Are there any plans to make navigatrix available for arm processors like cubie board? I don't think it would be difficult and this would allow users who have android devices to easily use opencpn and all the other programs for navigation.

There was some experimenting with the Raspberry Pi model B and also with the BeagleBone Black which is almost the same as the CubiBoard. The "problem" with this computers is that they are pretty slow compared to the x86 platform. OpenCPN for example runs on it but is not very nice to use, same goes for zyGrib. Airmail wont run at all. Feels like being back in the 90s when computers where slow. On the other side, if you add screen, keyboard, mouse, battery, flash memory, housing, wifi card, power supply, usb hub (which is really needed to add all the stuff which doesnt come with it) you end up at a price which is AT LEAST...usually more...as much as a cheap laptop from ebay but does not have all the connectors and not even half the speed of a real laptop.

Also i have a raspi running for quite some time now and it seems it doesn't last very long. The problem are all the usb connectors where all the add ons are connected to which are not implemented into the main board like on a normal computer. Even the flash cards have only a limited life time...seems to be much less the a harddrive. I am already on my third SD card.

Anyway, it is still possible to use these ARM computers for other tasks. So maybe they could be used as a companion for some special tasks like anchor alarm or AIS alarm. There is also the freeboard-server which can run the charts.
So we could make something work on one of these platforms, but most likely would not work on all of them. So we would need to adapt for each of them or decide for just one. Did you or anybody else test some other equipments and came to the conclusion its better then a laptop in terms of speed and price ?

Just found this one: toshiba encore tablet...it cost about 250 usd and has a atom procesor inside. Just in case somebody would like to have a cheap tablet with touchscreen.... i am almost sure navigatrix will run on it...

Having a distribution for arm would be great. The usecase would be somewhat different than general Navigatrix I guess. It could be a boat pc that is installed on a boat permanently. Why would you lug a tiny computer, keyboard, mouse screen and all the other paraphernalia around when there are Laptops. Arm SOCs draw next to no power, so they can run almost all the time. Most of the internet stuff is not super critical IMHO. It could be more like a chartplotter on steroids.

Programs I'd like to run on such a device would be:
Opencpn (It doesn't have to be superfast, just displaying the map will suffice- do the detailed planing on your Laptop and copy the routes over to your arm system if ARM is too slow for you)
Zygrib (could be sped up a lot by displaying the lowest resolution map)
jTides (BTW throw out wxtide- in Indonesia it is often wrong- false information is worse than no Information)
Polar Information displays
Movie and Music Player (Night watches!!!!)
VNC and Samba to connect to your Navigatrix laptop if you want to access some files/ programs

All the Windows programs won't run on ARM since they are compiled for the x86 platform. Java should run on Icedtea

Boy I'd love to do something like that and will do so for sure when I'm back home (in about a year...).
All the best,
Christian

I agree with both David and zenfunk. To a complete navigation system nothing better than navigatrix and laptops. However to a cheap and open substitute of plotters nothing better than an ARM platform.

The question is if we would have forces and resources to maintain 2 distributions.

It's a good point, Roberto.

This is where I jump in and remind everyone of Moe's Law Everything is a matter of Time, Money, and Monkeys. Change occurs when one of those three change.

Anyone who says "Hey, I think I can help." should get added to the crewlist. Beyond the code challenges and increased hardware scope, we are already straining bandwidth allotment on the servers. Some things should be considered.

I wanted to note, that I have done a bit of work to fix the performance issues on small arms. This is why I asked in the first place. Now OpenCPN runs on these arm computers much faster than it used to run on atom netbooks. It is using only 3 watts of power.

As time goes on, the arms will only get faster and lower power, and cheaper, but they are already highly desirable platforms for navigation. Currently the modular design is cheaper by far, because if one component fails, you can still keep everything else rather than get a whole new system. Also can get exactly the components you want.

I think it would be great to have a navigatrix distribution which can be easily flashed to an sd card to save configuration time for many users.

What would be required to build this?

I would be interested in collaboration if we make a group to work in this. We actually have an approach with spanish users:

(spanish) http://campus.sailoog.com/course/view.php?id=9

SailPi is Plotter, SDR AIS, NMEA multiplex, NMEA wifi server, meteo...

Just bought a Toshiba Encore (refurb) from the Toshiba Store on ebay for $150 free shipping.
Very much faster than I expected!
First thing to do was to get rid of the MS Explorer browser and the pre-installed trial programs (all they do is silently in install more crap).

Haven't got the cable yet for adding a USB stick.

Am 'hoping' the same USB stick that worked so flawlessly on my laptop works on the tablet. how cool would that be.

It should work....you just might need to add a external keyboard temporary to get into the bios to boot from the usb stick. Let us know if you have any luck with it.... otherwise you may install the usb boot loader "plop" on windows. You can find it inside the tools folder.