The Marine Electronics Hub
Check out the full size screen shot. I took it here at my desk while designing a custom screen for Maretron’s N2KView monitoring and control application. I was picturing myself the master of a high-end cruiser putting together the screen I’d like to have accessible anywhere on the boat—and off it—when anchored.
I’m not sure what Raymarine’s rational is for creating its own proprietary NMEA 2000 cabling system, though I’ve been studying the brochures and manuals available (on Ray’s nicely updated site). Aside from the small diameter (11mm) of the connectors, the features touted in the ST70 brochure…
In addition to the tank/rudder adapters I tried, Maretron sent over some new cabling parts of interest. Let’s check out the big picture, starting with the quadruple tee at lower right…
I recently added tank level and rudder angle info to the lab’s NMEA 2000 network. In both cases this involved wiring a Maretron Adaptor to a standard analog sensor. N2K skeptics will no doubt gleefully point out that the two sensors…
Maretron is a little shy about its N2K Analyzer software tool—it’s still in “beta” and there’s still no help file—but I think it’s nifty. If you have an interest in NMEA 2000…
Krill Systems just announced its solid state (SS), black box (BB), marine PC, which means I get to drag out this shot of Casey Cox mugging with it at my kitchen table in June. The box uses a flash disk drive and embedded Windows XP for 24/7 reliability with a current draw of only 55 watts. It’s meant…
Yesterday commenter JC asked how to connect his new Yamaha F250 to a Garmin 5212. The answer is a little less definite than I thought…
I had a long phone interview with Garmin this morning and was mucho pleased to learn that the limited NMEA 2000 support in the 4 and 5000 series is only temporary…
I first heard about it at NavaGear, immediately contacted developer Paul Shirley about a sample, and now am an extremely pleased PAS-Thru Box user. You may already have read my whining about NMEA 0183 wiring difficulties. Many boats these days are spider-webbed with fine gauge wires carrying important data; they’re painful to install and often end up way too vulnerable to damage, not to mention poorly documented and hard to modify. Well, I don’t know how the Box could do more to remedy these problems…
Cool. Not only has Lowrance switched to standard style N2K screw connectors, but they’ve also added the nifty Double T fitting seen above, and they seem to be emphasizing NMEA 2000’s name and multi-manufacturer compatibility over “LowranceNet” in their new marketing…
