Art Technology Lab

We design technology with intention. Software, and hardware built for clarity, performance, and lasting impact.

Projects

Marine Data Simulator

Code

github.com/olafont/MarineDataSimulator

Marine Data Simulator

A desktop simulator of marine instrument data. A vessel sails or motors through simulated wind, current, tide, waves and depth, and its instruments send data to any program that listens: chart plotters such as OpenCPN, Signal K servers, instrument displays, or the software you are testing.

It speaks NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000, Signal K and AIS over UDP, TCP, WebSocket, serial port and file. It is written in Rust, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and is open source under GPL-3.0.

Marine Data Simulator running a sailing loop off Cape Canaveral: navigation and environment controls on the left, a chart with the vessel, its route and AIS traffic in the centre, and outputs and sensors on the right.
The built-in sailing loop off Cape Canaveral, with AIS traffic.

The simulator is for testing only. Never connect it to a vessel under way, and never feed its output into public AIS services.

GitHub User manual