Could a future Apple iPod or Google Android equipped cell phone or PDA be a universal configuration device for our N2K based boat networks ... and more ?
It has been a disappointment that configuration of some NMEA-2000 (N2K) devices require an instrument display of the same brand, due to brand x not recognizing a brand y N2K PGN. Same goes with field upgradeable software.
It seems to me that all the standards exist, and just a little additional engineering could produce a dumb N2K device that could bridge N2K protocols over Bluetooth to a iPod or Android enabled PDA, making it appear to software on such a device that it is hardwired to the N2K network on your boat.
Imagine then we could download an application from Google or Apple, for each N2K device we purchased, that could enable us to use our PDA or iPod as a GUI to configure our N2K devices and download software updates.
I don't know much about Google's Android and it's Apple App Store equivalent, but both seem to be robust platforms for enabling average people to purchase, download, and use very dissimilar applications on the same device without turning them into a brick. So .. by extension we should be able to cram a bunch of dissimilar configuration applications for our boats N2K network together in once device ... something impossible to do with any one vendors chartplotter or instrument display today.
It doesn't have to end there either. Perhaps some additional software can be downloadable to our iPod or PDA that converts popular PGN's to more generic XML format. Then many other types of applications could be available to boat owners that utilize information from our boat sensors.
Applications could conceivably be created for a variety of uses such as:
• a remote sensor display, as simple as depth, or as complex as showing lift and headers (sailboat racing)
• providing an application like ActiveCaptain Mobile access to our boats GPS and heading
• enabling position, speed and wind, to be sent once an hour (or whenever it senses a nearby cell tower) to friends and family
• enabling position and performance to be recorded, sent as email, and recombined to play back todays regatta at the bar
• crunch data and place new data on the network. For instance use my boat polars and true wind data to produce a target boat speed for display back on my network ... to an N2K instrument that would show both boat speed sources (one actual and the other target).
• enable an application to compare AIS target information to MMSI numbers in an iPod address book .... and warmly alert if friends are nearby.
How would you use such a capability on your boat? Want to expand on this idea?
Needless to say Dan, this is a subject near and dear to my heart.
Sure, there's nothing standing in the way of having mobile phones become a view into NMEA 2000 or any other data available. The mobile phone is the one screen that everyone has with them on a boat these days. Why should that screen only show caller ID's?
The flippant answer to your question is that it's all "just a matter of software." In reality, there are also some hardware interface issues.
You called out the iPhone and iPod (Touch) as two examples of target devices. Apple really needs to make some changes before acquiring data with those devices is easy. Right now, there just aren't any good interfaces to outside data except over a cellular or WiFi connection. It is certainly possible to create an NMEA 2000-to-WiFi box to re-broadcast all data across WiFi and into an iPhone. It can more easily be done by interfacing the NMEA bus to a laptop that would then re-broadcast the data over WiFi. MacENC/iNavX provides that type of capability today.
For Google Android and most other phone platforms, the interface is much easier. For those more open platforms, serial and Bluetooth capabilities exist that allow data to stream in. It would be pretty easy to connect a Bluetooth transmitter to an NMEA 2000/serial connection and have that data available all over a boat (as long as it's less than 60' LOA).
I do something very similar today with test software that I have. My Raymarine helm has a multiplexer that combines all NMEA and SeaTalk data together and broadcasts it over Bluetooth. When I'm sleeping at night, my cell phone is monitoring our position from that data and displaying it on a chart. It uses the heading sensor data to rotate the GPS cursor so I can wake up and immediately see where the boat is and it's correct orientation. And of course, if the boat moves further than a set distance, an alarm goes off - right next to me.
I would expect more things to appear that will allow the interfacing, display, and interaction with all of this NMEA data. I'd also expect to see real internet connectivity from NMEA to the web turning your boat into a mini web server and allowing other internet-connected devices to receive the data (whether on the boat or somewhere else). I can't yet begin to imagine where that might lead.
ok, so there's kind of already a solution to this, and.. paradoxically, a reason this will never happen, or if so, only by an N2K hardware company (maretron is my guess)....
dont reinvent the wheel, find the community..
check out: http://macsailing.net/fbb/ for all things mac and sailing interrelated. Almost everything is available now, but it's all being translated from 0183 to IP and back.. to enter the N2K data stream.
