Hacking the Speedpuck

The Speedpuck is an excellent device for displaying the speed of a small sailing dinghy. At around 225 pounds, not a cheap gadget for casual day sailing.

Small speed improvements may be achieved by tiny adjustments of sail trim, which can be difficult to detect unless a GPS or some form of speed display is in use. When travelling at only 4 or 5 knots a small increase can represent a considerable percentage speed gain.


The Challenge.

I wonder if I can build something that will do the same job for a fraction of the cost?
Construction details and code here.

Arduino Dinghy Speed Display

Small speed improvements may be achieved with tiny adjustments to sail trim, which can be difficult to detect unless a GPS or some form of speed display is in use. When travelling at only 4 or 5 knots a small increase can represent a considerable percentage speed gain.
Construction details and code here.

Arduino based GPS Compass

On occasions we may not require "degree" accuracy when checking our course. It may be sufficient to know the approximate direction we are travelling and that's good enough.

This little Arduino project will extract our course from a GPS NMEA stream and display our heading on an 8 point compass display.
Click here for construction details