Volvo Penta Easy Connect and Garmin Chartplotter compatibility snafu

[Red Raven]

Just a heads up for those who may add the Volvo Penta Easy Connect adaptor to add smart phone Bluetooth interface to your Volvo engine.

I added the Volvo PentaEasy Connect Bluetooth interface to our 2014 R27 with Volvo D3-200 and Garmin GPSMAP 7212 Chartplotter over the winter.

Upon spring launch this week I found the chartplotter had no GPS signal. No boat position, no auto routing etc. Turns out the chartplotter was trying to use the Volvo Penta Easy Connect as its GPS source. I have no idea if the Easy Connect even has a GPS antenna!

To resolve the issue, thanks to Google and YouTube and a sharp Danish boat owner (not Ranger Tug or Cutwater) who happened to have the same issue, I had to go to the Garmin configuration settings for NMEA 2k communications and change the GPS preference from AUTO to the Garmin 19x series GPS antenna.

Works perfect now.

Happy Boating!

Curt

 

[madjack]

Good to know...thanks

 

[madjack]

double post...my bad

 

[Full_O_Fish]

As an addendum to this, I changed out the old/original Volvo nmea2000 gateway for the easy connect last season and ran into a similar issue, however it may be worse...

The easy connect automatically takes priority as an instance 0 device on the nmea network for ALL data types regardless of whether sensors are attached/installed on the engine and the Garmin system uses it as a priority. For GPS the source can be changed through the above mentioned method, but not all data sources can be selected/changed in this way.

For example the perfectly working nmea2000 rudder indicator had always been populated and accurate. As soon as the easy connect gateway went in, no more rudder indicator.... As long as the ignition is turned on, but turn off the ignition so the gateway is off and back comes the rudder. If you have a rudder sensor connected to the engine harness, then it gets used when the engine ignition is on and goes off or reverts to the other when the ignition is killed.