Raspberry Pi – Software – OpenCPN

Chartplotter and GPS Navigation Software

About

Chart Plotter and Navigational software program for use underway or as a planning tool.

Developed by a team of active sailors using real world conditions for program testing and refinement.
    •   Verified Super Clean Code
    •   Open Source
    •   Developed by Boaters
    •   Real-world Tested
    •   Updated Regularly
    •   Loaded with Features
    •   Its Free Software

Supported Chart Formats

Worldwide standard S57 and encrypted S63 vector chart support.
BSB v3 and earlier raster charts.
MBTiles chartsets.
Up-to-date ENCs for selected worldwide regions, distributed by o-charts.org

AIS

AIS input with full target-tracking and collision alerting.
AIS support for SART with selectable MMSI for automatic MOB handling.
AIS support for DSC and GPSGate buddies.

Routes

Route planning with tidal support.
Built-in great-circle routing.
Integrated weather routing plugin.

Language Support

20+ languages supported.

Performance

OpenGL support for enhanced performance on modern hardware.

GPS Tracking

Route navigation with ship tracking functions.
Waypoint navigation.
Autopilot output support.

Alarms

Anchor watch/alarm functions.
MOB Alarm with tracking.

Weather

GRIB and GRIB2 file input and display for weather forecasting.

Plugins

Over 40 plugins to choose from.
Get Plugins

User Manual

Built in for offline use.

Display

Single-chart and Quilted display modes.
Single and split-screen display.
North-up, Course-up and Chart-up.
Moving-map display mode.
Tide and Current prediction and display by location.
IHO S52 compliant display of S57 and S63 vector charts.
A selection of display themes.
InlandECDIS ver 2.3 support

NMEA Data

Dashboard for configurable on-screen display of ship’s NMEA data.
NMEA 0183 GPS interface at selectable baud rate.
Advance NMEA message handling structure with built-in multiplexer.

Data Transfer

GPX waypoints, Track and Route input and output file support.
GPX Layers for annotation of charts.

Installation

Adding OpenCPN Ubuntu PPA to Raspbian Software Sources

Once you have Raspbian running on Raspberry Pi, go to Menu → Accessories → Terminal, and type:

A text editor will open. Move the cursor to the end and add this line if you are on Raspbian Stretch:

Or, if your Raspbian is the latest Buster:

Save the file pressing Ctrl X, say Yes and press enter. Now type:

(A certificate management service, needed for the next command) Then type

and press enter. Now be sure you have Internet connection and type:

The Software sources will be updated and finally you will have to type:

and you are done!

Installing plugins

Most plugin packages are named as opencpn-plugin-<pluginname> , to install a plugin, use a command like shown on the example below:

Wildcards can be used in the installed package names, so to install all the available plugins, you may use:

Some plugins have different names. Go to the plugins page to know the correct name:

If a new version of OpenCPN or a plugin is released and you want to update (this IS a good idea), just type:

Download Charts

You can find lots of charts on this website: http://chartcatalogs.github.io/

Chart Manual Install

Chart Downloader is the easier, preferred way to install charts, but at times manual techniques are useful.

For this example, we will use the freely distributed NOAA US charts.

Unzip all those folders (US1EEZ1M, etc…) to a location on your hard drive. For this example we used My Documents/charts.

Start OpenCPN, and point it to your chart directory Settings > Charts > Chart Files > Add Directory (remember My Documents is actually something like C:\Users\user-name\Documents\Charts)

Click Select Folder

Tick boxes “Scan Charts and Update Database” and “Force Full Database Rebuild”