OpenCpn with Halo 20+ Radar

[osprey_II]

In the process of purchasing a new Simrad Halo 20+ Radar to replace my older Raytheon R10XX. I would appreciate any advice someone might have on my proposed setup. I have not searched this forum completely so there may be some relevant existing treads as well.

Here is what I would like to do.

Connect the Radar's RJ45 connector to a Netgear GS105 5-port switch.
Connect the Lowrance RJ45 to 5-pin yellow Ethernet adaptor cable to my Lowrance HDS Carbon Chartplotter.

Connect two Android tablets (Samsung Tab 2 and a 10" DragonTouch tablet) to ports on the Ethernet switch using (I assume) RJ45 to USB adaptor cables.

I want to display Radar-pi through OpenCpn on these tablets since my Lowrance chartplotter is only a 9" unit that I need for the chartplotter. The tablets will display the radar at the upper and lower helms, I'm hoping.

I currently have my NEMO 2000 data available on a WiFi gateway connected to the Raymarine SeaTalkng network. I think the true heading is available on this network from the EV autopilot. GPS/depth/temp info from the Lowrance HDS unit connecter to Seatalkng.

Is this all possible? I have no experience with digital radars or OpenCpn on android devices.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[nohal]

The radar plugin is not available for Android, so if you want to use a tablet, it would have to be something like MS Surface.

[Hakan]

osprey..

You may also like to read more about the radar plugin in this manaul

[osprey_II]

That's the manual I read but I obviously missed the fact that Radar pi do not run on android. As I said, I only have experience running OpenCpn on a Win 10 PC so bad assumption on my part. Nevertheless a win 10 tablet it will be if it can do the job. Thanks for the information, I knew I needed help. I will probably need more yet.

[boardfun]

you could sort of do it with the tablets. You would use VNC to display OpenCPN running on something like a Pi. Create a hotspot on the boat and connect the tablets wirelessly.

[osprey_II]

That sounds complicated, I have no experience with PIs. However it got me thinking about other possible solutions using the hardware that I have. First comes to mind is trying to emulate a PC on an android device. I thought I read something about that, or it might have been the other way around emulating android on a PC. Even if its possible I not sure it would allow Radar Pi to run.

[osprey_II]

After playing around a bit it appears I can run OpenCpn on a mini PC and using Deskspace I can extend the desktop to an android tablet and then drag the Radar_Pi window to the tablet. This works with both a WiFi connection or a USB connection between the PC and tablet. This is similar to what Boardfun suggested just using a very small mini PC instead of a raspberry pi. I think.

[osprey_II]

Extending the pc desktop to multiple android tablets is easy and I could drag the radar windows (Halo A and B) to fill any size tablet via Wi-Fi. However, to use any more than one tablet I need to run at least two instances of OpenCpn on the same computer or at least two instances of Radar-Pi. Looking into this issue it looks possible by creating a portable version. I tried running 5.8.2 and 5.8.4 simultaneously, but no. Hoping for a simpler solution. Anybody with any updated info on this stuff.

[nohal]

Simply copy the whole OpenCPN directory (As you seem to be on Windows probably C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenCPN) and in that copy start opencpn.exe with -p parameter. You can create as many of these copies as you want.
All the data files will be created locally, so for more instances you need more of these copies, not start multiple times from the same one as they would fight for the data.

[osprey_II]

By making a new duplicate copy of the opencpn dir I am able to run opencpn using -p in parallel with the first copy . When it opens it's not setup the same as the first copy so I have to install the radar plugin. On doing so it gives an error 'unable to copy the catalogue file'. I tried downloading the *.tar.gz but no success getting it to work.

[Douwe Fokkema]

But be careful, sending the radar data over WiFi is not reliable. It may work, or it may not work. And when it functions it can produce missing spokes anytime, or stop functioning completely.
Using remote desktop does not have these limitations.

[osprey_II]

I think I should be ok then. The radar has a wired connection to opencpn/radar_pi and deskspace is just a desktop extender over WiFi.

I'm still not able to load radar_pi in the portable (-p) instance of opencpn. Have anyone encountered this issue?