A33 & Nasa Wind Instruments—works now

[Quark Elec]

The following is a customer’s reply on their setup on A033 and NASA Wind transducer. We hope this could help others who have similar setup in their boat.

---

Great news – I’ve got my A033 working!

The problem was that I wasn’t supplying power to the protocol bridge (I looked at a wiring diagramme that was posted on the forum and I replicated that).

So now I have:

– Nasa tactical wind transducer at 10Hz

– Quark protocol bridge

– A033 multiplexer

– A032 converter

– B&G Vulcan 5 MFD

– Raymarine ST60 depth & speed

– Amec AIS

all talking to each other on a mixture of NMEA0183, NMEA2000 and Seatalk1 !

I’m not quite there yet though.

The wind appears to be working fine. However the Nasa unit has a poorly designed means of resetting the relative angle (you have to connect two terminals when it is centered, which likely means going up the mast, or motoring on a windless day), and I have heard stories of it resetting every time you power up.

To quote from another forum:

“My IS15 has low resistance between nmea + and – during power up => the nasamarine.com nmea mast head unit is recalibrating at every power up. I have discussed the issue with nasamarine.com and the solution is to put a pull-up resistor between the nmea mast head unit red (+) and blue (signal) cable. The restior shall be at 10kOhm. This will keep the signal high during power up, but shall not be enough to keep the signal high when the IS15 is up and running.“

I don’t know if I will have this problem, but here appears to be the solution if I do.

Also, my Seatalk connection isn’t working perfectly yet. I have the boat speed reading, but it appears to be erratic – when I was motoring at 4knots, it periodically (every 20 seconds?) spikes up to 20-30knots before declining back to 3-4knots. I’m going to clean and recheck all the connections as a starting point. After that, I will use my computer and login to the wifi of each component and try to see what’s going on. THe boat is now out of the water for winter, so that will wait until spring.

The Seatalk depth doesn’t seem to be working though – no reading at all. I’d like to get this working for completeness, but it’s the least of my worries as I have the original ST60 depth in the cockpit which works fine.

Thank you for all your help.

[Author]

Posts