A full chartplotter and instrument display built on a mini PC, using nothing but open-source software — Linux Mint, OpenPlotter, and Signal K.
We wanted real navigation instruments and a chartplotter at the helm without paying proprietary marine-electronics prices for the display and the software. This is the stack that runs it: Linux Mint as the operating system, OpenPlotter to tie the boat's hardware and software together, and Signal K as the data server that takes in everything from GPS to depth to wind and makes it available to any chartplotter or app on the boat's network. All three are free and open-source.
The order matters — each piece installs on top of the last.
Download the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint from linuxmint.com and flash it to a USB drive with a tool like Balena Etcher or Rufus. Boot the mini PC from that USB drive and run through the installer — on a dedicated nav-station machine we just let it use the whole disk.
Once it's installed and you're booted into Mint for the first time, open a terminal and pull the latest updates before installing anything else:
OpenPlotter ships as a package you install on top of Mint, then it manages everything else from its own Settings app. From a terminal:
That app is the control panel for everything else — charts, instruments, and Signal K all get installed as modules from inside it, not from separate downloads.
Inside OpenPlotter Settings, install the Signal K Installer app. Signal K installs and starts itself automatically once that app is in — there's nothing extra to run from the terminal.
Once it's running, the admin dashboard is at:
The first time you open it, you'll set up an admin username and password — that's what logs you into the dashboard from then on.
With Signal K running, the last step is wiring in the actual instruments — GPS, AIS, depth, wind, whatever's feeding into the boat's NMEA network — and turning on the matching connections inside Signal K so that data starts flowing. From there it's available to any chartplotter or app on the boat that speaks Signal K, on the mini PC itself or on a phone/tablet over WiFi.
We cover the whole build — wiring, hiccups included — on the channel. Catch it on the videos page.