There's obviously a ton of new PGNs, and of course, more everyday.. and many are purposely closed/undocumented.. and those that are.. well you can't really talk about em, not while selling something that works..
Long story short on the N2K front is that its a controlled situation, You can't certify (and therefore Brand) anything without something like $50k in 'member fees', good luck seeing that happen for macs, let alone linux in an 'uncontrolled environment' (not embedded and closed into part of a larger 'product' ).
for a 'software only' house, that kind of scratch was already hard, and only getting harder these days.. just to say your software does what its supposed to?
I've asked maretron about an osx driver for their USB Bridge, and they replied saying that OSX support was under development. Once that's in place (all N2K data making it onto a OSX's serial bus) it'll be pretty simple for the existing software makers to add um, 'unsupported new functionality', similar to how GPSNavX introduced GRIB and IP streaming in their infancy.. ..
I have no idea though if they will do this or not , but I too dream of a constantly updated Fuel, Potable Water, Black Water Calculation, translated into an ever shrinking series of circles superimposed on my chart on a separate layer than he latest Satellite imagery, AIS fixes, Waypoints, Twitter Users, and nearby solar powered robot fish, basking on the surface..
hope this helps
Android/iPod for N2K device configuration:
[1] Jeff wrote "The mobile phone is the one screen that everyone has with them on a boat these days. Why should that screen only show caller ID's?"
--> Exactly, much better than having to fire up your PC, plus no wories about vista vs xp, for users. It would be attractive to keep my old PDA's as backup configuration device for my sailboat in addition to my new PDA. Jeff .. would you venture to guess these devices would still work without their cell phone plans ?
Jeff ... just as google offers Opera Mini and other applications for the blackberry, do you think we could look forward to an Android version for our Blackberry's as well ?
[2] mrfugu wrote "There's obviously a ton of new PGNs, and of course, more everyday.. and many are purposely closed/undocumented.. and those that are.. well you can't really talk about em, not while selling something that works.. "
--> My thought was that, if the bridge was dumb, that N2K vendors could still protect their purposely closed/undocumented PGN's, like those used for configuration changes and software upgrades.
right, there's that too.. but to print anywhere 'NMEA 2000', you need to be a member of the consortium... that's the rub.
Dan, I have about 20 mobile phones and only 2 accounts. I use the phones without "phone" ability all the time. Some phones have more issues with it than others but for the most part, all of the high-end phones work OK.
Also, by using a GSM phone, you could just swap the SIM into your backup phone and it comes alive with your phone number. That's a nice advantage in case your primary phone crashes.
Android on BlackBerry? Not with the way they're doing BB today. BB systems only expose J2me for the developer. That's OK for applications (some) but not for an C based OS like Android. There has been a fair amount of Android hacking with other phones. There are some Windows Mobile phones that can "dual boot" to Android if desired now.
I really think that most of these issues are about to go away - although it'll take 5 years. Everything in mobile phone software is moving towards HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript using Ajax-like technology to implement real applications. It's just too much for any company to support native development on all of the different platforms today (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, webOS). Even big companies can't do it. And yet, every company's web site works on all desktop platforms and almost everything else that can connect. That's a really important point that is being noticed by all of the mobile platforms. If we can have powerful applications like GMail, Word-look-alikes, spreadsheets, and things like ActiveCaptain running on the web, why not use those technologies on the phones. That will allow support for all of the different platforms without the need to do native support on each one (just tweaking on each one). Most users will put up with a slight performance hit in order to get more functionality and ease-of-use as well as the ability to use apps across all platforms.
There is so much changing right now. But if there was one thing I'd bet on, it's these web technologies moving to phones...and soon.
What I like about my proprietary/closed chartplotter ... is that I need not worry about virus, O/S upgrades, and have other such computer maintenance work following me from work to my sailboat.
And don't get me wrong, innovation is happening ... for example Sirius weather integration with my chartplotter already and AIS available as soon as I buy it ... but I would like to benefit from the outrageous innovation that goes on in a non-proprietary system.
