Hi Otto, yes totally fine to bring these discussions here. We called this “community” for a specific reason, even if a topic is tangentially related to Saillogger or Signal K platform, it will benefit our comunity.
On your question, we are not aware of anything that is off the shelf ready to use as a wind instrument outside of boat network. The closest is possibly the Signal K Ecowitt
plugin I had developed a while back. This allows integrating Ecowitt weather gateway and temperature sensors to Signal K and as a result to Saillogger. Ecowitt has a wind sensor too and it can be added to this plugin. However we don’t have or use that sensor so there are no plans to add support for it right now.
Independently, using a “home style” wind sensor has its challenges if mounted on a boat. They are designed to be mounted permanently so the readings would be relative to north while boat wind sensor readings will be relative to heading of the boat. So the software needs to be smart enough to normalize it but that normalization would require heading data too which will lost likely require NMEA network to be on anyways.
So all in all, keeping the NMEA network on might still be the simplest solution. We keep it on all the time and it actually doesn’t draw that much power unless you keep the MFD on as well, which is quite power hungry.
