So maybe this is an all-about-Gizmo week. Given her multitude of electronics partly described on Monday, and the fact that the boat rarely sees shore power, plus how helpful readers were in spec'n out the ChartTable21 discussed yesterday (and yet more strain on the 12v bank), I'm keen to add some solar panels and I again seek advice. Oh, and while Gizmo does have a 6 kW generator, I don't like running it, and would enjoy removing it altogether. I created the drawing above (PDF here) in an effort to explain to a solar salesman in Arizona what I was up to, but I haven't purchased anything yet...
Maretron's new DCR100 DC relay box will not create a true distributed power system because it doesn't replace conventional circuit breakers. But it can give you some of the features -- like extending switching to an N2K network and beyond, and the ability to measure and alarm current flows -- and it seems like it would it be easy to retrofit to existing boat panels...
Thanks to Panbo reader Jeffrey Schwartz I just learned about the Mas-Technologies M200 system, which looks like it can neatly translate analog sensor data from Yanmar model JH, YM and LP diesel engines into NMEA 2000 PGNs that can be read by many displays, including its own. The system -- which starts $1,469 -- can also read four analog tank sensors and a rudder indicator, dual engines are supported, and Mas-Tech also offers start panels and even a wired shift-and-throttle remote. But something seems odd...
When Westerbeke developed a NMEA 2000 monitoring and control head for its generators way back in 2006, I thought the other generator manufacturers would follow right along. The approach seemed to simplify cabling and make it possible to at least monitor a generator from other displays if not actually go to the next level where, say, a NMEA 2000 inverter could turn the generator on and off as AC loads changed. To my knowledge that sort of advanced control has not happened yet, though in fact a check of NMEA's database of standard PGNs suggests that it is possible (look in the "power" category). One problem is that so far only Northern Lights seems to have followed Westerbeke's lead, with the WaveNet panel seen above...
Boat juice -- the 12 volt kind -- will be a big subject on Gizmo this season, and hence on Panbo. Designing and installing a solar panel system and experiments with various battery monitoring and distributed power technologies are all on the list, but step one is getting the Prestolite Leece-Neville 140 amp alternator that charges the main bank up to snuff. Last summer I needed help from Panbo readers to figure out that this alternator was actually working pretty well despite the large (and erroneous) amperage deficit shown on the Link 1000. But it began behaving badly toward the end of the season, sometimes refusing to charge, and besides I'd been persuaded that a more sophisticated regulator would be a good investment...
That's a recent picture of Bob and Elaine Ebaugh's Defever 44, Mar Azul, and I'm jealous on two counts. The obvious one is that beautiful clear-blue-sea-over-white-sand experience they're enjoying in the Bahamas (where I've not been in some time). The other is that virtual engine gauge panel seen on the laptop, which is giving the Ebaugh's a better sense of what their relatively old diesels are up to than many of us power cruisers ever have the comfort of. You may recall that Bob already did some cutting edge work with Ethernet and NMEA 0183 conversion which he wrote up for Panbo last year. Well, he's done it again, thoroughly describing what it took to adapt a Chetco Digital engine monitoring system to his boat, and how it's working...
I keep hearing good things about EmpireBus NXT, the second generation distributed power and control system developed by the Swedish firm Trigentic AB, and I'm beginning to understand why. It must have been a hard decision to completely redesign the original CLC system for such a tentative, low-volume niche market, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates the change from proprietary CANbus to NMEA 2000 for primary data communications. And, holy cow, look at all the other I/O they added. Aside from switches on the N2K bus, that 16-channel DC Module can be controlled with a 2-way wireless fob, or via Ethernet/Internet, or via a GSM cellular phone...even via an iPhone app purportedly...
Nigel Calder and I talked non-stop for about six hours on Friday (and probably could have kept going if we were younger men). He visited because he's working on a new edition of How to Read a Nautical Chart and wanted to check out the latest in electronic charts, particularly the mobile apps. I was happy to help with that, and I also got to ask some questions about Gizmo's systems and find out what's up with his marine hybrid project. I've always liked Nigel's chart book; while it's largely a nice reprint of NOAA's Chart 1 guide to symbology -- no longer published by NOAA, though available for download -- it also includes some terrific history of cartography along with analysis of where it's going electronically. I'll be particularly interested to see what he discovers when visiting the Chart of the Future project at UNH, which is apparently related to a new vector chart standard (interesting S100 PDF here). I was also pleased to learn that Nigel shares my enthusiasm for improving charts with crowd sourcing and even for 3D charting, and he's not a guy who's easily impressed with the latest thing...
I was glad to see the Solar Stik back at the Miami Show. I'd been impressed with the engineering -- especially that sweet taper -- when it was first introduced years ago, and it was nice to learn how many markets the company has found since. I also got a demo (that's why the photo shows one of the two panels is completely removed, which took seconds), and thus I'm pretty sure that it would be easy to do the turning and tilting required to get the maximum power out the normal panel pair. I may romanticize the notion of putting one's rum swizzel down every few hours to tune the solar array while laying in some tropical anchorage, but I don't think there's any denying that solar amps are directly related to angle of sunlight (15 degrees in any direction is the key fall-off point, according to the Stik guy). But would a power tower like this make sense on an amp-thirsty cruiser like Gizmo?
Chetco Digital Instruments has been quietly developing software and hardware to digitize and display analog engine info for some time, and with some success I hear. But as of yesterday's big press release, Chetco has jumped big time into marine data networking, particularly the hot, if confusing, area of putting NMEA 2000 messages into an Ethernet format and serving them to whatever wired and wireless devices can use them. So that little $579 SeaSmart device above contains an N2K-to-Ethernet gateway (by Actisense, I think), a WiFi transciever, and a "CGI/AJAX web server" that puts out an "open sourced HTML protocol" that will purportedly support "any application from weather station, dual engines, battery banks, fluid tanks and more." Excited yet?...
and wanted to check out the latest in electronic charts, particularly the mobile apps. I was happy to help with that, and I also got to ask some questions about Gizmo's systems and find out what's up with his marine hybrid project. I've always liked Nigel's chart book; while it's largely a nice reprint of NOAA's Chart 1 guide to symbology -- no longer published by NOAA, though 
