Hardware

Hardware

What BoatOS needs, what has proven itself, and what you can skip. Prices are rough ballpark figures (as of 2026) meant only to convey scale — the whole point of the project is ~€250 instead of €2,000+ for a commercial chartplotter.

This page is deliberately version-less: hardware ages more slowly than software. The exact software state is on the Home page under "The three channels".

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The minimum

Part	Recommendation	~Price	Note
Computer	Raspberry Pi 4, 4 GB	€100-150	2 GB works, 4 GB is more relaxed. Pi 5 and Pi 3B+ run too.
Storage	SSD over USB, 128 GB+	€20–40	Clearly better than an SD card — see below.
GPS	USB puck, e.g. BU-353N5	€30–60	Shows up as /dev/ttyUSB0 @ 4800 baud. Needs a clear view of the sky.
Display	HDMI touchscreen 10.1", 1280×800	€60–90	Tested: QDtech MPI1001. Touch over USB.
Power	DC-DC converter 12 V → 5 V	€10–20	Boat power is rarely clean 5 V. Size it generously (Pi 4 + display + USB).

That puts you round about €250 for a complete station: offline navigation, logbook, charts. Sensors and engine monitoring are optional additions.

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SSD instead of SD card

The single most important decision. An SSD over USB is not only faster but above all more reliable under voltage fluctuations — and on a boat those are the rule, not the exception. SD cards tend to die quietly under unclean power and frequent writes. For a system meant to hold a whole season's logbook, that's the wrong place to save money.

The ready-made image flashes onto an SSD exactly like onto an SD card.

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Networking on board

• LAN where possible. The Pi on the onboard router by cable is the most stable setup. If your dev PC is on the same router over WiFi, some routers enforce WiFi client isolation — then two WiFi devices can't reach each other, but a wired device can. When in doubt, put the Pi on the cable.
• A dedicated onboard router keeps the boat network separate from marina WiFi and makes addresses predictable.
• For the network architecture (dhcpcd manages eth0, NetworkManager wlan0) and the related traps, see Common Pitfalls.

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Sensors & engine monitoring (optional)

To get battery, oil temperature, oil pressure, coolant and RPM into BoatOS you need a path from the (often old, analogue) senders to the system. That's what BoatOpenIO does: a modular 16-channel gateway on an ESP32 that conditions the analogue signals and sends them to BoatOS over MQTT. BoatOS auto-discovers the topics and places them on the dashboard.

• Repo: BoatOpenIO
• Complete kits and assembled boards are in preparation — see Tindie.

A warning from real life: with the modular IO system, always check which mini-board sits in which channel before applying power. Feeding 12 V directly into a pull-up channel (instead of through the voltage divider) destroys the multiplexer, all the ADCs and the ESP32 at once via an I²C chain reaction. Details in the BoatOpenIO repo.

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What you can skip

• An expensive active cooler for the Pi 4 in normal operation — a passive heatsink is usually enough. Only reconsider for a closed, hot installation.
• A high-end SD card as main storage — put that money into the SSD instead (see above).
• A GPS HAT with antenna isn't necessary as long as the USB puck gets a clear view. The bottleneck is antenna placement, not the receiver.

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Next: First Start — flash the image and get it running.