Oy, I’m a tired puppy after 5 days of NMEA conference and yet more plane rides. Yesterday’s featured a puking infant during a bumpy landing in Boston followed by a final leg into Rockland on a little plane purposely run with some empty seats (they also rearranged us “for balance”, causing a wee bit more nervousness). But I am fully loaded with interesting info about NMEA 2000, AIS, new products and more, and I should be able to post more frequently, at least this week.
For starters, check out the NMEA 2000 “consistent” wiring system above introduced by Lowrance (more detail in a pop-up at Lowrance.com). It looks a lot like the standard NMEA 2000 cabling and connectors I’ve been testing but in fact it’s not certified and its plugs are purportedly not compatible! This is certainly not what the standard was supposed to be about—plug and play interoperability between different brands of gear—and I’m told it caused quite a hubbub in the NMEA 2000 committee meetings. (And I hope those folks who think NMEA is a “club” dedicated to keeping small developers out will note how fractious it really is). In fact there have been issues with the 2000 cable standard all along. Many think it’s too expensive and/or too bulky. That’s why Simrad, Raymarine, and Lowrance each use their own proprietary 2000 cable to interconnect their own 2000 equipment (which is legal under the standard). That’s why Simrad and Raymarine had to supply patch cables to tee into my test system (though I could have made them fairly easily).
So it would seem even messier if Lowrance sells an alternate, uncertified backbone cable/tee system—even if it leads to some of the first 2000 production boats, as announced by Ranger last week—but I’m told that there is going to be a happy ending to this story. Two reliable sources tell me that there will be a major breakthrough in the cable situation announced within a month. I’m guessing they mean that Lowrance will end up truly compliant and that the industry will agree on a second, less costly (though possibly more limited) cable and connector standard.
One comment that inspired my “Geeks vs ME Empire” rant a while back was: “Megalomaniacal marine elex vendors disdain such commoditization as evidenced by the disappearance of most stand alone dumb GPS sensors and proprietary integration of d/s sounders into proprietary networks.” I really, really didn’t understand where that commenter was coming from. It strikes me that the planet is awash in GPS sensors that can output in NMEA 0183 format (or 2000) via bare wire, standard serial plug, USB, Bluetooth, etc. etc. I have a cheap Deluo mouse GPS that has swappable dongles so that it can output via DB9, USB, and custom iPaq PDA serial plugs (& get power too), and it’s worked with all sorts of software. How commoditized can you get?
And while it wasn’t long ago that all depth, speed, temp, etc. sensors were proprietary, these days Airmar (which makes most of them) offers a wide variety of “Smart” versions. More than I realized, actually, as I discovered at Airmar’s much improved web site (try the Smart Sensor .pdf for starters). As illustrated, these sensors process their own signals. Add power and out comes NMEA 0183 or 2000 data to feed a plotter or multifunction display from most any of the ME manufacturers or a PC or, in the 2000 case, a network of up to 50 separate devices. So what was that guy talking about?
Here’s a NMEA 2000 application I hadn’t thought of, but one that makes terrific sense: the Bennett NMEA 2000 Trim Tab Interface will install easily back near the tab motors, tee into a 2000 trunk line, and send the status of the tabs to all displays on the network. Plus it will work with any of the company’s currently available tab systems (80% of US market), and it will only cost $120. I’ve been on many boats, including my own 25’ Ralph (recently back in the water), where indicators would make the tabs much easier to use, but when I’ve asked builders why they don’t install the currently available ones, they say they’re too unreliable and/or too expensive. This looks like a far better solution, and another reason why boaters and builders might move to 2000. There are two caveats, however. One is that specific displays will have to be programmed to show the tab information they are receiving. The example above is a 2000 plotter/sounder by Lowrance, which has already agreed to support Bennett’s interface. (The tab window could be more efficient—i.e., show the info well in less space—but I suspect that this is just a prototype). The second is that this product, introduced at MAATS, won’t be available until 2006. But that gives companies like Raymarine, Simrad, and Maretron time to program their displays to work with it, plus it will encourage other electronics companies, boat builders, and boaters to climb on the NMEA 2000 bus. Bennett doesn’t have information about the interface on its site yet, but there is a neat, if slightly geeky, simulator. It’s perfectly possible, by the way, to also control tabs via NMEA 2000, which would simplify installation, particularly on multi station boats, and would also enable integration of the controls with, say, Maretron’s pitch and roll sensor.
Monitoring and control systems can potentially do anything. Once you have a system of sensors, cable backbones, PCs, screens, and so forth performing the core task of collecting and distributing information and system commands, well heck, why not blend in security, entertainment, communications, inventory/maintenance management, digital documentation…whatever. A case in point is Hyperion (above), the 157’ super yacht built in 1998 by Royal Huisman for the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark. Clark had to start a small company called Seascape Communications to create the system he envisioned, and what a humdinger the resulting “Genisys” is. 24 onboard computers monitor 50,000 data points and display on 22 touch screens throughout the vessel. Clark and his crew could mind and manage everything from windshield wipers to ballast transfer pumps to e-mail wherever they wished onboard. Clark could even “cruise” the yacht by satellite from his den in California (or his airplane), leading to the waggish comment that it was the world’s largest remote control toy. And guests had their own screens mounted into berth-side drawers so that they can amuse themselves with the system’s 1200 CD’s on hard disk, 400 DVD’s in changers, world band tuners, and masthead cameras!
