BoatBanter.com - Raymarine product horrors

BoatBanter.com (https://www.boatbanter.com/)

- Cruising (https://www.boatbanter.com/cruising/)

- - Raymarine product horrors (https://www.boatbanter.com/cruising/90357-raymarine-product-horrors.html)

Raymarine product horrors

larry wrote in
:

Geoff Schultz wrote in
:

You don't need to do this as software on the C120 will allow you to
monitor the traffic on the NMEA and SeaTalk busses. I think that
you'll find this in the System Integration screen. This is also
where you'll see the error counts.

If it's not fast enough to render the raster....when does it have time
to log data??

Why are you making up this kind of statement when you clearly don't have
any proof of this. I suspect that he's most likely feeding garbage to the
chartplotter and it won't/can't draw the chart, leading to the blanking. I
can easily imagine this happening if the lat/long is changing too rapidly
for the system to redraw. When the lat/long changes slowly enough, that's
when he sees his position jump. You can't expect to feed garbage to a
system and have it behave "correctly" when the lat/long change delta
exceeds anything reasonable.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org

Raymarine product horrors

Geoff Schultz wrote in
:

Why are you making up this kind of statement when you clearly don't
have any proof of this. I suspect that he's most likely feeding
garbage to the chartplotter and it won't/can't draw the chart,
leading to the blanking. I can easily imagine this happening if the
lat/long is changing too rapidly for the system to redraw. When the
lat/long changes slowly enough, that's when he sees his position jump.
You can't expect to feed garbage to a system and have it behave
"correctly" when the lat/long change delta exceeds anything
reasonable.

He's not in court, yet, so we don't have to "prove" anything to you or
anyone.

Any REASONABLE system would WARN you that it is receiving "garbage" with
some kind of error message on the BLANK SCREENS....instead of just
leaving you there, in the dark, wondering if you're gonna run over a
rock or bouy....

How slow is slow enough for it to render the chart? 5 seconds? 30? a
minute?

There's gotta be some kind of ERROR - WARNING timeout, right? I didn't
see one in the video, just a blank screen saying nothing....

Today, while letting Navicore plot my course to a country church in the
boonies to fix their organ, I was thinking about this thread and those
videos how thankful I was my $200 Nokia N800 Linux tablet and $100 Nokia
12-channel WAAS GPS tiny puck laying up on the dash didn't act this way.

If I boot Maemo Mapper and steal mosaic data from Micro$oft's Virtual
Earth composite through the cell phone, even going through heavy trees
and with the roof of the car causing a large obstruction aft of my
position from its GPS vantage point on top of the dash, I couldn't help
but be pleased as this freeware hacker program downloaded from maemo.org
perfectly plotted my course accurate to the center of the lane in the 4-
lane highway I was driving down at 60+ mph, far faster than a sailboat
needs.

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2007/maemo-mapper/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
http://www.flickr.com/photos/teddythebear/149479767/

My LD-3W tiny pocket GPS is much more sensitive and accurate than my
Garmin 185, even with the new Garmin antenna. It cold starts in about
30 seconds and just simply receives much better than any handheld I've
ever owned or seen. Also, being a bluetooth device, separate from the
displaying computer, your not forced to have the display anywhere near
where there's a clear view to the birds....wirelessly! It runs 15 hours
on a charge or you can just leave it plugged into 12V permanently. It
uses a common Nokia Li-Ion cellphone battery. I get about 20' range
between the units.

OK, this ISN'T a marine GPS device. What use is it on the boat?......

Open Google Earth on your computer and zoom in on any waterway with it.
Look at the ICW anywhere in the country, for instance. Zoom in close on
the ICW and look at the waterway from above.....

Now, compare this real satellite photo with the regular old marine chart
on your chart plotter. Wouldn't it be great if you could have both?
For about $350, you can! The Nokia N800 Linux tablet uses bluetooth to
connect to your cellphone and uses the cellphone for internet
service...as well as wifi. It's wifi sensitivity FAR exceeds any
laptop, too, but that's for the marina, we're in the ICW. If your
cellphone can make a call, the internet tablet can connect directly to
Google Earth, Virtual Earth and many other feeds for satellite photos,
street maps, topographical maps over the cellphone data link. You don't
need to buy data plugs with 5-year-old charts on them that are no longer
valid, anyways. You don't need to feed Garmin to open up the old charts
preprogrammed into last year's handheld or fixed mount. The satellite
photos Maemo Mapper operate on are a few months old. It's NOT realtime,
but its a helluva lot more up-to-date than that chart plug you just
bought from Waste Marine.

