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What you need
The gateway
One CanCan running the NMEA 2000 firmware, product ID 010010004 — either generation. A v2 box needs one extra setting, see below.
On the NMEA 2000 side
| A working NMEA 2000 backbone | powered and terminated, with the equipment already commissioned on it. The gateway reads a network; it does not build one |
| Equipment the gateway knows | Victron, MG, Arco Zeus, Vetus/Maxwell — the exact list is in Reference — NMEA 2000 gateway. Anything else on the backbone is ignored |
The equipment must be addressed on the NMEA 2000 side before it is useful on the MUXEN side: the gateway takes the MUXEN instance number of each translated device from the instance the equipment claims on the NMEA 2000 network. Two Victron devices left on instance 0 give you one MUXEN device, not two.
Wiring
| Connector | Goes to | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| CAN 1 | the boat's MUXEN bus | 500 kbit/s |
| CAN 2 | the NMEA 2000 backbone | 250 kbit/s — fixed by the firmware, it cannot be changed by configuration |
250 kbit/s is the NMEA 2000 standard speed, and it is what the firmware sets when it starts, whatever the board description says. There is no parameter for it.
Both are ordinary 120 Ω CAN buses: two wires and a common ground, one 120 Ω termination at each physical end of each bus and nowhere else. The gateway is terminated only if it happens to be at the end of a segment — on an NMEA 2000 backbone it never is, since it hangs off a drop.
The two buses stay electrically separate. Nothing from the MUXEN bus reaches the NMEA 2000 backbone except the commands and the battery data this firmware deliberately publishes there.
The gateway is a node on the NMEA 2000 network
It claims an address of its own and answers the network like any other device. To an MFD or a Cerbo GX it appears as a Victron device of class Electrical Generation, function Battery, model CanCan Muxen. That is normal, and it is how it is allowed to write to Victron equipment.
The box's own inputs and outputs
Two relays, two dry-contact inputs, two analog inputs — available here as on every CanCan, and independent of the NMEA 2000 function. They are off by default; see Reference. On this firmware each relay can additionally be driven by an equation written into Relay1Eqn / Relay2Eqn, evaluated from what passes on the MUXEN bus.