Hi,

With vnc viewer available for ios and android, has anyone tried installing vnc server on their laptop with a wifi lan router on board?
Conceivable the laptop could be safely tuck away safely in the most suitable place on board and multiple tablets or smart phone could act as remote chartplotter/display anywhere on the yacht by accessing navigatrix via vnc.

Ken
New Zealand

Yes, I did it, and it works great.
But I prefer to do it on my small Raspberry pi (only 0.3 A.), the power saving is really awesome (my laptot sucks 3.4 A even with the screen off).

Hi Monos 1,

This is awesome, I did not know that u can install nx0.5 on a RPi. Can you enlighten me on how to do this?

Many Thanks,
Ken

The major stumbling block of porting Navigatrix to a Raspberry Pi is that OpenCPN is a dog...possibly acceptable to some.

A few people testing it found it to less than inspiring. I found OpenCPN on the Pi to be more irritating than useful.

...however, the search continues.

Back to this topic. Navigatrix does have vnc4server to start or stop a VNC server and xrdp, a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server.

I'm just not sure all the parts for a remote desktop, as I expect it to look like, are there...or I just don't know how to work it; which is probably the case.

Well... I see very often some Atom computers Win7+opencpn running even slower than my Raspi.

There are some tips to make Raspi a little faster running OpenCpn:

-Use the Raspberry pi model "B" (512 Mb Ram).
-Overclock the Raspi (don't void warranty) to 1.000 Mz.
-Put the charts folder in a different place (a pendrive) than the main SD card (improve the charts loading).
-Using openbox instead of Lxde Desktop environment.
-Adding this lines to the config.txt of the Raspi:

framebuffer_depth=32
framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1

you may find it useful to edit your ~/.opencpn.opencpn.conf file and add values for MEMCacheLimit and/or NCacheLimit .. see opencpn.org for details.

Thanks Agurney...

http://agurney.com/raspberry-pi/pi-chart

I am using the cm93 worldwide charts and it works very useful for me, slow but useful.

When I use the vnc client with my computer it feels like slowwww. But with my Raspi it feels just the same than working directly with the Raspi, off course slow.... but functional.

And remember your little Pi will keep recording the tracks, showing your position and even sending orders to your autopilot with a very very little power consumption.

I sail in the Mediterranean, and in the summer my Navstation becomes a oven with my Net book. Now my Pi do it to me for a fraction of power an heating. Thanks Raspi...

By the other hand, the fact than the Raspberry pi works with open source software and open hardware too is a important matter to me.

Aside from the overclocking and framebuffer tweaks there's also a method of coaxing the gpu to do some of the work of the cpu.

I don't know how it's done, but I've heard it from a reliable source who saw a demonstration.

Very interesting because the the Raspi GPU its a great value by itself.

In fact, seeing videos on my Raspi across omxplayer works much better than any other Linux distro.

There is some XBMC ready-to-use software (OpenElec, RaspBMC) for Raspberry pi very powerful. Even it recognize my own remote control for the TV across the Hdmi wiring.

Yeah, it's fabulous for video...a bit weak for lots of calculation.

I'll see if I can find the 15 year old kid who did the gpu/cpu demo. He lives in town somewhere.

openplotter is a better alternative if youre going to run an rpi. everything is already bundled.