Faria Gateway Box Replacement with Garmin MFD

[WakeHawk]

Brief update.. Finally got my hands on a VMH 35. Wiring was straight forward for my configuration, just had to use 4 of the wires, the 12V+ & -, the switched 12V, and the optional illumination wire. I pinned in the constant 12V+ in with the N2K 12V+ in the 4 port DT connector, the switched 12V goes with the purple wire in the 4 port DT connector, the 12V- goes with the ground wire I added to the 4 port DT connector, and the illumination wire gets pinned in the 12 port DT connector that contains the fuel sender wire. The pic below is the wiring harness I built for the VMH 35, and N2K power wire, it also contains the wiring that goes to the resistive sensor to N2K adapter for the fuel tank level.



Here is a pic of the final mock up. The system all plays nice together, the Garmin MFD is sending the engine data from the J1939 network out over the N2K network, so hook up of the VMH 35 is simply hook up the wiring harnesses to the boat, plug in the harness into the gauge, and hook into the N2K network.


Next will be building the dash plate and support structure out of aluminum and tidy up the wiring under the helm and will be ready for the weather to get decent for sea trials.

[shag]

Looking good pal! I am so far behind on mine - working a lot and waiting on a couple small parts...

[Miljack]

This is soo cool, great work! Electrical work=magic, can't see electrons, so magic...

[WakeHawk]

Got the permanent structure built for the dash. Used 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" x 1/8" aluminum angle to build the brackets, and 1/8" aluminum plate to build the dash plate. Used 1/4" x 20 stainless steel fasteners to bolt it all together.


Top and bottom support brackets.


Top angle clips through bolted into the fiberglass helm to mount the new hardware to.


Here is what replaces the gateway box. On the right is the Veratron tank level adapter, and in the middle is the 4 port N2K network tee, the yellow cable powers the network, the tank level adapter hooks in there and there are 2 N2K cables that go to the Garmin MFD and the Veratron VMH 35. On the right hand side is one of the terminating resistors and the other end has a cable that goes over to the other side of the boat where the Fusion stereo and an air temperature thermometer hook into the N2K network.



A couple of shot of the new dash assembly being bolted in to the helm. The top angle tabs and the bottom bracket are the only places where I through bolted, the rest of the assembly I drilled and tapped threads in for easy installation and maintenance down the road.


Here is the final assembly. Next is to test run everything in the driveway on the hose, then just have to button up the top dash pad and close up the bottom access panel and will be ready to take it out on the water.

[MN Ryan]

Nice work!

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk

[shag]

Looks awesome! I would like to do something like that but want to keep my factory gauges... That's fantastic man!

[Fastsccaguy]

Very nice work! Do you have some water time with it now? How do you like it?


Edited to meet forum rules. Sent a direct message with a few questions.

[WakeHawk]

I've had the boat on the water 3 times with the new set up. So far the Garmin and VMH 35 work great in the dash. I did need to play with the brightness settings a little bit for bright sunlight, put the Garmin in auto brightness mode and it works well, and turned the brightness up all the way on the VMH 35 for daytime setting. Since I wired the VMH 35 up to the running light pin in the 12 pin DT connector, it has 2 brightness settings, so when I turn the nav lights on I have the brightness turned down for running in lower light. The Zero Off being completely separate from the gateway box still works as it always has, it and the check engine light are the only components reused from the original dash. Both the VMH 35 and Garmin can have custom alarms set up, so for instance fuel level on the VMH 35 I have it set up to alarm at 15%, once it hits this level it will pop up on the gauge low fuel and will turn on the low fuel warning light, on the Garmin it is a little more subtle, and it was default programed for low fuel level to be 10%, when it reaches this level the gauge on the MFD will turn red to draw your attention to it. One small issue I need to troubleshoot is the tank level adapter is influenced when the boat is in the full running mode (engine running & all systems running) vs. just coded in with just the stereo and MFD running (like accessory position on a vehicle). I ran the old fuel out of the boat down to around 10% reading while the engine was running, when I fueled up I was expecting to put in around 35 gallons, but was topped off at 26. So it looks like the way I have it wired using the existing wiring in the 12 pin DT connector, once everything is up and running it is influencing the resistance in that circuit, I suspect it has to do with the ground. So with a full tank, it is telling my I'm at 87% with the engine running, with the engine off and just the MFD and stereo running, it will read 100%. So I might have to build a wiring harness and hook the tank level adapter directly to the sender, but I can live with this since I actually have some fuel level indication and now know that I actually have more fuel on board than is indicated, so this troubleshooting may get delayed a while depending on weather.

