Sfera Baltic boat gets another Raspberry Pi-based makeover
You may remember this majestic vessel from when we wrote about it in 2021, after it had a Raspberry Pi-based makeover to become a fully automated pleasure craft. Sfera Labs’ Ulde Arcidiaco has now upgraded the 63-year-old Norwegian tug to take advantage of both Raspberry Pi 5 and Compute Module 5. Raspberry Pi Official Magazine caught up with The Baltic in the latest issue, out now.
In 1962, The Baltic, a 26 metre-long Norwegian tug, took to the oceans. Unlike today, boats of the 1960s were largely manually controlled. Little wonder because the most widely used computer was IBM’s 1401: it had a 16,000-character core memory and weighed several hundred kilos. The 1401 was so expensive that most companies would generally rent one.
The 1401 computer took 17 seconds just to boot up and lacked both software and interfaces needed to work in industrial, let alone marine, scenarios. Other early computers such as the renowned DEC PDP-1 would have been no more suitable or affordable to control a commercial craft. Yet by the time The Baltic tug had been in operation for 20 years, computing was beginning to make real inroads, and computer-controlled ships came on stream. Around this time, The Baltic was taken out of service and sold on. Eventually, time and computer capabilities caught up with the venerable craft, and in 2021 The Baltic embarked on a new life, with a brand-new control system built around Sfera Lab’s Raspberry Pi and Compute Module Strato and Iono hardware.
Heritage value
By the early 1980s when The Baltic tug was decommissioned, huge strides had been made in computing capabilities and costs had plummeted. After languishing on the south coast of England and then voyaging to the Mediterranean, The Baltic’s fortunes changed. “The new owner had the ambitious goal to fully refit the boat and transform it into a yacht, preserving the original design and heritage of the unit,” explains Ulderico Arcidiaco, the man tasked with modernising and fully automating the revitalised craft.
Standard PLCs (programmable logic controllers, often described as industrial computers) are used for the power management and some automation aspects of most ships, while everything else is done separately. Ulde was approached to add automation and decided on an audacious plan for an IPMS (Integrated Platform Management System) such as those found on modern military units or very large commercial ships. The fully integrated approach controls of all of the ship’s subsystems. The setup would cost a fortune to implement the traditional way, but made sense using Sfera’s Raspberry Pi-based PLCs and the firm’s own supervision software. He installed Strato Pi units to provide full, integrated control of The Baltic’s core and supplementary functions, from power distribution to tanks and pumps control, navigation, alarms, fire, lighting, stabilisers, chargers, inverters, battery banks, and video feeds.
The first phase of the refit saw Ulde install Strato Pi Compute Module Duo and Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ on The Baltic. These were replaced in 2022 with two Strato Pi UPS (uninterruptible power supply) modules with 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B. “It was a plug and play replacement,” he notes. “The combination of a more powerful CPU and more memory resulted in a 2× to 4× increase in performance, buying us ample margin to address the new needs.”
Nonetheless, by this year, Ulde saw the sense in upgrading. “When sailing, the amount of data that has to be processed and stored in real-time is significant,” he observes, and he knew from the outset that performance updates would be needed over the years, especially with new onboard systems and services to support. Two fully redundant Strato Pi Max XL units with Compute Module 5 and 8GB RAM plus a 480GB SSD now function as the core IPMS processors. Performance-wise, The Baltic’s upgraded setup is now around 15× more powerful than the original CM Duo setup Ulde first installed.
Time and tide
Having been born just a couple of years after The Baltic first set sail, Ulde has been an electronics and computer enthusiast since his teens and says he has seen “a meaningful chunk of the computer evolution”. The founder and co-CEO of industrial computer specialist Sfera Labs, Ulde says Raspberry Pi is one of the most important developments that happened throughout this journey. “Raspberry Pi opened a whole range of new opportunities, similar to what Linux did on the software side.
“Just as it was inconceivable to install a computer on a yacht in 1962, so it was unthinkable until a few years ago for a relatively small company such as Sfera Labs to be creating products and software capable of implementing a full IPMS on a complex vessel.”
Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #159
You can grab this issue from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, WHSmith, and other newsagents, including the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. It’s also available from our online store, which ships around the world. And you can get a digital version via our app on Android or iOS.
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