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ESP8266 Design Contest Entry NMEA Bridge for OpenCPN

I want to be able to run openCPN on both a laptop and a tablet at the same time. I would like the laptop down below deck, safe from the rain and salt water spray. I would like to have a mostly waterproof tablet in the cockpit to monitor progress. And I would like to be able to quickly check the ships status from the captains berth when off watch, maybe on a smart phone. The plan is to implement a device to read the serial data from all the boat instruments and send that data to openCPN over a WiFI link so there are no physical wires attached. It will broadcast the data with UDP so that multiple devices can read the data at the same time. The ESP8266 ESP-01 was chosen because it was on hand and it has adequate I/O for this project.”

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