Navico radar installation troubleshooting help please

[LifePart2]

I have just installed my brand new Navico 20+ radar.

I have connected power, and have plugged the ethernet cable into my raspberry pi, which is running the latest version of OpenCPN and the radar plugin.

I have selected Halo A and B as my radar types.

When I click on the Radar icon I get two windows:

A black one that says

Heads Up
Stabilized
RM

Navico Halo B - No radar
Navico Halo B: Initializing

Overlaid on top of this window is a white one that says:

Navico Halo A
Navico Halo A: Initializing
Navico Halo B
Navico Halo B - Initializing
Required OpenCPN Option
(greyed out) checked check box Accelerated Graphics (OpenGL)
Select Radar Types
Hide Radar

So, what have I done wrong? I thought I just plug it in and it is supposed to work?

Thanks,
Noel

[Franziska]

We have a B&G 4G directly connected to a Windows 10 laptop and needed to turn the Ethernet cable into a crossover cable to make it work.
No interface box.
Just the crossover ethernet able from radome to PC and a 12v power supply to the radome.

[Hakan]

Noel..
Radar plugin needs OpenGl activated.
The Info window is just that; "info" so the checked box is just a confirmation.
You may like to read the radar manual here.

[merrimac]

Your Raspberry Pi ethernet card needs to have a (any) IP address, as the plugin tells the OS which ethernet cards it wants to scan by its IP address. The actual IP address is not important as the radar and plugin communicate via Multicast.

Open a terminal and check that the radar cable is making the RPi think there is something:

sudo ifconfig eth0

It should show something like:

eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 10.56.0.1  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 10.56.0.255

If it doesn't say both UP and MULTICAST the plugin will not work.

You can set a (temporary) fixed IP address:

sudo ifconfig eth0 up 10.99.99.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

and try again. You can also do this in the RPi GUI via the network manager, but I don't know what OS you have so just read up on how to set a fixed IP address in your distribution.


> checked check box Accelerated Graphics (OpenGL)
means that OpenGL is active, as there is a check mark.

[Bill O]

Which Rpi do you have? You'll need the 4B so you can run opengl.

On our 4B, there wasn't much besides plugging in the RJ45 ethernet for the halo 20+ connection into the pi and it was running.

[LifePart2]

Thanks guys for the comments. I have been on a passage (without radar) so could not respond until now.

Originally Posted by Bill O

Which Rpi do you have? You'll need the 4B so you can run opengl.

On our 4B, there wasn't much besides plugging in the RJ45 ethernet for the halo 20+ connection into the pi and it was running.

I have the RPI 3B and have turned on OpenGL, tried a crossover cable and used an ethernet switch, but the Pi just becomes unresponsive, so I have been wondering if it just isn't man enough for the job and maybe I need to upgrade to the 4. With both AIS and Radar there is a LOT of data that has to be processed quickly, and even without the radar it often seemed to be slow to respond.

And then I find that not infrequently (and also on Windows 10) OpenCPN just shuts down for no obvious reason.

I have been hesitant to upgrade as there seemed to be other complications to using the 4. Bill, are you finding it is all running smoothly for you? Are you finding OCN to be fully reliable (ie not randomly freezing or shutting down) using the RPI 4B? Are you using OpenPlotter, or did you just do a basic install?

Noel

[Bill O]

Noel,
The 3B will be overloaded w/opengl turned on. When we ran the 3Bs we never turned on opengl and it ran fine even w/AIS coming into it.


Originally on the 3B, we downloaded ocpn from source since we thought we didn't need all the other things that came along w/oplotter. As time went on we found it was easier to just download oplotter and many of the "add-ons" were very useful.


As with many programs they can still sometimes lock up. In your case, the little 3B can't handle all you are trying to have it do and you need to do an upgrade to the 4B. Would do the latest version of oplotter V3 which hopefully fixed some bugs that were in V2.

[LifePart2]

Thanks, the plan now is to order a shiny new RPI 4b 8Gb from Amazon to my hotel at Disney world next week. But, here is the real question, will it run on the same little 15w DC 12v to DC 5v puck converter that was supplying my RPI3? And will I need extra heatsinks or a fan to keep it all cool?
Then I will install openplotter v 3 from scratch.
However, since I still have ocharts on the RPI 3 I will run that, without the radar, while we are in the Bahamas.

[Bill O]

Noel,
If you have normal ventilation in the area you have your pi placed, the included heat sinks w/the 4B should be fine. Not sure which GPS puck you have but would try it to see if it works.

Not sure if you use an inverter to power or a USB your 3B now, but the 4B needs more power. We go directly from 12V and we needed to upgrade the USB outlets to 3.0 with a 3.0 USB cord to avoid the low power indicator from flashing on the screen. If you are using an inverter, then using the included 4B power supply (the inline switch is a nice option) will be sufficient.

Can you transfer your Bahamas ocharts to a thumb drive to be able to use directly on the 4B?

[Hakan]

Just for info is there a good 12V-5V converter possible to adjust to 5.2V making RPi4B happy. See this post