Smartcraft Retrofit on a 360DA

Here is a photo of the junction box in the engine room (before I plugged in the blue CAN cable running to the helm, which is hanging down at the bottom right of the photo). The bottom two CAN cables plug in to each engine. The yellow thing is a terminator cap.

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Here is the junction box at the helm (obviously I haven't mounted it yet). The blue wire in the top is the other end of the ER-HELM CAN cable. The wire on the bottom is the SC5000 harness. There is another yellow terminator cap, as well as a weather cap in the fourth spot on the bottom.

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The only difference between the port and starboard engines is that the port engine SC plug has a 6 inch "extension cord" plugged in to the SC recepticle. The starboard engine doesn't have it. I tried with this little adaptor and without it.

Here is the port engine SC connection:
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Here is the starboard SC connection (it is at the left of the photo):
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Lastly, here is a photo of the connections to the SC5000 and the gauges. NMEA is connected, as is the air temperature sensor and the little horn. The only plug on the harness not being used is the one labelled Ignition (and the two secondary gauge plugs). All this sounded fine according to the installation guide - I don`t have DTS, so the ignition connection is unused.
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Scott, I don't think I tried that. First thing tomorrow...
 
Thanks Spiro, that may be different than mine since that is the newer vessel view. My 2002 8.1s only work with the older system view display.
 
On my way to the office this morning I stopped by the marina and tried turning the ignition on with the new fuel tank senders disconnected. In fact, the only thing plugged in to the SC harness was the SC5000. It made no difference whatsoever - still no power to the SC5000.

Then, as I disconnected everything again, I noticed that the label on the SC5000 harness says "Vessel View", and was manufactured in 2008. Is it possible that although all the plugs fit properly, that I have the wrong harness?

The part number is 84-898273-A01. I'll call Mercury later this morning to ask.

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Andrew,

I'd second Scott's point about the fuel tank lines. Keep in mind you do splice into the pink wire, but you have to connect to the section going back to the tank.

Do you have any System level devices other than the SC5000? If you don't and that isn't working everything is going to be dead.

If you don't have anything but the SC5000, I have a Sc1000 systems monitor that I used initially. It is the outboard device. I bought it to use as test tool. PM me your address and I will mail it to you. You can plug it into one engine at a time and make sure things are working.

Henry
 
Thanks, Henry. I was careful to ensure I connected my SC fuel tank harnesses to the end of the pink wire coming from the fuel tank sending unit, not the end going back up to the helm.

Your offer to send me your testing SC1000 is very gracious - I'll PM you after I speak with Mercury regarding the harness that I'm using.

Thanks,
Andrew
 
Thanks, Scott. I just ordered another harness from FP. Should have it tomorrow.
 
Just an update - Ken at FP is quite sure (as is Scott) that the issue is the harness. New one coming via FedEx tomorrow morning.
 
Update: Success!

The new (proper) harness arrived this afternoon from the great folks at FP Marine. Ken is a valuable guy to have in the extended Sea Ray family...

After making the connections to the SC5000, it powered up right away. It was a relief to see it light up.

Making it understand I had two engines, and configuring it to understand where they both were wasn't as intuitive as I'd hoped, but after an hour of trying every option I got it figured out.

A search on CSR showed me a post from Scott detailing the button sequence to initiate the reconfigure screens.

I did, however, have to reconfigure it about 10 times until I finally got it right. The magic potion was using the "Change Engine Location" screen and setting it from STBD to PORT. This wasn't so intuitive. But, once done, all the gauges sprang to life, and everything works correctly.

One note - there as been some discussion about whether analog and SC gauges can coexist. My experimentation shows that they indeed can, as long as the analog fuel gauges are out of the loop. I have both full gauge clusters working at the same time (except the analog fuel gauges), and it is all cool. In fact, keeping the analog gauges hooked up reassured me that the SC gauges were displaying the correct data.

Now, I just have to cut the mounting hole for the SC5000, and move the ST60 to a new location. The final step will be to figure out how to deal with the old gauge wiring. Any suggestions? Henry - I think you previously mentioned that you left it all in tact tied up behind the helm. How did you protect the leads from shorting anything out?



Thanks to everyone for their kind advice and help. Had I had the correct harness to begin with, this really would have been a plug and play upgrade.

