A bridge over (not) troubled waters: Collecting marine data from your couch

Do you ever have a weird feeling that something around you is off? I certainly do, and one recurring thought I have is that the vintage boat I'm helping restore has sunk. I decided to use the tools available to me to put my mind at ease: software, a soldering iron, and stubbornness. My crewmate and I have built a way to get live data from our boat while on the couch at home at 3 am :) Data is a great way to reduce anxiety, and in this case has also generated a rising tide of interest in marine tech infrastructure. In this talk, we will give you a tour the cool Python and OSS tools we have discovered for collecting telemetry on boats, a specialized marine data collection platform (Signal K), and an MQTT bridge to bring it all into our smart home dashboards on Home Assistant.