Simrad’s AT10, mentioned a while back, is a small and inexpensive utility device that translates certain NMEA 0183 messages into NMEA 2000, and vice versa. If you go to Simrad’s manual download site and use the keyword “AT10”, you’ll find a list of 0183 sentences it purportedly understands (but you may have to add a “pdf” extension to open the file). I was hoping to use an AT10 along with good old Nema Talker to simulate basic data on my test network. And as you can see in the N2K Analyzer screen above, bigger here, it works.
Everything on the network gets the depth, heading, water speed/temp, and wind speed/direction PGNs, as you can see here. But only the Raymarine E thinks it has GPS attached. You can see on the screen shot that PGN 12905 “Position, Rapid Update” is being sent, but my guess is that the Garmin 5212 and Lowrance LCX aren’t happy unless they see some of the other GPS PGNs (there are several). Now maybe this is a Nema Talker problem, though I checked all its output strings, or maybe there’s another explanation, but right now I wouldn’t count on an AT10 to get 0183 GPS into N2K. I also tried the AT10 the other way, populating the backbone with sensors, and opening Coastal Explorer to the serial cable I’d wired to the translator. There was a somewhat similar problem; CE gets a position from that RMC sentence shown below, but it doesn’t recognize the AT10 output as a GPS and won’t show satellite status. The data refresh rates are also painfully slow with all those sentences active (though it was fine in the other direction). By comparison, the Maretron USB Gateway understands a lot more PGNs and is much faster (and pricier). While I don’t think the AT10 is up to feeding a lot of data to a PC, I can sure see how it would be handy for more limited tasks. As always, though, don’t presume success until you’ve seen it!
Posted by Ben on May 13, 2008 10:08 PM
Comments
Please see my post on thehulltruth about this. Works for depth, lat/long but not speed. I'm bummed!
Posted by: Chris at May 17, 2008 7:06 PM
Chris, I think that's an issue with Garmin output, not the AT10. If you look at the big version of the screen shot above, you'll see that the AT10 is sending both SOG and Water Speed data in N2K format.
Posted by: Ben at May 18, 2008 12:57 AM
Has anyone done a cross listing of AT10 NMEA0183 sentences to NMEA2K PGNs, similar to what Maretron has in their USB-100 manual? They've listed the NMEA0183 sentences, but they seem reticent to list PGNs output on SimNet. I think there's a big opportunity in the market for a NMEA0183 MUX that puts everything on a NMEA2K data bus. Maybe Brookhouse or Actisense has something in the works?
Posted by: CraigI at November 16, 2008 9:56 AM
Craig, You can see some of the PGNs generated by the AT10 in the top screen shot. I did ask Simrad for a full listing, but haven't received it.
I think Actisense, Furuno, and probably others are working on N2K/0183 translators, but I haven't seen one yet.
Posted by: Ben at November 16, 2008 10:27 AM
Ben - Simrad seems pretty reticent to divulge anything. I was trying to find the optimal NMEA0183 sentences to send from my Garmin 492 through the AT10 to my Simrad Wheelpilot WP32 and all they would send me were the PDFs listing the NMEA0183 sentences accepted by the AT10 & WP32. One would think that internally they could check what PGNs the WP32 was accepting and reverse map them on the AT10. Since the AT10 seems limited to the volume of data, I was hoping to minimize the amount of data my Garmin was transmitting.
Craig
Posted by: CraigI at November 19, 2008 6:27 PM
At the METS the Actisense folks were indeed showing their USB to NMEA-2000 and NMEA-2000/0183 converter products.
Both are to be very reasonably priced (all possible NMEA 0183 data. Obviously, you can't convert all NMEA 2000 data to 0183 since some things just don't have a 0183 equivalent.
Their USB gateway is to be significantly cheaper than the Maretron product, and apparently includes enough "smarts" so that it will not allow invalid NMEA-2000 data on the NMEA-2000 bus as it validates everything that the PC software side sends. This will make it cheaper to validate the PC software as they don't need as expensive a NMEA-2000 certification as they'd need otherwise.
Actisense is working with several marine software suppliers to interface their new USB converter. It does not present a standard serial port (as that would be NMEA-0183 again) to the software; they'll supply a DLL and API information to the software vendors.
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