I know, I know…boring techy stuff. Still, sometimes you need a boring techy gizmo to do something cool and unboring!
Like with this Rose Point Coastal Explorer 2.0 beta. I’ve been playing around with it at home, and I’m ready to take it down to the boat. Once aboard, I need to plug my laptop into my Raymarine autopilot, in order to get Coastal Explorer to drive the boat for me.
But modern laptops don’t have plain old serial ports anymore. Instead, they have USB ports. It ain’t just a different style of plug, either…USB moves data faster, and it does some fancy signal handling; fancy compared to the serial port’s RS-232 standard, anyway. Which, by the by, is pretty well compatible with NMEA.
OK, if you’re still with me, take a look at the Keyspan USA-19HS High Speed USB Serial Adapter. Long name for a simple little dongle that allows you to plug serial devices into a USB port.
Why this one in particular? Well the folks at Milltech Marine (who market the SR161 AIS receiver I’ve installed aboard Two Lucky Fish) say it works, and so do the propeller-heads at Rose Point Navigation Systems. In fact, this units seems to get good marks from a lot of boaters.
So anyhoo, I need one of these. If you need one too, please consider buying it by clicking on this link to Amazon. Amazon’s got a good price, free shipping, and Navagear gets a tiny portion of the proceeds if you use this link to start your shopping.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Agree on the Keyspan… those seem to be more stable and universally useful than the others I’ve tried (and they are OSX-friendly at the driver level). I use one to slurp collected data from the Kestrel 4000 pocket weather station via its optical cradle into the Mac.
Cheers,
Steve
Opto Isolation is the word every engineering type used when talking of a connection from network to computer. I believe that that is not a component of the Keyspan. But I don’t know for sure. I do know that my raymarine serial port connected to an ibm laptop by keyspan worked fine, but crashed my mac (there were other equipment added, too – so the cause is unknown – but it seemed to be high current or voltage out).
For anyone contemplating going to NMEA 2000, this electrical-ground-loop-avoiding isolation is important according to every tech on N2K backbones that has spoken with me.