frant said...frant said...
I have used my GT31 speed sailing GPS unit with Seaclear on my laptop. Seems to work seamlessly. I have a GPS antenna fix mounted on the boat which is wired into the NMEA hub of my TacTik wireless instruments. The NMEA hub is hard wired into the autopilot and chartplotter and everything talks to each other. The beauty of the GT31 on the laptop is that it provides a completely independent GPS fix for Seaclear , is fully portable and has a standard USB cable connection between GPS and laptop.
Now what I want to do is hard wire a USB cable/terminal to the NMEA hub so that I can hook the laptop to the hub. This is required to allow depth and windspeed to be shown on the Seaclear window, will also be required to plot AIS information and use the Seaclear computer to drive the autopilot.
I am off to Jaycar to see what USB cables are available for hardwire termination.
My chartplotter uses Navionics gold (vector charts and these are not compatible with Seaclear) so I am trying to build my library of raster scanned charts.
Ramona, Do you know the pinout for a USB connection to Seaclear. The manual has the pin settings for a 9 pin serial plug as opposed to 5 pin USB plug. I have just wired a new AIS compatible VHF radio (DSC) into the USB Hub. It is starting to get pretty crowded with all the wiring into the hub. I would like to clean it up by wiring the USB socket into the hub and then perhaps obtaining a USB "splitter" so that multiple devices can be plugged or unplugged without the finicky wiring involved to hard wire.
This is a question best asked on the Seaclear forum or check the archives.
groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/seaclear_mapping/infoPlenty of people there that have similar set ups and this is a question that pops up. There are also some very clever individuals on there including Olle, the designer of the programme . The previous owner of my yacht was an electrical engineer and my yacht has done 5 Sydney hobarts, 3 Lord Howe races etc. It has a fully integrated system with the instruments and a fixed Garmin plotter gps but no AIS. He has hand written manual to go with it but its a nightmare of over complex wiring. I leave the plotter off and just use the instruments separately. My laptop is mounted in a bracket at the nav table sans battery and is connected direct to the ships 12v system. The only other item plugged in is the gps puck.
Interesting item the GT31, uses the same chipset as my puck but the puck is only $27. I use a Garmin 72 as a backup, I prefer to keep items separate. The Garmin is very heavy on batteries.
