iKomminicate gateway

Twistedtree...

So, given that we agree that there is some lip service going on in the marine industry, what makes anybody think that there will be strong adoption of this new protocol among the big players? What do they have to gain besides potentially loosing market share in the probably highly profitable accessory market?

Remember that you are an odd duck in the marine electronice consumer segment. You have a strong tech background, and are happy to get involved at the protocol level. The average guy that buys what I'll call a "upscale" marine electronics package just wants it to all work together. For them buying all the bits and pieces with one manufacturers label on them is a sure bet that it'll all work, and one tech support number to call if it does not.

Now I do see the big players adopting some protocols that do not represent a potential loss of revenue to them. Things like Canbus to talk to engines. They have nothing to loose and everything to gain with things like that.

ksanders said:

Now I do see the big players adopting some protocols that do not represent a potential loss of revenue to them. Things like Canbus to talk to engines. They have nothing to loose and everything to gain with things like that.

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Kevin, are not you, Jeff and Twistedtree speaking of the recreational boating world rather than commercial. I've been on the bridge and engineering spaces of newer liners, ferries and tugs where it seemed the controllers, field instruments and navigation systems were well integrated. Not unlike my industrial experiences with ABB and Siemens.

Just a few small examples: the ability for a cruise ship to remain in position via virtual anchoring as passengers disembark for a day's activities or ship board power plant operations to keep lights, servo motors, plumbing and electronics operating.

The marine electronics recreational business is rather small and the likes of Furuno, Garmin and Simrad to play nice makes sense but requires an impetus yet to evolve. Maybe Flir's purchase of Raymarine will pay dividends beyond advertising hoopla. Is Maretron a player here?

Just curious.

ksanders said:

So I've been convinced that maybe a new protocol might be good for the marine world...

On the issue of SNMP over wireless that's easy. If a device has a IP address and a SNMP client, and the UDP ports are not blocked the media (wired or wireless) is not relevant.

We are doing more and more networking over cellular for mobile applications. We have dedicated ip addressing and are using SNMP to manage the remote routers

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I haven't been involved with SNMP in a long time. 15-20 years ago we had some very expensive network management software IIRC from HP. It more or less required skilled dedicated labor. A nice large screen with a view of the network was set up and when visitors came through the shop, they were always impressed with the network display. In reality, we found it totally worthless. Can't remember all the issues we had with it but there were a lot of false positives and false negatives. After a year or so, we finally pitched the whole thing and wrote it off as a bad investment. Hopefully SNMP is more reliable and useful today. I suspect if you are just managing remote routers, it might be useful but we were trying to manage every device on a large corporate network on a FO backbone. I have nothing but cuss words for SNMP. IMHO, it is IT hypeware.

Donsan said:

I haven't been involved with SNMP in a long time. 15-20 years ago we had some very expensive network management software IIRC from HP. It more or less required skilled dedicated labor. A nice large screen with a view of the network was set up and when visitors came through the shop, they were always impressed with the network display. In reality, we found it totally worthless. Can't remember all the issues we had with it but there were a lot of false positives and false negatives. After a year or so, we finally pitched the whole thing and wrote it off as a bad investment. Hopefully SNMP is more reliable and useful today. I suspect if you are just managing remote routers, it might be useful but we were trying to manage every device on a large corporate network on a FO backbone. I have nothing but cuss words for SNMP. IMHO, it is IT hypeware.

Click to expand...

Yes, network management has come along way since 20 years ago. It is a stable, reliable part of any large network.

sunchaser said:

Kevin, are not you, Jeff and Twistedtree speaking of the recreational boating world rather than commercial. I've been on the bridge and engineering spaces of newer liners, ferries and tugs where it seemed the controllers, field instruments and navigation systems were well integrated. Not unlike my industrial experiences with ABB and Siemens.

Just a few small examples: the ability for a cruise ship to remain in position via virtual anchoring as passengers disembark for a day's activities or ship board power plant operations to keep lights, servo motors, plumbing and electronics operating.

The marine electronics recreational business is rather small and the likes of Furuno, Garmin and Simrad to play nice makes sense but requires an impetus yet to evolve. Maybe Flir's purchase of Raymarine will pay dividends beyond advertising hoopla. Is Maretron a player here?

Just curious.

Click to expand...

Tom, I have not been on a large commercial boat like a passenger liner so I cannot speak for what they do, but I can say that just thinking about it they probably use same equipment we utilize in the industrial world.

