Which laptop? A possible solution. Waterproof, tough.

[Obi]

As Stuey_Two says, this is not an expensive option at all, there are plenty of toughbooks on ebay for as little as £40 at the moment - which is why I started this thread - I thought it would be helpful for people looking for some sort of chart solution for buttons.

With a bracket on the binnacle, its not going to fall off. As skipper stu says, the only risk is that it will break the floor if it falls.

Im having one for the cockpit binnacle as a chart plotter and nothing else.

Total cost: GPS dongle £20, CM93 charts, Laptop £60 and bracket for binnacle.

M

 

[fmoran]

Get a good IBM TP second hand and you will have no problems. I have had them on board for 12/15 years without a problem - the current T42 being 4/5 years old.

However I do not really recommend a PC for navigation / AIS as they are extremely heavy on power - you are far better with a modern graphics display if you want to keep constantly running, as you certainly will if you are using AIS.

I use the TP for getting the weather, email, and generally keeping in touch.

 

[shmoo]

Get a good IBM TP second hand and you will have no problems. I have had them on board for 12/15 years without a problem - the current T42 being 4/5 years old.

However I do not really recommend a PC for navigation / AIS as they are extremely heavy on power - you are far better with a modern graphics display if you want to keep constantly running, as you certainly will if you are using AIS.

I use the TP for getting the weather, email, and generally keeping in touch.

Agree with this and would rather use a plotter but have yet to find one that displays AIS with the sophistication of SeaClear (CPA, TCPA, rate of turn, and especially projected track). Would welcome being corrected.

 

[Spyro]

I posted this on a thread in the lounge about Ebay.
I recently purchased a Toughbook CF27 with windows XP on Ebay for £45.
Now loaded with CMAP ECS and working perfectly. If you don't have one already you will need a 12v cigarette lighter type adapter for it. I have seen them advertised in the for sale forum for around a 10-15 pounds.
It's amazing how quick these work when they have virtually no other programs or anti virus software to load up. Mine didn't come with a optic drive but it was easy to transfer all data via a memory stick.

 

[penfold]

Strewth - I've got 3 x Thinkpad 600's set up for navigation - they're currently 12 years old and I reckon good for another 12. Not treated with kid gloves either. Cost me all of £20 each.
And - being modular (IBM calls these FRU's - Field Replaceable Units), they're easy enough to fix, swap parts around etc.
Not very high spec by today's standards, but then I ain't driving a Space Shuttle !

I've just rescued a pair of TP 380EDs from almost certain skip-related doom, I think a slightly posher version of the 600? What software do you have on them, and what (if anything) do you connect to(SSB, GPS dongle etc.)? And you're right about robustness; they give the impression of being resistant to thermonuclear blast!

 

[Gordonmc]

I remember mentioning this product on a thread a while ago, and am now looking for a small tough solution for my cockpit myself.
****
Now, if i can only find a small one, old and cheap

Mark

My thinking as well.
I had an HP Evo which I had intended dedicating for boat use, but the battery was goosed and the cost of a replacement was exhorbitant.
So I bought a refurbished CF-20 off Ebay for £70. It came with XP Home already loaded and I paid for a memory upgrade before it was dispatched.
Despite being an old spec machine it does what I need.
I use an external CD Rom drive for loading programmes as the machine only has a floppy drive. It only has a single USB 1 port so I bought a 4 port USB 2 PCMCIA adaptor to take a GPS mouse for the navigation programme.
The only other problem is that there is no video card so no watching films, but that was never the intention anyway.
The Toughbook now lives on the boat and I have instant access to all my manuals and spec sheets, plus photos needed for the rebuild... and the chartplotter so I can plan where to go when seaworthy.

 

[DaveRo]

I've got 3 x Thinkpad 600's set up for navigation - they're currently 12 years old and I reckon good for another 12...

Unless they get the Blink of Death like mine. But in general, I agree: my kids went to uni with second hand Thinkpads and they survived - the laptops and the kids.

I currently have a Lenovo Thinkpad. Very strong. Claims to detect if you drop it and park the disk heads before it hits the ground. Don't know how that might work on a pitching boat ;-)

 

[prv]

What is the replacement for the IBM thinkpad 600?
At the moment, it looks like there isn't one.

You might be right. Old Thinkpads were renowned for their robustness (apparently some salesmen used to stand on their own machines in front of potential customers to demonstrate) but the received wisdom is that since IBM got rid of the brand to Lenovo this has been degraded. Still good laptops from a technical point of view, but closer to the mainstream rather than following IBM's habit of doing things in its own heavy, solid, boring, but unstoppable way.

Pete

 

[knightvision]

We have a panasonic CF-18 toughbook, like Spyro, bought from ebay. Associated with this we have the Memory-Map UK Charts (£40) and a 3G USB dongle for GRIB and Weather. We also have a small HP 400 battery printer. So we can print off the photos, but also print maps from Memory-Map Charts, which is perfect. The Toughbook runs for about 4hrs on battery when playing movies and we supply more if needed by a Targus power adapter. This works as a DC-DC converter for 12V and as 240V AC-DC converter as well.

So far this has been reliable, is manages everything we want, including the boat log and running expenses.

Edmund

 

[jonjo]

However I do not really recommend a PC for navigation / AIS as they are extremely heavy on power - you are far better with a modern graphics display if you want to keep constantly running, as you certainly will if you are using AIS.

Agreed, I am struggling to picture the usage profile of a weather toughened PC wired as a primary display in-cockpit. On a 12 or 24 hour passage the power requirement would be a major hit on a typical yacht's battery capacity.

 

[Amulet]

I'd agree with the multiple obsolete approach. I have three far from state-of-the-art laptops, disk backup and a few cheap handheld gps units. I download routes etc to the handhelds. A helluva lot of things have to fail before I have no sane navigation by gps. I carry the disks etc to rebuild the whole shooting match (vacuum packed) and I can survive with stored routes on the handhelds and four drycells for more than 24 hours.

Even if it all failed, I can get quite far just on my iPhone (or my wife's if mine has been dropped overboard). I have a dedicated external iPhone battery good for a few hours.

Only one word of caution. If you do think your twelve year old laptop in the locker will save your life when you spill beer on your main one - use the spare to navigate for a day or two a month just to convince yourself that it's working. Likewise your iphones.

 

[st599]

Strewth - I've got 3 x Thinkpad 600's set up for navigation - they're currently 12 years old and I reckon good for another 12. Not treated with kid gloves either. Cost me all of £20 each.
And - being modular (IBM calls these FRU's - Field Replaceable Units), they're easy enough to fix, swap parts around etc.
Not very high spec by today's standards, but then I ain't driving a Space Shuttle !

I have a laptop at work where the uptime (ie since it was last switched off) is over 4 years.

Shuttle runs on ~20MHz 8086s. Large transistor size is less susceptible to damage by cosmic rays.

 

[webcraft]

Agreed, I am struggling to picture the usage profile of a weather toughened PC wired as a primary display in-cockpit. On a 12 or 24 hour passage the power requirement would be a major hit on a typical yacht's battery capacity.

We've been using an IEE PC 901 with a SSD so more shock resistant but not exactly toughened as such. It is a 12V machine, so the 12V adapter isn't really having to do any work. We only have one 110AH domestic battery, and this little netbook isn;t too hard on it. We also have a fairly modern toughbook, but that takes a lot of power via an inverter so isn't much use for extended use on passage except under engine.

- W