Open AIS tracking for Marine Traffic

Fitzy 1

Believe it or not Windy is used by mariners during long transits and it has been an invaluable tool. I would love to see open AIS contacts during my transits as this would eliminate multiple applications running at the same time. It would speed up my system and increase situational awareness. Thank you for the amazing amount of information you report.

idefix37

@Fitzy-1
Your request is strange to me.
Don’t your navigation software/chart plotter already offer AIS display?
To fulfill your demand, Windy app should receive external NMEA data to display real time AIS targets from your AIS receiver/transponder.
What type of boat do you sail on?

mhaberler

@Fitzy-1 this has come up in various shape or form several times, for AIS, ADS-B, and other location-and-whatnot reporting data sources

then some half-assed effort is expended on datasource X, plugin published, victory declared and the whole thing rots away

this scheme just does not fly - however, there seems to be a legit demand for displaying nonstandard stuff on maps

my recommendation would be - split the problem into two:

a) a generic "here's a plugin which can display various stuff on a windy Leaflet map" part
b) a per-use-case "transform my data into the format the former can display it"

there is a superb example in the node-red ecosystem for a): https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-web-worldmap and I suggest to give it a try

you display "stuff" on the map by sending a JSON message with coordinates, and attributes what and how to display it
you "move" stuff on the map by sending that message with new coordinates

that is pretty much it - see the usage section: colors, icons, popups, speed/heading vectors, links, images, send GeoJSON, KML etc and what not

now node-red has an internal mechanism for message passing between nodes and that needs to be replaced by some generic vehicle - for that I'd use a Websockets listener/connector, passive/active HTTP or just passive/active TCP.

Step1: transplant the inbound message handling mechanism into a windy plugin.
Step2: recreate the outbound "Events from the map" so an external data source can react to click, pan, move, delete, file drop.

Then, to integrated your AIS or some other data source you only have to transform the data into the format expected by the map interpreter. And it could be pretty much any language one is familiar with - node, python, whatever.

I've used node-red-contrib-web-worldmap - it's well supported, stable and very popular. The core code is some 3000 lines and well written.

@rittels