What the manual carries
Pixel sur Mer, which makes the Exocet instrument processor, documents Race Control in the Exocet user manual. It is chapter 9, Communication with third party software, section 9.3, Nordic Stars Race Control. The section has subsections for the prerequisites, the configuration on the tablet, the Exocet configuration, the variables Race Control sends, the variables Race Control reads, and support.
What the link carries
With an Exocet on board, Race Control reads every variable the Exocet exports. It reads them over the Exocet’s own protocol, the one Exocets use between themselves, so the values arrive as the processor’s calibrated channels with their units — including channels a team has built in its own graph, which have no NMEA 0183 sentence of their own. The tablet shows them live.
Race Control sends its own numbers the other way, under the group name NordicStars, so the crew reads them on the boat’s displays: time to gun, time to burn, distance to the line, line bias, the two laylines in time and in distance, the opposite-tack heading, target boat speed and target wind angle, polar boat speed, and VMC to the next mark. The group holds fourteen variables and a clock.
A value the tablet has no reading for at that moment is left out of the frame rather than sent as zero, and the display shows it as inactive. That is the difference between a number the tablet does not have and a number that is genuinely zero.
What it takes to set up
Two boxes in the Exocet’s configuration: one for what the Exocet sends out to the tablet, and one for what it takes in. On the tablet, the EXOCET card under SETTINGS → INSTRUMENTS holds both directions, and the addresses and ports each end needs are set there. The link is point to point, so an Exocet already sending to another machine needs a second output configured for the tablet. The steps, in the order a crew works through them on the boat, are in Race Control on the boat.
For a boat with an Exocet, section 9.3 of the Exocet user manual is the reference for the set-up. Questions about the link go to support@nordicstars.ai.
Read the method
The documentation this post draws on.
- Race Control on the boat — Licence to first gun: access and seats, signing in, the setup flow that finds the boat’s telemetry itself, the strip’s four states, the pre-start walk, the course, the live fleet overlay, the tabs, FINISH — and replaying the start afterwards.
- Navigation — The navigator’s own section: every race plan the fleet holds in one list, the weather already fetched for each routed plan and what makes a corridor stale, the viewer that draws a forecast on the chart and how to read a wind barb, routing a course in the browser with the tablet’s own engine and comparing the variants that change the answer, the marks the whole organisation reuses and why a plan copies one rather than pointing at it, the chart tools that measure a range and bearing and place a mark from one, the navigator’s log and routes pinned from the boat, the deck channels a boat transmits to its own instruments, and taking a plan away as GPX.