Category: Electrical & Engines
Back in 2008 when I delved fairly deep into NMEA 2000 fuel management (1-Garmin, 2-FloScan, 3-Raymarine, 4-Maretron, 5-SmartCraft, and 6-Lowrance), I may have gotten a related concept wrong. While I was mostly experimenting with how fuel flow data gets integrated into an overall system, I noted a couple of times that if you have such data coming out of an electronically controlled engine, it should be more accurate than what can be measured by flow sensors. Well, as suggested by that “Assumed Fuel Consumption” label on that Steyr Motors display above, maybe not…
The average boater doesn’t need a power analyzer like this, but battery scrooges and testers like me might be interested. This Medusa Research Pro is actually designed for radio control hobbyists but its features and value appealed to my inner geek, and so far I’ve been really pleased with what it can do…
Never mind that Mercury promised a NMEA 2000 gateway to its SmartCraft engine monitoring system back in 2001, the one it’s poised to actually ship in 2010 looks quite powerful and useful. If you check out the Gateway PDF above linked to this MercMonitor gauge page, you’ll see that it can deliver a whole lot of engine messages to your N2K displays. Plus it turns out that a gent named Glen Erly has installed a prototype system and written about it in some depth…
Never mind that Mercury promised a NMEA 2000 gateway to its SmartCraft engine monitoring system back in 2001, the one it’s poised to actually ship in 2010 looks quite good. If you check out the Gateway PDF associated with the MercMonitor gauge above, you’ll see that it can deliver a whole lot of engine messages to your N2K displays. Plus it turns out that a gent named Glen Erly has installed a prototype system and written about it in some depth…
Wow, Kees Verrujit, our N2K Panbot in an attic, has out done his own reporting on last year’s METS, and he even shot some videos for us. A collective tip of the beanies to Kees, please:
In
general the feeling was quietly positive. Everyone still around will probably be able to weather the remainder of the economic storm. Attendance today was lower than the earlier two editions I visited, but then this was my first time visiting on the last day so I can’t say for
sure how busy it was. Sorry to say, there was no big big news. Still there were a number of exciting new developments. I’ve kept those to the end of this long mail!
Does too much fantasizing about the electronics future make you too want to jump back to the practical? Well, how about cable ties! I’ve used several hundred of them in the last six months, and cut a hundred more, and have some opinions. For one thing, I’m grateful to the Cobra cable tie company for sending me samples of their low profile ties, because they’re great. The material and ratchet mechanism are strong, they look tidier than regular ties, and — most important, I think — you, or someone working on your boat at a later date, will not cut their hand on a sharp plastic snag. You can tighten and trim Cobra ties OK with a wire cutter, but that Eclipse tool works slick (and better than the Anchor version I already had, in my opinion). Cobra ties cost a bit more and don’t seem widely distributed, but the company sells direct (though penny pinchers may want to go elsewhere for the tighten/trim tool).
I also like hook and loop ties…
It’s easy to understand why the Newport Boat Show judges chose the EFOY fuel cell as Best New Product (even given an interesting group of nominees). Those boxes above can automatically charge a boat’s batteries at 600, 1200, 1,600, or even 2,200 watts, depending on model, using just a modest amount of methanol, while apparently emitting just a little noise and damp carbon dioxide gas. But do they make sense on the practical level?
NMEA 2000 has been working well on Gizmo this summer, making it easy to get heading, wind, depth, GPS, and more to all the MFD systems I’ve been testing. AIS over N2K has some issues, but then again the Garmin VHF 200 is good evidence of what’s possible. However, I’ve just begun to explore how NMEA 2000 can integrate Gizmo’s engine, tanks, batteries, and other non-navigational systems. A few weeks ago, for instance, I plugged an Albatross demo case into the boat’s backbone to see how data from those three Analog Adaptors above would display…
Bert van den Berg, proprietor of Cruz Pro, writes that “Once every few weeks or so we get an instrument back or get a call from someone who says one of our instruments is acting erratically. Almost invariably it ends up that the customer (or worse, their electrical installer) has done something dumb and wired it so that the instrument is susceptible to voltage transients. For this reason I have written an article to help show how electronic installers would wire electronics into a boat as opposed to how many electrical installers wire electronics into a boat…Please have a look and let me know what you think.”
Something I was very pleased to find on the ever more likely future Gizmo is extensive documentation on its DC and AC wiring…
Like so many CruzPro instruments, the CS-60 fits a 54mm hole, comes round or square, and has a three-button interface (with a surprisingly deep menu structure behind it). But what’s a “Clocked Switch”? Actually that “gauge” contains four solid state switches each capable of handling a load up to four amps and each programmable to its internal clock in two ways…
