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Old 28-05-2015, 09:50   #1
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EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Hi all!

Our startup company has finished the development of EDO instruments, a fully customizable NMEA interpreter software with dozens of features like virtual instruments, performance analysis, advanced alarm system, polar tools, logbook function, etc.. The demo version for Windows and Mac OS is available at our site www.seamantec.com.
Any feedback is appreciated.
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Old 10-06-2015, 18:36   #2
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Those are very attractive displays.

It is a little late in the game to only be supporting NMEA 0183 - the world has largely moved on to NMEA 2000. Do you have a strategy for support of N2K? Personally I am using an Actisense NGT-1-USB to access N2K data - you might consider supporting them since they do make available their drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Old 11-06-2015, 01:39   #3
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your comment.
We are planning to support NMEA N2K, but several of our satisfied clients connects to NMEA2000 system using converters, like Actisense NGW-1.
That's why we postponed a little bit the N2K development. We are already in connection with Actisense, so we will support there driver.


Peter
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Old 11-06-2015, 02:57   #4
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, gonczyjani & Peter.
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Old 30-07-2015, 12:36   #5
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Has anyone tried this?

How long is the free trial?

Shame it's so expensive -- I think the price point is more like $49.

Still, it looks quite interesting.
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Old 30-07-2015, 13:39   #6
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Tried the free version on my iPad2 and found it did not work 75% of the time. On further investigation found out it runs on the newer model iPads.

The few times it did load, it looked like it had potential.


Sent from my iPhone- please forgive autocorrect errors.
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Old 02-08-2015, 18:50   #7
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

I've got the latest updates of iOS on my iPad and the app just shuts down every time I try to open it.
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Old 06-08-2015, 21:29   #8
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Looks really interesting. The NMEA 0183 transducers are important to support--glad to see this. We have a few NMEA 2000 instruments aboard but the rest of them are 0183 and will remain for as long as they keep on working We do our own (similar but not nearly so complete!) software via our Raspberry Pi, so not really something for us--but think it looks great for other folks who aren't interested in building their own software. Best of luck with it!
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Old 07-08-2015, 01:04   #9
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Quote:
Originally Posted by Schooner Chandlery View Post
Looks really interesting. The NMEA 0183 transducers are important to support--glad to see this. We have a few NMEA 2000 instruments aboard but the rest of them are 0183 and will remain for as long as they keep on working We do our own (similar but not nearly so complete!) software via our Raspberry Pi, so not really something for us--but think it looks great for other folks who aren't interested in building their own software. Best of luck with it!
It's not a question of supporting these or those transducers -- it's what language does the system speak.

Almost all PC and Mac based navigation programs speak 0183 exclusively. Even Go Free seems to speak 0183 although it's all proprietary to Navico and should have been simple to do it in N2K.

I guess that's because it's easier to program. 0183 is based on simple serial communication and it's also easier to get the data onto a computer. It's not that big a problem for us because there are decent converters on the market (Actisense for one) and also most (if not all?) MFDs will bridge N2K data to 0183.

The drawback, though, is that not all N2K data is converted to 0183 -- there are many more N2K PNGs than there are 0183 sentences. It's also slow, and it's only one direction. It would sure be great of some of these companies would start to speak N2K natively.

This program could sure benefit from speaking N2K because it's not a nav program, but an instrument program, and there is a ton of N2K data which you might want to display which you can't get on 0183.

It looks really beautiful and really powerful, but there is no real demo program (you can install it but can't use any data on it), so you can't really try it out without dropping 100 euros on it. Also the developers seem to be AWOL, and there is no sign that they are actively developing or supporting it. They do not seem to have appeared on CF since they made these initial posts.

So although I am tempted by it -- I need a program like this -- I think I'm going to have to pass on it for now.
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Old 07-08-2015, 01:19   #10
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Agreed. I could use a program like this too, but for N2K. As I said earlier, I have the Actisense USB converter and so would want something using that. €100 seems steep also - agree with earlier post that half that seems closer to the mark.

Greg
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Old 07-08-2015, 01:30   #11
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

I gave this feedback to the developers:

Hi:

I have been looking at your really interesting EDO instrument program.

There are a number of things which stop me from dropping $99 on it, however, and I thought you might want the feedback:

1. There is no demo program, so you can’t try the program out before spending the quite large purchase price.

2. There are many reports of problems and no sign of any work to fix them. A very high degree of reliability and user support will be a key factor in people’s decision to spend money on such a product, it’s not enough for it just to be pretty – software products which are simply pretty are generally free or very cheap.

3. You have never appeared on Cruisers Forum after making a single post introducing the program and have never appeared to discuss or answer questions. Googling the program name, I don’t see any activity of yours on any of the sailing forums – in my opinion you can’t suceed in this kind of business with a new product without engaging the community.

