Category: Electrical & Engines
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…
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…
