nmea0183out using Pican-m not working

[drawlusyk]

Hello all,

I have a raspberry pi 4 hooked up with a Pican-m hat. I am trying to use the Pican-M to output GPS data in order to connect to a Cobra VHF Radio. I had this working 6 months ago, but after system update some settings were lost and its not working any more. So the positive is that i know it has worked, the negative is that after weeks at trying to get it working again, i am not sure if i am missing something or if the hardware is damaged.

I have an ais/gps device connected via USB. I have configured the GPS in signalK and see the GPS data fine.

I have followed the instructions for the Pican-m to enable uart and using openplotter serial to make connection to signalK. I have configured this pican-m connection as a nmea0183out in hopes to write out the GPS data to this connection

I have configured the "convert signalk to nmea0183" plugin to output the GGA GLL to nmea0183out.

I review logs and see the nmea0183out of GPS data.

when i login and cat /dev/ttyOP_pican or /dev/ttyAMA0 i do not see anything. when i turn on the VHF i do not see position.

I am wondering if anyone has any detailed description of getting nmea0183out working with a Pican-m?

Thanks
Dennis

[tkurki]

cat on the devices will not show if something is being written there, as it reads data coming from the serialport.

Activating debug log key signalk:streams:serialport logs data being written to and read from serialports.

Have you configured Output events for your connection? As nmea0183out has the data you want you should enter that.

Or you can be more specific per sentence, this is my configuration for outputting location data to my VHF: This works because signalk-to-nmea0183 produces the per sentence events (prefix g for generated).

[drawlusyk]

Hello. Thanks for the feedback. I have done as you have mentioned. I have also included the screenshots of the current config. The VHF is still not receiving the GPS data. Is there any way to see the output to the serial port at an OS level? If cat /dev/ttyAMA0 does not work, is there another option? I would like to determine if the picanm is working or not.

.

[tkurki]

I don't think trying to dig deeper into the OS level is fruitful. Writing.. messages clearly say what is being output.

Things to check when debugging serial connections:

• TX/RX: both on the pican-m and the VHF side. this can be sometimes confusing
• polarity
• speed: is VHF expecting 4800 as you have set? probably, but worth checking

You can check pican-m's output signal with a simple LED: https://support.digitalyacht.net/Tech%20Support%20Bulletins/Tech%2000019-2011%20LED%20Test%20of%20NMEA0183%20Output.pdf

[Peter-Petrik]

@drawlusyk take a look at the product page, specifically "Additional Resources". The first link Testing NMEA 0183 on the PICAN-M HAT was written after my many hours of communicating with the manufacturer. Check polarity of the IN/OUT connections. I only got it all working when I connected PICAN-M OUT to the VHF OUT, and IN to IN. Not as documented, but it has worked ever since for me.

[ZM2533]

I have had a similar problems and discovered that the labeling of the polarity on the PicanM hat was incorrect, with + and - reversed on both input and output terminals. Works fine now.