A lot of you probably know I have quite a complex boat electronics system that was all home built for very little money and is mostly provided by a little Raspberry Pi (Single Board Computer) that I built at home.
Many have questioned how reliable this has been and if it is able to handle the Marine environment?
The answer is, I have now been running this for almost two years trouble free. I had a small issue with the HDMI output socket but was able to fix that easily enough without having to wait for months or get a service person out “when they could find time”.
The device runs faultlessly and I expect to use it extensively during our passage across the Atlantic, whereas I know that after a few days without being turned off the commercial chart plotter I have will need to be restarted or will just restart itself, the RPi will keep going without a glitch and provide me full navigation information and control to my tablet, phones, laptops and via its own touch screen.
I thought about buying a second as a spare in case, because they are less than £100 and that is because of their short supply, when I bought the one I am using it cost me £35.