As the gigantic hurricane Dorian barreled its way up Florida's Eastern Seaboard in October 2019, I had to leave Britannia to fend for herself in a marina at Cape Canaveral, Florida, For three days I remained very concerned about the boat, with only sketchy TV reports to say what was happening at The Cape. A Float-hub device would have dramatically changed this scenario by transmitting real time boat information to my home computer and I-phone.
The concept is logical enough: you connect all the things you want to monitor to the Float hub, a rather innocuous little yellow box only 3” x 5” x 1½-inches but evidently with an over sized brain. The data is transmitted through either Wifi or cellular connection and you see an interactive “dashboard” of your boat as it is actually happening.
Float hub operates on the NMEA 0183 protocol, (National Marine Electrics Association), that most modern instruments conform to. There will be a newer NMEA 2000 version available shortly.
I wired the Float hub to show output from my wind generator: the condition of two sets of batteries, and whenever two bilge pumps came on. This information would be particularly helpful if a boat was on a mooring or at anchor rather than in a marina. If the boats position suddenly changed you would know it had moved for some reason. If it was being stolen you could follow it without the thieves even knowing they were being tracked. It would also be useful to bare-boat charter companies to show the position and equipment status on their vessels. The device also sends out its own internally collected data, for saloon temperature: barometric pressure: GPS position and boat speed.
The basic Float hub with only Wifi connectivity costs $149.00, plus shipping and data transmission is free. The combined Wifi/cell version costs $239.99 with retrieval plans at $9.99 a month, or $99.99 yearly.
I wouldn't say I’m looking forward to the next big storm but it will be interesting to watch what is actually happening on the boat.
Read more about this neat little device at www.floathub.com.
