I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA. As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs. Manufacturers
and hobbiest alike would benefit. Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well. I'm not
lamenting anything... I'm just trying to get people thinking about moving
forward, taking some control, and maybe just maybe benefiting mankind in
some sort of way :-). BTW a pic is a programmable chip by the same name.
---- Posted via Pronews.com - Premium Corporate Usenet News Provider ----
http://www.pronews.com offers corporate packages that have access to 100,000+ newsgroups

Poit wrote in
00.119:

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

AS much as I like open source and open standards, on boat electronics I'll
have to disagree. Profits would be so low with so few actual customers,
none of them would survive.....

How many people within 10 square miles of your house own a boat radar?

See my point? The market is really TINY, even if the clients are very
rich. Bill Gates is only gonna buy ONE radar for his yacht. The guy down
your dock only buys his because he can't get one for free on the cheap.

So, we sold 2 radars at amazing profit margins.....instead of one at lots
less profit margin in the open source radar world.

Manufacturers would flee the market if they couldn't rip off the rich
boaters with proprietary stuff to sell 'em more.......

The market is just not there.....

I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA.

Why?

As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs.

Based on what do you make that claim?

Manufacturers
and hobbiest alike would benefit.

How? There aren't enough numbers to justify it.

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

You naively equate what works for BILLIONS of devices, across hundreds (if
not thousands) of markets with the SIGNIFICANTLY smaller marine market.
There's just no comparison.

I'm not
lamenting anything... I'm just trying to get people thinking about moving
forward, taking some control, and maybe just maybe benefiting mankind in
some sort of way :-)

Oh please, spare me the ill-informed naive sentimentality. Back it up with
a sound argument and facts, not fluff.

"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...
He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced
like
their Honda.

And that is exactly why marine instruments will not support an ethernet
interface with TCP/IP because it is simply too expensive to implement. And
surely people will now tell me that I can buy an ethernet card for my PC for
less than $5. But this will simply not happen for the relatively small
marine market.

Meindert

"Poit" wrote in message
00.119...
I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA. As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs.

The NMEA standard IS an open standard. The information is available to
anyone who wants it. And yes, you have to pay a small fee to get th standard
on paper but that is quite a normal procedure. Manufacturers do not pay
royalties or whatsoever for NMEA devices.

But I agree that there could be s more mature version, created by all of us,
still using cheap standard serial comms (no ethernet), in ASCII and capable
of having multiple devices on one bus. A similar standard exists and is
called SeaTalk. This one however is binary but it wouldn't be a problem to
create an ASCII variant of it, running on a comfortable high speed and
having a better hardware layer that is insensitive for interference and
still be cheap (CAN style).
And to ease implementation, the ASCII data could still be in NMEA format
which everyone already supports.
So basically, just a change in the hardware layer could take NMEA up to the
next level.

Meindert

Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time. I
can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best thing
in boat electronics, like SeaTalk. Yet we have a huge, inexpensive
commercial infrastructure all around TCP/IP and yet the marine industry is
trying to reinvent the wheel. You should revel in this foolishness and
consider this as a golden opportunity to develop a transport network like
the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard, but using TCP/IP as the flexible transport
medium. Where the entry and exit ports are box standard NMEA, but are in
fact intelligent gateways to the Ethernet transport. You can buy off the
shelf single chip TCP/IP support and inexpensive switches. I see these
gateways programmable as talkers or listeners with a central
router/controller accepting the NMEA inputs and buffering them as well as
distributing them by IP address at any rate the listener required. This
solution solves all the NMEA problems and by developing additional gateway
flavors, solves all the compatibility issues between devices and
manufacturers. Most of this already exists inexpensively. All it takes is a
little ingenuity to integrate it into a total package. I think the market is
huge. There are a lot of floating customers out their just waiting for this.
Please also keep in mind that this same transport can also move all data
types including other, unrelated traffic like audio, video and other
computer related data streams.
Steve


"Meindert Sprang" wrote in message
...
"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...
He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics
market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced
like
their Honda.

And that is exactly why marine instruments will not support an ethernet
interface with TCP/IP because it is simply too expensive to implement. And
surely people will now tell me that I can buy an ethernet card for my PC
for
less than $5. But this will simply not happen for the relatively small
marine market.

Meindert

Hi Steve,

"Steve Lusardi" wrote in message
...
Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time.

I'm lurking here every day... so not really away :-)

I can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best thing
in boat electronics, like SeaTalk. Yet we have a huge, inexpensive
commercial infrastructure all around TCP/IP and yet the marine industry is
trying to reinvent the wheel.

Well, I think it is not that simple. Off course we have thousands of cheap
products for ethernet networking. Most of which are not suitable nor allowed
in marine environments. Take the average UTP CAT5 cable: not permitted on
board of SOLAS vessels. The average hub is not IEC945 compliant: not
permitted on SOLAS vessels. Not to mention the average RJ45 connector...

Furthermore, while everyone is hammering on using TCP/IP to replace NMEA:
TCP/IP is the least suitable protocol for this. In a marine network, one has
several devices all sending information to whoever it concerns. TCP/IP on
the other hand, is a point to point protocol. UDP broadcasts would be much
better since they reach every device on the network. Look at the average
Serial-Ethernet bridge: they all to TCP/IP to replace ONE serial link. Not
suitable. Look at the price of these little boxes compared to bog standard
ethernet cards and you see how in a relatively small marine market prices
would increase when you equip devices with an ethernet interface.

