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How I’m going to....
#1
I recently bought a 1996 Hunter H336 that came with ST50 Depth and Speed instruments, ST4000+ Auto pilot, ST60+ Wind instrument, and a Garmin GPSMap 2010C all in the cock pit and a tube screen based vintage Navcenter 500 and a Old Radar system in the Nav Station. I plan to add the Open plotter Pi in the Nav station connected up like in the picture.

[Image: 074646c93417f0b5dbd1f6dfe6d65055.jpg]

I may connect the Pi into the nmea bus that comes back out of the Garmin so that I do not have to power up the older nav station based Radar and GPS.

Does open plotter share way points on the NMEA bus? Would AIS information be available on the NMEA bus? Would radar data be available to open plotter?
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#2
Hello Techstyle,
 
We have a similar setup on our boat; Raymarine ST60 instruments and ST4000 Autohelm, Raspberry Pi 3B+ with dAISy HAT for AIS.  All the Raymarine instruments talk to each other via SeaTalk, a proprietary format from Raymarine.  The ST4000 Autohelm has a NMEA 0183 “IN” connection but not a NMEA “out” connection. 

NMEA 0183 is a format with one "talker” and up to four “listeners” on one NMEA cable or network.  Some people have set up several NMEA networks that all feed into OpenPlotter/OpenCPN/Signal K on a Rasperry Pi.  Signal K can multiplex all those signals and output them to other devices over a cable or wifi.
The key is to convert SeaTalk into NMEA 0183.  There are 3rd party devices like those of Digital Yacht that can make the conversion. https://digitalyachtamerica.com/product/st-nmea-iso/ We felt the $200 was a bit steep.

We kept digging and found that Raymarine’s Multi Display repeater instrument has a NMEA “IN” and NMEA “OUT” and does convert SeaTalk into NMEA.  These act as a repeater and can be found cheaper than buying a new piece of equipment.  I’m still in the debugging stage of the SeaTalk to NMEA conversion.  I may have a bad USB converter.

To answer one of your questions, yes AIS is available through the NMEA output.  We’ve successfully broadcast the NMEA stream over the Raspberry Pi wifi and can show AIS targets on Navionics on an iPad.

I’ve successfully sent waypoints from our Garmin GPS in NMEA format to the ST4000, so you should be able to create a NMEA stream out from OpenPlotter to the ST4000 AutoHelm.
Let me know if I can help in any other way.
 
Good Luck!
 
Geoff
 
 
 
 
Raymarine ST60 Multi Manual  http://www.c470.jerodisys.com/470Lib/st60mult.pdf
Raymarine ST4000 Manual   https://nyborg-motorbaadklub.dk/onewebme...ndbook.pdf
 
I'll attach a diagram of our setup with our GPS as the NMEA talker and the ST4000 Autohelm, DSC Radio, and OpenPlotter as a listeners on the NMEA network. 

We’ll probably reconfigure our setup to add a NMEA out stream from OpenPlotter to the Multi and make the GPS standalone backup.  I believe we’ll need to set up rules on what NMEA sentences Openplotter sends out on the so that Openplotter is not creating an endless loop repeating the information it is receiving.


Attached Files
.pdf   Shadowfax Openplotter setup.pdf (Size: 160.64 KB / Downloads: 328)
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#3
Geoff,

Thanks for that information, I didn’t notice the autopilot was data in only - thanks!

Both the radar and the Navcenter (in the Nav station) have bi directional NMEA 0183 connections and so does the Garmin GPSMap in the cockpit. The only problem is that the radar and Navcenter are old “tube” type monitors and I didn’t want to have them on all the time, so the device you mentioned may be a good replacement. I may be able to run the radar or Navcenter headless. They are both a bit dinosaur like!

[Image: e295b456aacee92a260ba6c4d04cf9f4.jpg]
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#4
(2020-01-18, 05:56 AM)Ok, I\m a total novice at this...just put Open Plotter on Raspberry pi 3 + with Sense Hat...got compass, pitch, roll, temperature and pressure I2C sensors, now I gotta figure out how to use the wheel drive only Raymarine ST-4000.  I know I'll need a NMEA converter of some kind.  Is there a USB dongle that will do this or do I connect directly to GPIO pins?  Obviously was thinking of setting up cheap wheel auto pilot without needing the Raymarine control head or compass.  Can this be done?  Thanks Wrote: I recently bought a 1996 Hunter H336 that came with ST50 Depth and Speed instruments, ST4000+ Auto pilot, ST60+ Wind instrument, and a Garmin GPSMap 2010C all in the cock pit and a tube screen based vintage Navcenter 500 and a Old Radar system in the Nav Station.   I plan to add the Open plotter Pi in the Nav station connected up like in the picture.

[Image: 074646c93417f0b5dbd1f6dfe6d65055.jpg]

I may connect the Pi into the nmea bus that comes back out of the Garmin so that I do not have to power up the older nav station based Radar and GPS.

Does open plotter share way points on the NMEA bus?  Would AIS information be available on the NMEA bus? Would radar data be available to open plotter?
Reply
#5
Not sure I can answer your questions but you can NMEA0183 in/out via a USB to RS422 connector. My Autohelm has issues and I can’t get Wind or track control
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