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KBox Firmware

- Buy KBox on Tindie!

KBox Update - May 2020

Thanks for your interest in KBox! As of May 2020, I am not manufacturing or selling KBox anymore. All the source code and design files remain available for your inspiration and if you have any question, feel free to reach out by twitter message, email or via a github issue.

You might also be interested in my new project, inspired by KBox: a better sailing analytics platform. So if you are looking for a way to improve your tacks, perfect your downind sailing or just measure sailing angles and speeds, head over to ChartedSails.com.

What is KBox?

KBox connects your boat networks together and translates message from one bus to the other. KBox also includes multiple sensors that publish information on your boat networks. Finally KBox has a screen that can be used to repeat some of your boat parameters.

Of course KBox is designed with the SignalK specification in mind and will be compatible with it.

KBox hardware includes:

• One NMEA2000 interface,
• Two NMEA0183 inputs (one of them can be used as a Seatalk input),
• Two NMEA0183 outputs,
• One WiFi interface that can connect to an existing network or create a new network on your boat,
• Three analog inputs to measure voltages between 0 and 23V (batteries, solar panels, generators, etc),
• One shunt input to measure current consumption of your main house battery,
• One barometer,
• One inertial measurement unit providing a magnetic compass, an accelerometer to measure roll, pitch and yaw as well as a gyroscope,
• An SDCard to record data.

KBox is an open-source hardware project. You can review the schematics and build it yourself. You can also order a fully assembled and tested KBox from tindie. Every KBox sold via tindie helps support the project. Thank you!

Find more news about KBox on hackaday.io.

How to get a KBox?

You can now order KBox on tindie.com. Supply is limited so use the "Join Waitlist" button to help me figure out how many I need to order and build.

What can I do with KBox?

We are still working hard on the software but we anticipate that the first and most useful use-cases will be:

• Relay GPS and AIS information to your mobile devices (for example, an iPad running iNavX).
• Monitor your energy and display voltages and currents on your existing NMEA2000 equipment
• Record your boat position, and all its parameters (speed over ground, speed over water, heeling angle, apparent and true wind, etc) to an SDCard to replay the race at a later point.

Because KBox is open-source, you can do a lot more things with it:

• Use KBox as a basic NMEA2000 to USB or Network gateway (for example, for SignalK development)
• Build an open-source autopilot and use KBox hardware as the main sensor and computer (we have extension ports to connect to the actuator)
• etc ...

Current software status

As of September 2018, the KBox firmware:

• General functionality
  • Creates a new WiFi network (KBox) or can join an existing network (via simple code modification and recompiling)
  • Supports up to 8 simultaneous TCP clients connected on port 10110
  • Integrated web server
  • Configuration via a config file on the SDCard (see extras/config for examples
• NMEA0183
  • Forwards all NMEA0183 sentences to WiFi clients via TCP
  • Converts RMC (GPS speed and coordinates) and MWV (Wind) to SignalK
• NMEA2000
  • Forwards all NMEA2000 messages to WiFi (even the ones not understood by KBox) in Seasmart format (they look like NMEA sentences and start with $PCDIN)
  • Converts PGN 127245 (Rudder), 127250 (heading), 128259 (boat speed), 128267 (depth), 129025 (position rapid lat/lon), 129026 (sog/cog rapid) and 130306 (wind speed and angle/direction) to SignalK
  • Generates PGN 127508 (battery), 130310 (baro pressure), 130306 (wind), 127257 (attitude), 127250 (magnetic heading), 129026 (sog/cog rapid) from SignalK
• Sensors
  • Measure nmea2000 bus voltage as well as all three battery banks voltage.
  • Measure barometric pressure
  • Measure roll, pitch and magnetic heading
  • Sensor data is available in SignalK and is automatically converted to the relevant NMEA and NMEA2000 messages
• SignalK:
  • All updates generated from NMEA, NMEA2000 and internal sensors are available over websocket
• Data logging
  • All NMEA and NMEA2000 messages are logged to the SDCard
• Display
  • Battery monitor page: shows voltages of all battery
  • Stats page: shows number of received and transmitted messages on all interfaces

For more information on current work and future updates, please refer to our issue tracker.

