Yacht racing is a spectacular sport with a lot of uncertainty coming from weather conditions (wind and precipitation), which makes each start unique and unpredictable.
Project description
The current project allowed complementing the website with a live map showing the competing boats location, their routes and speed, actual weather information, etc. It was ordered by the Sail yacht association (L-6 class) in Russia and implemented by the innovative Geoservice company.
You can always find the yacht position by clicking the “show on map” icon next to the corresponding yacht name.
The interactive leaderboard shows the current and average speed for each boat, the live track each boat follows, and some other helpful information.
Switching to the OpenWeatherMap_Wind in the top right corner (“layers” icon) allows seeing the current weather conditions, especially wind speed and direction.
For professionals, it might be interesting and informative to see the routes of all competing yachts to make conclusions about the mastery of each crew.
The project is already deployed, though some improvements are still on the way: race player, archive, measurement tools, admin mode, and a lot more.
Technical details
The technical side of the project is pretty straightforward:
each yacht is equipped with a GPS tracker (Navtelecom and Teltonika devices mostly used on the yachts);
the tracking devices report the data (location, speed, etc.) to flespi
The solution by Geoservice (Geoservice24 Sailing) requests the data from flespi via REST API, performs further processing and visualization
Geoservice24 Sailing is embedded into the Sailing yacht association website.
Why flespi?
Backend only needed — the Geoservice team designed and coded the client-facing part of the solution themselves. No extra features, no extra cost.
Powerful REST API — it’s convenient to extract the data needed thanks to flexible requests.
Quick and effortless equipment setup — it’s just a matter of a few minutes to point the GPS trackers to the domain name:port of the proper flespi channels and get all the device messages for easy access.
Instant aggregation of messages from various types of devices in a unified JSON format for consumption in the target app.
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The guys from Geoservice were invited to one of the races held by the Sail yacht association in Saint Petersburg to see how their solution works in real life and to have some fun of course. Isn't it proof of successful and mutually beneficial cooperation?
