NMEA 2000, hail the first hobbyist!
All the well-informed feedback I’m getting to my marine electronics maintenance query reminded that a fellow named Joseph Howard wrote last week about the NMEA 2000 hobby project he’s pursuing, and also documenting over the MarinetteBoat forums. “It will be a ARM7 based fuel gauge reading PGN 127505 using Luminary Micro's LM3S8962 evaluation board, 89 bucks from Digi-Key. I am hand coding the stack extensions for address claims. (Wish I'd used a PIC 18 CanBus as they have a free J1939 stack). Quite a bit of C coding.”
Now stack extensions and address claims are way, way over my head, but I’m darn sure that good things will evolve from “hobby” involvement in NMEA 2000. “MarinetteJoe” just got started and already there’s some valuable information posted, and a few fellow hobbyists and developers are gathering. Joe has even contacted NMEA itself, hoping to set up a NMEA 2000 hobby contest sponsored by Marinette and possibly Nuts & Volts magazine. I hope NMEA will go for it. I also hope NMEA will cool it with the copy protection that’s restricting what hobbyists and just plain boaters can learn about just what “open standard” N2K PGN messages mean and how they’re structured. Our man Russ has been lobbying about this behind the scenes, and a call to arms may be called for. In the meantime, here’s a tip of the soldering iron—I really do have one, somewhere—to MarinetteJoe!
Specifications which are not freely available and freely implementable are not "open". For example, you don't have to pay anyone to implement Ethernet, or TCP/IP, or SNMP (which NMEA2000 regretably mimicks). *THOSE* are "open standards" in the generally-accepted definition of the term. Until anyone can join the NMEA2000 club, it's exactly that, an exclusive club. And maintenance of some "sanctifying software" is an utterly bogus excuse. The Internet works just fine without paying an oath of fealty to some 3rd-party protocol police. In fact, almost all the technologies that the Internet beat-out *did* have protocol police, and expensive protocol specifications, and all kinds of hoops to jump through. Coincidence? I think not.
Harump.