Hi Bill, There are a few ways to skin that cat. I'm also an IT guy, we live for workarounds :-)
Skin the cat #1 To Navico's point: It would probably be somewhat of a feat to get the Zeus2 to recognize a 20 + year old WP 30 as a bonafide NMEA2000 modern day autopilot. Someone could spend months researching , write some fancy code to fool the Zeus, build that into an Arduino board, plug it in between, spend quite a few $$$ on ancillary stuff, and fool with it for untold hours to make it work. --- > not my speed. Skin the cat #2: Spend about $2,800 - $3,200 to get a proper controller CPU / hydraulic or $$ mechanical under the deck steering quadrant driving system, build the fiberglass mounts needed, drop the rudder to fit, etc, etc. For all that you get to use the cool Zeus autopilot functions / screens and have a robust blue water ready autopilot system. Most likely the thing to do for serious offshore work / not necessary for land locked Lake Lanier Georgia. Skin the cat # 3: Play it safe and spend 200 bucks / buy the Actisense NMEA Buffer SBF-3-BAS to make sure you don't fry your 1,000 bucks + chartplotter, ( http://www.allgadgets.co.uk/marine/pc/Actisense-NMEA-Buffer-NBF-3-BAS-p532.htm) and hook-up the Autopilot to use it's own Steer to wind function or follow waypoints dictated by your routes in Zeus. You don't necessarily have to use the Zeus autopilot functions. Using the video / NMEA0183 cable connected to Zeus and running it as designed it will broadcast all the necessary wind / depth / speed / heading / cross track / waypoint information to NMEA0183. The old WP30 is actually designed to listen to that broadcast info and react accordingly (It's supposed to do it quite well). You just make sure your Zeus is on and configured to broadcast then you hold the "Standby" WP30 button for a few seconds, and click both left and right arrows (On the WP 30 controller) at the same time. Done! Now the WP30 is a slave tho whatever Zeus is broadcasting and everything is working as designed by Navico 20+ years ago. Option #3 Works for me. Best of luck with the project. Francois Rivard 1990 34+ "Take Five" Lake Lanier, GA
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