Alternative SeaTalk wiring

[Sailoog]

shure it is better to have an blinking feedback led for the traffic on the bus, but it would be better to get an 2-way-traffic as intended on the old seatalk bus. As this is somekind of special serial communication with 9 bits we need an better library to realize this. i am in the hope for one with spare time to put this togeher. so an future design of arthur should bear this in mind.

• Did you try the new wiring?
  
• Does it work for you?
  
• Could you provide details about your seatalk1 bus and devices?
  
  

The blinking LED isn't the improvement here, just a positive side effect. The important thing is that using this new wiring, seatalk1 systems that are not capable of using this optocoupler-based connection will now be able to connect regardless of the values of their bus resistors.

IMHO I do not think it is worth investing time and effort into software or hardware solutions to send seatalk1 data.
Setalk1 and NMEA 0183 are really old data formats, but NMEA 0183 will still be around for a long time and seatalk1 will not. New GPS, AIS receivers and autopilots, still accept NMEA 0183 but only old and discontinued devices use seatalk1.

In the other hand the idea of this connector is to receive data from our old devices before they die and are replaced. I can not think of any case where we should send seatalk1 data to the bus from OpenPlotter when you can use NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000 and Signal K. We should help the seatalk1 format die with dignity