We have recently been busy with the big project of tidying up our electric panel (hopefully more on that soon), so to add a quickly rewarding piece of excitement along the way, I decided to tackle a more simple project: try to connect our nav instruments to our newly installed autopilot.
In the instrument pod that came with the boat, we have a GPS/chartplotter, the autopilot display and three separate displays for depth, speed and wind connected to their respective sensors.
The displays, all daisy chained together (or at least this is what I thought at the time), talk in SeaTalk, the old Raymarine language with its own set of connectors.
Raymarine moved away from this standard, with SeaTalk2, and now its new generation standard with a new language and connectors: SeaTalkNg. The boat came with the "possibility" of an autopilot... Meaning it was listed on the ad but the owner had no clue on why it was not starting. Luckily, after a little fiddling in the instrument pod and simply rewiring the display, the autopilot agreed to start raising our hopes of a nice voyage from Tire-Bouchon's former home in San Diego to ours in the Bay Area. One hour later, the transmission belt of the wheel pilot was found ruptured, leaving us with prospective of hand steering handsteering - but what better way to learn how to know one another? The problem got fixed almost one year latter by purchasing and installing a new wheel pilot EV100 from Raymarine. Since the unit was new, it came with its own communication network based on SeaTalkNg. The installation went smoothly with the exception of the installation of a dedicated RF ground cable for the brain unit (ACU), the necessity of which was well hidden in the instruction manual and ended up postponing our trial sail by another weekend.
We now had a nicely functioning autopilot with its own network, going from the Nav Pod (for the display), to the cockpit locker (ACU) and finally under one of the settee seats (for the sensor) while passing close to the electric panel as the whole network needs power. Sadly, the network would not be able to talk to any of our other instruments, nor to the future VHF/AIS we are planning to install (NMEA2000 standard). The first step of this enthusiasm for having a nice network sharing all the boat's information started in the Nav Pod for which we gave in and bought the $85 or so kit that allows the conversion SeaTalk to SeaTalkNg. I'm always amazed at the price of these proprietary pieces of Raymarine equipment, as you have to count around $30 for a single cable or connector. Anyhow, it was money well spent as the connection when smoothly and the kit included more cables than we needed. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the SeaTalk network is not powered any longer as it will get powered from the SeaTalkNg. The former T connector that connected the network backbone to the autopilot display was readily replaced by a hub. One port restored the connection to the autopilot display, the second one, yellow as opposed to the usual white, was dedicated for the SeaTalk network and the last one white was unused and waterproofed with one of the provided blanking plug - we had contemplated briefly, with envy, the idea of connecting the GPS/charplotter to our network, but it talked old style NMEA, which cannot be connected that casually to the newer standards. Aside from that, the operation had been successful, until I noticed that the SeaTalk network had two sources of power because... it was not a network! Only the port side depth and speed display were connected together, which, after searching all our drawers for the previous owners' SeaTalk cables, turned out to be likely due to the lack of a long enough SeaTalk cable...
However, since we were in the middle of an electric project with the panel job, I had everything at hand to splice up a new SeaTalk cable with the just the appropriate size to reunite the two sides of our pod. After some cutting, crimping and heat shrinking, my connection was made and my hopes were high for this to work just fine when we'll be done with our panel and able to start our electric appliances again.
And one week later, after a weekend of labor to finish up with the panel, it did! It worked right away and I could see the wind direction jumping around on the autopilot display.
Projects that work at once are rare enough, no matter how small they are, that I decided to keep track of them under this category "Little victories". For motivation!
In the instrument pod that came with the boat, we have a GPS/chartplotter, the autopilot display and three separate displays for depth, speed and wind connected to their respective sensors.
The displays, all daisy chained together (or at least this is what I thought at the time), talk in SeaTalk, the old Raymarine language with its own set of connectors.
Raymarine moved away from this standard, with SeaTalk2, and now its new generation standard with a new language and connectors: SeaTalkNg. The boat came with the "possibility" of an autopilot... Meaning it was listed on the ad but the owner had no clue on why it was not starting. Luckily, after a little fiddling in the instrument pod and simply rewiring the display, the autopilot agreed to start raising our hopes of a nice voyage from Tire-Bouchon's former home in San Diego to ours in the Bay Area. One hour later, the transmission belt of the wheel pilot was found ruptured, leaving us with prospective of hand steering handsteering - but what better way to learn how to know one another? The problem got fixed almost one year latter by purchasing and installing a new wheel pilot EV100 from Raymarine. Since the unit was new, it came with its own communication network based on SeaTalkNg. The installation went smoothly with the exception of the installation of a dedicated RF ground cable for the brain unit (ACU), the necessity of which was well hidden in the instruction manual and ended up postponing our trial sail by another weekend.
We now had a nicely functioning autopilot with its own network, going from the Nav Pod (for the display), to the cockpit locker (ACU) and finally under one of the settee seats (for the sensor) while passing close to the electric panel as the whole network needs power. Sadly, the network would not be able to talk to any of our other instruments, nor to the future VHF/AIS we are planning to install (NMEA2000 standard). The first step of this enthusiasm for having a nice network sharing all the boat's information started in the Nav Pod for which we gave in and bought the $85 or so kit that allows the conversion SeaTalk to SeaTalkNg. I'm always amazed at the price of these proprietary pieces of Raymarine equipment, as you have to count around $30 for a single cable or connector. Anyhow, it was money well spent as the connection when smoothly and the kit included more cables than we needed. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the SeaTalk network is not powered any longer as it will get powered from the SeaTalkNg. The former T connector that connected the network backbone to the autopilot display was readily replaced by a hub. One port restored the connection to the autopilot display, the second one, yellow as opposed to the usual white, was dedicated for the SeaTalk network and the last one white was unused and waterproofed with one of the provided blanking plug - we had contemplated briefly, with envy, the idea of connecting the GPS/charplotter to our network, but it talked old style NMEA, which cannot be connected that casually to the newer standards. Aside from that, the operation had been successful, until I noticed that the SeaTalk network had two sources of power because... it was not a network! Only the port side depth and speed display were connected together, which, after searching all our drawers for the previous owners' SeaTalk cables, turned out to be likely due to the lack of a long enough SeaTalk cable...
However, since we were in the middle of an electric project with the panel job, I had everything at hand to splice up a new SeaTalk cable with the just the appropriate size to reunite the two sides of our pod. After some cutting, crimping and heat shrinking, my connection was made and my hopes were high for this to work just fine when we'll be done with our panel and able to start our electric appliances again.
And one week later, after a weekend of labor to finish up with the panel, it did! It worked right away and I could see the wind direction jumping around on the autopilot display.
Projects that work at once are rare enough, no matter how small they are, that I decided to keep track of them under this category "Little victories". For motivation!