In the industrial world we build out SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems to monitor and control allot of what is behind the scenes in daily life.

I have been heavily involved in the electrical and petroleum industries doing just that, controlling and monitoring things from a single screen. We do exactly what boaters want to do, which is see and control machinery and other systems. We use industrial protocols that have been out there for years, decades even. We use these protocols because they work.

You see almost everything in this world can be reduced to either an analog (voltage, current, pressure, level) or a digital (on, off, status) signal. We can read these signals and put them on a display. We can write these signals back to equipment and turn things on and off, adjust things like throttle settings, etc... We do this every day, all over the world, quite reliably.

So, that was the basis for my original post... Why are we trying to re-invent the wheel here?

So, as to your question, I do not know why the recreational market makes things so complicated.

There was some discussion earlier in this thread that our old protocols won't work for marine use. Yes that might be true in a sense, but it's also incorrect as well. The example was brought up that under the NMEA protocols you have the need for one thing to transmit out a value autonomously and other things listen to it. That specific example is not a need, it's a designers want.

In my world it works the other way. If one device wants information from another device it asks for it. It polls the other device and gets its data. Or a central controller collects data and sends it out (writes it) to the devices that need it. Under some other protocols a device can be programmed to send it's critical data to specific devices.

No, it's not the happy utopian world where a device might offer it's data up to the world, but then again all our industrial stuff works together, so the proof is in the pudding as they say.

This big thing that's different on commercial boats, depending on their size and mission, is that nav equipment has to meet IMO and other specifications. Their are strict performance standards, certification that actually verifies that the equipment works as it is supposed to, and standard interface requirements. Interestingly, IMO calls for NMEA 0183 in most places (perhaps even all), but nowhere is NMEA 2000 allowed in an IMO device. You can have it on your boat, but it will not help you meet any of the IMO requirements. You can read into that what you like.

This stuff can and does integrate together nicely, but not with N2K. My radars get their instrumentation from GPSs and heading sensors from 3 different vendors, display AIS targets from yet a 4th vendor, and display ARPA targets on a 5th vendor's charting system. The charting system outputs waypoints for a route, the waypoints and bearing show up on the radars, and the autopilot steers the boat to the wayppoint. On arrival, everyone switches to the next waypoint and keeps going merrily on its way.

On smaller systems, I've seen this mostly work on N2K, but not all of it. And it's very sensitive to any one problematic device.

ksanders said:

Twistedtree...

So, given that we agree that there is some lip service going on in the marine industry, what makes anybody think that there will be strong adoption of this new protocol among the big players? What do they have to gain besides potentially loosing market share in the probably highly profitable accessory market?

Remember that you are an odd duck in the marine electronice consumer segment. You have a strong tech background, and are happy to get involved at the protocol level. The average guy that buys what I'll call a "upscale" marine electronics package just wants it to all work together. For them buying all the bits and pieces with one manufacturers label on them is a sure bet that it'll all work, and one tech support number to call if it does not.

Now I do see the big players adopting some protocols that do not represent a potential loss of revenue to them. Things like Canbus to talk to engines. They have nothing to loose and everything to gain with things like that.

Click to expand...

In my experience, the larger companies get dragged into new things. They never lead the way. Smaller enterprising companies will create alternative devices using the open protocols and interfaces, deliver better value to customers, and purchases will start moving towards them. Eventually the larger companies will have to adapt or die.

The other big advantage to open standards is that when things don't work together it will be evident to everyone who screwed up and needs to fix their product. Vendors won't be able to play Monkey-in-the-Middle with us, which is what they are doing now with N2K.

Of course none of this will happen over night.

FYI, my iKommunicate Gateway arrived today. I was KickStarter backer #43 on October 26th with originally an expected delivery of "February 2016".

refugio said:

FYI, my iKommunicate Gateway arrived today. I was KickStarter backer #43 on October 26th with originally an expected delivery of "February 2016".

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Some of the delay was due to me. I tested it pretty hard and any problem found was fixed with new firmware. They could have gotten the device out earlier and just had everyone else do the updates. This way is better.

I got my unit in January.

Jeffrey S said:

Some of the delay was due to me. I tested it pretty hard and any problem found was fixed with new firmware. They could have gotten the device out earlier and just had everyone else do the updates. This way is better.

I got my unit in January.