KBox firmware overview

KBox is based on the Teensy 3.2 architecture and is compatible with the Arduino development environment. The WiFi module is an ESP8266-13 and is also programmed with an Arduino compatible SDK.

This project contains the source code for the firmware running on the host micro-controller (teensy-like Cortex M4 micro-controller) and the firmware running on the WiFi module.

Building and flashing KBox

Read the Developer setup page of the Wiki to learn how to install and run the tools required to program KBox.

Mailing list

Please join the KBox-Discussion mailing list! This is the best place to ask questions and discuss KBox.

Reporting problems and Contacting the author

If you run into problems or would like to suggest new features for this project, please use the GitHub issue tracker.

You can also find me (@sarfata) on the SignalK Slack server.

Contributing

Please post contributions on GitHub, in the form of pull-requests and add your name to the list of contributors below. We kindly ask that all contributors share their code under the MIT license. If you wish to share your code under a different release, please make it a library and post a pull-request to include your library.

List of contributors:

• Thomas Sarlandie
• Neftaly Hernandez
• Heiko Behrens
• Ronnie Zeiller

License

The original code of this project is distributed under the MIT license.

Please note that most of the libraries have their own license:

• Adafruit Sensor is under the Apache license
• Adafruit BMP280 is under the BSD license
• Adafruit BNO055 is under the MIT license
• ADC library is a permissive custom license
• Arduino JSON is under the MIT license
• FlexCAN is licensed under "The Unlicense"
• i2c_t3 is under the LGPL
• ILI9341_t3 is under the MIT license
• NMEA2000 is under the MIT license
• NMEA2000_teensy is under the MIT license
• Time is under the LGPL
• SdFat is under the MIT license
• ESPAsyncTCP and ESPAsyncWebServer are under the LGPL
• The Teensy core files are distributed under the MIT license with a specific clause. The KBox hardware includes a bootloader chip sold by pjrc.com and supports the Teensy project.

To work on KBox and program the WiFi module, you will also use ESPTool which is under the GPL.

Fair winds and following seas to the authors of these libraries! Without them, this project would not have been possible!

Changelog

• 2018 09 07 - v1.3.6

  • Force ESP board definition to generic module w 1MB flash to avoid build error.
  • Upgrade ESP platform to 1.8.0 to use ESP8266 framework 2.4.2 which improves stability of the WiFi modules and seems to fix a number of connection issues for other people. Hopefully will also improve KBox wifi stability.
  • Add HTTP CORS header on /signalk. This makes KBox compatible with the amazing Kip to display your boat data in a browser.
  • Fixed a typo in the reboot reasons.
  • Add missing dependency pyserial in the list of dependencies for kbox.py.

• 2018 07 26 - v1.3.5

  • Fix a bug that would cause KBox to crash on NMEA sentences without a checksum
  • Fix a bug where RMC sentence without a date would crash KBox
  • Added support for parsing DPT and DBT NMEA sentences
  • Added support for generating DBT and DPT sentences. By default only DPT is enabled.
  • Added support for parsing XDR air temperature measurements.
  • Parse magnetic variation from RMC sentence
  • Generate NMEA2000 messages for air temperature measurements

• 2018 07 06 - v1.3.4

  • Specify a list of default environment so platformio does not build all variants of the project by default.

• 2018 07 06 - v1.3.3

  • Fix a bug which forced us to use program-esp to update the wifi module. It is now possible again to just use the following commands to update KBox:

       platform run -e host -t upload
       platformio run -e esp -t upload
    

  • Change default esp upload speed to 921600 because 2000000 does not seem well supported on Windows.

  • Changed the 'end of programming' detection method to more reliably detect when we are done programming and reboot KBox.

  • Tested the official ESP uploader on Windows and OS X. Comment out the line tools/platformio_cfg_esp.py in platformio.ini to use it. It will be a little bit slower but might work better for some people.

