I read this with interest, I am new to OpenPlotter, I am about to set up my new system, waiting for everything to arrive, tomorrow hopefully. I have old Stowe Navigator 1, Navsounder and Windvane heads, all the sensors don't work. I don't have any databox. The wiring on my boat is a nightmare to get to and instead of replacing these old screens in the cockpit, I was wondering if I could use the existing wiring and screens fed by data from OpenPlotter over NMEA 0183. Did you get yours to work, do you think it would be possible to have them display data?
(2023-04-23, 08:30 PM)luckybeanz Wrote: [ -> ]I read this with interest, I am new to OpenPlotter, I am about to set up my new system, waiting for everything to arrive, tomorrow hopefully. I have old Stowe Navigator 1, Navsounder and Windvane heads, all the sensors don't work. I don't have any databox. The wiring on my boat is a nightmare to get to and instead of replacing these old screens in the cockpit, I was wondering if I could use the existing wiring and screens fed by data from OpenPlotter over NMEA 0183. Did you get yours to work, do you think it would be possible to have them display data?
just remember that NMEA0183 is single talker, multi listener, so it you are bringing data in from multiple devices you will need 2 wires for each transmitter (talker) and then an additional 1 (if you are lucky and you can share the ground) or 2 wires for opposite direction. what I have done is bring everything into the pi (signalK) and then out via one transmitter pair (2 wires) from the pi out to everything else.
As far as I can detect, if you send a stream of NMEA 183 data to the Stowe displays (that I have) they will each pick up the NMEA sentences that are relevant. That is, the Wind display should display the relevant wind NMEA sentences and so on. If you can see the NMEA data in OpenCpn debug window being output to a usb to NMEA converter and then connect that to a display you can check what is going on. On my boat the displays are daisy chained together and each display picks up the data relevant to it from the output of the Databox. If you are just sending similar NMEA from OpenCpn I assume the displays should work but I have not tried it.
The Depth Sounder display may be a problem as the Databox sends the pings to the transducer and converts the returns to NMEA so you will need to get a NMEA depth below transducer sentence to send to the depth display.
Jodel