Category: Electrical & Engines
That somewhat odd looking “waterborne structure” is Robinhood Marine Center’s first Island 40, designed to give renters who may only have small boat skills a wicked nice Maine cruising harbor experience, as in swinging on a mooring with seals, osprey, lobster men, and cruisers for neighbors, with good exploration possibilities in all directions, and with a pleasant “destination” marina nearby. And it’s a hoot! I’m sitting at the Tessie Anne’s spacious aft dinette right now, enjoying a cool sea breeze and the use of a well thought out battery/inverter/solar panel system…
Paneltronics new load shedding system is somewhat related to my battery/monitor/charger travails. Boaters of all sorts are struggling to management their electrical appetites and the line between electrical and electronic is getting fuzzy indeed. And there are all sorts of us; I have no need for AC load shedding personally, though this device is unique in that it’s aimed at boats like Gizmo…
There’s no such thing as a stupid question, right? Please? Above is the only label on each of Gizmo’s main bank 8D batteries, and though it says AGM in big letters upper right, I’m...
That big fella scrunched alongside Gizmo’s Volvo Penta diesel is the new love of my life 😉 It’s hard to imagine a better engine guy experience than what I got this week from Pat Ricci, proprietor of Thomaston Boat and Engine Works. When I called him on Tuesday, after Monday’s somewhat traumatic break down, I knew there was a major fresh water coolant leak somewhere around the exhaust manifold, and an engineer/sailor friend who had a look predicted a two phase repair — dissemble and diagnosis, then parts ordering and repair — that would total several days labor and several large boat bucks. But Pat did the diagnosis right on phone and said he’d order parts and do the whole repair in a half day, soon. Which is exactly what he did, and more…
Regardless of anchoring acrobatics — and just how the heck do you tie this 146′ tri alongside a dock, with a line throwing gun? — M/Y Alastra joins the short list of exotic vessels I’d love to cruise around Penobscot Bay, if only briefly, and if only to freak out the traditionalists. And you can bet there will be some pretty interesting systems on board; in fact, I heard about this creature because Palladium Systems just announced the monster gear contract they’ve won. It includes not just their Ethernet/Windows-based SiMON monitoring system — with some 269 data points reporting to wheel house and engine room, and probably various iThings as well — but also their new Titan electrical system…
What follows is a first time guest entry by regular commenter Adam Block, who is planning a 2011 Pacific
crossing aboard his Nordhavn 47 Convexity. Adam says “hehad no idea what he was getting into when he started a recent electronics upgrade,” but he did manage to convert analog engine data into NMEA 2000 for display in the N2KView software above and elsewhere. He’s also written a clear explanation of the options available for this tricky task, and the specifics of the NoLand RS11 he used…
The Miami demo of Minn Kota’s new i-Pilot technology got somewhat humorous. After some time with that trolling motor head turning this way and that as it automatically retraced a GPS track or pulled us along to a waypoint — where it could even maintain station — I started thinking of it as a faithful, friendly robot. If I owned one, I might paint eyes and a smile on it to heighten the sensation. And in retrospect it might have been whispering, “Hey, bub, I represent Johnson Outdoors technology prowess; wait until you see Geonav!”
I’ve been looking through a lot of material on BEP’s new CZone system, and finding it impressive. But its descriptive subtitle — “Networked Control and Monitoring System” — seems a little vague to me. In fact, Simrad changed that to “digital switching” when they showed off their nifty CZone integration with the NSE series (covered briefly in a Miami Show entry). It does seem like the handful of manufacturers who dare to compete in this complex niche can’t agree about what to call it, but I like “distributed power”. You can see why in the simplified CZone sample diagram above; like the competition, those OI modules efficiently distribute an electrical system’s core power feed and circuit protection functions to where they’re needed, while networking the switching and much more. There is no central breaker panel on this boat, and a lot less wire. The following diagrams tell more about the concept…
Just yesterday, in my blogging birthday post, I commented on Panbo’s international reach, and today I’ve got some interesting evidence (and more tomorrow). That shot of the new Garmin 700 series above was recently sent to me by Petar Maksimovic of Info Team, Garmin’s Serbian dealer. And there’s more of interest on that screen than just the language. Info Team has been working for nearly a decade to create Serbian road and waterway maps under Garmin’s MPC system, and says that its latest SCG RoadMap includes official Plovput data for about 1,600 kilometers of rivers and canals. Apparently that effort was not only an innovation for inland European, but also helped Info Team create a market for marine electronics. In fact, the company, which also is doing some things I haven’t yet seen right here in the world’s largest ME market, as Petar explains…
I’ve had a Marinico GalvanAlert “Shore Power Corrosion Detector” for a year, but I only got to use it briefly at first. That was time enough to see how handy it is to have a power tester right in hand as you hook up your shore cable. At minimum, a green LED will tell you that a dock receptacle is live. Plus you’ll get a red LED if the polarity is reversed, and two yellow levels of warning about stray current in the ground line, i.e. the stuff that can eat metal parts off your boat’s bottom. By now I’ve used the GalvanAlert, which costs about $140, a fair bit at a dock and even in a shed, and have seen how its steady monitoring can reveal shore power mysteries…