You should revel in this foolishness and
consider this as a golden opportunity to develop a transport network like
the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard,

NMEA2000 is based on CAN

but using TCP/IP as the flexible transport
medium.

Do you realise that basic CAN only transports 8 bytes per packet at a time?
To put TCP/IP on top of that causes a huge overhead on the network, not to
mention the burden on the processor that drives the CAN controller. CAN was
never invented for this. CAN was invented to broadcast data on a network to
every one who needs it. No point to point connections. CAN is perfect for
distributing navigation info.


Where the entry and exit ports are box standard NMEA, but are in
fact intelligent gateways to the Ethernet transport. You can buy off the
shelf single chip TCP/IP support

At a price....

and inexpensive switches. I see these
gateways programmable as talkers or listeners with a central
router/controller accepting the NMEA inputs and buffering them as well as
distributing them by IP address at any rate the listener required.

The speed of NMEA is so low that you can simply dump it on an ethernet
network as it comes, without any intelligent distributing or rate control.
Do some math: 100Mbit/s vs 38400 b/s: That is the equivalent of 2600 AIS
receivers spitting out data continuously one one UTP cable.

Meindert

"Steve Lusardi" wrote in message
...
Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time. I
can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best thing
in boat electronics, like SeaTalk

WERE reinventing, past tense. NMEA2000 is the solution for it, and it works
QUITE well.

Yet we have a huge, inexpensive commercial infrastructure all around TCP/IP
and yet the marine industry is trying to reinvent the wheel. You should
revel in this foolishness and consider this as a golden opportunity to
develop a transport network like the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard, but using
TCP/IP as the flexible transport medium.

Which screams of how little you understand about instrumentation networks.

I think the market is huge. There are a lot of floating customers out
their just waiting for this.

I call bull****. List actual numbers, not pie-in-the sky hopes.

Please also keep in mind that this same transport can also move all data
types including other, unrelated traffic like audio, video and other
computer related data streams.

Which, again, screams of how little grasp you have of how instrumentation
networks function.

Larry wrote:

Poit wrote in
00.119:

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

AS much as I like open source and open standards, on boat electronics I'll
have to disagree. Profits would be so low with so few actual customers,
none of them would survive.....

How many people within 10 square miles of your house own a boat radar?

See my point? The market is really TINY, even if the clients are very
rich. Bill Gates is only gonna buy ONE radar for his yacht. The guy down
your dock only buys his because he can't get one for free on the cheap.

So, we sold 2 radars at amazing profit margins.....instead of one at lots
less profit margin in the open source radar world.

Manufacturers would flee the market if they couldn't rip off the rich
boaters with proprietary stuff to sell 'em more.......

The market is just not there.....

hmmmm, well, firstly I measure square kilometers, secondly where I live on
the Norwegian coast I would count about 3000 leasure boat owners in the ten
square kilometers, about half of them has a closed top boat with
permanently fitted equipment like autopilot, GPS, some chart plotters etc.
I would guess some 10% having large leasure boats with radar. Then there
are somewhere between 20-50 full time or part time fishermen, all with
fully equipped electonics on board and finally, we only have two ship lines
with a total fleet of about 30 large commercial vessels using expensive
stuff from Kongsberg, JRC and others.

We who pay for our own stuff rant on a regular basis about the lacking
interoperability, cost and for the techies - moaning&groaning about the
closed proprietary standards removing all the fun.

I agree with the original posting: communication should be as open as HTML
and our kroner, dollars or what have you should be spent on developing
better systems, not closed systems.

I'd buy that open box, and a few houndred others in my neghbourhood.

Bill,
The problem is across the entire marine spectrum, not just pleasure craft.
There are thousands of commercial vessels that not only bus the nav gear
through NMEA and other IMO approved interfaces,but now also host Ethernet
networks as well. The IMO is a very conservative and at times very backward
organization. I do not agree with Meindert, but he does raise very valid
points. NMEA 2k is better than 0183, but it doesn't hold a candle in
transport capability or flexibility in comparison to Ethernet. It is no
longer necessary nor desirable to host stove pipe transports for different
purposes. The world has changed. I am an electronic engineer that has been
involved with both IT and aircraft instrumentation for 40 years. the world
has changed, we need to keep up. Ethernet and TCP/IP is used by billions
world wide. Implementing this technology allows this "very small" market
place you speak about enjoy the cost advantage of a technology used by the
world.
Steve

"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...

"Steve Lusardi" wrote in message
...
Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time. I
can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best
thing in boat electronics, like SeaTalk

WERE reinventing, past tense. NMEA2000 is the solution for it, and it
works QUITE well.

Yet we have a huge, inexpensive commercial infrastructure all around
TCP/IP and yet the marine industry is trying to reinvent the wheel. You
should revel in this foolishness and consider this as a golden opportunity
to develop a transport network like the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard, but
using TCP/IP as the flexible transport medium.

Which screams of how little you understand about instrumentation networks.

I think the market is huge. There are a lot of floating customers out
their just waiting for this.

I call bull****. List actual numbers, not pie-in-the sky hopes.

Please also keep in mind that this same transport can also move all data
types including other, unrelated traffic like audio, video and other
computer related data streams.

Which, again, screams of how little grasp you have of how instrumentation
networks function.