Great breakthrough today in navigation electronics. I finally got the depth sounder solidly in place. I had to epoxy the transducer to the hull which was fraught with difficulty and then rove the cable and extension back to the Garmin GPS which will double as the depth sounder. After literally days of work it all fit together.
The autopilot, a wonderful 7 year old Simrad Robertson 22, is back up and running thanks to Joe and Roy of Joe's Marine Electronics. It just needed to be initialized; but silly me, I thought it was due to the new stainless steel water tanks. We motored in a 360 degree circle, and presto, it worked. Also Joe and Roy wired up the Garmin 545s GPS to the Simrad so that the autopilot will take us to any waypoint--remarkable. The autopilot is so crucial to our effort that I doubt we could do without it. It is worth at least 3 crew members, and it never eats, drinks, or complains.
The nav station has a new brace to prevent the lid from crashing down onto the laptop. It looks like a kid's shop project, but I can assure you it took many hours of thought and work. Anyway it is sturdy and fool proof.
I still can not get the Garmin to talk to the Acer laptop. The problem is that the Garmin puts out NMEA data down a wiring harness. I have been able to get the data from two wires into a 9 pin serial port which I soldered with great difficulty and clumsiness. Joe tested the 9 pin and says that the NMEA is getting down that far. However, the laptop has only USB ports and a serial port to USB adapter just does not seem to work. Ideas, anyone? I am resigned to using a separate GPS with a USB output.
All in all it was a good day today with many days of seemingly futile effort coming together. I am starting to think that the whole project is doable within the next 90 days.
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