Upgrading from ST60 to I50/i60 wind, depth, speed only - DIY or pay someone?

[jpeac2]

Hey Gang -

Hope you all are out in perfect winds.

Have a 97 Beneteau Oceanis 351 that I finally gave up on the previous Raymarine ST60 electroncis and bought the new i50/i60 package. No other electronics on board linked in.

Like most of you I have a decent sense of DIY for the boat but have also learned my lesson on when to call someone in to help.

Can anyone comment on how easy of a project this would be to install the new electronics?

Guessing the hardest work is running all the wiring. Can anyone comment to roughly how challenging that is?

Basically trying to figure out if I pay the $120 an hour or take a swing at this myself.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance!

[SV Bacchus]

If you are comfortable with your "decent sense of DIY", why not go for it? Worst case you call in the buck twenty an hour guy to finish it up if you don't get it going.

[sailjumanji]

I had an ST60+ speed/depth/temp display that went out. I replaced it with the i50 display. Didn't bother changing the speed or depth transducers, as they were fully compatible and plugged right in the same as on the ST60+.

I cannot comment on the wind instrument. That ST60+ still worked fine when I sold the boat.

[nightowle]

Did you see if there's a YouTube installation video out there?

[SV Bacchus]

Originally Posted by nightowle

Did you see if there's a YouTube installation video out there?

You can find lots of good stuff on YouTube!

[Alita49DS]

What about the Seatalk bus when using the new instruments? Mine daisy chain.

You will see that I posted a similar thread about replacing Raymarine ST60 instruments recently.

The bus is the original three pin proprietary shaped connector. I think the later one added the initials NG. Which like anything proprietary must stand for Not Good. Then there is NMEA2000 where again Raymarine has sought to screw people with their own proprietary connector on what should be a welcome all ethernet bus.

[sailjumanji]

Mine Daisy chain as well. The i50 depth/speed is compatible with both the older seatalk system, or the ng. You unplug the wires, remove the display, put the new one in, plug in the same Daisy chained wires. As for wind, you would need to check and see if old masthead is compatible. I suspect so, as I think Raymarine objective with this i50 line was to be direct replacement and backwards compatible to st60.

[Djarraluda]

I had the, almost, full Raymarine digital set-up on the boat when I purchased, including chat plotter and fish finder, except wind instruments that were another brand, wireless.
Had a lot of head scratching to begin with, because they suddenly refused to work, eventually realised I had to turn on the chartplotter to get things to work., all a bit pointless a lot of the time when daysailing for me in my home waters.

When I needed to replace the wind set-up I went to 160 but did not wire to the bus, simply let the sea talk pick-up the data rather than add an ITC5. Wish I had the same for the depth as well as I simply do not need the full set-up most of the time.
So the moral is to think of how you will use the instruments and configure their set-up to suit.
Roger

[mlaver]

I replaced my ST50+ depth and speed instruments with a single i50 tridata, and my ST50+ wind with an i60. I believe the ST60 wind transducer is compatible with the i60 (the ST50+’s was not) so no problem there. As mentioned, you existing depth and speed transducers and cables should work fine with the i50 instruments. You may need a good crimper if you have to replace a dedicated cable-to-instrument connector with the 4mm spade connectors the “i” instruments use (the ST50+s had these connectors. Not sure about the ST60s).

The bigger issue would seem to be networking and power. Presumably your existing instruments are Seatalk connected? If these are the only three instruments you’re dealing with you should be able to daisy-chain them with SeatalkNG. The Raymarine tech forums are a great source for this kind of stuff.

[Dockhead]

This is not rocket science. $120/hr? Bah!


It's useful for you to understand how the network is built and how it functions anyway. You will spend a good bit of time studying the existing system and learning about the mods required, so return on your own time will be far less than $120/hr (and probably less than $12/hr ), but it's worthwhile in most cases because it is so useful to understand how this stuff works and how it's connected on your particularly boat.



Just do enough studying before you start, to really understand what you're doing.




This comment:

Originally Posted by mlaver

. .. The bigger issue would seem to be networking and power. Presumably your existing instruments are Seatalk connected? If these are the only three instruments you’re dealing with you should be able to daisy-chain them with SeatalkNG. The Raymarine tech forums are a great source for this kind of stuff.

Is spot on. SeatalkNG is NMEA2000 and is dead simple to hook up. For easy future expansion of your system and later upgrades, it is beneficial to establish an N2K backbone and start hooking stuff up to that. Then it will be totally simple to hook up future devices.



Many, many people have been through this same upgrade path, so there is plenty of knowledge and plenty of equipment available to make it relatively painless.

[a64pilot]

Replaced all of mine last year, The “I” instruments are NMEA 2000, The plug may be different to make it proprietary, but it’s NMEA 2000.
The individual sensors, depth, speed, temp, and wind wire in identically, literally just unplug from your old and plug into your new ones, plugs are identical and in the same locations, marked the same, use the same spade terminals etc.
If all you want is for them to operate all you need is power, but I would run the backbone wire anyway, cause likely one day you will buy other things that will network.
On the picture you see the wires for my wind instrument are missing, that is because my sensor is NMEA 2000, so there is no need to run the additional wiring, once you start with NMEA 2000, it gets way easier to add things, no longer do you have to run all of those wires and terminate them, just connect to the network and your done.