• 2018 07 06 - v1.3.2

  • Changes to the build configuration to improve compatibility with Windows and address breaking changes in plaformio.
  • Fix some issues that prevented the tests and sktool from compiling on Windows.
  • Also added automatic builds on AppVeyor with Windows to hopefully detect Windows issues sooner in the future.

• 2018 05 26 - v1.3.1

  • Fix bug which prevented WiFiRXError from being displayed on stats page.
  • Fix bug in kbox.py tool send wifi config command.

• 2018 05 18 - v1.3.0

  • New logfile format, compatible with SignalK server, saves NMEA messages, NMEA2000 messages and SignalK messages.

  • KBox will get the date from NMEA or NMEA2000 and display it on the screen.

  • KBox will wait until it knows the current time to start logging (this can be changed via configuration)

  • Log files are named after date and time of their creation

  • KBox will save in the logfile important system messages and some stats

  • Bunch of new configuration options:

    "logging": {
      "enabled": true,
      "logWithoutTime": false,
      "logNMEA2000": true,
      "logNMEA": true,
      "logSignalK": true,
      "logSystemMessages": true,
      "logSignalKGeneratedFromNMEA": false,
      "logSignalKGeneratedFromNMEA2000": false,
      "logSignalKGeneratedByKBoxSensors": true
    },
    

  • KBox will print version number and time on the "StatsPage"

  • StatsPage is the new default page

  • 

• 2018 04 25 - v1.2.4

  • Improved WiFi connection stability This required the latest version of ESP firmware. And also some changes to the TCP/NMEA server.
  • Bug#96: make wifi led go green when we have a websocket client connected

• 2018 04 23 - v1.2.3

  • Repeat all NMEA and NMEA2000 data to the computer when the serial port is opened at 38400 bauds.
  • Do not lock up when connected to a Raspberry Pi (was bug #68).
  • Publish internal sensors data to serial outputs.
  • Save all NMEA and NMEA2000 messages to the SDCard again.

• 2018 02 16 - v1.2.2

  • Go back to older version of ESP8266 framework (2.3 via framework 1.5) to get rid of random crashes. Still need to investigate more but we do not need 2.4 at the moment.

• 2018 02 15 - v1.2.1

  • Send PGN 130314 for high-resolution barometer data on NMEA2000 networks (that is in addition to PGN 130310 which was already sent before).

• 2018 02 10 - v1.2.0

  • Configuration option for WiFi. KBox can act as an access point and can also connect to an existing network. Both are possible at the same time.
  • KBox now shows WiFi info on the screen (status as a client and as an access point), number of clients connected, IP address)
  • KBox now announces its SignalK "self" properly and you can set your own MMSI via the config file.
  • Updated ESP8266 framework version to 2.4.
  • Fixed a bug where SDCard would not show free space properly

• 2018 01 10

  • Fixed bug #69 - We were sending pressure in Pascal instead of Bars in NMEA XDR sentences for pressure.

• 2018 01 07

  • Data coming from NMEA2000 bus is now sent to SignalK websocket output and will be converted to NMEA0183 (if a conversion is available).
  • Added an IMU page to show heel/roll/pitch on the screen
  • Added options to configure orientation of KBox inside the boat (still needs some work before it supports all possible orientations)
  • IMU calibration will be automatically saved when IMU reports its calibrated
  • User can do a long-press in the IMU page to save current offset for pitch & heel

• 2018 01 04

  • Add support for parsing PGN127257 Attitude (roll/pitch/yaw)
  • Also improved the output in NMEA and SignalK format when some attitude values are unknown

• 2017 12 28

  • KBox now supports a configuration file (kbox-config.json) on the sdcard.
  • KBox supports sending data to NMEA outputs
  • Generated NMEA sentences can be configured independently for each output (nmea1/nmea2/wifi)
  • Frequency of IMU and Barometer updates can be configured
  • KBox can be configured to only listen on NMEA2000 bus and not send anything
  • WiFi module can be completely disabled (will save power)
  • tools/kbox.py can be used to read/write files to the SDCard over USB

• 2017 12 07

  • Merge develop branch into master - Start the changelog
  • The old master branch is not in kbox-v0