July 31, 2024  Improved generator support

Engine Gateway YDEG-04 is now a full-fledged gateway for J1939 and SmartCraft generators and is compatible with the latest chart plotter updates.

Raymarine generators panel

Figure 1. Raymarine generators panel

Support for J1939 generators was added to the Engine Gateway five years ago. Support for Onan generators with SmartCraft interface was later added. At that time, support for generators on MFDs was rather poor and the data was mostly displayed as engine data. To enable the processing of messages from generators, it is necessary to add the following to the configuration file:

   GENSET=ON

This year Raymarine added a panel for controlling generators in the latest updates of LightHouse 4. But they did it in such a confusing way that we had to do some investigating.

First of all, they did not add support for NMEA 2000 PGN 127507 "Charger Status", which has "deprecated" status in the latest NMEA 2000 Standard, and only works with PGN 127514 "AGS Status" and PGN 127747 "AC Voltage / Frequency-Phase A". Simrad chart plotters (which are built on the same software platform as other Navico brand plotters, so the following should also apply to B&G and Lowrance) only support PGN 127507. So now Engine Gateway is sending all these PGNs to be useful for everyone.

Simrad generators page

Figure 2. Simrad generators page

Secondly, for the Raymarine, the exhaust temperature messages must come from the same CAN address as the rest of the data. If we are using data from the J1939 network, this is not a problem. To have the exhaust data sent to NMEA 2000, simply enable these messages by setting:

   EXHAUST_TEMP=ON

But often sensors in the exhaust system are installed by the users themselves (e.g. our Exhaust Gas Sensor) and are located in the NMEA 2000 network. To support such sensors we have added a setting:

   EXHAUST_FORWARD=id1|OFF,id2|OFF

Here we have tried to make things as confusing as possible. The setting specifies the NMEA 2000 instance (the second field in PGN 130316 "Temperature, Extended Range", not the CAN address) of the temperature sensor with data type 14 (Exhaust Gas). A setting before the comma connects the sensor to the first active genset, after the comma to the second. So, only two sensors are supported. The Engine Gateway will forward data from connected sensors from its own address.

Let's say you have a combined exhaust system and you have installed a temperature sensor with instance 0, and the two generators are connected to a separate YDEG-04 and use addresses 2 and 3 in NMEA 2000 (to not conflict with the engines which usually uses addresses 0 and 1):

   ENGINE_0=OFF
   ENGINE_1=OFF
   ENGINE_2=158
   ENGINE_3=234
   EXHAUST_TEMP=ON
   GENSET=ON
   EXHAUST_FORWARD=0,0

As you can see, ENGINE_0 and ENGINE_1 are not active, so the setting will be applied to engines (generators) ENGINE_2 and ENGINE_3, and will connect the same sensor. If you have one generator, the setting will take the form of:

   EXHAUST_FORWARD=0,OFF

However, will not work with latest Raymarine LightHouse 4 "Generators" dashboard panel. All other data will be displayed, but the temperature of the exhaust gases - not! For some reason it only works if you change the NMEA 2000 device type from "Engine Gateway" to "Genset Gateway". We have added a special setting for this:

   GENSET_N2K_CLASS=ON

Note that you will need to power-cycle the YDEG-04 unit (from the NEMA 2000 side) in order for this setting to come into effect!

Perhaps that's all you need to know. Please send us screenshots of your char plotters and tell us how Engine Gateway works for you. And remember, it can also record data from the CAN bus, and we can use that data to unravel the most confusing protocol and add it to our product.

Firmware update for Engine Gateway (v1.43) is available at Downloads section.

 

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