Since then, Clark had Royal Huisman build him the even larger yacht Athena, launched last fall, with more Seascape software on board. Now he’s announced the formation of CommandScape, which sounds like Seascape repurposed to automate large homes as well as yachts. Clark was the subject of the wonderful biography The New, New Thing, which begins with a hysterical description of Hyperion’s trail run in rough weather—failing computers, seasick film crew, et all…a must read excerpt here).
If you go to the NMEA Web site and click on “NMEA 2000 Info”, the very first thing you’ll learn is how expensive it is to use the standard. These fees piss off small developers no end. (And isn’t it poor marketing on the part of NMEA? Why not have some good dope there about how the standard works and what it can do?) But the fees are there to finance the infrastructure needed to truly support a complex plug’n’play standard. For instance, I recently heard that updating the software certification tool that assures compatability will cost something like $200,000.
Meanwhile, I was out on Sunday checking out the benefits of that compatability again, and looking foolish. (Is there a geekier 14’ outboard afloat?) Now I have the laptop mounted, also sharing data fine, though currently the Maretron gateway translates 2000 into 0183 because no PC program reads NMEA 2000 directly. That’s going to change, and I’m told that eventually thousands of independent programmers will be using 2000 data to build boat applications we haven’t imagined yet.
The June issue of PMY includes my take on the Furuno/MaxSea alliance. I titled it “Keys to the Kingdom” because it’s truly a big deal for Furuno to give PC software access to its whole NavNet system. It really shows what Ethernet can do, besides string multifunction displays together, and I’m guessing it will “encourage” Garmin, Northstar, and Raymarine to develop or find PC programs to run with their Ethernet systems. Dedicated electronics and PC-based systems used to be parallel universes (with a few significant exceptions); now they’re coming together. Good!
It was another damp weekend in Maine, but the leaves are popping and I finally got out on the water. The NMEA 2000 test rig performed fabulously. Check out the bigger image here to see how the Raymarine E120 and Simrad CX34 are both getting GPS, heading, speed through the water, etc. from the Maretron sensors. A PC charting program could have been easily sharing it too, had I dared bring a laptop along. At this moment I was drifting (speed 0, SOG 2.2; heading 85, COG 64) down the St. George River with…errrr…a rather high level of situational awareness. Both plotters were able to calculate current set and drift pretty accurately, and the Maretron display kept track of the little boat’s pitch, roll, and rate of turn. And I had even more redundancy than expected…it turns out that if I unplug the Maretron GPS, the E120 will switch over to the Simrad GPS that’s plugged into the CX34. The one glitch was the depth delivered by the Maretron transducer, much shallower than shown, but I’m sure there’s an explanation. Plus I had another sounder, not shown, and in fact the shoal area ahead is deeper than charted. And it’s a lovely river to gunkhole (click here for an experiment with Maptech’s chart server).
Hey, I actually can build something more substantial than sentences! Below is a plywood creation (bigger here) that will let me test the borrowed Maretron products (everything shown) and other NMEA 2000 gear either in my shop or clamped to my test boat, Gizmo. Note that all six devices shown not only share data through the rugged “Micro” size 2000 cable, but get power from it. That yellow wire is the 12v tap, supplying up to 4 amps to each side of the trunk line, which in this case is very short. Compass, 2000–PC USB gateway, GPS, and display are all on the upper or left side of the trunk. Depth/speed/water temp transducer, network test meter, and tees for the two plotters (separately powered) are on the other side. If I’d used heavier “Mini” size cable, there could be 8 amps available on either side of the tap. Putting together this little network was way easier than chopping up the plywood but there are details, like the Terminating Resisters at the trunk ends, you have to know about. Maretron has put together a useful “NMEA 2000 network designer’s guide” (and cable catalog) which is in PDF form here (if you just view individual pages, the guide portion starts on 17).
Yesterday I plugged both a Simrad CX34 and a Raymarine E120 into a little network of Maretron NMEA 2000 gear…and, hot damn, both multifunction units immediately recognized and started displaying the available heading, GPS, depth, etc. info. No setup, no multiplexer, no fussing with 0183 wires—it just worked. The Simrad also had its own GPS attached, recognized that multiple GPS sources were available, and let me choose, via a thorough set of interface menus, which one to use (see below, and bigger image here). Easy redundancy, not to mention easy data sharing across a multi manufacturer network…this is good stuff. I witnessed, and wrote about, these capabilities last winter, but actually having my hands on 2000 gear is still exciting. More to come.
Hot words about NMEA 2000 were tossed into a recent rec.boats.electronics thread:
“Oh, boy! Another proprietary, improperly documented, non-standard data protocol designed to keep the marine electronics assholes swimming in money for another decade...”
Yike! I believe that every phrase and implication — heck, every word — in that diatribe is wrong, though I do understand the frustration of hobbyists and small developers who want the same access to NMEA 2000 that they have to 0183. But 0183 can not do what needs to be done on today’s boats, at least not easily. For an example of “not easily” check out the data system on Steve Dashew’s new boat, mentioned earlier, especially the bigger version of the diagram below. I’ll be posting a lot about 2000 in future weeks as I test some interesting gear.
n NMEA 0183 format (or 2000) via bare wire, standard serial plug, USB, Bluetooth, etc. etc. I have a cheap 
