I've finally completed a project that I've been thinking/scheming over for a couple of years. The java based Marine Wireless NMEA Navigation Server. Right up there with software engineering, my other really big passion is boats. I love sailing and Susan and I own a 38 foot cutter named Sugata. Most boats transfer navigation data (wind speed/direction, boat speed/course, GPS, autopilot, etc…) about via serial cable using the NMEA protocol. Typically this limits you to having one laptop connected to all of your instruments in one place. I started thinking it would be cool to make the data available wirelessly so that any number of handhelds or laptops could access the data on a boat. This becomes more important as you get into larger and larger boats.
I needed a small 12 volt driven wireless access point with a serial connector (to connect to the NMEA devices). After a lot of searching I finally decided to use a Soekris board with 32MB ram and Pebble Linux running on a 256MB CF card (read-only) with a 200mW 802.11 transmitter with an external antenna. With 32MB ram I originally wrote the NMEA multiplexing/server software in J2ME but finally decided to try J2SE with a very low (16MB) max memory setting and sure enough it worked fine even under full NMEA data loads (which are admitedly pretty low). Then I needed a web interface to allow users to configure the wireless navigation server so they could easily change the administrator password, SID, encryption, download the system log to send me for debugging, and so on. For that I opted for Perl using FastTemplate (mainly because I was lazy and it could easily run in the remaining 12MB or so) running inside the tiny busy box http server. After I had the web interface mostly complete I also needed a way for users to upgrade the firmware/CF card (when I released new versions or fixed bugs). This is where you just have to love all of the Unix tools available. I was able to write the firmware upgrade portion in a couple of hours using familiar tools like md5, tar, bzip2, and mount (to remount the CF card read-write).
After I had the device built, working, and tested I put out the word for some beta boats to try it out on. The response was excellent with far more boats interested than I could afford hardware for. I got interested responses from commercial fisherman, racing sailboats, and many many trawlers. Having something work in the lab (my living room) is always completely different from reality as I soon discovered. There were a lot of bugs to fix and usability issues to address to get it working. I'm sure there's still a lot of work needed since it's only been tested out in a handful of configurations.
One company starting around the same time I started this project was Rose Point Nav. They make commercial navigation software and they added direct network support to their software to make it really easy to interface their software with my wireless navigation server which was pretty cool of them.
The biggest challenge in the whole process for me has been motivation (since I have a full-time job) and writing the manual. It's difficult to make installing/configuring a device like this easy for the novice. Heck, companies like LinkSys have whole teams developing their products and manuals and many people still run into problems. I received help from friends and a business partner on the manual but writing the software was basically a solo effort. I'm going to start out by selling my wireless NMEA navigation server directly on the web (using the open-source osCommerce platform). If it doesn't really take off I plan to open-source the software so other people can build their own wireless navigation servers. Either way, it's been an interesting and exciting experience!