Maiana status monitoring?

[rszemeti]

Hi,

There are 3 useful LEDs on the back of the board for GPS, AIS RX and AIS TX ... unfortunately, without a system of mirrrors, these are of no use once the unit is installed and are not copied to GPIO pins.

I can detect whether the Maiana has GPS position from the NMEA messages, so that part is not a problem ... but I would REALLY like to be able to detect the TX status ... to see in SignalK if it has transmit enabled, maybe the time since last transmission would be nice ... is there anything I can do to assist with this?  

The reason I ask is last year it worked great, but I had it just connected in the cabin with a short length of RJ45 and an SMA->BNC to feed the spare antenna.  This year, I made an aerial and installed it properly on the back of the boat. The antenna match is very good, but it only seems to want to transmit occasionally. When it does, I get great range (I have been received by stations 20 miles away) but most of the time, despite a good GPS position, it seems not to transmit.

I have a version 10.0 Maiana board ... it would be good to be able to tell if it thinks it should be transmitting or not!

[Sailoog]

Using the openplotter-maiana app you will know the status and the timestamp of the last transmitted message:

[rszemeti]

Ah, OK, I shall have to try and compile the latest firmware to work with my board and pretend to be a later board as when I try it with my 10.0 board it just says "hardware is too old" ...

   

[rszemeti]

OK, so for some reason, there is a check in the script that the hardware version is at least 11.3 or greater, I have no idea why this was added. I did submit a pull request that was accepted some while ago that adds support for V 10.x boards to the more recent firmware and my board is running V 4.1.0 firmware which is recent enough. I think detecting the firmware version would make a lot more sense than detecting the hardware version ... providing it is running late enough firmware, the hardware it is running on should make no difference, at least to the ability to display and chnage settings.

I removed the requirement and it appears to work correctly with my 10.0.1 board. Status is displayed, TX software switch works, settings can be changed etc.

[Sailoog]

Are you still in OpenPlotter v2??? I am not sure but this should be fixed in v3 and v4.

[rszemeti]

I have now installed OpenPlotter V4 on a spare pi/HAT, the same problem exists in openplotter-maiana V 4.x

If you look around line 222 in this file, you will see it:

https://github.com/openplotter/openplott...rMaiana.py

I would fix it and submit a pull request, but I don't know why it was locked out in the first place on hardware version, as even the old 10.0.1 hardware can run the current firmware.