It would be nice to be able to take a handheld gps, run ascii through a pic
and into a lcd without have to pay through the nose just for the
information to do this. Off the shelf stuff is fine for real applications
for your boat or plane. But why should we have to pay for the signal that
comes out of our units? Besides if the manufacturer did't have to pay
license fees themselves, maybe they would pass on the savings.
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I have no idea what you are lamenting. Have you tried to hook up a HD TV
lately? If this a general whine about complexity, perhaps you should
recognize that complexity goes hand in hand with capability. You rarely can
have one without the other. Please understand that ascii is a 7 bit digital
character set, not a transport standard and I have no idea what a pic is.
Just what payment are you referring to for plugging in a lcd or for that
matter, what maufacturing license are you referring to?
Steve

"Poit" wrote in message
00.119...
It would be nice to be able to take a handheld gps, run ascii through a
pic
and into a lcd without have to pay through the nose just for the
information to do this. Off the shelf stuff is fine for real applications
for your boat or plane. But why should we have to pay for the signal that
comes out of our units? Besides if the manufacturer did't have to pay
license fees themselves, maybe they would pass on the savings.
---- Posted via Pronews.com - Premium Corporate Usenet News
Provider ----
http://www.pronews.com offers corporate packages that have access to
100,000+ newsgroups

"Steve Lusardi" wrote in message
...
I have no idea what you are lamenting. Have you tried to hook up a HD TV
lately? If this a general whine about complexity, perhaps you should
recognize that complexity goes hand in hand with capability. You rarely can
have one without the other. Please understand that ascii is a 7 bit digital
character set, not a transport standard and I have no idea what a pic is.
Just what payment are you referring to for plugging in a lcd or for that
matter, what maufacturing license are you referring to?

He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced like
their Honda.

There's not a large enough market, in TOTAL, of likely vessels to make cost
effective to cater to an EVEN SMALLER market of hobbyists.

Yes, it would be good if Maretron and others made a cheaper interface to
bridge NMEA2K. Their current USB unit is a bit pricey, but understandably
so given the size of the market.

I'm guessing by 'pic' he's thinking of the programmable chip of the same
name.

As for cheap LCDs, check out Lowrance and Garmin's options. They're
amazingly inexpensive compared to offerings from other vendors.

And Steve makes the excellent point of complexity and capability. I'll
reiterate the old rule: "Good, fast, cheap... pick two."

I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA. As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs. Manufacturers
and hobbiest alike would benefit. Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well. I'm not
lamenting anything... I'm just trying to get people thinking about moving
forward, taking some control, and maybe just maybe benefiting mankind in
some sort of way :-). BTW a pic is a programmable chip by the same name.
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Poit wrote in
00.119:

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

AS much as I like open source and open standards, on boat electronics I'll
have to disagree. Profits would be so low with so few actual customers,
none of them would survive.....

How many people within 10 square miles of your house own a boat radar?

See my point? The market is really TINY, even if the clients are very
rich. Bill Gates is only gonna buy ONE radar for his yacht. The guy down
your dock only buys his because he can't get one for free on the cheap.

So, we sold 2 radars at amazing profit margins.....instead of one at lots
less profit margin in the open source radar world.

Manufacturers would flee the market if they couldn't rip off the rich
boaters with proprietary stuff to sell 'em more.......

The market is just not there.....

Larry wrote:

Poit wrote in
00.119:

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

AS much as I like open source and open standards, on boat electronics I'll
have to disagree. Profits would be so low with so few actual customers,
none of them would survive.....

How many people within 10 square miles of your house own a boat radar?

See my point? The market is really TINY, even if the clients are very
rich. Bill Gates is only gonna buy ONE radar for his yacht. The guy down
your dock only buys his because he can't get one for free on the cheap.

So, we sold 2 radars at amazing profit margins.....instead of one at lots
less profit margin in the open source radar world.

Manufacturers would flee the market if they couldn't rip off the rich
boaters with proprietary stuff to sell 'em more.......

The market is just not there.....

hmmmm, well, firstly I measure square kilometers, secondly where I live on
the Norwegian coast I would count about 3000 leasure boat owners in the ten
square kilometers, about half of them has a closed top boat with
permanently fitted equipment like autopilot, GPS, some chart plotters etc.
I would guess some 10% having large leasure boats with radar. Then there
are somewhere between 20-50 full time or part time fishermen, all with
fully equipped electonics on board and finally, we only have two ship lines
with a total fleet of about 30 large commercial vessels using expensive
stuff from Kongsberg, JRC and others.

