signalk-binnacle

Binnacle

A WebGL chart plotter for Signal K.

It has not been field-tested at any scale. It has been developed and verified against a single Signal K server, never across a fleet or a range of real-world boats, hardware, and conditions. It is also not certified for safety-of-life navigation. Always carry redundant means of navigation, cross-check against your primary instruments, and treat every display as advisory.

What's new in 0.10.5

The radar picture works on real hardware now, with help from a tester running a live radar:

• The radar echo renders correctly. It had been blank with the stream live for three reasons, all fixed: the echo layer was off and nothing turned it on, the fallback color ramp left strong returns transparent, and the spoke image was drawn transposed and swept the wrong way. The echo now draws in the right orientation and sweeps clockwise from dead ahead, and it turns on automatically the first time a radar is detected.
• Transmit and standby control. Key the radar between transmit and standby from the radar panel, with a live status reading transmitting, standby, warming up, or off, plus a "Show echo on chart" toggle synced with the Layers eye.
• Read and write access prompt. If the server granted Binnacle a read-only token, a banner now offers a one-click request for read and write so routes, waypoints, tracks, course, alarms, and radar controls can save. The chart keeps updating while the new grant is approved.

The radar spoke stream also reconnects automatically after a drop and carries the auth token, and the controls parse whichever capability shape a provider serves.

See the changelog for the full list.

What it does

Signal K is an open marine data standard that streams a boat's navigation, environment, and AIS data over a single API. Binnacle displays that data: a GPU-rendered, offline-capable chart plotter that runs in a browser and is served by the boat's Signal K server.

It is built for low-bandwidth, offline use on modest hardware. It has night-readable themes, computes collision and course data on the client when no server provider supplies them, and caches viewed areas so they keep rendering without a connection. It runs on the same Raspberry Pi that hosts the Signal K server.

Features

Binnacle ships its full feature set as a Signal K webapp:

• Charts and layers: a GPU vector base map, server charts, four streaming bathymetry and ENC sources (NOAA ENC, BlueTopo, and EMODnet each add a nested survey-quality facet; GEBCO is global base bathymetry), and your own PMTiles charts added by URL or served from the server's charts folder, in a collapsible, categorized Layers panel with per-layer toggle, fade, and drag-reorder. A 24 hour track history layer draws the server-recorded past day under the live track.
• Overlays: free, key-free OpenSeaMap seamarks, marine protected areas, maritime boundaries, and NASA GIBS ocean conditions (sea-surface temperature and sea ice), each with its source attribution.
• Routing: draw and save routes as Signal K resources, or tap Go to here (long-press or right-click the chart) to navigate straight to a point. Follow a route with a nav strip (cross-track, distance, bearing, velocity made good, and time to go) over the v2 Course API, with an arrival alarm and skip-waypoint controls. A plan speed turns the route into a passage plan with per-waypoint and whole-route arrival times, and routes import and export as GPX to move between Binnacle and other plotters and MFDs.
• Profiles: save named bundles of your settings (theme, which layers are on and their order, the weather layers, the collision thresholds, and the track and planning settings), switch between them in one tap, set a default, export and import them as files, and sync them across devices through the server when you are logged in.
• Weather: a zoom-capped mini-map with animated WebGL wind, pressure isobars, waves, precipitation, cloud, and radar, a tap-for-value readout, and a conditions and warnings panel.
• Tides: the nearest tide station's next high and low with a 48-hour curve and the nearest tidal-current station's next flood or ebb. NOAA CO-OPS covers US waters out of the box; the signalk-tides plugin extends coverage worldwide when the server runs it.
• Lookout: a collision watch with CPA and TCPA, chart-highlight rings, an audible alarm, and a published Signal K notification, plus a sortable AIS target list (by range, CPA, or name) with live range and bearing, tap-to-locate, and faded target trails from the tracks plugin. An Alarms panel collects every active alert on the boat (engine, autopilot, any plugin) with one-tap Silence and Acknowledge that propagate to every station.
• Anchor watch: drop the anchor at the boat, set the swing radius (or capture it from the live distance), and get a drag alarm that latches until acknowledged. It drives the signalk-anchoralarm-plugin when installed (so the alarm keeps running with the browser closed) and falls back to a fully in-browser watch when it is not, with a draggable drop-point marker on the chart.
• Man overboard: an always-visible MOB button in the top bar with a confirm pop-out. Confirming marks the spot, publishes the boat-wide Signal K alarm, and raises a recovery strip with live bearing, range, and elapsed time, plus an opt-in Steer to MOB handoff to the course system. An MOB raised by another station shows here too.
• Measure: tap points on the chart for per-leg range and bearing and a running total, labeled at the last point.
• Tracks: record, save, show, and export your voyage track as GeoJSON, save a track as a reusable route, reverse a route for the return leg, or navigate home by retracing your track.
• Waypoints: drop one from a long press, see them as named markers, and locate, go to, rename, or delete them from the Waypoints panel; they live in the server's waypoint resources, so they interoperate with every other Signal K client.
• Trends: depth, apparent wind, barometric pressure, and speed over the last 24 hours as themed graphs from the server's v2 History API, or live session sampling without a history provider.
• Points of interest: Crow's Nest, ActiveCaptain, and other notes as themed markers with a structured detail panel, plus custom chart symbols from the signalk-symbol-manager plugin.
• Your units: every readout follows the server's imperial-or-metric unit preference; knots, nautical miles, and bearings stay nautical.
• Themes and offline: day, dusk, and night-red themes, offline caching, and self-hosted assets.

