free iPhone app for boat motions

[leigh]

All,

I hope the mods won't view this as excessive commercialism (it's not--the app is free with no ads!), but as a wee pet project of late I put together a Small Craft Motions Program (SCraMP) for the iPhone 4/iPod Touch 4G. I'm hoping the boating community (small and large, though I'm really trying to target this as something that could improve safety for small fishing boats) will find it useful.

The app is available free in the app store here.

If you do test it out, I'd love your feedback, and have put together a very short survey here.

Thanks!
Leigh

[Flyer69]

I might try it, seems kinda silly to use an accelerometer to tell me how rough it is. Then again, it's nice to be able to put an objective number on conditions to explain why I turned back.
What exactly is the "motion warning index" ??

[Capt. Phoenix]

Maybe so you can put a threshold on how much of a beating your boat is taking. Without that you just have to guess by the feel of it.

[dougpine]

This is a great start, Leigh. I'd like to see a Rate of Turn display with large, easily readable digits showing degrees per minute ROT port and stbd. Pilots and tug drivers would be all over that.

Sent from my iPhone using the gCaptain app

[leigh]

Flyer, the idea for an index is just to boil down multiple degree of freedom motions into a single benchmark value.

Doug, that's easy! Do you want yaw rate or literally a maneuvering circle measure based off GPS? (GPS data is part of v2 which should be out in a week or so.)

[Flyer69]

Any way to slow the data stream down?
Add a button to do a screen capture easier than pushing the home key and power key at the same time?
Use a corner data box on the index screen showing current value for index?

[leigh]

Good thoughts Flyer...I'll see what I can do. Running values from the accelerometers and gyro are part of v2. Doing that for the index as well is easy if it would be of use. Would screen captures be more useful than data logging? I've had a lot of requests for a logging feature and have that high on my todo list at present...

And I was hasty when I said doing the yaw rate was easy--well, it is easy, but making it readable is more difficult. That sensor is so twitchy that the values are unreadably hopping around. I need to do some sort of smoothing or filtering to make that useful. Plenty of work for v3 it seems...

Thanks for all the feedback!

[Flyer69]

What format would the data be logged in, how would we export it to a spreadsheet program or something like that?

[dougpine]

Doug, that's easy! Do you want yaw rate or literally a maneuvering circle measure based off GPS? (GPS data is part of v2 which should be out in a week or so.)

It would need to comply with IMO Resolution A.526(13) found here.

[dougpine]

Doug, that's easy! Do you want yaw rate or literally a maneuvering circle measure based off GPS? (GPS data is part of v2 which should be out in a week or so.)

It would need to comply with IMO Resolution A.526(13) found here.

[Capt. Phoenix]

It would need to comply with IMO Resolution A.526(13) found here.

Technically, it cannot. Though it can conform to most or all if it except 2.3.4.


When you get it perfect I want one for androids...

[dougpine]

Technically, it cannot. Though it can conform to most or all if it except 2.3.4.


When you get it perfect I want one for androids...

True indeed.

[dougpine]

Technically, it cannot. Though it can conform to most or all if it except 2.3.4.


When you get it perfect I want one for androids...

True indeed.

[leigh]

Thanks for the IMO link--that's exactly the type of feedback I'm looking for.

And you'll have to talk to my husband about getting this on the droid--I'm converted to being a mac gal.