Electronics, Raymarine in particular

[doris]

Looking at the life of current electronics I find it disturbing that there appears to be a 10 year, maybe less, redundancy being built in to modern kit. A mate had a Raymarine E120 wide screen that is now ten years old. the knob broke last year and Raymarine could not provide a new one, they now longer support that device, at 9 years!! That was fixed by finding a supplier in Canada who 3D Printed a new one, lucky.
He is currently having a problem updating the charts, Navionics, but the cartridge is now longer immediately available and the existing may/may not be updateable!
On that basis if one is buying a boat more than 3/4 years old one should allow for a complete new set of electronics!!?????
Does anyone have any recent experience of i70s and their longevity?

Rather depressingly, if the other manufacturers are the same that's potentially an effective £1.000-1,500 on the annual running costs of a boat!
And the second hand market is booming, hmmmmmmm

 

[fredrussell]

Just the way things are nowadays with tech, boaty or otherwise. Things are replaced rather than fixed, which is obviously a tragedy environmentally.

 

[Laysula]

My Raymarine stuff (ST50 and RL70c plotter ) are still running perfectly despite their advancing years. However C map have decided not to update their nt+ charts anymore............ Bastards.

 

[Laysula]

In addition Tom Tom won't support my car gps any more..................Bastards.

 

[lustyd]

Try buying a knob for a boat cupboard from the manufacturer after 10 years, or better yet curtains! At least the electronics are obsolete so there's a reasonable excuse to discontinue support. Having just upgraded I would suggest there is enormous value in the newer stuff and am surprised that so many boats choose not to update more often. Just the addition of chart overlaid radar at the helm is worth the upgrade cost to me, add in AIS and the larger screen and it's truly amazing what's changed in 10-20 years.
I wouldn't try to rescue a tape based stereo in a car either. Even if a spare knob was available the cost of repair would be hard to justify given the low cost of a new plotter and the benefits of fitting one.

 

[doris]

My point really is that no one seems to be paying attention to the fact that a nicely presented ten year old boat probably needs £12 grand, maybe more, to be spent on the electronics.
I quite agree that the efficiency of modern kit is amazing but I'm very unconvinced that the functionality has much improved over the last decade. The huge jump was made 10-15 years ago and, apart from auto-pilots, has plateaued since then.

 

[Birdseye]

Looking at the life of current electronics I find it disturbing that there appears to be a 10 year, maybe less, redundancy being built in to modern kit. A mate had a Raymarine E120 wide screen that is now ten years old. the knob broke last year and Raymarine could not provide a new one, they now longer support that device, at 9 years!! That was fixed by finding a supplier in Canada who 3D Printed a new one, lucky.
He is currently having a problem updating the charts, Navionics, but the cartridge is now longer immediately available and the existing may/may not be updateable!
On that basis if one is buying a boat more than 3/4 years old one should allow for a complete new set of electronics!!?????
Does anyone have any recent experience of i70s and their longevity?

Rather depressingly, if the other manufacturers are the same that's potentially an effective £1.000-1,500 on the annual running costs of a boat!
And the second hand market is booming, hmmmmmmm

Found just the same thing with a 9 year old Raymarine radar. No spares available and the reason given was that when they planned a run of an item they ordered the bits they needed plus 20% as spares and when they were used up ...... Gone are the days when electronics were assembled from standard bits you could get from an electronics store. And thats before you try to find someone to repair a surface mount assembly.

Mind you, its the same with your TV.

 

[smert]

My point really is that no one seems to be paying attention to the fact that a nicely presented ten year old boat probably needs £12 grand, maybe more, to be spent on the electronics.
I quite agree that the efficiency of modern kit is amazing but I'm very unconvinced that the functionality has much improved over the last decade. The huge jump was made 10-15 years ago and, apart from auto-pilots, has plateaued since then.

I'm looking at a full electronics upgrade (including transducers but not radar) at the moment and I am certainly not looking at £12k!

 

[Yngmar]

The big name stuff is overpriced garbage (hardware and especially software) which people for some reason accept as normal (as they do with their phones and computer operating systems). There's a few that are better quality, Maretron being one of them, but they cost even more and they don't make every part you might want.

You're not the only one surprised at this state of things. Some folk go as far as building their own kit, often cobbled together from various bits and bobs, nowhere near marketable, but it works for them because they know how to keep it going. Difficult if you want to sell the boat though. Others keep their old Raymarine kit going forever because at some point the circuit diagrams and service manuals leaked out and so they can usually be repaired by those with some electronics skill and equipment, although some parts can't and the supply is slowly drying up. Yet others fit the cheapest basic transducers (depth and wind is all you really need) and use consumer hardware running OpenCPN or an affordable Navionics subscription for GPS and navigation. We do a mix of all of the above

The market is a mess of standards too, there's the closed current gen NMEA 2k, which is proprietary, with some of it more or less well reverse engineered, but often does not interplay well as the big name stuff has horribly buggy implementations that crash at the slightest unexpected bit in a packet. There's some Javascript kids wanting to do everything in JSON because that's all they know, there's an upcoming (released now?) Ethernet thing from NMEA, which they market as "high bandwidth", meaning it'll not fully replace anything and instead be milked for additional money alongside the already expensive N2k stuff. And there's NMEA0183, which is ancient but the only thing even remotely resembling an open standard that works. The inofficial but widely used NMEA0183 over TCP/UDP works well too.

