Open Data Buoy to Analyze Weather and Sea Conditions for Sailing Regattas

This papers describes an open data buoy which analyses weather and sea conditions for sailing regattas. The aim of this Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is to provide accurate wind and sea measurements free of boat disturbances in order to support performance analysis for inshore or coastal sailing. This data buoy is composed of several sensors such as anemometervan, Global Positioning System (GPS), Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and it is flexible enough to plug additional sensors. The energy consumption of the embedded system is optimized in order to increase the battery life. It is based on a ARM Cortex-M4 processor allowing to measure and to compute wind conditions, to store these data on SD memory card and communicate through wireless networks. On the other hand, real-time and postprocessing softwares are developed to visualize and to analyze wind and sea measurements. From these data, wind reference is available to properly correct the wind measurement on the sailboat and to analyze a sea area.