PILOTLINK – A Sneak Preview

Our R&D team have been hard at work and we’ll be launching a new Digital Deep Sea product called PilotLink in May. PilotLink is a Class A AIS wireless interface designed specifically for commercial pilots. All Class A AIS transponders are fitted with a standard pilot plug connector. PilotLink connects direct to this to gather AIS and GPS data from the ship’s system and allow it to be used with a range of popular apps such as iSailor from Transas and iNavX. More details will be available in May but here’s a quick pic.

If you’d like to learn a bit more, why not listen to our podcast here – all about PilotLink. Digital Yacht will be publishing a regular edition of SeaVoice, our audio podcast on the iTunes store. Make sure to subscribe

PilotLink is battery powered from a standard 9V PP3 battery. Its also fitted with a USB power input connector so can be used with an USB type power lead or external USB battery. Battery life is around 15 hours from a PP3 but this can of course be extended by using the optional USB power packs. PilotLink is around the size of a pack of cigarettes and its also available with a tough wrap around rubber cover as below

Updating our WLN10 or WLN10HS

It is almost 2 years since we released our popular WLN10 and WLN10HS wireless NMEA servers and in that time the number of mobile wireless devices has sky rocketed. Originally most customers used these products with iPhones and iPads but with Android devices now outselling Apple products, we get more and more customers wanting to use our products with Android apps like iRegatta.

Originally all of our wireless NMEA devices created an Ad-Hoc network, which is where devices connect directly to each other, automatically self assigning themselves an IP address in the same network range. Windows PCs, LINUX PCs, Macs and all Apple devices supported Ad-Hoc networking, but unfortunately Android devices did not. The new V4.00 now works in Access Point Mode, which is both Android compatible and more stable/reliable than Ad-Hoc mode.

Customers wishing to update their WLN10 or WLN10HS, need to be aware that the process does require a certain level of technical ability. Please consult our Tech Support Note 00051-2013 for information about the procedure and if you are in any doubt as to your ability to follow these instructions, it is probably safer to send the unit to Digital Yacht for updating. If though, after reading the Tech Note, you are confident to give this a try, then I suggest you also watch the “How To” video below which shows the process you follow on the PC.

Finally, the TeraTerm “Macros” that are mentioned in the Tech Note and Video can be downloaded by clicking here.

New PilotLink to debut at Seawork 2013

Our new wireless interface PilotLink will have its worldwide launch at this year’s Seawork exhibition in Southampton in June. Our UK distributor, CA Clase will be demonstrating it along with our CLA1000 Class A Transponder on stand A143.

SeaWork International is is the largest and fastest growing commercial marine and workboat event to be held in a European working port. Now in its 16th successful year, Seawork attracts over 450 exhibitors and 7200 visitors from all over the world and is an ideal location for our PilotLink debut.

Designed to connect to any AIS Class A Transponder, via the IMO standard pilot plug connector, PilotLink creates a wireless network that Pilots or Navigators can connect to. All of the AIS targets and GPS data for the vessel is transmitted wirelessly to any PC, smart phone or tablet where it can be displayed and used by a compatible app or software package.

Powered from it’s own internal battery or via a USB cable, PilotLink is an ideal portable tool for all commercial Pilots but also a useful accessory for any operator of a Class A Transponder.

If you intend on visiting SeaWork this year, please come by the CA Clase stand for a working demonstration of PilotLink.

Connecting a Garmin 400 or 500 Series Plotter to iAIS

The Garmin 400 and 500 series plotters are some of the most popular small boat chart plotters on the market and it is not surprising that we get many enquiries about how to connect our products to them. Normally customers just want to add an AIS receiver or transponder to their Garmin unit, but last week we had an interesting enquiry from a customer that wanted to add AIS, but also wanted a wireless solution for his iPad.

This particular customer only wanted to receive AIS targets and so our iAIS was the obvious choice but had he wanted a transponder then we could have done a similar setup with one of our AIT2000 and WLN10HS units. As we were discussing how the two systems would wire together, I realised that with the two NMEA 0183 ports that the Garmin has and the NMEA 0183 input (4800 baud) that our iAIS has, that we could also have GPS data and other NMEA data from the Garmin transmitted wirelessly to the iPad with the AIS data.