In short, yes it's depressing, but nobody seems to have a good solution for the problem

 

[Yealm]

Isn't upgrading part of the pleasure ?
Anything electronic is going to be a million times better 10 years on

DOI just got a new Mackbook Pro 14 - incredible ! - 8 years after last one

 

[laika]

Good timing. UPS tracking is telling me the button doris refers to is arriving from Canada tomorrow. It’s a £2 bit of plastic which is costing me £100 including postage and taxes because it’s cheaper than replacing the (otherwise perfectly functional) plotter. Raymarine initially gave me the part number and told me to contact a dealer and it was only after I went back to them and told them the dealers had all told me it was unavailable that they acknowledged it was. I still have the 30 year old st50s, although the dodgy depth head is currently being looked at by the service centre.

there's an upcoming (released now?) Ethernet thing from NMEA, which they market as "high bandwidth"

Ah OneNet. Scheduled for 2012. Released as a standard last (?) year. Essentially N2K over ipv6 over Ethernet as far as I’m aware. I was holding out for that to upgrade my kit, but yet to see a real product.

 

[Buck Turgidson]

Anyone who pays £100 for knob deserves to.

 

[laika]

Anyone who pays £100 for knob deserves to.

Because you’d rather have the hassle and expense of buying a new plotter and chart card? (Note to the OP: CF cards *were* available from navionics last year). This is the main control button and the plotter is junk without it. Raymarine charge more than that for a faceplate to make their new plotters fit the hole your old one came out of. £100 is insane for a couple of pieces of plastic connected by a bit of rubber but it lets me fix the problem and have a working plotter this weekend and for the foreseeable future with minimal time input, and currently my time is at a premium. Finding a new plotter with the same connectivity as my C90W might be challenging, meaning more grief with rewiring

 

[Stemar]

Isn't upgrading part of the pleasure ?

No.

Signed,

Impoverished sailor

 

[ashtead]

If you think raymarine is bad don’t buy Fusion radio-5 year old units regularly pack up and no repairs due to defective circuit boards. During 14 years of ownership of our last boat we did replace our chart plotter raymarine porthole size screen of 2001 with a newer Garmin after 10 years and it truly amazing little unit. Now living with a raymarine es unit -not easy to drive sometimes.

 

[fredrussell]

No.

Signed,

Impoverished sailor

I think that’s the crux of the issue. If you’re wealthy enough to have a six figure plaything you might not baulk at having to by a £1k plotter every few years. The manufacturers know their market, and it’s one in which people that can be arsed to fix things are in the minority.

 

[ibbo]

There's a lot to be said for navionics on phone and tablet (s), and basic log/ depth.

 

[Sandy]

My point really is that no one seems to be paying attention to the fact that a nicely presented ten year old boat probably needs £12 grand, maybe more, to be spent on the electronics.
I quite agree that the efficiency of modern kit is amazing but I'm very unconvinced that the functionality has much improved over the last decade. The huge jump was made 10-15 years ago and, apart from auto-pilots, has plateaued since then.

Goodness what are you using?

In the last year I've upgraded my 35 year old Stowe kit with Garmin and spent less than £3000. Just waiting for the 35 year old Raymarine autohelm to fail and I can change that over to Garmin.

 

[Buck Turgidson]

Because you’d rather have the hassle and expense of buying a new plotter and chart card? (Note to the OP: CF cards *were* available from navionics last year). This is the main control button and the plotter is junk without it. Raymarine charge more than that for a faceplate to make their new plotters fit the hole your old one came out of. £100 is insane for a couple of pieces of plastic connected by a bit of rubber but it lets me fix the problem and have a working plotter this weekend and for the foreseeable future with minimal time input, and currently my time is at a premium. Finding a new plotter with the same connectivity as my C90W might be challenging, meaning more grief with rewiring

it's a knob right, not the switching device itself, just the tactile interface between you and the switching device. I would have fabricated one from a bit of wood or plastic.

 

[laika]

it's a knob right, not the switching device itself, just the tactile interface between you and the switching device. I would have fabricated one from a bit of wood or plastic.

If you're familiar with the design and operation or the E and C series wide unicontroller and how it interfaces with the actuators below and believe you can fabricate an alternative which prevents any water ingress to the unit in an amount of time which makes it economically viable perhaps you should set up in competition to these canucks: there's obviously a market for this. I suspect you will need a 3D printer though: a bit of wood and a whittling knife probably won't cut it.

Actually in my case *if* I were retired and had nothing better to do with my time I would have gone down a route of rubber moulding as it was that, as the connecting piece of the various parts, which was the problem. However I have precious little free time and don't own a house with an attached workshop so "spend the money and just go sailing" was the logical option rather than having the disconnected plotter sitting in a locker for weeks and a plastic bag duct taped to the helm pod