Wednesday 16 March 2016

Plug and Play NMEA

For some time now I have been looking at how I get access navigational data for use in my spatial development. That sounds awfully grand, let's try that again!

There are instruments all over modern boats; wind speed, wind direction, depth, vessel heading, location even other vessel locations, all available over a few different communications systems with the title NMEA - Which actually stands for National Marine Electronics Association, so strictly speaking NMEA is not a type of communication, in the same way the Hoover is not is not a vacuum cleaner. It turns out the NMEA set standards for communications. At the time of writing there are essentially 3:
  • NMEA 0183 - V1 The original standard, basically RS232 at 4800 baud
  • NMEA 0183 - V4 The last of the Serial standards working at 38000 baud
  • NMEA 2000 - Essentially CAN bus
The NMEA standard does lots more than just set the protocol, it all defines the messages (or sentences) that are sent over the wire

If you have played around with serial communications before you soon realise that you can only really connect one serial device to another, you can't connect lots; as they will all talk over each other. So either you have devices with lots of serial ports (often you find displays on boats with a few inputs for NMEA) or you have instruments that daisy-chain together to pass the messages along or… you get a multiplexer.

A multiplexer acts like a hub, grouping all the serial messages together and passing them down a single port to be read by your down-stream devices, they are very clever as they buffer all the messages and group them together. However this has some problems as well.

Typically 4800 baud is fine for a single instrument, 4800 bits per second, or 600 8 bit words per second should be enough for a spinning wind vane, even with direction information. Except of course it's not just the data being sent, it's also the tags saying what sort of data. Even if that is only a few letters (e.g. HDG for heading and 180) you are talking 6 letters, plus start, end and error correction. Suddenly you are looking at tens of messages per second. A 10hz GPS updates 10 times per second for location, direction and speed. That on its own could saturate a single NMEA connection. What happens if you have many of these or are transmitting more than 1 instrument? Well the NMEA redefined things and allowed 38000 baud - or roughly 500 messages per second, which is a lot better. But you still have issues connection lots of things together and even then you can use up 500 messages fast!

CAN bus is a relatively new boy in town, it actually comes from the automotive industry as a fault tolerant, high speed communication solution for cars. The idea being you don't need to run a wire for each of the little computers in a car, you just daisy chain them all together and they will cooperate. It's a bit more complicated than that, as it is still a serial communication bus, just a more intelligent one running at up to 1mb per second - or about 128,000 messages per second. That is more like it! You only need one wire between all the instruments and you can have as many receivers or transmitters as you like!

So we have lots of ways to get the instruments to talk together, which one shall we use? Well, there is the quandary; NMEA 0183 has been around the longest and is arguably the easiest to implement, so "Low cost" instruments all use it. NMEA 2000 is obviously the best and easiest to use from user point of view, but it costs more to implement it in the electronics, so typically what you end up with is a mix of all of the protocols:
  • NMEA 0183 @ 4800 baud for depth sounders, logs, autopilot maybe GPS
  • NMEA 0183 @ 38000 baud for AIS and maybe GPS with heading sensors
  • NMEA 2000 for AIS, GPS, autopilot and modern plotters

Anyone who has tried to work with this knows how notorious NMEA 0183 can be for just not working, so I was not looking forward to trying to harvest data from all the disparate busses (busi? Bus'?)

Step up to the mark Actisense they have a range of multiplexers and NMEA bridges that link all this stuff together. I got myself an NDC-4 which lets you plug 4 NMEA 0183 devices together (configurable to 4800 or 38000 with message filtering and priority) + a USB port - which looks like a serial port to any PC. Then I got an NGW-1 which lets you communicate bidirectionally between NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000. So I can plug the USB into almost any NMEA port. Admittedly I really ought to get the NGT-1 which plugs NMEA 2000 into USB, but all the test software I could get only really talks NMEA 0183 messages, the interface to NMEA 2000 has an SDK and has potential to be fast, but odd. So First things first, prove I can wire all the stuff together and get data!

On my desk I am looking at half a dozen flashing LEDs. I bought a NASA AIS receiver and a B&G GPS and heading sensor - So Location, speed, heading and AIS Data (AIS tells you about other vessels within VHF range at 38000 baud.) The B&G GPS is NMEA 2000 and the AIS is NMEA 0183. So I simply connected the NGW-1 (NMEA 2000 -> NMEA 0183) to the NDC-4 (NMEA Multiplexer) the instructions are in the box with lots of pictures. Remembering that transmit wires on one device connect to receive wires on the other. Then connected the power to the NMEA bus and the NDC, plugged the GPS into the NMEA 2000 bus (plus the terminators and power) and finally plugged a USB cable from the dedicated connector in the NDC-4 into my Windows 10 PC - which automatically detects the NDC as a serial port!

How do you test NMEA networks? Well there are lots of flashing LED's going on here. The handbooks tell me that there is data being exchanged. I can even put a serial port monitor on and capture text flying over the serial ports. But by far the easiest way is to run something that understands these messages. The obvious choice would be OpenCPN, an open source chart viewer with various plug-ins… Unfortunately I have never really had the patience to get on well with OpenCPN, it doesn't choose it's scale band well and the way it renders annoys me intensely. It also suffers from the traditional open-source malaise of only having the sexy bits complete. The hard bits, like declutter, error trapping and reliable import/export all have annoying issues. So I tend to fall back on a reliable (and inexpensive) paid for product, Nuno Navigator.