See the changelog for the full list.

Architecture

Binnacle is built on a current web stack and engineered to run on modest helm hardware:

• Front end. Svelte 5 with runes, Vite, and TypeScript, linted and formatted with Biome. The code is organized as cohesive, single-responsibility slices under a strict Feature-Sliced Design, with the import boundaries enforced by the build through a dependency-cruiser gate, a modular stylesheet assembled one concern per file, and shared UI primitives and helpers, so a new feature drops in against stable interfaces rather than by surgery on the core.
• GPU rendering. MapLibre GL JS draws the vector base map and chart layers on the GPU. The own vessel and every AIS target render as GPU symbol layers, and wind draws as a WebGL particle field advected through the forecast on the graphics card.
• Off-main-thread real-time pipeline. A dedicated Web Worker hosts the Signal K WebSocket client; deltas are coalesced into frame-rate batches on a worker timer and fed into a path-keyed reactive store, so a busy AIS anchorage updates the readouts without stalling the chart render, and data and alarms keep flowing while the tab is in the background.
• Minimal network and render work. Binnacle subscribes to exactly what it draws, keeps everything in SI internally, and converts only at the display edge.
• Offline caching. Self-hosted fonts and assets (no CDN for app code). PMTiles chart areas are cached as blocks in IndexedDB at the protocol layer, so they work offline even over plain http; tides, notes, weather, and the vessel conditions persist the same way. Over https a service worker additionally caches the base map, plugin chart tiles, the overlays, and predictions.

Requirements

• Signal K server 2.x.
• Node.js >= 22 (for building from source).
• A browser on the helm display, tablet, or phone.

Installation

Binnacle is a Signal K webapp. The production build ships inside the package, so there is nothing to build.

From the App Store (recommended). In the Signal K admin UI, open Apps and Plugins, then Store, search for Binnacle, and install. Open it from the Webapps list.

With npm. Install into the server's home directory and restart Signal K:

cd ~/.signalk
npm install signalk-binnacle

From source. See Development below.

Usage

Open Binnacle from the Webapps list in the Signal K admin UI, or go straight to http://your-sk-server:3000/signalk-binnacle/. It opens on the chart, centered on your boat.

A few interactions cover most of the helm:

• Open the context menu. Long-press the chart on a touch screen, or right-click with a mouse, to drop a waypoint, choose Go to here to navigate straight to that point, start a route or a measurement, or place an on-chart widget.
• Manage layers. Open the Layers panel to toggle each chart, bathymetry source, and overlay, fade it with the opacity slider, and drag the rows to reorder how they stack.
• Switch themes. Cycle the day, dusk, and night-red themes from the theme control. Night-red is pure red on true black for a dark-adapted watch.
• Mark a man overboard. Tap the always-visible MOB button in the top bar and confirm to mark the spot, raise the boat-wide alarm, and start the recovery strip.

For offline charts and tiles, see Offline operation and SSL below.

Offline operation and SSL (optional)

SSL is not required. Binnacle runs fully over plain HTTP, which is how the Signal K server serves it by default: the chart, AIS, weather, points of interest, tracks, and the Lookout alarms all work without it.

