Showing posts with label NMEA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NMEA. Show all posts
Saturday, February 18, 2017
The NMEA 2012 conference
Who needs Vegas when you can go to the Royal Pacific Resort. You couldn't find a better place to hold the National Marine Electronics Association's 2012 annual conference. This is my second year as judge for the annual NMEA technology awards. I was joined by Tim Queeney, editor of Ocean Navigator magazine who is this year's senior judge. You know this because his robe has the four gold stripes. Glenn Law, editor of Saltwater Sportsman is our new judge who replaced Ben Ellison.
I'll grant you the plane ride is a long one, but you're met at the lagoon by friendly resort staff who wield their machetes to help clear a path to the resort check in area.
The rooms are certainly airy and all feature sunset views. The swinging beds are very comfortable, and form fitting. The gentle rocking of your bed in the tropical breezes gives you a great nights sleep.
The fresh water private swimming lagoon is the perfect place to just loll around in warm volcanic vent heated water. Mix this with beverages served in a coconut shells, and you have a perfect afternoon.
The highlight of the conference is the banquet where the NMEA technology winner is toasted by the crowd. This years winner is Fusion's NMEA certified 700 series marine stereo. There were also honorable mentions for Furuno's new Time Zero MDF, and SI-TEX's VHF/AIS antenna splitter
This was then followed by a Luau style dinner prepared by the local resort staff. The main entree was a delicious native specialty called long pig. Unfortunately the Fusion guy seemed to have disappeared before I could interview him about the award.
This years conference schedule was busy. The normal NMEA conference was overlayed with the RTCM (Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services) conference.
The general boating public doesn't hear much about RTCM, but this group plays a critical role in developing the communication standards for DSC, EPRIB, AIS, GPS and other forms of marine radio communications and IMO electronic charting. There was a multitude of training classes and seminars, most of which were presented twice giving participants fewer scheduling conflicts. The vendor exhibit hall was open half days, allowing easy access.
The general boating public doesn't hear much about RTCM, but this group plays a critical role in developing the communication standards for DSC, EPRIB, AIS, GPS and other forms of marine radio communications and IMO electronic charting. There was a multitude of training classes and seminars, most of which were presented twice giving participants fewer scheduling conflicts. The vendor exhibit hall was open half days, allowing easy access.
The often disparate interests of boat builders, marine electronic manufacturers, and their dealers, big box retailers, Internet discounters, third party developers, certified or just compatible, and so on will make going forward like walking a tightrope in an earthquake.
NMEA has successfully come a long way in a very short time, and the roles of those who have to make the stuff work on a boat have changed also. Its been years since circuit diagrams have been included in manuals, and to be brutally honest, installation of systems today are largely just plug and play. The traditional electronics installer has really become a systems integrator, and sometimes interior designers. Their purview now extends to digital power distribution, audio and video, Bluetooth, WiFi, satellite communications, mobile devices, engine monitoring systems, vessel security, and often we deal with equipment built to other international standards. Then add to this the exponential increase in technology, a lot of which will have a very short lifespan.
So is NMEA worth our support? I would give it a resounding yes. Just think of what it would be like without NMEA. Things would be a mess. Every manufacturer would have differing technologies. Systems wouldn't talk to other systems. Chaos would reign and the Apocalypse would be near at hand. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but NMEA makes my job easier, and more importantly both predictable, and reliable. I choose NMEA certified gear first, if at all possible.
I had the opportunity to spend some time with Bruce Angus who is currently NMEA's executive director. He is an engineer by training, has business experience, terrific people skills, and is a good listener. Take this from a guy who spent decades working for high technology engineering companies, this is a rare and valuable combination. So I think Bruce will do very well at NMEA's helm, and the only practical advice I can proffer to him is to find out what NMEA doesn't do well, and then don't do it. Next year, on to San Diego. Same Installer time, same Installer channel, with four gold stripes on my robe.
The photo of the hammock was posted by by Wikipedia user ArronY
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Playing with PuTTY and NMEA
"Welcome to "This is your life,", and please give a warm welcome to our surprise guest NMEA 1.5."
"Do you recognize this voice NMEA 1.5? "Hello NMEA 1.5. You used to help me by sending important navigation information." "Why, is that my old friend LORAN?" "Yes it's me NMEA 1.5, it's great to see you. I'm retired now and live in a mobile home park in Florida. We had great times together though. Without you I could have never talked to autopilots. We made life better for boaters."
