Hoeken's Anchor Alarm

[hoeken]

I just pushed v1.1 of my new plugin (hoekens-anchor-alarm). I spent a lot of time polishing the web app and hopefully making the UI easy to use. Its a fork of the signalk-anchoralarm-plugin, but with a ton of personalization. I figured some of my changes would be controversial, so I decided to just make a fork instead. Its good to have variety, right?

From the README:

I wanted a simple, web-only anchor alarm with my own personal UI style and some features that may be controversial (like automatic alarm cancelling if your engines are running). If you want to use an external app or API, you are probably better off using the old plugin.

Some of the changes I've made:

• Added historical tracks from the @signalk/tracks-plugin plugin.
  • I recommend setting this to a resolution of 1000ms and 86400 points to keep. This gives you high resolution data for the last 24 hours. If you've got plenty of memory, you might as well use it.
• Added a check to prevent anchor alarm from firing when propulsion.*.rpm is > 0
  • I always forget to turn the anchor alarm off and it always goes off when I'm leaving the anchorage.
  • If you're truly dragging and you have your motor(s) on, then you know about it and you don't need another annoyance when you're dealing with it.
• Lots and lots of UI improvements:
  • Added colors to the historical tracks. Green = new, fading to red = old.
  • Added a line to show distance and bearing to anchor.
  • Added wind speed / angle
  • Added plugin status
  • Changed UI to dragging anchor to set position instead of panning.
  • Removed distance to anchor from anchor radius UI
  • Added auto-guess when not anchored to speed up the anchor placement.
  • Increased the max zoom
  • Added other boats + their tracks
  • More responsive UI

Usage

This plugin is intended to be used through the web interface with a phone or computer browser. Simply point your Web Browser to http://[signalk-server-ip-address]:[port-number]/hoekens-anchor-alarm/ and you can set your anchor alarm.

The way I use this app is to anchor the boat first, then once I'm settled I will use the webapp to set the anchor alarm. This is where its good to have a high resolution on the tracks, as you can usually see exactly where you dropped the hook. Make sure to set your radius a bit bigger to avoid false alarms.

If you have engine data in SignalK (propulsion.*.rpm or propulsion.*.state) then you can enable the engine check functionality. Then, when you leave the anchorage under engine power, it will automatically end the anchor watch. Additionally, if you are dragging anchor and you start your engines to reposition, it will also disable the anchor alarm. When your anchor is dragging, it can sometimes be hectic. There's no reason to bombard you with alarms when you are aware of it and getting it sorted.

This app pairs well with some other software:

• Node-RED + Pushbullet for push notifications to your phone. Really great for when you're off the boat. Also works when you're on the boat to get an alarm on your phone.
• signalk-autostate - Simply by using the anchor app, the plugin can automatically determine the difference between moored and anchored. You can then use this to automate things like an anchor light.
• I highly recommend installing Tailscale on your devices. It makes it sooooo easy to access things SignalK and its both free and dead simple.