Step 12 Using openplotter tools remotely

WARNING: this information has been written in 2021, when pypilot version was 0.24 and Openplotter was 2.0. In 2023 these versions have by far been superceded and information in this chapter is most likely to be partly obsolete. Work in progress will be documented in the Workbook Release Notes.

As said before, the tools on openplotter default to connect to the pypilot on localhost. They can, however, be used on a remote pypilot. This is useful when you want to connect to an attached tinypilot.

This applies to the following scripts:

• pypilot_client [-s] [ip-address]
• pypilot_client_wx [ip-address]
• pypilot_calibration [ip-address]
• pypilot_control [ip-address]
• pypilot_scope [ip-address]

When pypilot_client is invoked with the -s switch, the IP address is stored in the file ~/.pypilot/pypilot_client.conf. Any subsequent invocation of any of the scripts above will default to that IP address.

Example:

# In this example, 10.10.10.2 is the address on the tinypilot
pi@openplotter:~ $ pypilot_client -s 10.10.10.2
[whole database dumped]
pi@openplotter:~ $ pypilot_client -s 10.10.10.2 -c ap.heading_error
ap.heading_error = -2.122
ap.heading_error = -2.154
ap.heading_error = -2.158
^C
pi@openplotter:~ $ pypilot_calibration
[...]

This does not only apply for when you invoke these scripts from the command line, but also when you invoke them from the openplotter interface: from then on, your pypilot is the external one. If you ask me, this is a good example of how well-implemented a modular architecture can be.

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Step 13: SignalK connections >>>