Nuyina Watch Update

Since the end of November I’ve been aboard the Nuyina on Voyage 2 of the 2025/26 season. On this expedition to resupply Casey Station and then to explore Heard Island I’ve made great use of the Nuyina watch, and coded a few more improvements. In this update I’ll summarise the watches functionality and each watch face. Watch faces are switched by using the top button on the right side of the Nuyina Watch. The Nuyina Watch can be turned off by pressing the bottom button for six seconds, and turned on by momentarily pressing the bottom button.

The Nuyina watch is a smart watch with an AMOLED display run by an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. The watch connects to the Nuyina’s Expeditioner watch face and retrieves and displays data available to expeditioners from the ship’s DiRT intranet portal, as well as the Aurora Kp Index from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Main features:

• Sunlight readable display
• Time is sync’d to Ships Network Time Protocol (NTP) server hourly.
• Automatic Time-Zone Switching when the ship’s timezone is set on DiRT.
• Cool Displays!
• 12 Hours Battery Life (Enough for your twelve hour shift)

Main Face

The Main Watch Face is the face the watch normally displays. While on this watch face the screen will only display when you are holding the watch in an attitude to read the watch face, to save battery power. While on this watch face the watch saves power by only getting data once a minute. The displayed data includes:

• the date and time, synced hourly to the ships NTP time server
• the outside temperature measured by the Nuyina’s weather station,
• the Aurora Kp Index from NOAA
• the ships speed in knots and heading in degrees
• the depth of the water as measured by the ships echo sounders or multibeam sonar

Ship Face

The Ship Face displays:

• the ship’s current heading on a rotating compass bezel
• the ship’s course over ground with an arrow
• the ships speed and water depth like on the Main Face
• the relative wind speed and wind direction relative to the ship, useful for knowing whether it is worth going outside to see that aurora

While the watch is displaying the ship face, it remains connected to the WiFi and polls the data from the ships API at second intervals. This consumes more battery life but maybe useful during science operations.

Map Position

The next watch face is conditional on where the ship is located in the world. I’ve drawn a number of faces showing areas of importance to the Antarctic Program including the stations, Tasmania and our sub-antarctic islands. If the ship is with in the bounds of one of these maps, then the watch will display this face, if not it skips to the Southern Ocean Map watch face. These map faces are displayed below:

Tasmania

Heard Island

Casey Station

Davis Station

Mawson Station

Macquarie Island

Southern Ocean Map

The face that follows the ship face, or the local map face if you are with in the bounds of a local map; is the Southern Ocean Map face. This face plots the ship on a map of the source ocean. Also marked by a dot are Casey, Davis Mawson, Macquarie Island statons and Heard Island to give spatial awareness of where the ship is relative to the AAD’s places of interest.

Winch Face

The last watch face on the Nuyina is the Winch Face. This watch face displays winch payout, speed and tension data. You can cycle It also gives you an ETA to zero payout, or to the depth depending winch speed. Useful for knowing if you’ve got enough time to grab another coffee before the CTD arrives on deck. The selected winch can be switched by pressing the bottom button. Winches include:

• Deep Tow
• Towed Body
• CTD1
• CTD2
• CTD GP
• Corer
• Trawl Winches (Port and Starboard Dual Display)

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