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[SOLVED] Need Help! Stuck routing wind data
#1
My boat network has gotten complicated:  RPi3B running updated OpenPlotter. TinyPilot with Minimal Weather Sensors, fully updated, running near the helm. We've just added a Vesper Cortex vhf/ais transponder/hub. 

Here's my difficulty: The handset of the Vesper will display relative wind angle/speed if streamed in via NMEA0183 into the Vesper Cortex hub.  I'd like to make that happen.

However, since updating the TinyPilot, I don't understand the routing of the minimal weather sensors data into openplotter.  

On devices running opencpn which are wifi connected to the Openplotter system, I can see relative wind displayed on their dashboards using the updated plugins for Dashboard and Pypilot (pypilot configured to connect to the TinyPilot, and with NMEA Forward checked). I can see APMWV sentences flagged as 'virtual' in the NMEA Debug stream in Opencpn. 

If I look at the SignalK web interface, I see OPpypilot as enabled in the data connections, and the weather sensor data listed in the data browser, and updating.

I've added an FTDI rs422/rs485 serial dongle attached to /dev/ttyUSB0. Through this, I expect to be able to pass NMEA0183 sentences into the Vesper Cortex hub. 

I don't know exactly how to monitor the ftdi serial device: I've tried cat, socat, and screen utilities without success. I see one of the device tally lights blinking with traffic, but I think those are sentences coming from the Vesper Cortex hub. I'm pretty sure the weather sensor sentences are not yet routed to the serial device. 

And this is where I am stuck. 

I need guidance on how to set things up to route the APMWV sentences from tinypilot through openplotter to the ftdi serial dongle,  and help to monitor the traffic on that dongle. 

If I can succeed with those issues, I'm pretty sure I can get the Vesper displaying the wind data on its handset. 

Who can step up, and share what they know? Thank you to anyone for their suggestions. If we can get this sorted out, I promise to write it up in a "how-to" to pay it forward.
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#2
Your wind data is in signalk. You want to export it in nmea0183 to your rs422. You need the signalk plugin signalk to nmea0183. (Some explanation https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-to-nm.../README.md).
You can find another description here https://openplotter.readthedocs.io/en/la...mples.html (but the sentences are comming in nmea0183 format from opencpn)

There is another plugin for signalk, to filter the data:
"Forward and filter NMEA0183 input to NMEA0183 out"

The slow NMEA0183 interfaces can't transfer many sentences. Be sure to send only needed data!
Martin
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#3
(2022-03-24, 11:03 PM)e-sailing Wrote: Your wind data is in signalk. You want to export it in nmea0183 to your rs422. You need the signalk plugin signalk to nmea0183. (Some  explanation https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-to-nm.../README.md).
[You can find another description here https://openplotter.readthedocs.io/en/la...mples.html   (but the sentences are coming in nmea0183 format from opencpn)]

The slow NMEA0183 interfaces can't transfer many sentences. Be sure to send only needed data!
Martin

Hey, Martin,
Thanks so much for your reply. The part I've bolded was the greatest help, and, funny thing, I'd been on that page before, but hadn't paid enough attention to the sense in it. 

One major stumbling block I had was attempting to manually type in the filtering selections in opencpn's Connections setup. It must have taken me an hour before I noticed the radio button to open the pull-up menu of NMEA sentence headers. I selected the few that originate in the minimal weather sensors (from Sean).

With opencpn set to autostart at launch in my headless openplotter system, and the pypilot plugin in opencpn set to forward the autopilot NMEA  through to opencpn connections (look in the pypilot plugin configuration dialogue), and if you follow the steps on the page I've bolded above, both in opencpn and signalK, you will have a filtered routing structure directing the wind/wx data out to your boat network.

This is major: After making changes to SignalK, RESTART SIGNALK!!!

Coincidentially, the Dtech rs422/rs485 dongle depicted at the top of the bolded page is the same I'm using, and it was a struggle to get wired correctly to the Vesper Cortex M1 hub NMEA wire bundle. Here's the correct colors to the pin block for the M1:

With the pin block inserted into the D9 plug, and the dongle's wire pointing up, the block has five connectors: From left to right the blocks are GRN-GRN-BLU-BLU-BLU. The left-most block is marked T/R+. That is pin 1, and they go 1 thru 5, left to right.

The M1's NMEA0183 bundle connects from 1 thru 5 thus: DarkGRN - YEL - ORG - WHT - GroundBraid. The baud rate is 38400. That having been said, your mileage may vary.

On the DTech, the lights will cheerfully blink even when the wiring is screwed up.You can verify you've got it right, at least for data received from the boat network, by running sudo cat /dev/ttyUSB* in openplotter. If you see gibberish, try swapping 1 and 2.  If your data out isn't reaching the network, try swapping 3 and 4.

I hope these notes from the rough day this gave me will save someone else some time.

Cheers!
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#4
Could someone please tell me where the settings.json file is located? That is referred to here: https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-to-nm.../README.md

If you want to output the conversion result into a serial connection you need to configure the serial connection in the server's Admin interface and add an extra line to the settings.json, specifying that the serial connection should output the plugin's output...

Thank you skyeyedoc for your detailed repsonse, it helps!
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#5
(2022-04-03, 09:59 PM)La Zorra Wrote: Could someone please tell me where the settings.json file is located? That is referred to here: https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-to-nm.../README.md
/home/pi/.signalk
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