Yeah that will work. That one is RJ45 female socket - so you’ll need another RJ45 - RJ45 male to male (eg a normal computer network cable)
Small chance you will need a cross over network cable if you don’t get a link light on your wireless bridge wired network port.
Thanks for the help, here in the US, it is tough to integrate anything that is not “Lowrance”
is it the same where you are?
Has it been determined if this works with the FS series also? I believe they do not have WIFI, but do have a hardwired ethernet port that may provide the same access?
Hi Marko
I had a look and seems lowrance elite FS does support screen mirroring. So i think hooking up your wireless bridge to the ethernet port would work fine.
That is very good news. Thank you very much for responding.
Hello.
Hi aussiemaverick,
nice to read this topic!
I started working on it straight away. I have connected my Lowrance HDS pro to a WiFi router and I can stream the lowrance via a WiFi bridge to the VLC app.
I just can’t figure out how to get the video images from the Lowrance into the HUB.
Can you explain the steps on how to get the Lowrance into the HUB, or is there another topic for this that can help me?
Hi @Marcel007
Do you mean HUB or HUD ? If its the HUD heads up display in mission planner, i can’t remember 100% all the steps but here is based on my memory.
Get IP address of lowrance HDS. (in my example 192.168.1.10)
Make sure VLC can display HDS stream ok then close VLC
Gstreamer installed in default location (c:/gstreamer)
Mission planner installed
On MP HUD, go to Video → Set GStreamer source.
rtspsrc location=rtspu://192.168.1.10:554/screenmirror latency=50 ! decodebin3 ! videoconvert ! video/x-raw,format=BGRA ! appsink name=outsink
Note - change the 192.168.1.10 to whatever IP your lowrance HDS is.
Beautifully done! As long as you purchase a 4G router, you can remotely control your boat in a LAN within a 4G network for free, and you can remotely control your boat without distance restrictions.
I hope you can continue to study how to achieve remote control lowrance
I provide an idea, it should be possible to remotely control lowrance, deploy the host on land, and deploy sonar on unmanned ships. There is a cable connection between the lowrance host and the sonar. I analyzed the connection method and it should be an RS422 connection. Two of the cables are tx, which provide power to the sonar at the same time. The other two are RX, which receive data from the sonar. signal, I guess all sonar signals at different frequencies are transmitted to the host, and the host can choose to parse and display the sonar signals at different frequencies.
If you use the RS422 to RJ45 network interface, you can transmit the sonar signal remotely, thereby deploying the host on land and deploying sonar on the unmanned ship. The disadvantage is that the signal is a little delayed.
Hi aussiemaverick,
sorry for the late respons.
I have the lowrance working on VLC.
But I can’t Gstreamer to work.
I suspect something went wrong when downloading Gstreamer. Which version of Gstreamer did you download? (Or a link)
The Lowrance works on VLC.
I installed Gstream.
Mission planner installed, and connect via WiFI.
But when I go to MP HUD - Video - Set Gstreamer source. I get this message
Someone knows what Im doing wrong??
Hello everyone.
.
Do you know if this can work with other sonars lines like the Lowrance Hook
And do you know if the ethernet on the psi-1 could be useful. Like a active listening 3-in-1 transducer plugged in the psi-1, and the psi-1 plugged to a rPi (would it need the hub?)
Trying to use this with an ASV so trying to have it the most automatic possible (but that’s after being able to connect haha) Did your setting needs hanging at every startup with the HDS?
Hi nice thread!
Which lowrance models are able to work ? Are HDS 8, Ti not 2 supposed to work?
In my understanding all lowrance model with nmea 2000 can work!
I expect only the lowrance units that have ethernet will output the full sonar images. I think every HDS will work since they all have ethernet.
The serial ports (NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000) are for just basic information swapping like GPS location, basic depth readings.
I’ve been able connect to the screen mirroring over two cellular hot spots. I added a mini router that allowed for a VPN client and a cellular hot spot on the boat. The router has to port forward VPN client connections to port 554 to the Lowrance local IP. Then from my cell phone with the VPN set up I can access the screen mirroring with VLC. Here’s a quick sketch:
There are a couple things I’ve learned from this though.
First, I had some weird interference with the FRSKY radio reception. Everything worked on the bench but out in the field the radio distance was cut drastically short. Ditching the cellular and router brought connectivity back. I’m hoping it’s the proximity of the router but I’m still testing that.
Second, I’d really like to get connectivity working with the Lowrance App. Being able to adjust depth range remotely would save me having to re-run surveys. Being able to see the depth remotely will help but being able to correct it without recalling the craft would be even better. I’m struggling to determine how to trick the app into connecting over the VPN and how to forward the traffic to the Lowrance on the router are just out of my reach.
I would love suggestions but I’m really just hoping this info helps someone else trying something similar.
Great post @FTWMaker
The diagram makes understanding your setup so much easier. Are you using the “link” app on the phone / tablet ? If VLC works, then the link app should work for at least mirroring. You will probably need to add the HDS manually - just with the IP you use for VLC.
To get screen control working - lets get a bit more information.
The cellular hotspot should have 2 addresses (ignore VPN IP for now)
wifi interface IP - eg will be a private one like 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x)
cell interface IP - we want to find out if this is a real public IP - or also a private one. If its private - then thats called cgnat - and yes you will need VPN on top. Don’t share your actual IP, just need to know if its public or private.
Here i’ve done a diagram of best case scenario for remote viewing and remote control of lowrance HDS via 4G/5G.
If you have best case scenario on the boat side - it should be pretty straight forward to configure the VPN stuff per this document and the remote control should work fine. The further away you are from the best case scenario - the more complicated it gets.
Thanks Aussiemaverick! Your labels are clearer than mine and I appreciate you catching onto and continuing my wired vs wireless line type convention!
That was my first attempt and how I picked the GL.iNet router on amazon originally. It is running OpenWRT out of the box and includes the VPN server. When I tried it I couldn’t get the land side VPN client to find the boat side VPN server with DDNS. The DDNS connected fine over a standard network connection but failed when behind the cellular hotspot. So the next step was to use a hard keyed IP. I found the Hotspots IP and pointed the client that way. That didn’t work either and a little googling hinted at cellular service data plans being problems for this type of thing. Apparently there are layers of routing on the cellular network side that interfere with this type of effort. The concept is novel to me though so I’m likely overlooking or misunderstanding something.
After that I tried giving both boat side and land side VPN client credentials to an existing VPN server of mine that’s “land locked”. I was able to confirm both clients were connected. I still couldn’t find the Lowrance from Land Side until I noticed/realized that the router is the VPN client and the Lowrance is on a separate local network behind the routers IP. (I should have known it sooner, b/c it seems obvious now) That’s when I added the firewall rule to port forward 554 to the Lowrance. Bingo. Full remote view.
There are two issues I’m chasing now;
quick reply
Almost certainly the 2.4Ghz radio in the hotspot is whats interfering badly with the FRSKY. I had similar issues. I tried all the different 2.4ghz channels - and none worked well. I moved to 5ghz only.
Port 5353 is bonjour - which is an auto discovery protocol.
Bonjour is what Lowrance use to automagically discover what HDS units are on the local network. For my setup I just configured the HDS IP manually in the app.
Got’cha. Good to know on the 2.4Ghz. How are you manually configuring the HDS IP in the app? I’ve not found how to do that. Even changing the SSID and PW is a PITA.