"Well NMEA 1.5, how are you feeling?" "Well I'm doing okay, I guess. I don't do much work anymore, and nobody calls me to do anything new. I mostly hang around in my ninth floor walk up apartment with my five cats and watch reruns on TV. I was important once you know, but today, not so much."
"Do you recognize this voice NMEA 1.5? "Hello NMEA 1.5. You used to help me by sending important navigation information." "Why, is that my old friend LORAN?" "Yes it's me NMEA 1.5, it's great to see you. I'm retired now and live in a mobile home park in Florida. We had great times together though. Without you I could have never talked to autopilots. We made life better for boaters."
"Do you know this voice NMEA 1.5?" "Hi grandpa." "Is that my grandson NMEA 4.10? Why you little uncaring urchin. You can't take a few minutes anymore to with visit your old grandfather? You're always hanging out with that 38,400 baud AIS fast crowd, and using all of them fancy new sentences. You pissant whippersnappers all need a real good strapping. Why I outta take my belt off right now, and give you that thrashing you deserve. I'll teach you some respect for your elders." "Ahem, we will be right back to "This is your life" after a few words from our sponsors."
It's been a bit of a struggle. I have an older Simrad autopilot and IS15 expander box, a vintage Garmin 17x GPS, and a new HP laptop with Nobletec's Odyssey Time Zero navigation software speaking NMEA 4.x. The expander box speaks NMEA 1.5, the autopilot speaks NMEA 2.3, the Garmin is an open ended NMEA port speaking some version of NMEA 3.x. Add to this a serial to USB converter and you can't get there from here. When I use the term "open ended" I'm describing NMEA wiring that uses the device's ground for data communications, instead of the NMEA + (A) and - (B) wires now mostly seen. there are also some slight electrical differences between NMEA 1.5, and the later revisions.
What I tried to do first was to try to get the laptop to swallow data from two talkers at once. you never know, I have had this work, a few times. In this case it didn't, and I wasn't surprised. The Nobletec software would take the GPS data, or sort of take the data from the expander box, but not both. Regardless the NMEA 1.5 data from the expander box always ended up garbled.
The Nobletec software has a port monitor that will show you what the system thinks it's receiving. The data was a mess. Sentences that were too long, sometimes no line feeds or carriage returns, or just babble. About 75% of the data made it through intact, but the bad data played havoc with the Nobletec system when you tried to get the data to display.
Why? I don't know for sure, but I think a combination of the serial/USB conversion, and the old NMEA 1.5's open ended data transmission just didn't play well together. There is another path. I abandoned the expander box, and ran new wiring back to the auto pilot. The NMEA version is newer, and it's not open ended.
In days of yore Windows software through XP all included HyperTerminal which I used to log serial data. This is no longer the case, and it now costs $60.00. Ouch, so I now use PuTTY. It's free, and simple to use. I like free, and simple.
So this time, I wanted to see what the data looked like, before I fed it to the Nobletec system using PuTTY. Open the program, select the port you are using and the baud rate, and the electron gods liked the autopilot's NMEA 2.3 a lot better.
PuTTY is easy to use. Select the port, and the baud rate. If the data stream looks okay, log the data, and take it back to the lab for analysis. If it's badly garbled, then you likely have the wrong baud rate. In the marine world there are only typically three options. 4800, 9600, and 38,400.
The data log from the auto pilot looks good, so far. There is a second set of integration problems however. There may be a future AIS receiver that will output at 38,400 baud, there is the Garmin GPS, and the auto pilot data, and we want to output position data to the VHF, and possibly have it talk back to us.
There is also the problem of the missing heading data from the autopilot that has to be dealt with. It's not in the data stream from the pilot, even though the compass is connected to it. So to solve most of these problems we are going to use an Actisense NDC4-USB multiplexer. That adventure has started, and not without some minor hitches I'll talk about mid week, and I promise I'll be a lot less geeky.
There is also the problem of the missing heading data from the autopilot that has to be dealt with. It's not in the data stream from the pilot, even though the compass is connected to it. So to solve most of these problems we are going to use an Actisense NDC4-USB multiplexer. That adventure has started, and not without some minor hitches I'll talk about mid week, and I promise I'll be a lot less geeky.
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