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Too funny. On the iKommunicate forum they just said that they made a late change and only tested it on their software N2K simulator and not live hardware. Every device is now arriving with a need to update to a firmware released yesterday. I happened to log on and check but i imagine many others will install without being aware of the update (which, btw, is not on their firmware download page!)


Keith

I don't have the hardware change so I didn't see that. We're in the process of swapping out my unit.

You update the firmware within the iKommunicate admin panel directly.

The thing works really well. I've had mine on now for 3 weeks continuously and it doesn't miss a beat, need a restart, or anything else odd. It's just working for me.

Jeffrey S said:

I don't have the hardware change so I didn't see that. We're in the process of swapping out my unit.

You update the firmware within the iKommunicate admin panel directly.

The thing works really well. I've had mine on now for 3 weeks continuously and it doesn't miss a beat, need a restart, or anything else odd. It's just working for me.

Click to expand...

Updating is supposed to be via the online admin panel or the micro SD card stored under the "iKommunicate plan end cap", but - get this - that feature wasn't working until the latest release which...you can't get anywhere. I have a 12vdc power supply at home so I just plugged it in and did the automatic update to the June 8th firmware, but there's no sign of the June 16th update (per Paul Sumpner):

• "The Device List had been working for months, but a recent change to the code broke this feature and it was not picked up by our firmware release testing, as we only tested with our simulated N2K network rather than a real one ! We have taken steps to ensure that all releases (big and small) will be tested on both our simulated and real N2K network.
  
• If you download the latest firmware, released yesterday, this is fixed. Also with this release is the new Upload Firmware function that allows you to download the firmware on another device and then upload it via the web interface if you do not have internet connectivity on the boat."

User "marinereview" is reporting that his installed system is continuously rebooting "about every 6 minutes". He doesn't have the ability to "Upload" from the microSD card, and so he's going to have to get online with the device, do a quick scan for the device, log in, access the admin page, download the new version (when it becomes downloadable!), and reboot the device...in under 6 minutes.

As we are all (you, me, Digital Yacht) software developers I think you can appreciate the "epic fail" here.

I just got an email saying the new firmware was available, so I updated and yes the new off-line update page is there. It will be interesting to see if it will stay up more than the few hours at a time.


Keith

I don't know what problem I have that they're really addressing. I just don't get excited over pre-market things on kickstarter. However, the discussion is very interesting.

BandB said:

I don't know what problem I have that they're really addressing.

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I have a minor use case that I'm envisioning. I have an Airmar WS-200X on my N2K network, connected to my laptop via an Actisense NGT-1 USB emulating a COM port. So that connection can only be used by one app on the laptop. I typically have it connected to Coastal Explorer but I would like to be able to use Weathercaster to show all the weather (particularly wind) data - and I can't use both at the same time. I could install a 2nd NGT-1, but...

...I'm envisioning a Weather page on the iKommunicate that I can hit from a web browser - on my nav PC or actually any device on my boat's LAN (wired or WiFi).

But I just checked it so see if the device was still up from this morning and it had locked and couldn't respond to a web request even though the Status light was green and there was no Error light. I had to power cycle it to get it going again so I have no idea how long it was operational, whether it would have eventually rebooted itself, or in fact any idea what happened. And before I could even finish typing this message it's again unreachable. Not good.

refugio said:

And before I could even finish typing this message it's again unreachable. Not good.

Click to expand...

I hope you're contacting them about it. They can give you a command to trace everything so they'll see what's going on.

Mine has been running for 3+ weeks and hasn't had a problem. The only reason it's 3 weeks and not 10 is that I turned off the network circuit breaker a few weeks ago to reset the router.

Jeffrey S said:

I hope you're contacting them about it. They can give you a command to trace everything so they'll see what's going on.

Click to expand...

I've posted a few messages but there hasn't been a response. I did get an email from Paul asking for more information.


Keith

Update: Paul also posted on the forum (another user is having the same experience) and has put me in touch with the CamanoLight developers.

Update #2: a new firmware has apparently fixed my issue. I have also learned about the multiplexing capabilities of this device which will allow me to remove my NGT-1 and I don't also need to add an NGW-1-AIS to process 0183 AIS. I'll have all my 0183 and N2K data available to my nav laptop and any other devices on my boat LAN.


Keith

Keith/refugio: I'm looking at an I-Kommunicate install. Can you provide an update please on how your setup is working? Are you successfully getting all your 0183 & N2k data onto ethernet and on to your nav laptop?