Nuno Navigator is written by Chersoft who also wrote the digital versions of the UK Hydrographic Office (otherwise known as the Admiralty)  SOLAS Books for radio signals, list of lights, tides and safety publications. That includes not only the user products (known as ADP and Total Tides) but also the systems used internally to manage the products, with an additional layer to license them. Underneath the Admiralty products is a very flexible rendering engine that they also use in their Leisure products - Like Nuno Navigator. I used to work for the UKHO and I have a lot of respect for Chersoft (and more importantly the guys that own and run it!) as people who not only understand their products, but also how they are used by sailors.

Needless to say I quite like Nuno Navigator. I started it up after I had plugged in the NMEA spiders-nest I had created and within a few seconds voila, I had location data and AIS data as an overlay on the chart for Southampton. This all worked first time, no trial and error - just plug and play!

The next step is to see if Signal K (an open source restful interface for marine data) is viable and allows me to do the kind of spatial logging I have planned… But that is for a later blog!

So what is the moral of this rambling blog post?
  • Using products like Actisense NDC-4, NMEA really is now plug and play, in fact it's easy!
  • Nuno Navigator just gets more and more impressive! 

Tuesday 8 March 2016

So I Bought A Boat

Today I bought the third most expensive thing I have ever paid for… But it wasn't a house. It's funny, immediately after I say yes to any number with more than 3 zeros in it I always get that little pang of self-doubt. All the inertia leading up to the moment washes away and I am left on a little island of "You've done it now" but in this case it's a rather nice little island, with perhaps a palm tree or two.

It has been many years in the planning, a minimum of twenty years, probably closer to thirty, but I have always planned to retire, or at least stop living to work, as close to 50 as I could. I think my father first put the idea in my head and nearly every plan I have made since has involved having everything in place do that. The Mortgage will finish when I'm about 50 and the kids will all be over 18, that's the major things I suppose! I'm not 50 yet mind you, it's all in the planning.

My wife says I'm just trying to copy my dad, in a way I am; but only in the way that you would look at somebody putting their umbrella up and agree that putting on a coat might be a good idea. When my parents separated, my mother went off into Europe with my siblings, I stayed at home making a living and my father decided to buy a steel boat (from memory for about £10K) he then spent another £10K making it ocean going, then, with about £30K in the bank he set off around the world, going sort of the wrong way through the med. He never got all the way around, but he learnt a lot (some of which he told me) and he had a right giggle on the way.

Today I took my own view on my father's bright idea, I bought a second hand Ocean going cruising yacht. My take is I bought one that you could set off in immediately. I'm not going to (set off immediately that is) but I am going to use it as a base to live in whilst I work as a solution architect for Ordnance Survey in Southampton. The idea is I learn all the foibles in a nice safe mooring and get to implement all the bright ideas I've had in an environment that won't kill me! In the meantime I have a place to live very cheaply near my work place (I actually live in North Devon.)

The boat I bought is a Steel Callisto 385, I'll cover why Steel is about the best material in later posts, take it from me it is. This particular boat seems to have been owned by somebody who knew what they were doing, it's actually very difficult to find anything wrong with it; apart from being 19 years old, the previous owners meticulously took care of it, possibly too well, so everything is as original. The standing rigging for instance is original, it is in beautiful condition and fantastically well specified. But it is 19 years old. Really you should change the rig every 10 to 15 years, but the owner took such good care of it you wouldn't be able to tell it from a 5 year old rig unless you looked at the records - that may come back to bite me if the insurance company insists on a set age for the rig, or indeed just one piece has in fact worn.

The Yacht is a Bill Dixon design, built by Croft Marine. The builders went bust in the late 90's because, well, everyone was going bust then; particularly those in the luxury sector. Bill Dixon to this day is one of the worlds most respected designers. The boat itself is fantastically pretty, a round bilge design (meaning it has a smooth rounded hull, rather than the plate chines you normally get with steel.) I may actually have stumbled upon an absolute gem of a boat though, when they built the hull it was sprayed with molten aluminium inside and out, kind of like a high class galvanised coating that heals itself if it gets scratched. We could hardly find any rust on the boat at all! All over the boat everything is extremely well specified if not over specified, from water management to pumps to sails to cupboard space to cookers to heating. In fact we found it very difficult to fault the build in any way! The only areas of doubt on the whole boat were:
  • The teak decks - which had been cleaned so often they were getting too thin
  • The Sole plates (floor boards) - which for some reason were finished with linoleum rather that a nice wood
  • The instruments - which were fairly basic, I suspect because the owner actually knew how to sail properly
  • The Main in-mast furling - which can be troublesome or joyful; but are unloved by cruisers
Overall though nothing would stop you from just getting on the boat and sailing into the sunrise (must resist just a bit longer!)

Paul Fay (www.faymarine.com) helped me do an inspection after my initial viewing, he confirmed my view with proper evidence of the quality of the boat and he will be doing the full survey. Have a look at his site, he has more experience of self builds and steel boats than I care to think about and is massively pragmatic and practical. I would trust my life with him on a boat, indeed I kind of have!


I will write more as my journey progresses, in the meantime Aquamarine of Beaulieu is waiting for me to take ownership. It will be an interesting voyage.