As a Saillogger user, you can now put your boat’s data to work with your AI assistant in more ways. We’ve enhanced our existing MCP server and added webhook support. These enhancements let compatible assistants explore your boat’s data, help configure monitoring, and respond to alarms, automatically if you want.
We’re already using these capabilities to monitor our own boats. In this post, we’ll walk through how you can do it too, from connecting an assistant to Saillogger to having it keep watch and notify you when something needs attention.
AI has many uses, but outside of work, the primary way we use it is through AI assistants: Instinct, Grok Bot, Muse, OpenAI’s dots, the newly announced Claude Duet, and others. We use these assistants to help organize our daily lives, from booking concert tickets to helping with travel arrangements.
The most natural next step for us was to give those assistants the ability to monitor our boats. We now have a boat specialist agent that keeps an eye on our boats 24/7, even correlating boat data with events from our cameras, weather reports sent by Chris Parker (our weather router for the Caribbean), news about local events, hurricane reports for the Caribbean, and so on.
How It Works
[image: How Saillogger and AI keep watch over your boat]
How Saillogger and AI keep watch over your boat
For the AI integrations, the foundation is the data Saillogger already collects: what your boat reports via NMEA 2000, along with the historical records it keeps automatically.
Our new AI integrations build on that foundation, putting everything Saillogger can monitor and log for you at your AI assistants’ disposal with a single click. What’s more, we let AI assistants selectively configure monitoring settings in response to your prompts. They can help you figure out what additional things you can monitor on your boat and set up that monitoring for you. This is usually one of the trickier parts of setting up a boat monitoring and alarm system, but AI can be very helpful here.
The mechanism that connects AI assistants to Saillogger is called MCP (Model Context Protocol). It essentially allows an AI assistant to use the tools offered by a service provider. In this case, Saillogger offers a very rich set of tools that provide access to your entire trip history, statistics, and places you have anchored or docked, as well as your near real-time monitoring data and its history. All you need to do is tell your assistant to connect to Saillogger.
Connecting Your AI Assistant
Let’s see how it works in practice with Grok Bot. Just tell it to connect to Saillogger’s MCP server at https://saillogger.com/mcp.
[image: Connecting an AI assistant to Saillogger]
Connecting an AI assistant to Saillogger
This brings up an authorization window where you can approve the connection:
[image: Saillogger authorization window]
[image: Choosing access permissions]
Choosing what your AI assistant can access and change
You can choose read-only access or allow the AI assistant to change your sensor settings and create alarms too. We’ll cover alarms further below. The choice depends on how comfortable you are letting AI tweak your configuration, but in this example, we’ll allow it.
Exploring Your Boat’s Data
Once connected, Grok Bot will be able to retrieve near real-time data from your boat. Saillogger reports at one-minute intervals while your boat is online.
[image: Grok Bot summarizing the boat’s current status]
This gives a quick overview of the boat’s status, summarizing everything it can retrieve. The screenshot also happens to reveal that we’re taking a break from the boats and spending some time on land
Grok Bot can now also access historical data and create visualizations or perform other analyses for you. Here is a simple example that gives you a sense of what is possible:
[image: Grok Bot analyzing wind data]
[image: Grok Bot visualizing wind data]
Analyses and visualizations from Grok Bot, on demand
You can also let your AI assistant help you figure out which sensors you have and enable tracking for them in Saillogger.
Here is an actual example. We weren’t remotely monitoring solar output or the battery status of our RuuviTag Bluetooth sensors, which are placed in different parts of the boat. Grok Bot discovered these data sources and suggested monitoring them, as we’d already lost contact with one of the sensors in the port hull, likely because of a dead battery.
[image: Letting Grok Bot enable monitoring for additional sensors]
Letting Grok Bot enable monitoring for additional sensors
Just to add a bit of fun, let’s ask Grok Bot to summarize our last cruising season:
[image: Grok Bot’s summary of our cruising season]
Grok Bot’s summary of our cruising season
These are all excellent ways to use an AI assistant, especially when you use it more broadly and it can draw on your boating history, memories, journal entries, real-time data, and context while helping with your daily routines.
Having Your Assistant Keep Watch
But what matters even more to us boaters is having someone keep an eye on our boats while we enjoy a moment without thinking about them. So let’s ask Grok Bot to keep an eye on our boat:
[image: Grok Bot on watch]
Grok Bot on watch
With a simple instruction like this, it will start checking on our boat regularly. What’s attractive about AI is that it already demonstrates the ability to analyze information in context and even apply judgment. This kind of monitoring can go beyond a basic rule-based alarm system that triggers when certain thresholds are crossed.
You can also provide more details about your boat, the equipment aboard, manuals, and so on, which can make its analyses more useful. To us, this feels close to having someone watch our boat 24/7, applying context and boat-specific know-how to what may be happening.
Here is a great example: Grok Bot noticed that the saloon sensor’s battery was running low and that something was drawing a fair bit of power at night. It spotted these issues without specific instructions or explicit alarm rules. The overnight draw came from our Starlink, backup marina Wi-Fi connection, router, and Raspberry Pi, which together draw close to 100 W.