Zoom Google Earth in on some area from directly overhead and look
closely at the waterway. We'll look at the chart to see the bouy
positions, which don't change much. We'll look at the satellite photo
to see what's up ahead, A REAL PICTURE of it! Imagine Google Earth in
portable computer that also PUTS YOU EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE IN THAT
WATERWAY. It's so close you can see yourself changing lanes on the
interstate. It's so close you can see which parking space you put the
car into in any parking lot. Is that good enough for navigation? Yes,
it is. It won't see another boat because it's not realtime. But, it
will get you on your side of the channel in the fog.

The tablet is also a full-blown Linux computer that will do email, web
browsing, run hundreds of programs the hackers have ported to it. It
just got Abiword from the Linux community, a full featured word
processor (www.abiword.com) Go download the Windows version for your
laptop or home computer. It will do things Microsoft Word won't do for
FREE! There's a full Gnutella spreadsheet so complex I don't know what
all it can do. It came from Linux, too. The tablet can check your
email while navigating the waterways on Maemo Mapper, simultaneously.

Well, please don't slam me for showing you this. I don't care if you
like it or not, really. But, others may find it quite useful, both on
the boat and in their world.....

Raymarine product horrors

larry wrote in news:Xns9A366B59EE263noonehomecom@
208.49.80.253:

Geoff Schultz wrote in
:

Why are you making up this kind of statement when you clearly don't
have any proof of this. I suspect that he's most likely feeding
garbage to the chartplotter and it won't/can't draw the chart,
leading to the blanking. I can easily imagine this happening if the
lat/long is changing too rapidly for the system to redraw. When the
lat/long changes slowly enough, that's when he sees his position jump.
You can't expect to feed garbage to a system and have it behave
"correctly" when the lat/long change delta exceeds anything reasonable.

He's not in court, yet, so we don't have to "prove" anything to you or
anyone.

Any REASONABLE system would WARN you that it is receiving "garbage" with
some kind of error message on the BLANK SCREENS....instead of just
leaving you there, in the dark, wondering if you're gonna run over a
rock or bouy....

How slow is slow enough for it to render the chart? 5 seconds? 30? a
minute?

There's gotta be some kind of ERROR - WARNING timeout, right? I didn't
see one in the video, just a blank screen saying nothing....

How many systems are out there that wouldn't display an error message? I'd
guess that most vendor's systems wouldn't, as they expect the data to be
correct. What do you think your RL70 would do if it got bad data? Or a
Garmin? Probably the same thing. Expecting the developers to add in code
to check for rare events like this just doesn't happen. They have higher
priority functions to implement.

In my opinion, RayMarine isn't the bad guy here. I think that there's a
very high probability that he has something mis-configured in his system.
Your guess that it's the positioning of the GPS antenna seems reasonable,
especially when you look at the photos of the radar arch and GPS mushroom.
This should be easy to determine by running the system and turning the
radar on and off.

Since it appears that he installed the system by himself and hasn't
obtained professional help, RayMarine seems to have done everything that
they should have, and probably more.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org

Raymarine product horrors

larry wrote in news:Xns9A35D2BBAFB1noonehomecom@
208.49.80.253:

By the way, Seatalk isn't rocket science. Connect Seatalk data wire
(Yellow) to an RS-232C data in pin (pin 3 on the 25pin/pin 2 on the 9
pin) and hook Seatalk ground to computer data ground pin (7 on the 25, 5
on the 9). (I use little mini clips and made a snooping test cable.)
Boot good old Hyperterm. Save you a dumb terminal ASCII.ht connection
to make it easier to come back. Mine's on my laptop. Plug Seatalk
Hyperterm and look at the data, yourself, as it streams by. At some
point, after it has filled the buffer, pull the plug and look down
through the data for noise and crazy bits. Seatalk isn't encrypted...

