January 27, 2008 18:44
The folks at NMEA have made it very difficult to support NMEA-2000 directly. The full protocol documents are very expensive and then there is a "certification" process which costs even more.
(By a lot, I mean north of $10K per product.)
Maretron makes a converter which transcodes 0183 and 2000 messages. In theory this should allow existing software to coexit with NMEA-2000, although I personally know of no testing along those lines to verify the conjecture.
It would be nice if there were a genuinely open protocol available for marine electronics, but NMEA-2000 ain't it. When you have to sign an NDA and pay lots of bucks to both read the docs and implement the protocol, it is *not* an open standard, no matter how many times they claim it is "open" for some weird definition thereof. This allows the NMEA "country club" complete control over who is allowed to play on their course.
harumph
-mo
(By a lot, I mean north of $10K per product.)
Maretron makes a converter which transcodes 0183 and 2000 messages. In theory this should allow existing software to coexit with NMEA-2000, although I personally know of no testing along those lines to verify the conjecture.
It would be nice if there were a genuinely open protocol available for marine electronics, but NMEA-2000 ain't it. When you have to sign an NDA and pay lots of bucks to both read the docs and implement the protocol, it is *not* an open standard, no matter how many times they claim it is "open" for some weird definition thereof. This allows the NMEA "country club" complete control over who is allowed to play on their course.
harumph
-mo