The benefits of this arrangement, are that any iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad can receive AIS and GPS data anywhere on the boat, even if they do not have their own internal GPS, such as the Wi-Fi only iPad and iPod Touch. Even 3G iPads and iPhones that have their own internal GPS, will benefit from the always on, Garmin GPS which should be more accurate, particularly when you take your iPad/iPhone below deck.

Of course a suitable App will be required to read the AIS and GPS data, but with some recent new app releases, the number of available Navigation Apps that support wireless NMEA are growing. This particular customer intended to use the popular iNavX app, but other apps worth considering are; iSailor from Transas, iRegatta from Let’s Create, the new Imray app or the SailTimer app that I recently wrote about.

The customer was delighted with the proposed solution and I quickly drew up the following connection diagram and sent it to him. I hope that by publishing this article, many other Garmin 400 and 500 series owners might benefit from a new wireless AIS solution.

Problem with NMEA (COM Port) Connections on Ubuntu

In response to a comment on my recent “Managing the Device Manager”, where Michael reported problems getting his AIS100USB working on LINUX, I decided to download the latest OpenCPN and make sure that the new NMEA Connections code that they have recently added to V3.20 did in fact still work like the previous versions.

It has been a while since I played with the LINUX version of OpenCPN and with a normal Ubuntu V12.04 32 bit setup, I was surprised when I could not get the NMEA data from my AIS receiver or transponder to be received. To investigate further, I opened a Terminal Window and typed…

dmesg | grep tty

Which returned the following information about all of the serial ports – “tty” is a legacy term in LINUX from the days of Teletypewriters which then evolved in to computer terminals that used serial ports to connect to the mainframe computer.

The Dmesg command extracts information from various log files and returns the current and historical information about USB devices that have been connected to the PC. In the screen above, you can see that a USB to Serial converter was connected and given the name ttyUSB0 (this was my AIS receiver) but that this was disconnected. Then you can see that another USB ACM device was connected and given the name ttyACM0 (this was my AIS transponder) which is still connected.

So I now knew which serial port had been setup by LINUX for my AIS transponder, so the next step was to use a LINUX program called Screen to send the NMEA data coming in to ttyACM0 to my terminal screen. First I installed the Screen program by typing the following command in to the terminal…

sudo apt-get install screen

Once installed, the following command should have displayed the NMEA data coming in on port ttyACM0…

screen /dev/ttyACM0 38400

However, when I ran this command, I very briefly saw a warning displayed saying that I did not have the necessary permissions to access this device. This was my first clue as to the problem with no NMEA in OpenCPN. I re-entered the command this time running it as the “Root” user using the sudo command…

sudo screen /dev/ttyACM0 38400

This time the Screen command worked and I saw the following display…

So it would appear that for some reason I was being denied access to the COM port devices. My first thought was that this was a problem with OpenCPN and I looked at ways to run OpenCPN as root. Fortunately advice was on hand from a Digital Yacht customer called Fulup who had previously helped me in getting OpenCPN to work with our AIT2000.

Once again Fulup’s good LINUX advice was invaluable and he highlighted that the problem lay with changes in the way the latest versions of Ubuntu set default user permissions. The COM ports use to be available to all Users but now you need dialout permissions to access them. Fulup advised that I should add my Username to the dialout Group and then I should be able to access the COM ports, without opening up a potential security risk of running OpenCPN as root.

To do this, it was necessary to open a Terminal Window again and to run the following command exactly as written, note that $LOGNAME is a shell variable and will automatically get the name of the currently logged on user;

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $LOGNAME

So now your username has been added to the dialout group and you just need to logout and log back in again to make the changes take effect. Once logged back in, run OpenCPN to make sure you can now read data from the COM ports.

I was very pleased to find that this fixed the problem (thanks Fulup) and I now have NMEA data coming in from my AIS Transponder or my AIS Receiver. Hope this helps anyone else having similar problems on the latest 12.04 or higher versions of Ubuntu.