If I'm correctly reading the technical description of the electrical
interface at http://www.thomas-knauf.de/rap/seatalk1.htm , I don't believe
that you can simply connect SeaTalk to an RS232 port and read the data
correctly. According to it, the voltages have to be inverted.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org

Raymarine product horrors

larry wrote in news:Xns9A35D2BBAFB1noonehomecom@
208.49.80.253:

By the way, Seatalk isn't rocket science. Connect Seatalk data wire
(Yellow) to an RS-232C data in pin (pin 3 on the 25pin/pin 2 on the 9
pin) and hook Seatalk ground to computer data ground pin (7 on the
25, 5 on the 9). (I use little mini clips and made a snooping test
cable.) Boot good old Hyperterm. Save you a dumb terminal ASCII.ht
connection to make it easier to come back. Mine's on my laptop.
Plug Seatalk Hyperterm and look at the data, yourself, as it streams
by. At some point, after it has filled the buffer, pull the plug and
look down through the data for noise and crazy bits. Seatalk isn't
encrypted...

To further correct Larry's statement, SeaTalk is encrypted in the sense
that it's a binary protocol. Datagrams are between 3 and 18 bytes in
length and are totally binary (the messages don't contain any ASCII
characters like you'd see in a NMEA sentence). Thus Hyperterm won't do you
any good unless a version that display hex bytes and knows how/when to
terminate a datagram.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org

Raymarine product horrors

Geoff Schultz wrote:

larry wrote in news:Xns9A35D2BBAFB1noonehomecom@
208.49.80.253:

By the way, Seatalk isn't rocket science. Connect Seatalk data wire
(Yellow) to an RS-232C data in pin (pin 3 on the 25pin/pin 2 on the 9
pin) and hook Seatalk ground to computer data ground pin (7 on the
25, 5 on the 9). (I use little mini clips and made a snooping test
cable.) Boot good old Hyperterm. Save you a dumb terminal ASCII.ht
connection to make it easier to come back. Mine's on my laptop.
Plug Seatalk Hyperterm and look at the data, yourself, as it streams
by. At some point, after it has filled the buffer, pull the plug and
look down through the data for noise and crazy bits. Seatalk isn't
encrypted...

To further correct Larry's statement, SeaTalk is encrypted in the sense
that it's a binary protocol. Datagrams are between 3 and 18 bytes in
length and are totally binary (the messages don't contain any ASCII
characters like you'd see in a NMEA sentence). Thus Hyperterm won't do you
any good unless a version that display hex bytes and knows how/when to
terminate a datagram.

-- Geoff
www.GeoffSchultz.org
I've built that interface circuit and it does work. Hyperterm
definately wont do the job. Larry must be confusing Seatalk with NMEA.

--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & 32K emails -- NUL:
'Stingo' Albacore #1554 - 15' Early 60's, Uffa Fox designed,
All varnished hot moulded wooden racing dinghy.

Raymarine product horrors

On Jan 31, 7:29 am, larry wrote:

I am very happy to report that further speculation in this matter will
not be necessary: my dealer has just informed me that the decision
has been made to graciously accept the return of these products.

To all of those who took the time to contemplate possible solutions to
the problems exhibited, and especially to the majority of you who did
so without feeling any need to resort to personal insults while doing
so, I offer my sincerest thanks.

There will always be a cold beer awaiting you aboard my vessel.

Raymarine product horrors

On 2008-01-31 10:29:21 -0500, larry said:

Abiword from the Linux community

Minor rant: An editor friend uses abiword so I downloaded it to read
one of his files. Sorry, but the unix/Mac version isn't something I'll
use unless I absolutely have to, and then only to convert the file to
something a more friendly program can handle. It was slow and glitchy.

Note too that I *intentionally* have zero Microsoft products on my
computer. I can read and write their garbage files without breaking a
sweat, but I hate that evil empire.

--
Jere Lull
Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/

Raymarine product horrors

On 2008-01-31 14:27:03 -0500, Geoff Schultz said:

Expecting the developers to add in code to check for rare events like
this just doesn't happen.

Sorry, but I'm a developer and I program the odd-event handlers first
because I *need* that info when things go "bang".

Okay, I'm an exception because my programs must work 100% of the time
or say what was wrong so the problem can be fixed fast. For some
reason, when you manage 10-20 billion dollars' investments, they want
things to balance to the penny every day.

Still, I can attest it really takes no real effort to output error
messages whenever some action gives an unexpected result.

--
Jere Lull
Tanzer 28 #4 out of Tolchester, MD
Xan's pages: http://web.mac.com/jerelull/iWeb/Xan/
Our BVI trips & tips: http://homepage.mac.com/jerelull/BVI/

Raymarine product horrors