April 12, 2019  Tons of small updates

All products with Wi-Fi, CAN Log Viewer software, and rudder and tank adapters were updated. Meet the season with new firmware!

 

Actually, we do not have too many new features, but rather many small fixes and improvements. The Rudder Adapter and Tank Adapter got updates 1.01 and 1.03. These contain a small bug fix in calculations, and the Tank Adapter now supports 0-5V sensors in the same way as the Rudder Adapter. The Tank Adapter additionally has a REFERENCE setting (0 - 16V) used when the output of a voltage sensor depends on power supply. The user manual of the Tank Adapter was updated; see Section III.1.4 regarding voltage sensors connection.

All Wi-Fi products (YDWG, YDWN, and YDWR) got a lot of small fixes and improvements. Two of the most significant improvements are better SeaTalk reception (works fine on a bus even with a poor signal) and bus arbitration in the NMEA 0183 Wi-Fi Router.

The microcontroller of the NMEA 2000 Wi-Fi Gateway works at 1/4 of its possible speed to save your battery power. This was not enough to process messages when the NMEA 2000 bus was 100% loaded (in the real world, the NMEA 2000 bus is loaded at 10 - 20%), but we preferred to re-write and optimize some code instead of stealing your Amps. We are proud that this product consumes the same amount of power as five LEDs. This is cool for a Wi-Fi product and the best result among all the Wi-Fi gateways that we know.

We also optimized the CAN Log Viewer. This can be significant for netbooks or the rare laptop that someone may have on board. More importantly, this product now can send manually entered messages (or a set of them) to the CAN network (see the new "Tools" menu), which will come in handy for installers and developers.

In the "Tools" menu, you will also find menu items to download (backup) and upload ZCF files to chart plotters with CZone support. But note that you use these functions on your own risk. Unlike all others, Furuno chart plotters do not support upload of digital switching configuration files from a MicroSD card — special software and a very expensive CAN bus adapter are required.

But with this new feature, you can create a configuration file for your Circuit Control on our web site and upload it to a Furuno with the CAN Log Viewer. This also works with other chart plotters (Raymarine, Simrad, B&G, Lowrance) and allows, for example, renaming buttons on the MFD screen without inserting the card.

We also released a technical update for the Bridge. With it, the Bridge will not try to claim the address on the CAN2 interface and will not forward service messages automatically if its speed is other than 250 kbps. Devices manufactured since the second half of 2017 have a chip with more memory onboard than was used in the previous devices. The update allows storing of larger user programs on new devices, and future updates of firmware will require more memory.

And a few words about our upcoming products and updates. The first shipments of NMEA 0183 Multiplexer and NMEA 2000 W-Fi Router have already been sent to dealers and they will be available for all users next week. Manuals (Multiplexer, Router) are already available for download.

There is one more great thing expected for our engine gateways (YDEG, YDES). It will soon be possible to replace engine temperature or pressure data with data from a specified NMEA 2000 temperature or pressure sensor. For example, the line in the configuration file:

     SUBSTITUTE_OIL_TEMP=0,1,2

will instruct the gateway replace the oil temperature data of port (0) engine with the air temperature data (1) of the specified instance (2).

We have no pressure sensor adapters for NMEA 2000 yet, but very probably we will offer a solution soon. Subscribe to our mailing list to keep informed. We will also will offer great discounts on earlier, non-upgradable models of our Barometers and Thermometers without digital switching support next week, but this special offer will be available to our customers and subscribers only.

All updates are available in the Downloads section and are strongly recommended.

 

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