4. The program does not support NMEA2000, which seems to many of us to be a serious flaw in an instrument program, which is supposed to display all kinds of instrument data. For a navigation program, this is not such a problem since all essential nav data is available on 0183, but for an instrument program this seems to me like a fatal flaw.

5. It’s very expensive for what it is. Your price falls in between a price which would be accepted in the broad consumer market (too high), and what real professional users are willing to pay. But real professionals users will demand a very high degree of development and support – that’s what they pay for. Compare with N2KView from Maretron, which is fully developed and supported as a primary instrument system capable of replacing, rather than simply supplementing, hardware instruments. If you want to sell it to the broad sailing community, however, look at INavX as a model of a very successful product in that community. In my opinion, your program should not be more expensive than that (instruments are not more important than nav), and the support and level of development of the product should be no less than that. Note also that the INavX people are very active on all of the sailing forums, answer questions, and are very responsive to solution of problems.

I’ve taken the time to write all of this only because it looks like such a great program – I am hoping it will become well developed and widely used, and worth buying. So good luck!
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Old 07-08-2015, 06:02   #12
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dockhead View Post
Also the developers seem to be AWOL, and there is no sign that they are actively developing or supporting it. They do not seem to have appeared on CF since they made these initial posts.
I have this app on my iPad. I found a bug, told the developer, he asked for a NMEA trace, I gave it to him, he said he found the bug and it will be fixed in the next release.

All by personal email, so I wouldn't say that they are not responding or developing and supporting this.

As for N2K support, not even Maretron, nor many other apps that I am aware of, uses direct N2K bidirectionally - they all require encapsulation and conversion to 0183. The Vesper does this, and I think your Go-Free works this way also.

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Old 07-08-2015, 07:41   #13
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Hi everybody,

First of all sorry, for not responding all of the post, but I haven't got any notification from the system. So thanks Dockhead to inform us.


I try to answer all of the questions, and opinions.

NMEA2000: This development is absolutely on our target list, but first we need to spread our product more widely. Until that you can use a converter as mentioned. The Actisense version is parsing almost all of the data what the EDO instruments current version knows. When we will make the N2K version we will make more virtual modules, for example motor yachts.

Demo vs Trial version: You can try all of the functionality of the software with the 30 day trial version, but you can't connect to the boat. If you really want to try this on your boat and ready to write a testimonial and send some photos how to use our app onboard, I can send you a couple of day trial version. Just send me an email(peter at seamantec.com) I hope this is a fair deal

Pricing: We think the price is still reasonable. There is some unique feature what gives our app a higher value: polar editing, performance calculations, speech based alarm system, log file replay. But maybe this feature is not important for everybody, and they just want an easy to use virtual instrument app. If we pull out some of this features and made a more common version for EDO at that time the lower price is reasonable. But before we make this decision we need more feedback.


Bug fixes, feature development: When someone report us an issue we always investigate it, and depend on the severity, we put into our development queue. We move as fast as we can, but still a small company, so sometimes it's take on time, but we are doing this full time.


We are a young company in this industry, and the PR, communication, marketing is not our strongest part, we are focusing much more for our product development. That's the reason why you didn't find too many results from us.

I hope I've answered all of the questions but if you have still any just write a comment, or send me an email (peter at seamantec.com)


ps.: Now find the notification settings at the cruisers forum settings.
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Old 07-08-2015, 09:57   #14
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

Quote:
Originally Posted by colemj View Post
I have this app on my iPad. I found a bug, told the developer, he asked for a NMEA trace, I gave it to him, he said he found the bug and it will be fixed in the next release.

All by personal email, so I wouldn't say that they are not responding or developing and supporting this.

As for N2K support, not even Maretron, nor many other apps that I am aware of, uses direct N2K bidirectionally - they all require encapsulation and conversion to 0183. The Vesper does this, and I think your Go-Free works this way also.

Mark
It's good to hear that you had a good support experience. Why haven't you reviewed the program on here? I haven't been able to find any real user experiences anywhere. Would be really interesting to hear how this has worked for you.

As to native N2K. - Yes, Gofree speaks 0183, but the Maretron PC software like N2KView and N2KAnalyzer speaks N2K and displays a lot of data for which there are no 0183 sentences. Nobeltec, TimeZero, Coastal Explorer, Expedition, and a bunch of other nav programs speak N2K natively, see: http://www.actisense.com/products/nm...-software.html

The biggest problem is you need to pay a license fee, but for expensive commercial programme,s this should not be a problem.

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Old 07-08-2015, 10:10   #15
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Re: EDO virtual instruments for sailors

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It's good to hear that you had a good support experience. Why haven't you reviewed the program on here?
I considered that but held off because I have the iPad app, not the full expensive PC program everyone here has been discussing.

The iPad app is inexpensive.

And because I have the iPad app, the only way to run it is through a wifi gateway, which are pretty much limited to 0183, and not 2000. The apps that take advantage of this are likewise.

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