Do I have to do something special when I return home after a trip?

[mshulman]

Hi!

We just went out for a four hour sail today. While we were out, I noticed that the realtime monitoring feature was working.

Then we got back to the slip. I left the raspberry PI running signalK on. After we put the canvas on the boat, I turned off the cockpit MFD, which is the GPS source for the NMEA network.

Now I see under Monitoring > Realtime, that spillover thinks that the voyage is still under way, and the last reading from the boat was 29 minutes ago.

When I look at the signalk sailloger plugin, I see:
0 entries in queue, last connection to the server was 29 minutes ago.

That's roughly the time that I turned off the MFD.

So a few questions:

1. If I want to monitor windspeed, direction, temperature, do I need the MFD on so that there's a GPS source?
2. Do I have to do anything to "close" the trip? If I had left the GPS on, would that have automatically closed the trip after not moving for a certain amount of time?
3. Is there a way to predict how long it takes for the voyage to show in the logs? Does it depend on having a GPS source for the SignalK server?

[admin]

Hi Michael, everything is automated, so you do not need to do anything to finish a trip. However GPS readings are required to conclude a trip or monitoring to function.

More specifically on your questions:

1. You do need a GPS source for monitoring function as it relies on your position. Keeping an MFD on would be an obvious overkill though. Do you have any other GPS source like an AIS transceiver? Alternatively, you can just add a puck GPS to your monitoring device as a backup. Or if you have Starlink, we have a plugin to use it as a backup GPS source too.

2. You do not need to do anything to close the trip. It is all automated. The moment you turn on you MFD, Saillogger will conclude the trip has completed and will close it out automatically.

3. It is an hour after you finish your trip and yes it does depend on the GPS. This is important because Saillogger avoids short stops to get gas etc.

[mshulman]

Got it. So it's an hour after we stop moving. Is that documented?

Is there a USB connected GPS I can plug in to my computer?

[admin]

You can plugin a USB based GPS to your monitoring device. Depending on what it is, it will require a configuration like gpsd, which may require you to do some tweaking.