I am using Coastal Explorer on a Win7 laptop, instrumentation is B&G H5000, data is transported on NMEA 2000 network, Actisense NGT-1 connects NMEA 2000 network to laptop via USB.
How do I select a specific device to tell Coastal Explorer to use?
An example I am working on: there is a single masthead wind sensor and there are four NMEA 2000 wind sentences appearing on the NMEA 2000 network (PGN 130306). This is expected, the devices supplying that sentence are:
device id/description
[008] H5000 0183 no. 2 → actual sensor values
[021] H5000 CPU → corrected wind values
[028] H5000 MHU → dummy wind data
[007] H5000 0183 no. 1 → dummy wind data from 0183 network
I would like to tell Coastal Explorer to use device [021] as the wind data for CE’s instrument display. How do I do that?
Coastal Explorer lets you select specific position, heading, water speed, and depth sensors, but does not have that option for multiple wind sensors. It is very odd that you have a single wind sensor that is appearing as multiple devices on the NMEA 2000 network. Would you mind sending us an electronics log? We might be able to figure something out for you based on that.
To do send a log, click the Search button in Coastal Explorer and enter $data . This will open a File Explorer showing the Coastal Explorer data folder. In there, you’ll find the two files we’re interested in. The most important will be the file named Electronics.log. (Windows might hide the “.log” part from you, which means the capital E will be important, since there is another file named “electronics.db” and the “.db” part might be hidden.) The other file is called “PreviousElectronics.log”, but it is optional. Just send one or both of those files to support@rosepoint.com and we’ll take a look.
I’ve looked over your electronics log and unfortunately was not able to find a way to reliably force Coastal Explorer to use a specific wind sensor. I will add a request to our list to make it possible to prioritize your wind sensors. This should be pretty easy to do and would be useful for anyone else that has multiple wind sensors.
By the way, it appears your NMEA 2000 network has a lot of duplicated data other than the wind. I’ve never seen anything quite like this and am wondering if you might have some sort of NMEA 0183 to NMEA 2000 translator that might be translating information that is already on the NMEA 2000 network?
Thanks for looking at the issue. I’m at the back end of reinstrumenting the boat and next task up is examine network traffic to remove extraneous data. I’ve been down this path for the wind data and know for certain 3 packets are expected, the 4th instance is extraneous but I know why it is there and can easily be isolated in, for example, Expedition.
How does CE handle the idea of multiple data for different depth sounders and temperature sensors?
Hopefully CE could be updated for NMEA to allow data selection that is granular for all data on the network.
You can set priorities for some types of sensors and Coastal Explorer will use values from the sensor with the highest priority that has valid data. Currently this works for position, heading, depth and water-speed sensors which we’ve found to be the ones most likely to be redundant. It is not really practical to do this for “all data on the network” but we should be able to add wind sensors. This is managed in “Settings > Electronics > Sensor Priorities”.