We who pay for our own stuff rant on a regular basis about the lacking
interoperability, cost and for the techies - moaning&groaning about the
closed proprietary standards removing all the fun.

I agree with the original posting: communication should be as open as HTML
and our kroner, dollars or what have you should be spent on developing
better systems, not closed systems.

I'd buy that open box, and a few houndred others in my neghbourhood.

I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA.

Why?

As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs.

Based on what do you make that claim?

Manufacturers
and hobbiest alike would benefit.

How? There aren't enough numbers to justify it.

Open standards has worked well for the
internet for years and this could be applied here as well.

You naively equate what works for BILLIONS of devices, across hundreds (if
not thousands) of markets with the SIGNIFICANTLY smaller marine market.
There's just no comparison.

I'm not
lamenting anything... I'm just trying to get people thinking about moving
forward, taking some control, and maybe just maybe benefiting mankind in
some sort of way :-)

Oh please, spare me the ill-informed naive sentimentality. Back it up with
a sound argument and facts, not fluff.

"Poit" wrote in message
00.119...
I'm not whining about complexity. I'm just thinking that it would be nice
to get away from NMEA. As I said in the original post that if an open
standard were created it would eliminate un-nesessary costs.

The NMEA standard IS an open standard. The information is available to
anyone who wants it. And yes, you have to pay a small fee to get th standard
on paper but that is quite a normal procedure. Manufacturers do not pay
royalties or whatsoever for NMEA devices.

But I agree that there could be s more mature version, created by all of us,
still using cheap standard serial comms (no ethernet), in ASCII and capable
of having multiple devices on one bus. A similar standard exists and is
called SeaTalk. This one however is binary but it wouldn't be a problem to
create an ASCII variant of it, running on a comfortable high speed and
having a better hardware layer that is insensitive for interference and
still be cheap (CAN style).
And to ease implementation, the ASCII data could still be in NMEA format
which everyone already supports.
So basically, just a change in the hardware layer could take NMEA up to the
next level.

Meindert

"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...
He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced
like
their Honda.

And that is exactly why marine instruments will not support an ethernet
interface with TCP/IP because it is simply too expensive to implement. And
surely people will now tell me that I can buy an ethernet card for my PC for
less than $5. But this will simply not happen for the relatively small
marine market.

Meindert

Meindert,
Very nice to hear from you again. You have been away quite some time. I
can't believe I am hearing this from you. You are the perfect person for
this thread. I think you need to think a bit outside of the box. As you
know, each NMEA manufacturer today is addressing the inadequacies of NMEA
with their own propriety solutions and selling them as the next best thing
in boat electronics, like SeaTalk. Yet we have a huge, inexpensive
commercial infrastructure all around TCP/IP and yet the marine industry is
trying to reinvent the wheel. You should revel in this foolishness and
consider this as a golden opportunity to develop a transport network like
the CAN bus SAE J1939 standard, but using TCP/IP as the flexible transport
medium. Where the entry and exit ports are box standard NMEA, but are in
fact intelligent gateways to the Ethernet transport. You can buy off the
shelf single chip TCP/IP support and inexpensive switches. I see these
gateways programmable as talkers or listeners with a central
router/controller accepting the NMEA inputs and buffering them as well as
distributing them by IP address at any rate the listener required. This
solution solves all the NMEA problems and by developing additional gateway
flavors, solves all the compatibility issues between devices and
manufacturers. Most of this already exists inexpensively. All it takes is a
little ingenuity to integrate it into a total package. I think the market is
huge. There are a lot of floating customers out their just waiting for this.
Please also keep in mind that this same transport can also move all data
types including other, unrelated traffic like audio, video and other
computer related data streams.
Steve


"Meindert Sprang" wrote in message
...
"Bill Kearney" wrote in message
t...
He's also failing to grasp the TINY size of the marine electronics
market.
Much like the naive fools that rant about how their boat isn't serviced
like
their Honda.

And that is exactly why marine instruments will not support an ethernet
interface with TCP/IP because it is simply too expensive to implement. And
surely people will now tell me that I can buy an ethernet card for my PC
for
less than $5. But this will simply not happen for the relatively small
marine market.

Meindert