I kept running into the same problem building onboard systems.
Everything worked — but it never quite felt joined up.
Over the last 6 years I’ve spent a lot of time around marine electronics, from Raspberry Pi builds and Signal K to NMEA, MQTT, Node-RED, Grafana, Victron and custom hardware.
There’s a huge amount of clever, genuinely useful innovation in this space.
But when you start putting it all together on a real boat, it can quickly become a collection of separate pieces rather than one coherent system.
At one point I had:
• individual web pages for different hardware
• Node-RED flows
• Grafana dashboards
It all worked, but it wasn’t something I found particularly intuitive to use day to day.
I then tried building ESP32 and STM32-based control screens. They looked much better, but still felt a bit limited in terms of flexibility and integration.
So I decided to start again — and approach it a bit differently.
That’s where mySmartApp™ came from.
The idea is to create a simple app layer that sits above all of this — something that can bring together Raspberry Pi systems, custom hardware, MQTT, Signal K, NMEA data, APIs and tools like Node-RED into one place.
Somewhere you can:
• monitor
• control
• configure
• visualise
— without needing a separate interface for everything.
For those of us who enjoy building systems, dashboards and integrations are part of the fun.
But on a real boat, there’s also something to be said for things just feeling straightforward and easy to use.
I’m getting close to opening up beta testing and would genuinely value input from others working in this space.
If you’re involved with marine electronics, Raspberry Pi systems, Signal K, MQTT, NMEA, Node-RED, Grafana, Victron — or anything similar — it would be great to connect.
