Category: Network & control

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 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…

It may seem nuts that the Raymarine E-Series can input/output data via good old NMEA 0183, SeaTalk (Ray’s proprietary improvement on 0183), SeaTalk2 (actually NMEA 2000), and SeaTalk HS (actually Ethernet)…but it’s a darn good data architecture. For one thing, there are situations where…

This is Garmin’s first reaction to my NMEA 2000 complaint:

We chose to focus on engine data since…