"Meindert Sprang" wrote in message
Nice piece of marketing. Take an off-the-shelf product (Soekris Engineering
net4521 , ~ $200 including case), put your own label on it, load it with
linux and sell it for 4 times the price of the off-the-shelf product...

Pity though that this NMEA navigation server has no real NMEA
inputs/outputs. :-)

Meindert

Meindart,

Indeed, the soekris is a great unit and embedded linux was a natural
choice.

Our thinking regarding no real NMEA inputs/outputs was that we want to
support seatalk networks, seatalk/nmea networks, and straight nmea so
going with an external multiplexer (e.g. Noland, Brookhouse, Raymarine
NMEA bride, etc...) makes a lot more sense and quite frankly is a lot
easier at this early stage.

I would eventually like to integrate something like the Brookhouse
unit which does both NMEA and Seatalk and ultimately get the cost down
more but that only happens when you can start buying in some
significant volume.

I think you're oversimplifying regarding $200 for the soekris since
that's only a part of the equation. There's also 200mW senoa wireless
card, external antenna, internal storage, 12 volt connection wiring,
virtual serial port software, nmea navigation embedded server
software, a web based administration interface, etc... We're making
nowhere near the 4 times profit you suggest on this unit so it's not
as nice a piece of marketing as you give me credit for, although I
wish it were ;-)

Thanks for your feedback, it really is a big help to see which areas
folks are critical of so I can work on sorting those out for when we
begin actually selling the product to end users!

Cheers,
Todd

--
Marine Wireless
http://www.marinewireless.us