RE: [rcpilot-devs] GPS NMEA support

[Michael J. P. <mi...@vi...>]

Really what are you doing?

Don't know if I ever mentioned it to you but I use to sail quite a bit.
I had a Saga 43' built for me some years back. I just sold it recently.

http://www.sagayachts.com/saga43/43_photos.html
http://www.sagaowners.com/photos/mikep/index.html

I kept her on Lake Champlain and took her down along the east coast of the US a couple of times.

I also got to do some sailing in the Bahamas which was totally amazing. 67mph winds and all.  ;-)

The one thing that bothers me about NMEA is the cost of purchasing the protocol specs.
I don't remember what it is anymore but I remember sending them an e-mail about it when I found out.

I have most of the NMEA protocol decoded on the rcpilot site (I found it somewhere on the net at one point).
I needed it to build the autopilot.

The other protocol I worked with a bit was SeaTalk. All the electronics on my boat were Raytheon.
Very cool stuff. Radar, Chart plotter, DGPS, Autopilot, environmental telemtrey, and more.

I had the whole boat running off of my laptop. Or I could use the repeater up at the helm.

Mike


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 3/9/2004 at 8:40 PM PK Wooster wrote:

>Interesting, a friend of mine and I have been investigating NMEA for a
>unrelated purpose, support for navigational instruments used by sailors.
>There are some existing interfaces in Java for this including a couple of
>Sourceforge projects.
>/peter