We did not buy this system. We wrote it.
Boatomation is a software company that installs. The automation platform aboard your boat is ours, line by line — which is why it can be shaped around how you actually use her, instead of around whatever a manufacturer happened to think of.
Almost everybody else is reselling somebody's product
The ordinary way to build a system like this is to pick a manufacturer, order their controller and fit the functions in their catalogue. That works — right up to the two moments that matter: when you want something the catalogue does not contain, and when the manufacturer stops making it.
We took the harder route. We are software engineers who went to sea, and the platform that runs your boat is our own code: written by us, maintained by us, and extended by us whenever an owner asks for something new. There is no vendor standing between you and the people who can change it.
An installer fits what exists. We can write what does not.
Nothing can be discontinued
A proprietary system from 2011 is the single commonest thing we take off a boat — and it was somebody's flagship once. Ours cannot be withdrawn from the market by a company that changed direction: it is ours, and it goes on as long as we do.
If it does not exist, we write it
There is no feature list to be limited by. If you can describe what you want the boat to do, in your own words, it can almost always be built — usually in days, rather than waiting for somebody's next product cycle.
It fits your boat, not the average boat
Every vessel of this age is a one-off, and so is every owner. Rather than bending your boat to suit the software, we bend the software to suit your boat. That costs us an afternoon and costs you nothing.
The people who wrote it answer the phone
When something behaves oddly you are not opening a ticket with a distributor who opens a ticket with a factory. You are talking to the person who wrote that part — and who can change it this week.
Every owner uses their boat differently
This is the part that is genuinely impossible with an off-the-shelf system, and it is where most of our work comes from. Your system is configured — and where it needs to be, programmed — around the way you actually use her.
- Your own words become functions: describe it at the survey, use it at handover
- Screens laid out the way you think about the boat, not in a manufacturer's menu order
- Rules that suit how she is used — weekends, a season aboard, chartered out, or laid up
- Names, languages and units that match your own, including for crew and guests
- Changed again whenever you change your mind, which everybody does in the first month
Tell us what you would like changed and we will tell you what it involves and what it costs, before anything is touched. Most of it turns out to be configuration rather than a project.
Everybody runs the same, current system
Being a software company changes what happens after handover — which is exactly where most installations quietly go wrong. Your boat does not get a private copy that slowly goes stale. She runs the current system, configured for her.
- What is specific to your boat is configuration and rules — not a private build that nobody else maintains
- Improvements arrive as they are written, instead of stranding you on whatever shipped with your refit
- A fix proven on one boat is proven on yours: there is one system to support, not fifty forks of it
- Most faults are found and fixed remotely while she is within reach — and she runs perfectly well when she is not
What is not ours, plainly
The software is ours. The hardware mostly is not, and it should not be: cameras, sensors, dimmers, valve actuators and panels come from established manufacturers, chosen per boat for marine duty, and bought at ordinary prices from ordinary suppliers.
Tying you to hardware only we can supply would be the same trap we spend our days taking other people's boats out of. So every part can be replaced by anyone, from anyone, for as long as it is made — and the part that makes them all behave as one system is the part we keep alive.
An installer fits the functions a manufacturer thought of. We write yours.
This is the difference between a set of connected devices and a system. Every one of these is a sentence somebody said to us about their own boat, turned into something she now does by herself.
The heating comes on, the water heater starts, the fridge drops to temperature, and the cabin lights come up to a low warm setting as you step aboard.
Lights off, audio off, the circuits that do not matter drop out, the alarm arms, and the seacocks you nominated close behind you.
Your phone tells you, with the water level and the run count, long before the third time becomes a problem.
Deck lighting comes up, the cameras record, and you get a still of the passerelle — while a gull landing on the pulpit is ignored.
She tells you, sheds the loads that do not matter, protects the batteries, and starts the generator if you allowed her to.
The saloon dims, the television and projector go off, the screen rolls up, the cabin lights follow you aft — and every bilge and smoke alarm stays wide awake.
Not one of these came out of a manufacturer's menu of scenes. They are written for your boat, and rewritten whenever you change your mind — which everybody does, in the first month.
Tell us about her
Ten minutes in the quote wizard tells us enough to put a real number on it. No technology questions — just the boat, and what you would like her to do.
The first two steps cost you nothing. No sales visit, no newsletter.