METS2010 and a new version of NemaStudio

METS 2010 Amsterdam

Last week I took the opportunity to meet a few business relations exhibiting at METS in Amsterdam. How often do you get a chance to see your customers in person, especially if they are from all over the world?

AIS-SART device

I had a nice chat with people from Weatherdock about their newest product easyRESCUE, nominated for the Dame Award (but unfortunately not a winner). The EasyRescue is a personal AIS-SART device with built-in GPS capable of transmitting an AIS-SART message in cases of emergency. It transmits an AIS message 1 in combination with a safety message 14. In NemaStudio you can simulate this by combining a Class A and a Class B object, but this is not ideal so I consider to implement a new AIS object AIS-SART or something. Let me know what you think of this idea!

Weather on board

I also met Dennis Walter of Bonito for the first time in person. He was demonstrating  his great WeatherInfoViewer using NemaTalker to provide the necessary navigational data to feed his software. Dennis turned out to be a very nice guy demonstrating his products with great enthusiasm and at the same time promoting Sailsoft to fellow exhibitors and prospects!

Actisense

It was also great to meet the very nice people of Actisense. Especially Andy Campbell, who has not only supported me heavily with the NMEA 2000 support in NemaStudio via the NGW-1 but also providing me with many fresh ideas. And not in the least by catching a few bugs in NemaStudio.
Andy showed the new analogue to NMEA 2000 devices (No doubt we will hear more about these shortly) and the QNB-1 Quick Network Block. This is a kind of junction box allowing connections to both NMEA-0183 buses and NMEA 2000 networks. In the latter case it acts as a multi-drop network connection block. To me this seems an invaluable piece of kit when fitting a NMEA 2000 network backbone on your boat.
In the image above Actisense’ Managing Director Phil Whitehurst (at the left) and me.

NemaStudio Version 1.9 released

Today (December 1, 2010) I formally released Version 1.9 of NemaStudio.

New in Version 1.9

• Functionality to optionally checking for a new version of NemaStudio has been implemented
• A ‘Check for New Version at Program Start’ option is added to the General Settings
• A ‘Check for New Version’ menu item is added to the Help menu
• Improved buffer handling in the serial port receive thread is implemented
• The I/O Monitor buffer size is now limited to 100 sentences in order to prevent huge memory consumption during long runs
• Logging to a log file: code changed to prevent a stack overflow in some situations
• The MDW sentence has been corrected for a magnetic variation mistake (E/W was interchanged )
• The VWR sentence was ignoring the decimal place of the speed when the wind speed variation was 0, corrected

New feature: automatically checking for a new version

From Version 1.9 NemaStudio can optionally find out for you if there is a new version available for download and install.

NemaStudio offers two options to achieve this:

1. Automatically at each program start, or
2. Manually via the Help menu

It is up to you which method you prefer. If you want NemaStudio to check for a new version each time the program is started, you need to check this option in the Program Settings.

Alternatively you can use the new menu option in the Help menu for this, if you don’t want NemaStudio to go out on the internet at each program start, as shown below.

Of course, since 1.9 is the first NemaStudio version offering this, you will not see a screen like the one above before the next new version (Version 1.10) is released.

I/O monitor change

The I/O monitor is now limited to show max 100 sentences on a first in, first out basis so it will always show the last 100 sentences sent/received. The reason behind this change is performance. Before Version 1.9 there was no limit to the size of the monitor window, resulting in a huge memory consumption when NemaStudio was running for a longer period.

NemaStudio can from today be downloaded and installed from the download swection of the Sailsoft website. Here is also the direct link to the installer: http://www.sailsoft.nl/downloads/NemaStudio19Setup.msi

Maretron USB100 Gateway

I have had (very) few requests from users to support the Maretron USB100 NMEA 2000 to USB gateway in NemaStudio. Unfortunately, in spite of my requests Maretron so far has refused to borrow me a device for testing. As a result I have to decide negatively to the requests to supporting the USB100, meaning that the Actisense NGW-1 will remain the only NMEA 2000 gateway supported in NemaStudio.