Re: Send data to NMEA2000 with Pican-m

[Teppo Kurki]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2021 at 12:38 PM Tero Lindberg <tero.l...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

New to marine electronics and even newer to SignalK.

I've been working on a custom UI and backend to manage the boat's lights, utilities and acquire data from sensors (i2c mainly), and SignalK of course.

I have this running on a rpi4 with pican-m and SignalK
Is there a way to send n2k messages to the bus to mimic battery statuses, switches, etc. so these could be visible on big brand MFDs in a standard way?

Yes, that is certainly possible and I do that on my boat. It is not "mimicing" - SK server is sending out messages exactly as a real NMEA2000 device would.

Tried to search for information and found the signalk-to-nmea2000 plugin, but wasn't sure if that was fit to purpose and with some tries wasn't too successful trying to mimic some messages from one of the tank sensors by sending them via Data Fiddler. 

Any advice or ideas would be greatly appreciated :)

If you have pican-m connected all you need to do is activate the plugin and the PGNs that you have data for in your server.

So the idea in the plugin is that you need to first have the source data for a PGN in SK. You can produce that with Data Fiddler, but then you must have first the plugin configured - N2K messages are created only when new data updates are received - so it is not enough that you created some data earlier, N2K output is triggered (if you have the plugin and PGNs activated) when you send the data from Data Fiddler.

For battery data make sure that you match the instance in the SK path in the plugin configuration.

Our Slack community is pretty active, you'll usually get much quicker responses to support questions like this there on #support channel. 

http://slack-invite.signalk.org/

 

[Tero Lindberg]

Thanks,

Did figure it out about a minute after posting after struggling for quite a while :)

Tried to actually delete the message, but now I at least got the Slack channel info. Thanks!

-Tero