Raymarine Lighthouse 4 Splashscreen

[Jmreim]

Two of the new (and probably useless) features of LH4 are customized spalshscreens and homescreens. The splashscreen displays during boot-up, and the MFDs can show a custom image instead of the default Axiom logo. The homescreen is the background for the apps that shows on the home page (charts, radar, cameras, etc.). The home page has traditionally been black but LH4 allows a custom image to be loaded.

Has anyone actually tried these? I have 2 MFDs on my boat - a 9" Axiom RV (master) and a 12" Axiom RV. I've had no problem loading a customized homescreen but have been unable to make a custom splashscreen work. Keep getting an error message that the image is too big - not quite sure if that means the image size or the file size. The manual says the image needs to be 800x480 or 104.24 DPI but no matter how I adjust the image, I get the same error message. Again, no problem with the homescreen custom image and interestingly, when I use the same image on the splashscreen, the error occurs. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong (not sizing my image correctly) or if LH4 just has a bug in this setting. Any suggestions would be most appreciated but as initially stated, this feature is pretty unimportant and not worth a lot of time.
Thx -
Jim

 

[Comodave]

Have you called Raymarine support? I have found them to be very responsive when I needed help.

 

[Jmreim]

Yup - but the tech support guy didn’t seem to know much about LH4.

 

[DDW]

Other than the splash screen, how do you like LH4? Buggy? Wondering if I should upgrade right before a long trip.......

 

[Comodave]

I don’t think there is too much knowledge out there about LH4 yet. I wouldn’t make any major changes right before a big trip. If things are working now why inject a potential problem.

 

[Jmreim]

Wouldn’t say I’ve fully tested it but it seems OK. Frankly, I’m not sure this update warrants a new version number - IMO, nothing groundbreaking here.

 

[DDW]

Yeah. looking through the documentation I think they just got tired of the number 3. The reason I might upgrade is supposedly the 3D Vision sonar is more stable.

One additional question: Did you lose all your settings and user data, or was it preserved across the update (like an normal 3.x -> 3.x+1 type update)?

 

[Jmreim]

Haven't checked everything but settings and MyData appear to be preserved.

 

[Comodave]

I may have to look into it since we put in the transducers for the Realvision 3D sonar.

 

[Tamrow]

I believe it’s covered in this Raymarine Live YouTube video.
https://youtu.be/iVy93SCSngs

 

[Jmreim]

Yes, he does explain it starting around 13:00. Problem is no matter what image size/resolution I try, I get an error. I suspect I'm having a resolution issue. The odd part is that I can successfully use a custom image for the homescreen but the splashscreen customization just doesn't work for me. Was hoping someone would have successfully accomplished this and could tell me how. Thx for pointing me to the video.

 

[Jmreim]

Just to close the loop, finally got this figured out - the key is resolution of the image being used. Has to match the resolution of the master MFD or the image will be rejected. There's a chart on p. 89 of the LH 4.0 Advanced Operations guide that provides the max resolution for all Raymarine MFDs.

 

[markrkrebs]

Buggy

Installed a month ago and we go out a lot plus I'm a live-aboard so I play with it plus I design MFDs for a living for airplanes so I'm "into" it.

Lighthouse 4 is essentially rock solid for me and I have a complicated setup with two units and a radar on WiFi. This really challenges the SW system.

I like it a LOT and recommend to anyone. It will hang if you overload it, albeit without bad consequences. The circumstances are in doing complicated edits deep in the menu system (not something you typically need or want to do, at sea) Sometimes the change is "too much" and after you submit it and cancel out of the edit dialog page, the display will just hang. Then it watchdogs and reboots. The very good news (and this is critical) is that your change DID get in. After the reboot, it'll be doing just what you wanted. So, I call this a nuisance problem only.

OTOH I've seen no relevant improvements. When the headliner feature is the splash screen feature, it seems there's nothing worth the upgrade. One imagines a long bug list of corrections they don't advertise which is why I took the upgrade, but retrospectively, I wish I'd waited. I DO play with the thing underway all the time, and take a lot of self-inflicted reboots because of this bug. I bet if their watchdog was 10sec longer, it'd never happen.

Other than the splash screen, how do you like LH4? Buggy? Wondering if I should upgrade right before a long trip.......