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sailing
Marine / Industrial Control
OpenThread Marine Control System
Hydraulic anchors & trolling motors
Replaced a collision-prone legacy broadcast mesh with an OpenThread network for reliable control of marine hydraulic anchors and trolling motors, plus ThingsBoard cloud and Alexa voice control — designed, built and demoed in four months.
4 months
Concept to working demo
1 SoC
Thread + BLE concurrently
Collisions
Removed at the root
- Client
- A US marine-equipment manufacturer (name withheld — NDA)
- Delivery
- Delivered by our founder at Croxel Inc (US)
- Role
- Embedded developer — system design and firmware
- Timeline
- 2022 · ~4 months
Stack
nRF52840 Zephyr / nRF Connect SDK OpenThread BLE MPSL Thread Border Router CoAP ThingsBoard Alexa Skill Flutter
help The problem
The client's boats control hydraulic anchors and trolling motors wirelessly, but their legacy broadcast-based mesh suffered on-air packet collisions — messages stepping on each other, causing dropped or delayed commands. For gear that physically moves a boat, an unreliable command path is a safety problem, not an annoyance.
build What we built
- An OpenThread-based control network replacing the legacy broadcast mesh. Thread's IPv6 mesh with proper MAC-layer arbitration and addressed, retryable messaging removed the on-air collisions at the root — commands reach a specific actuator instead of being broadcast into contention.
- Simultaneous BLE and Thread on a single nRF52840 using Nordic's Multiprotocol Service Layer, so the device runs the control mesh and BLE commissioning at the same time on one radio.
- Cloud integration through a Thread Border Router, bridging the mesh to ThingsBoard over CoAP for remote monitoring and control.
- An Alexa voice skill for hands-free remote operation, and a Flutter app to commission Thread credentials onto a new board over BLE.
check_circle The result
- done Delivered in roughly four months, culminating in a working demo: hydraulic control driven from the ThingsBoard cloud.
- done Protocol migration to solve a real reliability problem, multiprotocol firmware on a single SoC, border-router and cloud integration, and voice-assistant control.