Navigate · Cockpit
One screen for what you're doing right now.
The cockpit — what I also call the Helm — is the screen that runs while the boat is doing something. Underway at sea, instruments and route progress. Sitting at anchor overnight, anchor watch and environmental readings. Coming into the marina, proximity alert and AIS around the berth. The layout changes with the mode; the data comes from the bus.
Mode-aware layouts
The instruments change with what the boat is doing.
A boat underway at sea needs different information than a boat sitting at anchor in a bay, or a boat picking up a berth in a marina at night. The cockpit detects mode from the bus and switches the tile layout. You can also switch manually.
Passage mode
Speed over ground, heading, true wind, depth, and route progress. The boat is moving; every tile is about motion and navigation state.
Anchor watch mode
Anchor position, swing radius, drag alarm, wind and depth. Speed becomes proximity — how far from your set point, not where you're going.
Docking approach
At 0.5nm from the marina waypoint the cockpit auto-switches. Speed drops to the foreground; AIS shows nearby traffic at berth scale; depth alarm is set tight.
Night watch
When the sun's down, the cockpit comes alive.
The instrument theme runs on pure black with a touch of glow on each value. Glance-readable across the cockpit at 0300. Each semantic colour is fixed — orange is speed, cyan is environment, amber is direction, green is healthy. Your eyes know what colour means what before you read the label.
One tab, one MFD
Every browser tab is an independent display.
Traditional MFDs are hardware. I replicate that model in software: each browser tab running the cockpit is a full, equal-peer display. There is no master and no secondary — just tabs.
Equal-peer tabs
Open the cockpit on the nav station screen and on the iPad in the cockpit. Both show the same live data. Both can change the layout. Neither controls the other. If the iPad loses connection for 30 seconds and comes back, it catches up automatically — no manual refresh, no reload.
BroadcastChannel sync
Tabs within the same device coordinate via the Web BroadcastChannel API — the same mode switch, the same active route, the same alarm state. No server round-trip needed for local synchronisation. Across devices, the bus handles delivery.
No kiosk mode, no master
I deliberately avoided a "kiosk" or "secondary" screen model. Every tab is first-class. You don't need to designate which screen is in charge. If you close the tab that happened to have focus, the others keep working. Nothing breaks when a device goes to sleep.
URL-addressable state
Each cockpit mode and layout is addressable via URL. You can bookmark the anchor-watch layout and open it directly. Deep links work across devices — send a link from the phone and it opens in the right mode on the nav station.
Roadmap
The cockpit is the most-used surface. It gets the most attention.
Core instrument set
Speed over ground, heading, true and apparent wind, depth, battery state, route progress, and next-waypoint countdown. All three modes: underway, at anchor, marina approach. Auto mode switching at 0.5nm from marina waypoint.
Autopilot + AIS overlay
Autopilot state and target heading shown in the cockpit. AIS targets overlaid with closest-point-of-approach and time-to-closest- point-of-approach displayed inline. Depth-aware docking alerts.
AI in the cockpit
Ask the AI agent questions from the cockpit without leaving the screen. "Where's the wind tomorrow morning on our heading?" pulls the forecast, filters to your route corridor, and responds inline. No phone, no tab switch.
Try the cockpit in the demo.
The demo runs the full cockpit UI with synthetic instrument data. See how the mode switching works and how the instrument tiles lay out across different screen sizes.