Much of the offline caching works without SSL. PMTiles chart areas, the weather forecast, tides, chart notes, and the vessel conditions are cached in IndexedDB, which is not secure-context gated, so even over plain HTTP a reload replays the last data and previously viewed PMTiles charts keep rendering offline. What SSL adds is the service-worker layer: browsers expose the service worker and cache-storage APIs only in a secure context (HTTPS or http://localhost), so caching the base map, plugin-served chart tiles, and the streaming overlays activates only when the server is reached over HTTPS. Over plain HTTP those degrade cleanly to online-only with no loss of live function.

There are two good ways to add HTTPS to Signal K:

• The signalk-ssl plugin (source), which generates a local certificate authority, issues the server certificate, and distributes the root to your devices by QR code. It runs its certificate tooling on the shared signalk-container runtime. The Signal K server's built-in SSL settings (Server, then Settings, then SSL) are a bare-bones alternative.
• Tailscale, which adds remote access and publicly trusted certificates (no trust-store step at all) in one move. See Accessing Signal K remotely with Tailscale for a quick start, including a clean signalk.<tailnet>.ts.net service name.

One more step is required, and it is easy to miss: your browser has to trust that certificate, not just reach it. A self-signed certificate, including one the signalk-ssl plugin generates, is not trusted by default, and browsers refuse to register a service worker from an origin whose certificate they do not trust, even after you click through the page's certificate warning. So if you only accept the one-time warning, the page loads but offline caching never activates, and the console shows a message like "service worker registration failed: an SSL certificate error occurred." To fix it, install the certificate authority's root (the QR code or .pem the plugin gives you) into your browser or operating system trust store and mark it trusted, then reload over HTTPS. Once the certificate is trusted, the service worker registers and the base map and chart tiles cache for offline use.

Development

This project targets Node 22 or newer. Lint and format use the Biome binary, which must be installed and on your PATH (CI installs it via the biomejs/setup-biome action).

git clone https://github.com/NearlCrews/signalk-binnacle.git
cd signalk-binnacle
npm install        # install dependencies
npm run hooks      # install the git pre-commit and pre-push gates (run once)
npm run dev        # Vite dev server
npm run check      # type-check (svelte-check)
npm run lint       # Biome lint
npm run format     # Biome format (write)
npm run cruise     # dependency-cruiser boundary check
npm test           # Vitest unit tests
npm run build      # production build into public/
npm run test:e2e   # Playwright end-to-end smoke test

After npm run hooks, git runs a fast format, lint, and boundary check before each commit, and the full type-check, test, and build gate before each push. The hooks live in .githooks/ and are opt-in via core.hooksPath, never a package lifecycle script.

To run a local build inside your own Signal K server, link it into the server's module directory and add it to the server config so it loads:

ln -sfn "$(pwd)" ~/.signalk/node_modules/signalk-binnacle

{
  "dependencies": {
    "signalk-binnacle": "file:../path/to/signalk-binnacle"
  }
}

Restart Signal K, then open http://your-sk-server:3000/signalk-binnacle/ in a browser.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE for the full text. The software is provided "AS IS", without warranty of any kind. It has not been field-tested at scale and is not certified for navigation. Treat all on-screen information as advisory, and always carry independent means of position-fixing.

Acknowledgments

Binnacle is written and maintained by Nearl Crews. It stands on open data and open source:

• Signal K Project for the open marine data standard.
• MapLibre GL JS for the GPU map renderer, and OpenFreeMap for the vector base map, built from OpenStreetMap data under the Open Database License.
• Open-Meteo for the forecast and marine wave grids, and RainViewer for precipitation radar.
• NOAA for the ENC chart, BlueTopo bathymetry, the MPA Inventory, and the CO-OPS tide and current predictions; EMODnet for European bathymetry and protected areas; GEBCO for global bathymetry; NASA EOSDIS GIBS for the ocean-conditions imagery; OpenSeaMap for the seamark overlay; and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) Marine Regions service for the maritime boundaries.

Custom chart symbols come from signalk-symbol-manager by Joel Kozikowski, who also contributed the symbol rendering Binnacle uses in #6.

Binnacle pairs well with sibling plugins such as signalk-crows-nest, which supplies the points of interest it renders, and works with any Signal K weather provider, such as signalk-virtual-weather-sensors.

Support

Find this project useful? You can support its continued development by buying me a coffee.

• Report a bug
• Request a feature
• Security issues