[image: Grok Bot spotting a low sensor battery and overnight power draw]
Grok Bot spotting a low sensor battery and overnight power draw
So far I’ve been demonstrating this with Grok Bot, starting with the initial setup, but you can also use other compatible AI assistants. Here is an example with Muse:
[image: Muse bringing together weather reports, forecasts, and updates on friends]
Muse bringing together weather reports, forecasts, and updates on friends
In this screenshot, you can see how it combines multiple sources of information: an email from Chris Parker (our weather router for the Caribbean), forecasts from Windy, and updates on our friends. Our friends on Mimi are on their way to the Bahamas, where we first met them. It was very nice to be automatically informed when they left the dock in the Chesapeake so we could connect with them!
When an Hourly Check Isn’t Enough
Taking a step back, what is already available here is amazing. However, one obvious gap in this approach is the frequency of the checks. In the example above, we asked Grok Bot to check things every hour. What if something goes wrong a few minutes after the last check?
First off, we don’t think it’s a good idea to rely solely on AI, or any form of remote monitoring for that matter, to detect a problem that could sink a boat at a moment’s notice. Those situations need dedicated protection aboard, such as an additional high-capacity bilge pump triggered by high water or an automatic fire suppression system, with notifications sent in parallel. That deserves some thought of its own, but regardless, a system that checks every hour or so will always have a gap between checks.
That’s why we also developed a mechanism that lets AI assistants define alarms for your boat and wakes them up when those alarms are triggered.
Here is how it works: you can already define fixed alarm rules in Saillogger. Now your AI assistant can too, if you let it. These rules trigger when Saillogger detects a threshold being crossed. It could be wind rising above a certain speed, temperature dropping below a set value, or a bilge pump coming on. The AI assistant then gets notified alongside you, or instead of you if you prefer.
These rules normally notify you through email or a phone push notification in Saillogger. Now those alerts can also be delivered directly to your AI assistant through a webhook, allowing it to analyze the situation and take action within the permissions you’ve given it. Depending on the assistant’s capabilities, that might mean calling the marina or yard, or capturing video from compatible monitoring cameras. Your imagination and the capabilities of these AI agents set the limits, and those capabilities are growing very rapidly.
Alerts Set by Your AI Assistant
One key requirement for this approach is an AI assistant that can accept incoming webhooks. Not all assistants support this yet. At the time of writing, Muse doesn’t, though I’ve submitted several feature requests. Grok Bot does. Let’s see how it works in practice. Go ahead and tell Grok Bot to add a webhook for Saillogger:
[image: Setting up a webhook in Grok Bot]
Setting up a webhook in Grok Bot
It will provide a URL and a key in the panel on the right. Copy them into Saillogger’s Notifications settings, under Webhook Notifications:
[image: Configuring the webhook in Saillogger]
Configuring the webhook in Saillogger
Saving sends a test notification, which you can immediately see in Grok Bot:
[image: Grok Bot receiving a test notification]
Grok Bot receiving a test notification
Now you can choose which notifications to send directly to Grok Bot. You can turn individual notification categories on or off, or disable them all. For boat monitoring, keep “Monitoring Alerts” enabled so Grok Bot receives your alarm notifications.
[image: Choosing which notifications to send to Grok Bot]
Choosing which notifications to send to Grok Bot
Once webhooks are enabled, tell Grok Bot to set up alarms. You can be creative about how you want it to configure and respond to them. The good thing is that these settings don’t have to stay fixed. Grok Bot can adjust them based on where you are, your travel plans, the season, conditions, and so on. Here is an example:
[image: Asking Grok Bot to configure alarms]
[image: Grok Bot’s alarm configuration]
Grok Bot configuring alarms for our boat’s current state
To show this in action, we temporarily set the wind alarm threshold to 5 knots. And unsurprisingly, in less than 30 seconds, Grok Bot responded:
[image: Grok Bot responding to a wind alarm in under 30 seconds]
Grok Bot responding to a wind alarm in under 30 seconds
The layer of judgment that AI assistants can bring here is actually pretty impressive. It even guessed this was a test, without being told.
If something really is wrong, they can pull more real-time data, look at historical sensor readings, connect the dots, and put things in context. They can then take additional action, either automatically based on your prior instructions or by helping you diagnose and mitigate the issue. They can also visualize the data for you on demand. For example, my Muse is instructed to include trend charts whenever it flags a potential anomaly, so I can quickly assess whether something looks amiss.
You can also connect compatible assistants to messaging apps like WhatsApp, so you can literally text with your boat wherever you are. Here is how I communicate with Muse over WhatsApp:
[image: Communicating with Muse over WhatsApp]
[image: Continuing the conversation with Muse]
Communicating with Muse over WhatsApp
We also have someone looking after our boat, and we communicate primarily over WhatsApp. We haven’t needed to do this yet, but we could ask our AI assistant to contact him directly when something needs checking. For example, it could ask him to check the dehumidifier or air conditioning if humidity is rising, or the shore power connection if the boat loses shore power.
For friends or fellow boaters who don’t have Saillogger aboard, our companion service, AIS Fleet, also offers an AI integration. AIS Fleet is free to use and has its own MCP server at http://aisfleet.com/mcp, available with its $2.99/month subscription tier.
Feel free to contact us with ideas, suggestions, or examples of how you’re using it on your boats. We look forward to hearing from you!
Adapted from Boat Monitoring with AI, originally published on S/V Renaissance. Feel free to follow us there too
