Straining Toward Nomadness

I miss the mental simplicity and steady progress of only working on one thing. I reminisce about Epic Projects of yesteryear, and they all seem to share the single characteristic of being grand obsessions so all-consuming that the rest of my life was relegated to meatspace maintenance and the bare-minimum business of hustling for cash to stay marginally afloat. Clear. Focused. Irresponsible, but who cares... the project grows.

Things are different now, and it's exhausting. What I want is to be immersed in the ship with a departure plan clear in my mind, living in a haze of solder smoke backlit by software-driven blinkies, mechanical systems humming away in the background, the to-do list steadily shortening, test-jaunts as simple as casting off docklines and taking her for a spin. In some ways, that's even more compelling a vision than sailing off into the sunset; nothing like getting my geek on with that old envelope-pushing passion.

But the current reality is strangely orthogonal, as I attempt to multitask a dozen projects at once: aboard the boat, in the lab, on the computer. It's all fun; every little invention is a delight... but there are so many of them that I lose track of design documents on my own hard drive and get a wave of guilt when passing shelves laden with new toys. I've even declared a moratorium on acquisitions until I can put more of the previous ones to use and clear some mental shelf space.

Part of this is the huge lunge needed to claw my way out of the mire of complexity that is this land-based lifestyle, and it's not just the relatively trivial problem of dumping a household to go cruising. Hell, that's the easy part, even with the new vegetable garden, a loving mate, and her dog:


The hard part is the Microship lab, which is not micro at all: 3000 square feet packed with geekstuff from previous techomadic endeavors. When I walk around with a clear head, I realize just how little I actually use... so the Polaris mobile lab project continues to occupy center stage despite the seductive allure of Nomadness rusting slowly in the sunshine. The carpentry is almost done (today I wrapped up fabrication of 12 hinged panels that make the 45° jump between wall and newly insulated roof, providing a cable channel for all the benches). Once I distill the tonnage into a sleek 320 square-foot portable system, on-site boat projects should be less hobbled by the constant need to make 3-hour runs back to home base.

Since I also have to make a living while all this is going on, that project is starting to accumulate enough information for another book... a detailed how-to on turning a stock Wells-Cargo trailer into a mobile shop, with sections on carpentry, power, security, benches, inventory, and so on.

Of course, everything feels like a potential publishing project now; the Reaching Escape Velocity book is finished and available... a surprisingly smooth process. That's an Amazon link there in the previous sentence; it can also be ordered from the individual book page at CreateSpace (I make more money from the latter, but it's much less convenient for the buyer since there is no ability to queue up a multi-book order to get free shipping). I also deleted the PDF version that was for sale, and offer the book in my online store (signed if you like).

This information should help many projects get off the ground... the arts of working with sponsors, media, and volunteers are discussed in detail, along with the, um, obsessive focus on a massively complex undertaking that is the, um, yeah, the most important single thing you can be doing. I think I need to re-read this and apply it to Nomadness development!

There's an outline over yonder if you'd like to learn more (I'd paste it here, but HTML lists get all spacey in Blogger).

Speaking of books, now that I have been through the CreateSpace publishing process, I'm coaching an old friend as she brings her book to life. This is going to be interesting; I set up a simple web page for her and will post the occasional teaser until Saved for the Demon is available. It's a wild and engaging tale, believe me.

Boat Updates

Now that the weather is frankly gorgeous, I should be aboard every day working on ship projects... but instead I am in the forest, hustling to get the mobile lab ready for deployment. There has been some progress, however.

The most urgent class of tasks at the moment involves issues that impact my ability to cast off the lines and go for a sail. One of those was trivial-but-maddening: tool drawers that flew open at the slightest hint of roll, slamming to the extreme of travel and back with every wavelet. Clearly unacceptable. Once, long ago, they had clever plastic spring-latch assemblies embedded in a finger-hole nacelle, but both that and the corresponding strikes are no longer viable.

The redneck solution (pillow and duct-tape) got me through last season, but that's just embarrassing. Given all the constraints (not be an ankle-biter, not require major surgery, not be too expensive, not be ugly), the answer took longer than expected to emerge... but it was my favorite sort of fix: use something already in stock!

All it took was a pair of Southco soft draw latches:


These things are great (and available from McMaster-Carr) - they are soft and pliable, easy to use, and even look pretty good. Technically, they are not pulling in the right direction for use on drawer faces, but I'm confident that the problem is solved.

