ianj99
Active member
I believe this is the same device that forum user curtis also reported success with a year ago:
http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?376686-IPAD-AIS/page4
so that's at least two forumites using a fifty quid device which seems to do what the digital yacht thingy claims for several times that. Manual seems a little...errr..challenging though.
Does it support bi-directional communication?
I note in the blurb it says it supports UDP (which I presume means it can output the serial data as udp packets rather than as a TCP stream). Might that be a better choice of protocol for this sort of thing?
It does support bidirectional serial commmunication so you can control a serial device remotely as well as receive data from one.
I haven't tried UDP because Navmonpc which I use as the tcp client doesn't offer UDP as an option.
The manual isn't brilliant - never are when in Chinglish but the setup is fairly obvious - nothing needs changing except the baud rate if used in wifi AP mode.
I agree about the price - it opens your eyes to how little tech costs at the component level these days and how anything boaty ends up priced as 'think of a number and triple it', but that's nothing new.
Same applies to the gps, digital compass and 3d accelerometer chips mentioned in another post - they cost pence, yet Airmar's compass / gps unit is £600.
I had a peek inside the used one I won on Ebay and as you'd expect the 3" diameter pcb is populated with a few quids worth of the aforementioned chips. I suspect the built and tested pcb would cost about £25 - £30 from China, the housing and cable, about the same so the total cost including packaging would be about £100.