The PLATU25 Championship in Livorno (Tuscany, Italy) this summer had an unexpected IoT crowd gathered to watch it. Not to say that ships and chips don’t go together, but that there was a special reason behind this.

The famous sailing race was a stage for testing the latest IoT gear. The boats served as test subjects for both MicroStrategy, one of the world’s leading providers of mobile enterprise analytics and software, and our technology partner TOI – Things on Internet who brought a data acquisition device based on their popular 4zerobox.

The board programmed in Python thanks to Zerynth, allowed to record and send data to MicroStrategy systems for real-time analytics. The whole project was made also in collaboration with The Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI).

To see a glimpse of the atmosphere of the race, take a look at MicroStrategy’s video:

Real-time data for the nautical sector

This system shows information in real time, such as boat position, speed, pitch, roll, and yaw during the race. In this way, the participants of the race will be able to analyze their performance in a way that was not possible before.

The importance of this project doesn’t only lie in performance boosting of the competitors. It’s an opportunity to explore all the possibilities of having a smart and connected black box for marine vessels. In a day and age when vast amounts of cargo are being transported on ships, data gathering is essential. It enhances the effectiveness of ships and substantially reduces the risk factors.

All this also served as a good test for our friends at the Lincoln Project, and their Zerynth powered marine gateway, that we previously wrote about.

If you are interested in learning more about the Lincoln project, check out the post we made about their travels to Norway. Their IoT marine solutions in Python are getting really advanced.

More about MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leader in enterprise analytics and mobility software. For over thirty years now they have been building software that helps organizations transform into Intelligent Enterprises. They provide software and advanced services that deliver unique intelligence applications. To give you the extent of their impact upon the industry here is one fact, in 2011 Apple officially stated that MicroStrategy’s iOS app as one of the best business apps of the year.

We hope that you enjoyed our report from Tuscany. Don’t worry, we will keep you posted about how Python is helping the nautical sector’s technological advancement.

More about the Lincoln project

The Lincoln project is an EU Horizon 2020 research project dedicated to creating new types of new marine vessels. They have been creating vessels for surveillance and rescue, and as of recently for aquaculture and wind farms. Their mission is to produce smart, eco-sustainable and specialized boats that will improve the daily activities of businesses all over the world.

The LINCOLN project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n. 727982.