Project task

UpWind::NMEA is a project launched by the University Of Oulu. It's goal was to create a simulation environment that could mimic the instruments of a sailing boat, and to make them work together with navigation software that can handle the data given by these simulations. Previously when the software was tested the real instruments of a sailing boat needed to be used. This required moving the equipment around or using the instruments with the software directly in a sailing boat.

The main task was to simulate at least three sailing boat instruments: clock, GPS and anemometer. The simulations of these instruments had to output data that is NMEA-0183-compliant. The second task was to make a lightweight application that could handle sending the data into a RS232 port. It was also required that the simulation must know how to send the output data to networks or the Internet so that the lightweight application can get the needed data. Thirdly, the output of the instruments had to be saved to an XML-file. XML was preferred due to the performance when looking for nodes inside of the DOM tree and the possibility of adding comments to each of the sentences. Further work done in this project was creating a multisimulation for multiple boats and a compass instrument.

Scalability and modularity were emphasized in the implementation, allowing new instruments to be added easily. This was achieved by using a plugin architecture.

Project team

The project team consisted of six members: Iñigo Fuentes, Joni Komulainen, Jyrki Kyllönen, Kalle Lämsä, Joni Murtovaara and Juha Ulkoniemi. The work load was about 300 hours per head. During the project the team implemented succesfully all the tasks that were assigned to them at the beginning of the project.