Having a laptop computer in my boat to get at that innovation, well ... its just dosn't do it for me. Case in point, Clearpoint weather has a great product, lots of innovation, but there just isn't room for a laptop at my helm .. and running down below to check on the information, wasn't ideal ... plus I would be back to the maintenance issues I don't like.
Now something like a Raymarine ST70, but open and able to easily accept downloads of many applications, that would be really ideal especially if it matched my instruments displays in shape and bezel's ... dream on dan.
Howeverm for all the innovation that is happening on cell phones and PDA's now ... I think I could compromize with my PDA being the open non/prorietary device I use for boating applications to compliment my chartplotter and other devices. And ... it's going to happen anyway, as I start to adopt the applications Jeff has written about in Mad Mariner.
Now .. if there was just such a dumb N2K hub as I described plus a method for developers to get to some of the PGN's (like PGN to XML gateway software available for the phone)
Once that takes off ... who knows, maybe someone would create a weather tolerant PDA mountable in my cockpit that blends in with Raymarine, Garmin, Furuno, and other multi-function displays.
What I like about my proprietary/closed chartplotter ... is that I need not worry about virus, O/S upgrades, and have other such computer maintenance work following me from work to my sailboat.
And don't get me wrong, innovation is happening ... for example Sirius weather integration with my chartplotter already and AIS available as soon as I buy it ... but I would like to benefit from the outrageous innovation that goes on in a non-proprietary system.
Having a laptop computer in my boat to get at that innovation, well ... its just dosn't do it for me. Case in point, Clearpoint weather has a great product, lots of innovation, but there just isn't room for a laptop at my helm .. and running down below to check on the information, wasn't ideal ... plus I would be back to the maintenance issues I don't like.
Now something like a Raymarine ST70, but open and able to easily accept downloads of many applications, that would be really ideal especially if it matched my instruments displays in shape and bezel's ... dream on dan.
Howeverm for all the innovation that is happening on cell phones and PDA's now ... I think I could compromize with my PDA being the open non/prorietary device I use for boating applications to compliment my chartplotter and other devices. And ... it's going to happen anyway, as I start to adopt the applications Jeff has written about in Mad Mariner.
Now .. if there was just such a dumb N2K hub as I described plus a method for developers to get to some of the PGN's (like PGN to XML gateway software available for the phone)
Once that takes off ... who knows, maybe someone would create a weather tolerant PDA mountable in my cockpit that blends in with Raymarine, Garmin, Furuno, and other multi-function displays.
Apple Bluetooth, as Chris Ellingsen wrote on the blog, is now on the horizon. Seems like what I spoke about on this thread will be possible
Well some things have changed since this post started.
1) It now appears that Apple iPhones will be able to communicate with external devices around it using Bluetooth
2) I found this to my amazement today "Many analysts view Android as a viable platform for netbooks, the low-cost, stripped-down laptops that have become one of the hottest PC segments.". Wow ... imagine if a Raymarine ST70 or Garmin GMI 10 was to run on the Android operating system, what could that mean? People create their own marine software and sell it on-line just like applications for iPhones ... boaters who buy these applications can easily install multiple applications in a marine display and know they will all play together well. Am I dreaming ?
Is anyone seeing this yet ... the possibility our next marine electronics instrument display is based on the google android operating system and that you download additional capabilities from their store? Anyone ?
I'm in the process of building a "unified display" for use with iPhone/iPod touch that will show both NMEA 2000 data and non-NMEA data (tank levels, switches etc.)
At the moment it is being designed as a web application running over WiFi, but it could just as well go over Bluetooth if that starts working soon (with iPhone OS 3.0). Webpages can be made to look just like a "real" iPhone app, with some limitations.
I'm not using the cell phone or PDA as the center or hub on purpose; the idea is that since it is not tethered to a cable that it will shut off at the wrong moment. Therefore the data storage and smarts is going to go into a small server computer. This serves up webpages for the iPod (local wireless remote), a bigger computer screen (single screen overview) and if needed a real remote screen (via cellular GPRS/UMTS/Wimax etc).
The advantage of a webpage is that it is also "easily" adapted to other implementations like Android (well, in theory.) At least I won't have throw it all away if I decide to build for Android or Symbian as well.
For more information see http://yachtelectronics.blogspot.com/2009/06/dc-and-ac-power-control.html