BLOC 8 v2 — Overview

A BLOC 8 is the box that switches the boat's circuits. Lights, pumps, fans, hydraulic valves, a windlass contactor: the load is wired to one of its eight outputs, and from then on it is turned on and off from the boat's screens, from a switch panel, or by the box itself.

Unlike a gateway, a BLOC 8 does not translate anything. It is the device that carries the current. When it is powered off, or when it decides its supply is out of range, nothing it feeds is alive. That is worth knowing before choosing what to put on it.

Each output measures the current it delivers and reports it. Each has its own trip level and its own delay, so a short circuit cuts one circuit and not the boat. Nothing is user-replaceable inside: there is no fuse to change, and an output that has tripped comes back by being commanded off and on again.

One box, one job. The hardware is the same for every application; what the box does is decided by the firmware loaded into it. That firmware carries a product ID — the nine-digit number that names the finished product in the MUXEN catalogue — and the boat's Brain uses it to know which firmware belongs in which box.

A BLOC 8 v2 also drives a MUXEN e-paper panel: eight cells, one per output, each showing what its circuit is doing and each with a button under it. The panel is powered and fed by the bloc over its own link and keeps working when the CAN bus does not — see The hardware.

The catalogue

Product ID	Product	Application
010020008	BLOC 8 v2 — eight power outputs	power outputs

One product, one released firmware. The application has its own manual — follow the link above. Start there for wiring the loads, for the output settings, for the equations that decide when a circuit comes on, and for commissioning. What you are reading covers what is true of every BLOC 8 v2, whatever firmware it carries.

What is common to all of them

• One bus. Always the MUXEN CAN bus, always 500 kbit/s, always the same addressing: a function (what kind of device this is) and an instance (which one of them). See Reference.
• Configuration. No web page, no configuration file. Every setting is read and written over the CAN bus from the Brain, with muxen-uds. A factory-fresh box answers on the bus but publishes nothing, and holds every output off, until it has been given an instance number.
• Outputs held safe by default. A box with no instance number, or whose supply is outside its configured window, keeps all eight outputs off whatever anyone asks of it.
• Firmware updates. Over the same bus, without opening the box — see Loading and updating a firmware. A failed update cannot brick a box: the previous firmware comes back by itself.
• One LED, one panel. The system LED is the local diagnostic; the e-paper panel says the rest. See Common mistakes.

Where to go next

I want to…	Read
know what is in the box and how to wire it	The hardware
load or update a firmware	Loading and updating a firmware
understand why it is not working	Common mistakes
look up an ID, a function code, a LED code	Reference
set up the outputs and commission the box	the application manual