Chartplotter to Laptop

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Euphonyx

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New to the marine electronic environment. I want to connect my laptop to the chartplotter the back of the chartplotter (Cobra) has an NMEA outlet and a mini usb plug. tried connecting the computer direct via the USB port but nothing happened. I understand that I will need a device to bridge from the NMEA cable and language to the USB port, but I don't know what works well. Please help!
 
Have you actually got a gps software program on your laptop to pick up and read your NMEA signal. As far as I know you don't need any fancy boxes to interface plotter and laptop. I've done this with an older laptop that had a serial port and free gps charting software installed. wires were just connected with a chocolate box connector.
 
Dont have a chartplotter on the PC. Plan is to put the Chartplotter in the cockpit and to use the pc as a sort of navigation table repeater for the plotter at the moment. Will get more ambitious as I get to know it. My primary navigation is still paper based. Should I consider getting software for laptop? is that an easier route?
 
Euphonyx said:
Dont have a chartplotter on the PC. Plan is to put the Chartplotter in the cockpit and to use the pc as a sort of navigation table repeater for the plotter at the moment. Will get more ambitious as I get to know it. My primary navigation is still paper based. Should I consider getting software for laptop? is that an easier route?
Click to expand...

Paper charts are my primary navigation tools, I only use a laptop for passage planning and playing...:D

I do have a free chart-plotter type program on my laptop that again I only use for planning and general playing with. Good tool though. It's been discussed on this forum before and is called OpenCPN. The url for download is below. It's based on Raster charts which can be downloaded off the OpenCPN site and various sites throughout the web. I've enclosed another URL for one chart site as well. It's FREE so that's got to be a bonus.....:D

http://opencpn.org/

http://cnf.by.ru/bsb_charts.html

If you want to use this system you'll still have to have a GPS link to your laptop if you want to use it as a real-time plotter. With research on the web and some practise there is no reason that you can't make the OpenCPN system a worldwide mapping/chart tool.
 
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Thanks for that. I did toy with that idea and bought a GPS dongle for the laptop but there must be a way of simply using the screen of the computer to repeat the info on the chartplotter in the cockpit. any ideas on that??
 
Regarding the physical connectivity - forget the USB port on the back of the plotter for now. That is for connection to the PC USB port for firmware update. The Cobra website has good instructions for this which include how to check what firmware you're currently running, what to download and then how to upload to the plotter.

Back to connection for navigation - Basically the plotter manual will show NMEA output on a couple of wires, either shown as GND and NMEA OUT+ (or as NMEA OUT- and NMEA OUT+).

Laptops these days don't tend to have Serial ports on them. In the past you could just get a 9-way D-type plug, connect the two NMEA output wires to pins 2 and 5 and it would work.

Now you need to buy a USB<->Serial convertor. You'll either find them in the local electronics shop, computer store or on ebay (for about £10). They are just a short cable with a 9-pin connector on one end and a USB plug on the other. You will then just need to connect the NMEA output wires from the plotter to pins 2 (RxD) and 5 (Gnd) on the 9-way connector.

Whichever software you then use will have to be configured to match the COM port that the USB cable (and hence plotter) appears on the laptop as.
 
Euphonyx said:
Thanks for that. I did toy with that idea and bought a GPS dongle for the laptop but there must be a way of simply using the screen of the computer to repeat the info on the chartplotter in the cockpit. any ideas on that??
Click to expand...

Unless your plotter has a VGA output, (rare), that cannot be done.
 
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that one. I'm sure someone on here must be able to unlock the procedure if there is one. I think maybe one thing you might come up against depending on the plotter and charts you are using is lock out codes to prevent copying charts onto your hardrive. I had this problem with a Lowrance plotter. Had the chart on a SD card but couldn't get the charting onto the laptop screen.
 
Martin_J said:
Regarding the physical connectivity - forget the USB port on the back of the plotter for now. That is for connection to the PC USB port for firmware update. The Cobra website has good instructions for this which include how to check what firmware you're currently running, what to download and then how to upload to the plotter.

Back to connection for navigation - Basically the plotter manual will show NMEA output on a couple of wires, either shown as GND and NMEA OUT+ (or as NMEA OUT- and NMEA OUT+).

Laptops these days don't tend to have Serial ports on them. In the past you could just get a 9-way D-type plug, connect the two NMEA output wires to pins 2 and 5 and it would work.

Now you need to buy a USB<->Serial convertor. You'll either find them in the local electronics shop, computer store or on ebay (for about £10). They are just a short cable with a 9-pin connector on one end and a USB plug on the other. You will then just need to connect the NMEA output wires from the plotter to pins 2 (RxD) and 5 (Gnd) on the 9-way connector.

Whichever software you then use will have to be configured to match the COM port that the USB cable (and hence plotter) appears on the laptop as.
Click to expand...

That's a nice, meaty response! how do I islolate pins 2 and 5? count from top left?
 
It's probably easier to describe when you have the cable in front of you.

The USB<->Serial convertor cable should come with an end that's got the pins visible when you look into it (i.e. not the one with the holes).

If you look into the end (towards the pins) and have the five pins on the top row and four pins on the bottom row then count 1-5 on the top row (left to right) then 6-9 on the bottom row (left to right).

It will be a neater connection if you get a female 9-way plug to connect into it and wire your chart plotter cable to that. The electronics are in the plug end of the USB<-> serial cable so you can't go cutting into it.

(Note - if you look very carefully into the end of the plug or socket you may just find the pin numbers printed really really small next to each pin).
 
Euphonyx said:
Thanks for that. I did toy with that idea and bought a GPS dongle for the laptop but there must be a way of simply using the screen of the computer to repeat the info on the chartplotter in the cockpit. any ideas on that??
Click to expand...

If you want to use your laptop as a simple repeater for the display of your plotter you will need a "video out" socket on the back of your plotter and the ability on your laptop to accept video in and to be used a a slave monitor.

If your plotter does not have video out, then you will need to get the data from the plotter into the laptop and interpret it and dispay it by some sort of navigation software including charts.

Very few laptops can work in this slave screen way. Does yours? If not, tuen there are decisions to be made whether to connect the two units or have a secondary GPS aerial and standalone laptop plotter.
 
As mentioned earlier in the thread - OpenCPN is free and whilst you have to 'find' charts for it, it does a blummin good job.
 
Hi

That Fugawi application you mentioned is just the application. If you want to get NMEA position input to the laptop (from your chart plotter) then you will still need that NMEA-Serial-USB cable as mentioned previously. The Fugawi application will then use this plotter position information.

There are other applications that others might mention - including some free applications that just use your scanned in paper charts. It's easy stitching multiple scans together these days so scanning in a whole chart on an A4 scanner is not as bad as it sounds - and it's free.

OpenCPN is another free application (if you can get the CM93 or similar charts).

If you didn't want to mess around with cables then a USB GPS dongle could be used in the laptop for position information.

Hope this helps!
 
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