Saillogger Community

Hi @billknny, @MacJL , @Andrea , @stevemitchell , @Voodoo ! You asked, we delivered. We’ve just released native support for engine sensors. They’re now logged automatically, along with statistics for your sailing and motoring time. Check out the announcement here: https://community.saillogger.com/topic/142/saillogger-plugin-5-x-native-engine-logging

Hi everyone, we just released native support for engine sensors! They are now logged automatically, along with statistics for your sailing and motoring time. Check out the announcement here: https://community.saillogger.com/topic/142/saillogger-plugin-5-x-native-engine-logging

By the way, we just released native support for engine sensors! They are now logged automatically, along with statistics for your sailing and motoring time. Check out the announcement here: https://community.saillogger.com/topic/142/saillogger-plugin-5-x-native-engine-logging

Ahoy, Boaters!

We’re thrilled to announce Saillogger Plugin 5.X!, bringing two powerful upgrades to make your onboard experience smoother than ever.

🧭 Native Engine Sensor Support

Your engines are now first-class citizens in Saillogger!
With native support for NMEA engine sensors, Saillogger automatically tracks and logs engine hours for each trip, and for both engines if you’re running twin setups.

Here is an example:

What this means for you:

• Automatic logging of engine runtime, no manual input needed
• Detailed trip summaries showing sailing vs motoring time
• Works with any standard NMEA engine gateway, just plug it in and Saillogger does the rest

Whether you’re fine-tuning fuel efficiency, scheduling maintenance, or simply curious how much time you truly spend under sail, this update gives you effortless insights.

️ Blazing-Fast Install Times

Installing Saillogger on Victron devices is now up to 10× faster!
Plugin 5.0.0 dramatically reduces setup time on most Victron GX systems, it now completes in under a minute.

That means less waiting and more sailing.

Update Now

Go to Signal K and update Signal K Saillogger plugin to 5.X Make sure you have set a boat type in your boat settings page as well!

We can’t wait for you to try these improvements and see how effortless tracking and insights can be.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback, share your experience below.

Fair winds and following seas,
The Saillogger Team

Hi @mshulman , it is a good idea. Adding notifications to custom monitoring data is already on our backlog and it should address this need.

Checking the configuration, it looks like that section may be misconfigured. Make sure the Data Field section in the configuration is not empty. Also, for testing, please make sure you don’t change your monitoring configuration during a trip. Make any changes before starting or after completing the trip, but not in between.

Let us know the outcome.

Hi @Andrea , sorry we didn't see your previous message. Looks like your RPM is logged in trip logs and monitoring but we don't see anything about engine hours.

First step is to make sure it does show up in Saillogger monitoring, if it does, then it will show up in trip logs.

Do you ever see it in Monitoring? Make sure you give a proper field name and it maps to the Signal K path. Engine should be running or at least the ignition should be on when you do this.

Hi @digger thanks for the note, it is a good catch. We increased the resolution, you can check again.

Hi @joyride , not sure what happened here but it clearly didn't mark the trip start, so that was the issue but not sure when. Were the instruments on and was Saillogger receiving the position reports then?

When you leave the dock again, please check if Saillogger sees your position and in about 15 minutes recognizing you as being underway.

Hi @Andrea This would be a cool feature. We will log this in the backlog and look into it.

Hi @joyride , are your instruments and Internet on?

Hi @digger, welcome. You are spot on—if you want to share your position or logs with a select group of people, like your family, you can enable the public profile and set a password. That’s exactly what the password for the public profile is for.

Hi @Andrea, not sure if I could fully follow. Do you mean propulsion.port.runTime was available in Signal K with fresh data and it didn't show up in Saillogger?

Could you capture this when it happens?

Hi @Andrea, it is hard to debug this from the screenshots, as it appears there may be multiple factors at play. I am not entirely sure Smart Battery Sense works with Signal K, since we do not have one to test, but one thing to check is the frequency of its updates. Something feels off there.

For Saillogger, it watches these signals and checks their age. If they are fresh, it processes them; if not, it ignores them. Saillogger uses one-minute granularity for data but allows a bit of buffer time since not every source emits data regularly. That said, any reliable source should definitely send data every minute; otherwise, it is not ideal for monitoring purposes.

Hi @Andrea, when you see these in Data Browser, how fresh is the data? In other words, can you confirm the timestamps are being updated and are recent? It’s possible the data you saw was older and retained in Data Browser history. Saillogger normally only logs data that is fresh (less than about a minute and a half old), so if the data is stale, Saillogger won’t pick it up.

Hi @Andrea unfortunately no, all custom monitoring values are displayed in the same format like the second one. The latter one is specialized for reporting the house/main battery.

There is a monitoring option that will automatically convert these to hours, just choose "Duration" while you are adding it.

@Andrea you should be able to use /vessels/<RegExp>/propulsion/<RegExp>/runTime which is the total running time for engine in seconds. This will show up as something like propulsion.0.runTime in your Signal K. You can add this to your custom monitoring and look at the delta between the last tracepoint and the first one. Not the ideal UX but it will be automatically logged for you.

Hi @JeremyJed and @Andrea, Saillogger can track engine hours by adding them manually to your monitoring data, and they will be part of your trackpoints. This way you can see the engine hours at the beginning and end of the trip by clicking on those trackpoints.

However, this can certainly be improved. We always aim to provide the best UX, and it is important for Saillogger that things “just” work. We are working on making this an integral part of the log that works automatically (for example, Saillogger can detect when you are sailing or motoring, handle multi-engine scenarios, and give meaningful stats). Creating the right experience is a bit involved, and we did not have a good test bed for this until recently. We finally installed sensors on our twin Yanmars (running the N2K cables was the hardest part), and this is now at the top of our list of new features. It needs proper thought and testing since it is an important feature.

Automatically tying it to fuel consumption is more complex. The math is simple, but there are many scenarios that must be accounted for in order for it to work well. For example, fuel sensors are not always precise, logic must account for multiple tanks, transfers between tanks, additional equipment like generators drawing fuel, or swells causing fluctuating readings. We aim to provide a great UX, so this will likely not be part of the initial version. A better approach may be to rate the engines’ consumption and associate it with conditions like those above. This aligns with @Andrea’s note. It is possible but not a trivial implementation.

Taking a step back, and to summarize, you can already monitor engine hours and tank levels, and we will improve the experience as soon as we can run experiments on our test bed. Fully automated stats that provide smart insights into fuel consumption will likely take longer, until we can convince ourselves that the data is really good.

Thank you for your interest and for such an insightful discussion!