Trawler automation with DeviceNet

For many of us, fishing is a pastime that involves going to a lake with a rod, some bait and lots of time to kill. However, there is a lot more time, effort and complicated equipment involved for a commercial fishing vessel to go out to sea. By using innovative technology like DeviceNet, many of the typical challenges once experienced on this type of ship can be reduced. Since 1960, Simunovich Fisheries has been a privately owned fishing company in New Zealand. Today, they own the largest fleet of fishing vessels in the nation's fishery. Their success in the industry was not about to be extinguished due to a fire on board the Ocean Breeze, one of the vessels in their fleet. After nine million dollars worth of fire damage, Simunovich Fisheries was faced with the need to rebuild.

Fred Hansford of FHE Electrical was brought on to this project to determine what the best solution would be for the Ocean Breeze. Hansford's prior experience with the marine industry proved to be extremely useful for this project. Supplying all of the equipment, FHE engineered the system in conjunction with John Wright, an electrical engineer at Simunovich Fisheries. This project was met head-on with the initial challenge of the ship's location - it normally operates thousands of kilometers from the nearest land. In addition, traditional wiring on a ship is both difficult and expensive with multi-core cables running everywhere. As a result, this project would have required extra cores in each cable to retrieve the additional information from the devices connected to the network. After recognizing the possibilities in a marine application, FHE presented DeviceNet as an option.

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