The last question goes to the guy on eBay who sold me the SC5000 with a newer Vessel View harness: what kind of grief did he have trying to plug his new Vessel View display into his old System View harness??? It must have been as much grief as I just went through... (he was upgrading his newer 340). I wonder how long it took him to figure it out...
 
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OK, success, but with some issues...

Tonight, I spent a few hours actually "installing" the SC5000. Prior to tonight, I only had it "hooked up", not actually mounted and screwed in.

Issues: the installation guide says for a two-engine install, that only one engine can supply power to the CAN network. So, I had disconnected the power connection (a male-female 3-pin connector about 3 inches behind the smartcraft plug on the 8.1 engine) on the starboard engine. With the old analog gauges still hooked up - and with all the new SC stuff hooked up - the engines behaved properly.

Tonight, I disconnected all the old gauges. I left the old wiring harness in tact and used electrical tape to "seal" all the connectors from the old harness.

After completing the install of the SC5000 and moving the TriData, I tried to fire up the engines. The port engine fired up as it always does. The starboard engine's starter turned as it always does, but the engine didn't fire.

In troubleshooting, I decided to plug in the smartcraft power connection on the starboard engine (the port engine was already connected). Once I did this, the starboard engine fired up right away, and both engines behaved properly - including all the Smartcraft readouts on the gauges and the SC5000.

Then, when I tried to shutdown the starboard engine, it didn't shut down when I moved the ignition switch to "off". The port engine switch now powers both engines off.

Also, I noticed I only get one "beep" when moving the engine switches to "on" - only the port engine gives the pre-startup beep, not the starboard.

Any ideas???? The symptoms make me think I need to connect a wire or two from the old harness - but that is a wild guess...
 
I slept on this problem, and had a hunch. This morning I examined the old gauges wiring harness. Both tachs had two sets of ingition wires (purple) that were connected to one post on each tach. My hunch was that each of these two sets (port and stbd) needed to be connected together - which they would have been when they were connected to the post on the back of the tachs.

So, I clipped off the ring connectors and used the large yellow butt connectors from my Thomas and Betts kit and connected the 5 purple leads from the stbd tach together, and the 4 purple leads from the port tach together.

I then unplugged the CAN power connector on the STBD engine harness.

My hunch was correct. Now, the ignition switches work properly, and I get warning beeps from both engines.

My job is done - the Smartcraft upgrade is complete.

Well, I still have to install the steering sensor (rudder position sensor)... but that can wait for another day...
 
Andrew,

When I did my conversion I left the 10 pin round plug that connected the helm analog gauges and helm ignition switch in place, as well as all of its sub harnesses under the dash. On my sterndrive engine that plug is located stbd side rear. This supplies power to the ignition circuit. This is the upstream source of power for the engines. It sounds like you might have inadvertently disconnected one of the gauge sub-harnesses that also is carrying the stbd ignition power when you disconnected the gauges.

With that 'jumper' wire in place the port ignition power is being fed to both engines, in effect back washing into the stbd circuit.


Henry
 
Thanks, Henry. I left the old harness in place as well, and did not disconnect anything other than all of the individual ring connectors from the posts on the backs of all the old gauges. On the tachs, there were 4 ignition wires on the port and 5 on the stbd. The 4 port ones were grouped in twos (each pair had one ring connector), and the 5 stbd ones were grouped in a pair and a set of three. It is these sets of wires that I reconnected (ie: I connected the four port leads together and the 5 stbd leads together).

For the rest of the old harness leads I just used electrical tape to cover the ring connectors in an effort to prevent any shorts. Perhaps later I will snip off all the old ring connectors and seal the ends with heat shrink tubing - but I wanted to leave as much intact in case I had to revert to the old gauges for some yet unforseen problem...
 
I had the same problem - when hooking up my GPS - one engine I couldn't shut off independently. I installed too many junction boxes. Which created a loop. Removed the extra junction box and everything was fine.
 
One last puzzle from my Smartcraft install. My NMEA data that feeds the Smartcraft harness is coming from my C80. Just about everything is working (ie: displaying correctly on the SC5000) except speed. Depth, water temp, and bearing all seem correct - I just can't figure out what NMEA sentence to have "turned on" in the output settings from the C80 to make the speed appear correctly on the SC5000.

Has anyone solved this riddle?
 
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