Electronics - do you , don't you?

[JumbleDuck]

If the cost or your Matsutech is only seventy quid (70 GBP) would be interesting even at our s**t exchange rate and I would hope the manufacture bring out a black box AIS Transceiver at an even lower cost.

Sorry, I was being unclear ... I reckon the Matsutec + cheap VHF combination costs seventy pounds more than the Standard Horizon combined unit. Actually, thinking about it, it's a wee bit more than that if you need to buy a VHF aerial.

 

[rogerthebodger]

Sorry, I was being unclear ... I reckon the Matsutec + cheap VHF combination costs seventy pounds more than the Standard Horizon combined unit. Actually, thinking about it, it's a wee bit more than that if you need to buy a VHF aerial.

My misunderstanding but I have found the Matsutec HA-102 Marine AIS receiver and transmitter system at $285 with free shipping to me

 

[SiteSurfer]

Where did you find that price may I ask ?

Boo2

Heres the link on EBay. I was cheeky and did a best offer.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Standard-Horizon-GX2200E-Fixed-VHF-Radio-with-AIS-GPS-/252232635208

Good luck!

Owen

 

[laika]

I'm currently also looking at an Arduino on my desk with an ESP 8266 wifi module hanging off a breadboard and am reading up on the NMEA libraries, it looks to me like simply relaying NMEA to UDP for the iPad should be trivial and save me in excess of 200 quid for a wifi server.

I've not played with an esp8266 but have looked at them with interest. Would it be possible to dispense with the arduino and *just* use the esp 8266 (with appropriate gubbins for level shifting etc. the input)?

What do you do for the software? Is it as simple as just piping from /dev/tty<n> into UDP with socat or something?

It can be, yes. In fact Frank Baudet's "muplex" is a shell script which multiplexes NMEA-0183 using a clever combination of socat commands.
http://marinux.tuxfamily.org/#MUPLEX

kplex tries to be a lot more clever about a lot of things but if you're simply translating a single serial datastream into a single broadcast UDP datastream you can make the code *very* minimal and constrained-device-friendly.

 

[SiteSurfer]

I've not played with an esp8266 but have looked at them with interest. Would it be possible to dispense with the arduino and *just* use the esp 8266 (with appropriate gubbins for level shifting etc. the input)?

Interestingly theres a library to do that which I'm looking at now, I bought myself a pile of Arduino stuff to play with before Christmas, so I'm messing around with what I have. I was contemplating using a large LCD so that I could have a rudimentary heading compass in the same bit of kit that I could stick to the cockpit bulkhead as a kind of (very) basic heads up display with the data fed from the VHF feed - something that whilst available on the iPad - you have to squint to see!

Allthough I suspect that in order to do this I will need to use a compass sensor rather than the gps feed as the gps would only provide direction of travel not heading. Then I could probably write something else to interogate the data, to be honest - given that I don't NEED any of this its a wonderful opportunity to have a play

 

[Martin&Rene]

Jumbleduck

Have you seen this discussion about the Matsutech, particularly the later posts.

http://billlions.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/matsutec-hp-33a-43-marine-gps-ais.html

There seem to be some doubts about CE Certification and other operational issues. What is your understanding on these issues?

 

[GHA]

Interestingly theres a library to do that which I'm looking at now, I bought myself a pile of Arduino stuff to play with before Christmas, so I'm messing around with what I have. I was contemplating using a large LCD so that I could have a rudimentary heading compass in the same bit of kit that I could stick to the cockpit bulkhead as a kind of (very) basic heads up display with the data fed from the VHF feed - something that whilst available on the iPad - you have to squint to see!

Allthough I suspect that in order to do this I will need to use a compass sensor rather than the gps feed as the gps would only provide direction of travel not heading. Then I could probably write something else to interogate the data, to be honest - given that I don't NEED any of this its a wonderful opportunity to have a play

I got one of these - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B014R460WQ?ref_=pe_385721_51767431_TE_dp_1

Seems to work OK but so far only in the depths of a steel boat, uncalibrated, so didn't seem very accurate down there
Openplotter is set up to recognize these so setup was plug and play. AFAIK there are arduino libraries available as well.

 

[laika]

I'm wondering if this thread has morphed into one which might be better continued on the PBO forum. There's a few of our friends from the mobo forum who possibly monitor PBO for electronics project threads but not scuttlebutt?

I was contemplating using a large LCD so that I could have a rudimentary heading compass in the same bit of kit that I could stick to the cockpit bulkhead as a kind of (very) basic heads up display with the data fed from the VHF feed

Anyone recall if there's been much posted here on weatherproof instrument displays since the "larger displays" thread form a couple of years ago?
http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?328981-cheaper-large-instrument-displays-mast-mount

I got one of these - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B014R460WQ?ref_=pe_385721_51767431_TE_dp_1

I've often wondered...Is the only difference between something like this and the many-times-more-expensive compasses like the HMC6343 that the latter does all the hard sums for tilt compensation in onboard firmware? In which case are the algorithms readily available (and are you saying "implemented in openplotter"?) for doing tilt correction etc?

 

[JumbleDuck]

Jumbleduck

Have you seen this discussion about the Matsutech, particularly the later posts.

http://billlions.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/matsutec-hp-33a-43-marine-gps-ais.html

There seem to be some doubts about CE Certification and other operational issues. What is your understanding on these issues?

I have seen that post before, and there has been a lot of discussion about it here too, varying between the sensible to the simple but unsupported belief that Chinese people are inherently incapable of designing electronics. My unit has a CE (Conformité Européenne, not China Export) mark on it which I have never felt inclined to check up. In any case, I would not be terribly bothered: AIS is an international standard and since Matsutec sell these around the world I am fairly confident that any issues would have been flagged somewhere. A non-approved device made for use in a European system might be a different matter.

I've had mine installed for one season and have been very happy indeed with it. The GPS is excellent and the AIS seems to work just fine.

 

[bitbaltic]

If it works I don't think I'd care if it was stamped CE or Trotters Independent Traders personally

 

[prv]

If it works I don't think I'd care if it was stamped CE or Trotters Independent Traders personally

I'm not generally bothered about product certification, CE marking, etc. But I might be a little uneasy about an uncertified AIS unit in particular, simply because it isn't necessarily obvious whether it *is* working correctly. It could be doing all sort of antisocial non-compliant things on the shared communication medium, and provided you did show up on somebody else's screen a couple of times when you happened to check, you'd never know.

Pete

 

[JumbleDuck]

I'm not generally bothered about product certification, CE marking, etc. But I might be a little uneasy about an uncertified AIS unit in particular, simply because it isn't necessarily obvious whether it *is* working correctly. It could be doing all sort of antisocial non-compliant things on the shared communication medium, and provided you did show up on somebody else's screen a couple of times when you happened to check, you'd never know.

If they were making it for a small market that would worry me too, but since they flog tons of them to less protectionist areas of the world I am reasonably happy that mine will behave OK.