Monitoring system for the integrated acquisition of on-board sensor data in cruising motoryachts

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This paper describes an electronic instrument for the integrated acquisition of the data coming from the many sensors embedded in a cruising motoryacht, to be used as monitoring system during the production test of these industrial products. It consists of a single hardware-software unit automatically configured to execute the production test for a specific yacht among hundreds of possible different models, by downloading the specific sensor and subsystem configuration with a remote connection to the company yacht database. It is based on a PC provided with converters that transfer the various sensor data on a USB bus and a software package that receives the data, decodes the digital protocols (NMEA 0183, CAN J1939, TCP/IP, etc.) and provides a common interface for visualization, data storage and the computer-assisted semi-automatic realization of a formal test procedure. Performance data are uploaded to the remote database for immediate comparisons via the UMTS network. The yacht pitch and roll angles are measured by a custom wireless 2-axis inclinometer realized and integrated as a further sensor to be acquired. The monitoring system operates in the harsh environment of this nautical application and gives an unitary and synchronized view of the yacht status, otherwise not available, and a significant improvement in the yacht test phase, because the quality of the production is verified in a better, shorter and thus much cheaper and efficient way than before.