Managing the Device Manager

Some times when you are dealing with technical issues everyday, it is easy to forget that not everyone finds it easy to know where to look on a PC when things go wrong. One of the most common issues with any equipment that plugs in to a PC are Drivers, the little bit of software that tells your PC what a device is and how to use it.

Many marine products have a USB cable for plugging in to a PC and they are fine when they are installed and working but if something goes wrong during the installation, it can be quite frustrating and difficult to sort things out.

On Windows PCs, there is a particular piece of software called The Device Manager that keeps track of all of the components (hardware) that make your PC work. Whether it is the processor, the hard drive or just the lowly mouse, all of the “devices” are listed and monitored in the Device Manager, so knowing how to access it and find your way around it is a useful skill.

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, you access the Device Manager by clicking the Start button and then clicking on the Control Panel option, which will present you with a screen similar to the one shown at the start of this article. Then simply select Device Manager from the list of icons.

On Windows 8, press the Windows Key on your keyboard, to display the Windows 8 Mosaic Home Screen and then type Device Manager and hit enter. The search will show 3 results in the Settings, so click the settings option and then click on Device Manager in the list.

Device Manager

For Windows XP it is a little more hidden away and my preferred way of getting to Device Manager is to click the Start button and then to RIGHT click the “My Computer” option. In the context sensitive menu that pops up, click on the Properties option and a new System Properties window will appear.

My Computer Properties

Click on the “Hardware” tab and then you will be able to see a button labelled “Device Manager” which you then click on and voila you are in the Windows XP Device Manager.

Hardware Tab

So now you are in the Device Manager, which looks very similar for each version of Windows, so I will show the Windows 7 version. All of the devices are grouped in to categories and when you first enter the Device Manager only the categories are shown and you must “expand” a category by clicking on the + or arrow icon to the left of the category name to see the individual devices in that category.

In the image below we have expanded the very important ”Ports (COM&LPT)” section. This is the section of Device Manager where you need to look to find out what COM Port number Windows has allocated to your USB device. In this example we have two devices; one of our AIT2000 Transponders on COM 4 and a USB to NMEA Adpator on COM32. If you have multiple devices connected and you are not sure which is which, simply unplug one of the devices and see which entry in the Device Manager disappears and then reappears when you plug it back in.

If a category contains a device that has a problem, then Device Manager will expand that category which makes it very easy to spot problem devices. In the image below, one of our long range wireless adaptors has been connected without the drivers being installed and it is listed in Other Devices with a Yellow Exclamation Mark icon next to it.

If you have a problem device listed, you can try updating the driver by right clicking on the entry and selecting Update Driver. This will force Windows to search again for the drivers. With Windows Vista/7/8, if you have an internet connection, then it will try and find the latest driver online and install it automatically. This is by far the easiest method but may take a few minutes depending upon the speed of internet connection. If you are on the boat and have no internet connection your only option is to find the original product CD and either direct Windows to search for the driver on the CD or run the driver installer program again.

For Digital Yacht products it is always worth checking our Tech Support Notes in the Support>Downloads section of our website where we include step by step guides to fix driver problems for specific products.could try Uninstalling the device by right clicking on the entry and

Wireless NMEA on steroids !

When Graham Sunderland (professional navigator and author of Winning Tides) contacted us about configuring our WLN10 Wireless NMEA server to work at a baud rate of 115200, three times the normal high speed NMEA0183 data rate, we were slightly taken back. It turns out that Graham wanted to connect his B&G Hydra 3000 instrument system to Expedition the highly regarded tactical and navigational racing software.

Connection via USB is slightly problematic on modern PCs as there are no 64bit drivers for the Hydra USB interface, but by connecting the RS232 output to our WLN10 configured for 115,200 baud, Graham was able to wirelessly stream the large quantity of raw B&G instrument data around the boat. Data update rates were very fast and Expedition was able to receive, process and analyse the data to drive all of its performance racing calculations that it is renowned for.

We do not currently intend to release a standard version of our WLN10 that is set for 115,200, unless we suddenly get a large demand for it, but anyone wanting a “turbo charged” WLN10 for a similar application can contact us and we would be happy to pre-configure one for you.

Digital Yacht Ltd

Light Years Ahead In Marine Electronics