The stereo networks in and works nicely with the Garmin MFD, I can control nearly everything from the helm, to get into some of the more advanced features like the wifi and network settings I need to do that from the Fusion head unit, but all music controls are available at the helm. There have been some minor issues with the Fusion head unit. One day it was shutting down my amps for no apparent reason. There was a software update that came out since then that I installed and since then have not had any issues with the amps being shut down, but had some random loss of bluetooth connection to my phone. I have since completely deleted the pairing and redone it and have been good so far. Both of these are minor issues that can be worked around if needed. The sound quality is excellent with this head unit and the JL Audio amps, and one really cool feature is speed adjusted volume, once set up correctly, it automatically increases the volume as the boat increases speed. This is made possible with the N2K network, the head unit is able to use several different data sources to configure this feature, I used RPM and it works really nice.

Overall I am really happy with how this project came out. There are a few minor stereo glitches that I hope get sorted out with software updates, but overall this really improved the electronics situation on the boat.

[shag]

Great job man!

[WakeHawk]

Well, one thing I was curious of was how the check engine light would work. Last Saturday, while I was surfing, the check engine light came on so the driver shut it down. Fortunately I was able to replicate the error when I climbed back in the boat and drove it for surfing, with the new system, the check engine light functions as it originally did, in additions to the check engine light coming on, a red error code banner alert comes on across the bottom of the Garmin with the code of the fault. I was too busy paying attention to the Garmin and check engine light to check and see what the VMH 35 did. One nice thing about the Garmin, is it stores any alarms in a page called the warning manager, so if there is an intermittent code coming in you don't need to be right there to see what is going on. Here is a pic of the warning manager:

The 2 unit voltage alarms are from running all 3 ballast pumps with the engine off, when the 3rd one starts it draws the voltage just low enough that that alarm sometimes comes in. The 2 SPN 731-FMI4 codes, I had to look up, those are knock sensor errors. With the original Faria system, a "Knock Sensor Error See Dealer" or something like that would scroll across one of the bottom LED screens, but if you didn't catch the first part right away you would just see "See Dealer" the first time I had a knock sensor fail it was intermittent and took about a month or so to replicate the issue and catch the full message. So aside from having to look up the error code, this is a big improvement over the original system. I looked through some of the Faria manuals I have downloaded over the years and one of them has all the SPN codes for the errors that could be reported, I now have that manual downloaded on my phone. So changed out both knock sensors, had the boat on the lake this last Tuesday and Wednesday, and all is good with the world whether driving for wakeboarding or wake surfing.

[Spud]

Awesome work

[shag]

Again, great info!

[Miljack]

WakeHawk do you have an update on your MFD installation and usage? Do you think shag use of the Fox adapter box eliminate the wiring dancing you did with the existing Nautique/Faria gateway box? To me it looks like the Fox box would save a tremendous amount of wiring/work that you had to do to utilize the stock wiring & connectors, would you agree? Just trying to get my head around this type of project.

[shag]

@MIIjack, I still need to try it out, but I just downloaded the Fox app as well. It appears you can get every bit of engine data you could ever want, just as if you hooked up a computer to the diagnostic port. I doubt you can execute anything, and I wouldn't want to, but just another benefit.

[WakeHawk]

Miljack, the wiring was the easiest part of this project. All the wiring in the boat was in good condition, so it was much easier to build adapter wiring harnesses with DT connectors than to pull new wiring from the engine compartment all the way to the helm. This made the wiring part of the install plug and play. The gateway box is completely removed from the boat and has been sitting on a shelf in the garage for a year now! The only issue I had using the factory wiring was the fuel sender wiring where when the boat was running, there was something going on in the circuit to influence the resistance so it would through the gauge reading off. This was easily fixed by running wiring straight from the fuel level sender to the resistive NMEA 2000 adapter, once I did this there is no difference in tank level reading whether the boat is running or shut down with just the stereo and Garmin display running. Using the Garmin is very straight forward and user friendly, was very easy to set up custom gauge screens for different situations, can run the stereo from the Garmin, has GPS with a full set of charts for North America, Chirp sonar, probably some more features I'm not remembering off the top of my head. I think shag boat took a lightning strike, so he may be dealing with damaged wiring so using a Fox box might be the best solution for his situation. For boats that have intact wiring, building adapter harnesses and using the factory wiring will save a lot of wire pulling and fiberglass cuts. Specifically for the engine signals, if the MFD has a dedicated J1939 port, like most Garmin units, it is very easy to build a wiring adapter to go from the 3 pin DT connector from the boat's wiring harness to the MFDs J1939 cable. If the MFD does not have a J1939 port, Veratron builds a J1939 to NMEA 2000 LinkUp adapter that is very easy to program, would just use a 3 pin DT connector, to a 6 pin DT connector that the LinkUp adapter uses to wire it in.

Building the new dash plate and supports to mount everything in was more time consuming. It was not really difficult, just very tedious to get the shape just right and then cutting it out of 1/8" aluminum was time consuming. Overall I'm very pleased with how the project came out and do not miss anything with the old dash and electronics.