What I'd Instrument on Wanderlust
I'm coming off a couple of years on Microsoft's Windows IoT team, and I just bought a sailboat. Winter at the dock is a fine time to daydream about sensors.
Most of my day job lately has been the managed decline of Windows Automotive—helping vendors and customers, mostly overseas, who are still shipping new cars with devices running what used to be Ford SYNC under the hood. Windows Auto is a legacy story now, but legacy at automotive scale does not mean quiet. It means long support tails, odd firmware combinations, and phone calls from people who cannot afford for the head unit to become a brick.
The other half of the work is more fun: testing new builds of Windows IoT on current hardware—Raspberry Pi boards, other small controllers, the usual suspects in the "please boot reliably" club. It is the kind of job where you learn quickly that the demo works on the bench and the product works when the power supply lies a little and the SD card is not quite as fast as the datasheet promised.
A cool perk was bringing home a futuristic-looking, Cortana-enabled thermostat built on Windows IoT and wiring it into our home HVAC system. My family tolerated the experiment with good humor. Cortana never became the ship's mate I imagined, but the project reminded me how satisfying it is when software you touched in Redmond ends up controlling something physical in your house—valves, relays, the small machinery of comfort.
I also built something called the Kegocnizer. That is a story for another day, but it belongs in the same mental folder: microcontroller brain, real-world inputs, and the grin you get when the LEDs mean the beer is cold enough.
All that playing around kindled an itch I had not felt this strongly since the TRS-80 days: what could I build myself to automate parts of my world that I actually care about? Not a slide deck. Not a pilot for someone else's factory. My world.
And my world just acquired a 2007 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 39i. I got her to the home dock safely—again, another story—but for now she sits on winter duty-standby, and I sit inside with coffee, sketching ideas I will probably implement one at a time for the next decade.
So indulge the daydream. Suppose I had a pile of spare microcontrollers, a drawer of sensors—9-degree-of-freedom IMUs, temperature and humidity, maybe a cheap current clamp—plus an Azure subscription where I could stand up digital twins, always-on connectivity when the marina Wi-Fi cooperates, and a 3D printer to make cases and mounts that fit awkward corners. Power is 12-volt DC everywhere; that part is not hypothetical. The dream is the glue: firmware, cloud model, dashboard, alerts.
Start with the house bank. I want per-bank voltage and current trends, not just a voltmeter I glance at when I remember. A twin in Azure for "port house," "starboard house," and "start," with rules that text me when a bank diverges from its sisters or when charge acceptance looks wrong after a long motor. History matters: was last weekend's overnight draw normal, or is something new leaking amps into the cold?
Add motion and environment. A 9-DOF unit near the companionway could log heel angle and pitch in squalls—partly curiosity, partly "was that knock worse than it felt?" Cabin temperature and humidity at the v-berth and saloon, fridge and freezer probes that actually alarm before the cheese becomes a science project. Bilge cycle counts. A float switch is crude; counting pump runs over time tells you something different when the rain will not quit.
Engine room deserves its own twin: temperature trends, maybe an hour meter tied to vibration, oil-change intervals that nag based on engine hours rather than calendar guilt. None of this replaces a mechanic. It replaces surprise.
At the hull level, anchor watch is the classic problem: GPS position fence, drift rate, a loud notification if the circle grows while I am asleep. AIS already tells the world where we are; this is the inward-facing mirror—did we move when we should not have?
The dashboard is where the dream either becomes useful or becomes another hobby that eats weekends. I picture tiles for now: green/yellow/red, sparklines for the last week, drill-down when something went out of bounds. Alerts should be sparse and trustworthy. If the phone buzzes every time a cloud sync hiccups, I will disable the app and go back to walking below to check the panel—defeating the whole purpose.
Digital twins are not magic. They are a disciplined way to name the parts, relate them, and replay history. The boat becomes a graph: batteries feed a bus; the bus feeds loads; loads have duty cycles; sensors observe nodes; rules fire on edges. Microsoft sells the platform; I would be the annoying customer who actually models the galley fridge because that is where the real life happens.
Reality will intrude, of course. Salt air eats connectors. Heat in the lazarette cooks plastic mounts I printed too optimistically. Marina Wi-Fi is not "always-on" in any sense an engineer should trust. The right architecture probably keeps a local gateway on board that buffers readings and syncs when it can—Windows IoT thinking without requiring Windows IoT on every sensor node. Edge first, cloud second. I learned that at work; the boat would teach it again, more vividly.
I also know my limits. I am a software person who wishes he had spent more evenings on circuits and mechanical design. Robotics on the boat is a what-if, not a plan to automate the helm this spring. The near-term wins are boring and valuable: know the batteries, know the bilge, know the anchor, know the cold chain. Flashy autonomy can wait until the basics stop lying to me.
So it goes. Winter keeps Wanderlust quiet and me restless. The Windows IoT years gave me the vocabulary; the new old boat gives me the excuse. Somewhere between a Raspberry Pi in a dry bag and a twin in Azure is a project list long enough to last until the dock lines go back on—and that is exactly the kind of trouble I like.