This is where I am building out a Raspberry Pi with Open Plotter and whatever other goodies I can toss in there.
First, bought the Raspberry Pi 4 from Amazon. Bought the CanaKit version as I have previously bought that kit for another project that worked out nicely. Comes with cooling fan, power cable with a power switch, and an HDMI to Mini HDMI cable. Had to buy separately a 32 GB micro SD card.
Next step was to format the SD card, not sure it is necessary, but did it anyway using SD Card Formatter
Next, download openPlotter and create a bootable SD card.
I started with the openPlotter Basic for the RPI4 https://cloud.openmarine.net/s/sL9doDML7P4CQDo
Then I used Etcher to flash the SD card
Some basic items that you need to set once the Pi boots up. I opened an SSH connection so I can shell to it, and I opened the Serial port in order to run the GPS.
These can be done from the command line on the pi, or the GUI from the menu on the pi. However you when you launch the preinstalled OS from the openCPN image, you will be prompted to change the password. Go ahead and do that.
Then open SSH, this will allow you to shell into it from any other computer, and is useful if you decide to run the pi headless later, which we will do. The images below are both ways to set the SSH. In the 1st one we can open a terminal window and type: raspi-config or if that does not work, you can :sudo raspi-config.
Alternately you can click the Raspberry icon in the top left corner, Preferences/Raspberry Pi Configurations then the Interfaces tab. You can open both the SSH, and Serial connections. We will need serial open in order to establish a connection to the GPS unit so go ahead and click it here. In the image below Serial is not selected, but you will select it.
Next we need to get our GPS unit talking to openCPN, so this for me was the tricky part. It was hard to find the answers outright, Documentation and blogs, etc, all say a few things to hook it up but I did not find one that gave you the details of the matter. And I may have simply skimmed over docs, and maybe did not read them thoroughly enough. I am not too big on spending all my time reading about, more like to get hands dirty and dive right in. Sometimes that bites me in the ass. This may have been one of those times who knows.
So I bought this little unit off Amazon as one of the folks mentioned best to use UBLOX, and go with version 8 or 9. No idea what UBLOX was, so some googling got me up to speed. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071XY4R26/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Plug the GPS unit into one of the USB ports on the PI4, I am not sure if it matters what port, there was a mention from one of the sites I was at where their unit did not work on the USB3 port, the blue ones. So, to be safe I moved my keyboard to a blue port and used the bottom USB2 port on the PI. I did not test it on the USB3 yest. Maybe later.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
https://openmarine.net/openplotter
Setup the external USB GPS at 5.59 Minute mark
