Laptop used a a chart plotter

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shewitt

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I am considering purchasing a laptop to use as a chart plotter picture editor etc. Can any give any advise on how you install and set up a GPS card and the best place to purchase the card. Also any other advisce on the use of a laptop on board will be appreciated

Thanks in advance

Wayne
 
rather than use a GPS card, you are better off using either a handheld and input through the serial port (however serial port not available on newer laptops. You can get a serial/USB converter, but not all of them will work with GPS, or you can get a USB/GPS/Mouse (search for that on ebay).
You can also connect laptop to an SSB receiver and get weather fax.
Plotting programmes will vary greatly in price but seaclear is free, you just need to scan in some charts for it. - this is a specialist field, but if you search back there has been a lot of discusiion on this in the past.

You should not rely entirely on the laptop for nav, but also put an occasional fix on a paper chart so that if/when laptop crashes you still have knowledge of where you are - this is also a good reason for either using a hand held as the source of your GPS, or having it available as a back up.

Some people use a PDA as their chart and plotter, but not so good for planning.

A laptop will use a lot more power than a dedicated plotter, and also cant be used in the cockpit cause it doesnt like salt water!
 
We've used the Laptop as the basis of an onboard navigation and entertainment system. The issues we've had to deal with have been power, gps signal and getting decent sound out of it.

Firstly power, we got a voltage converter from maplins that converted the 12 volts from the boat supply to 18 volts for the Laptop, these have a variety of end fittings and you can set them to a variety of different voltages so they should suit your purpose.

GPS signal. Our laptop didn't have a serial port so at first I bought a USB gps from ebay, they are incredibly cheap and arrive from Singapore within days. However it didn't work within the boat and the cable wasn't long enough to feed it outside. I already had a Garmin in the boat so I bought a serial to usb converter. Now we have to make sure the Garmin is switched off when we power up the computer or it thinks it is a mouse and the cursor jumps all over the screen. As long as we leave it switched off till the computer is powered up it works fine.

The navigation software we use is SeaPro but there are a host of other solutions.

The laptop can play DVD's and CD's but the sound from our laptop is rubbish. I didn't want to cart extra speakers down to the boat so I had to think of a way of using the existing speakers. The radio didn't have a "in" socket but i had heard of a device that you attach to your earphone socket and it transmits a signal to your radio. I ordered one of these from Hong Kong at an incredibly cheap price £3.50 plus £4 postage. Now we play the DVD's on the Laptop and we have surround sound from the radio speakers.

There are still other things planned such as internet connection and onboard tv via a tv card but havent got round to those yet.
 
You can turn off the mouse - right click my computer - properties, hardware tab scroll down to the pointing device it thinks it has found and turn it off..

Ian
 
when the cursor is jumpig all over the screen I find it difficult to right click on my computer. Does this work for you?
 
Further to Steve's comments have now finally got my setup working. I have a similar enviornment but could not get the power from my Dist panel to power the cigar lighter adapter voltage converter.
Everytime I plugged it in, the cabin lights went out and would not come back on until a couple of minutes after I had unplugged the converter again. I can only assume that this was some kind of circuit protection capacitor being drained by the current required to drive the laptop.
Have now taken a feed directly from the battery at 12volts, AS per previous posts. I have pluged this straight into my laptop and it works fine. No requirement for voltage conversion. I have also removed the battery from the laptop so that there is no current drawn to charge the internal laptop battery.

All now working OK. I was even watching telly on the laptop via a Hauppauge WINTV USB device this weekend. Not intending to do this very often ! Can also confirm that the FM transmitter things work well. I was a bit worried that there might be an issue getting the signal to the aerial at the top of the mast as they have a very limted range, however it works better on the boat than anywhere else. Not sure why.
 
I also have one of those gps mouses, meeces, eh? and I use a USB extension lead without any noticeable drop in performance, so the mouse is outside without obstruction.
/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Been wondering about using an inverter or even a converter as you mention. Battery drain is my concern. On long passages is the drain from the batteries an issue?
also would you recommend using a converter say 12v - 18/19v or an inverter 12v-220v and then plug in the laptops own transformer?
 
I'm sure the less steps you take the more efficient it has got to be.
12 v dc to 18v dc must be better than 12v dc to 220v ac and back to 18v dc.
 
As I said my machine works fine straight from a 12v supply.

I know of people who use inverters and also some who use the cigar light style converters.

I would suggest that you will have to watch how much you drain the battery, this is why I have removed the internal battery so that I am not using up power.

I ran mine for about 3 hours on Sunday with no appreciable/notable loss of battery charge. But there must be a finite time that it will run. How do I work it out ?
 
I use my laptop with an inverter, mainly because it's a Dell Inspiron 6000 (comparative cheapy) with requires 19.5v to run or charge... it didn't work on the 19v setting on a Maplin adaptor. The £30 inverter powers it just fine, but you do have to watch the 5A it pulls from the battery banks when charging the laptop battery! That drops to 1.6A when the battery is fully charged. As mentioned by NAS, the wind generator covers that.

In fine weather only, for pilotage I velcro the laptop on top of the mainhatch under the sprayhood. This is not my only nav system, so if it does cease to function my trip will be unaffected.
 
There is a safety issue with a mains inverter - do you really want 240V around when you are at sea and potentially have wet hands? Probably not. A voltage converter is much safer

To reduce battery drain invoke notebook power saving modes, you can really get the consumption down by a few simple steps. Get the screen ( the largest current draw) to turn off after a short time, wake it up by a keypress when you need to refer to the plotter. If you are not logging data you can also get the hard disk to turn off and save power. Make sure any unused peripheral cards and ports are turned off or unplugged. USB, network cards & modem all use power and if you are short of it then every little helps.

Biggest saving is to get a modern low power Centrino notebook, mine will last for about 5 hours on its own battery alone and takes very little when charging.

Finally its worth carrying a spare 12v car battery just for the computer and power supply, you can pick up a smallish cheap leisure battery in Halfords for £25 or so which will run the computer for several days - just charge it up at home or on the boat before you make a passage and when you arrive, that way you have no worries about main batteries
 
Yep, agree with you Blue Chip. Centrino chips are the way to go. We powered our previous Pentium laptop via an inverter, which was fine for most of the time, but useless when trying to receive wefaxes and RTTY. The inverter 'noise' just drowned out the signal.

The Centrino is terrific, and will easily download the daily wefaxes we use with loads of power to spare. Charging is, as you say, very quick.

Cheers Jerry
 
Steve,

Assuming you are using NT/2000/XP on your laptop, the problem is due to the operating system sending plug and play detection signals down the serial port during startup.

A simple fix for this is to add the following to you boot.ini file normally stored on drive c:

/fastdetect:com1

Assuming your serial port is com1 otherwise modify to suit. This should ve added to the end of the path under [operating systems].

Hope this may be of some help.

Dave
 
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