Working with the talented team at Sea-Kit has been illuminating to help understand the data connectivity challenges faced by uncrewed vessels. Read the full case study below
Sea-Kit are an uncrewed surface vessel manufacturer and operator who require equipment onboard to outperform rough and challenging sea conditions. For them, reliability is critical. These vessels don’t have human crew to step in and solve problems, so having reliable systems and navigational data is crucial. They also often require Type Approved devices that are in a small form-factor, and which are capable of performing several tasks at once, rather thatn the need for several devices performing singular tasks. It is for these reasons that they turned to Actisense and our PRO Range of equipment.
Peter Walker, Design and Development Manager at Sea-Kit explains their particular challenges:
“We typically use non NMEA 2000 equipment up a mast due to the fact that this is a venerable point to the elements and we don’t want to risk corrupting the entire NMEA2000 line from one fault up the mast so we use NMEA0183 devices (GNSS x 2, Weather WX Station, etc) but we need route this data around the vessel and serial data in this format wasn’t designed to be shared multiple times, this is where Actisense is invaluable to us.”
He continued:
“We understand the limitations of the systems and equipment that we use on the boat. To ensure that we have reliable and constant communication to the boat without any compromise on performance or operations, we use multiple redundancy methods to ensure the vessel can always communicate data back to the control centre. This is why products like the PRO-MUX-2 becomes an incredible tool to us, because it not only can take multiple individual forms of serial data, but it can combine them and route them to multiple listening devices around the vessel individually. For a USV, this is incredibly valuable because we don’t want to waste sending high bandwidth data to devices that doesn’t require it – so we only send what we need to the devices that need them.
We also use the built in webserver to route more data to other devices around the vessel through an ethernet connection, doubling up on the redundancy in case of cable failure. Having an ethernet connection on all the Actisense PRO Range is certainly one of its greatest features in my mind as it means we can use it all over the vessel.”
To help create these interconnected systems, Sea-Kit specifically chose the PRO-MUX-2 Type Approved NMEA multiplexer to connect multiple GNSS devices for both heading and positioning data, additionally making use of our PRO-NBF-1 Type Approved NMEA buffers for splitting to redundancy PRO-MUX’s. Also connected to the system were elements such as AIS, weatherstation & environmental, and an NMEA 2000 electric compass (which they convert back to NMEA 0183 using our NGW-1 gateway).
Data is output (in RS422) to multiple VHF radios, DSC radio, AIS, chartplotter (TimeZero) and their Sea-Kit autopilot system.
Mr. Walker concluded: “In this new age of digital boating and ECDIS, we need data from multiple types of devices, serial, ethernet, CAN-bus, and analogue signals, to interface into the new digital systems out there. For us, this needs to be reliable and easy to problem-solve when there is an issue on one of the many systems it interfaces into, and there is nothing better to do this job other than Actisense.”