite specific to the Beoga Beag boat, but this will change, over time (and with your help!).

The architecture is split between a low-level, Arduino-like board and an upper-level FreeBSD-based board. The low-level board controls the second-by-second operations such as steering, sail trim, and battery voltage. It is designed to focus on things such as real-time performace, tight PID-control loops, and basic telemetry such as voltage/current measurement, electronic compass, and wind direction. The upper-level board has the advantage of floating-point and the disadvantage of a pre-emptive, multiprocess operating system. So it focuses on the "bigger picture." In this world-view, the GPS is read by the upper-level system. Likewise, any satellite communications are handled here.

This mimics the way an ocean-going, racing sailboat (such as a Volvo Ocean Race boat) would organize itself. The two watch teams alternate the constant, 24/7 job of steering and sail trim, while the navigator analyses weather systems and makes more strategic decisions.

The code in this repository is designed to handle all of the upper-level tasks associated with navigation, overall monitoring, reporting and logging, error detection, and anything which can be done on an hourly cadence rather than the tasks which require constant attention and control.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'sgslib'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install sgslib

TODO: Write usage instructions here

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kalopa/sgslib. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the GPL v2 License.