Speaking of problems, I'm dealing with a couple of lighting issues. The first is the wimpy solar LED RailLight that not only rusts in a single season, but has poor-quality mounting hardware, batteries that don't make it through the night, and non-marinized components. One of mine came with a cracked globe and missing screw... I would call this a good idea cheesily implemented, and thus a waste of money. I thought I was going to relocate my pair to the garden after deciding they aren't boat-worthy, but they didn't survive being wet and neither works... so off they go to the dumpster after I harvest the little solar cells:


The second lighting-related annoyance is actually from a manufacturer that I have respected for years - AquaSignal. I used their lights on the Microship with Luxeon LED retrofits and 350 mA constant current sources, and naturally looked to their new Series 32 when preparing to replace the old incandescents.

Well, It's the most astonishingly fragile assembly I've ever seen in this product space, and the instructions are useless.

Apparently, they expect this to stay rooted to the harsh stern environment with only a little expanding plastic bushing on one side, and nothing on the other but the friction of the wire-exit tube. Behind the gasket, it is potted; there is no mounting base (the substrate is actually very well-made and substantial, but I suspect drilling an extra mounting hole is not what they had in mind). I'm suspicious of the wire exit, which appears to have a capillary path to the interior... though when I peek inside, I suspect there is enough potting.

Short of bonding this in place with 3M 4200, which may be the best move, I was so convinced that I was missing some intended mounting scheme that I even posted to Cruisers Forum in the hopes that I'd be derisively pointed to an obvious RTFM-ish solution. No such luck. Other people have been gluing them on as well. Not quite sure what the company was thinking, but despite excellent light output, I cannot recommend these:


Next up: fabrication of the stainless cage around the woodstove (all parts on hand), mounting the bracket for stowing the dink's petite little outboard, fixturing the water heater behind the shower enclosure, extracting the last of the old watermaker for the fellow who bought its pump on eBay, mounting the shore-water entry where the old water heater stack exited, and starting the power system retrofit.

A Paleo-Techomadic Take on Location Independence

In my previous post, I mused about the sudden interest in something that has been central to my life since 1983... a number of variations on what is basically full-time travel augmented by geek tools that are now universal (and a way of thinking that makes it sustainable). Some people are even monetizing this, selling books, courses, coaching, and other materials... and indeed, when I look at how much of a conceptual leap it must be from the perspective of a life of employment, I suspect there is a market. I know that my 1993 First Steps document helped get a lot of people moving, and it even presupposed a set of technomadic urges. It really is simple in principle, but there are countless technical details that are not at all obvious, and it is good to see the aggregation of tips and techniques.

(attribution needed; this was in my old humor file)

I've been asked a few times if I'm annoyed that young pups are claiming to have just invented something that I've been doing for 25 years... but actually, the answer is no. The only irritating part is an occasional lack of historical perspective, but that's easily adjusted with blog comments and community participation. Otherwise, I think it's pretty cool that this toolset (both technical and intellectual) is finally accessible enough to become a trend, and the hype will probably calm down. I can think of four good reasons why someone might be motivated to contemplate full-time technomadics:

1. No choice in the matter, due to loss of home... might as well be proactive about it and design a rootless lifestyle to incorporate solid communication and productivity tools!
2. Discovering that one is spending so much time on the road servicing clients (or doing other gigs) that it makes sense to become decoupled from a home base. This is subject to context-switching overhead, and is best suited to either long on-site consulting gigs or short, high-paying ones that allow lots of travel time in between (the latter was the case when I was on an open-ended speaking tour for a few years).
3. Wanting to find a way to afford a life of full-time travel and exploration, without having to save up and then chip away relentlessly at what sailors call "the cruising kitty." Freelancing or practicing locally marketable skills while traveling is a highly effective business model... and predates me by a few centuries. I just added portable computers and network connectivity to the mix, unexpectedly becoming high profile in the process (selected thumbnails here and here, exhaustive list here).
4. Being obsessed with the geekery of the mobile platform. I'm also in this category (obviously), though it can get in the way of travel itself. Why am I conjuring a network of 15 Arduino nodes, a resource-management system, the on-board server, an integrated communication console, and a mobile lab to support it all... when I could forget the gizmos and go sailing during this gorgeous weather window? It's a sickness, I tellya.
   

I'm looking forward to seeing how this all evolves, now that one can realistically accessorize their preferred travel style with the tools necessary to be truly location-independent. I will close with a bit of self-indulgence... a complete scan of my article in the August 1984 issue of Popular Computing, 25 years ago. Each thumbnail below opens into a readable page; this was a fun one, and really captured the feel of this new way of life.

Digital Nomad Redux

Why does it take the stirrings of springtime to accelerate the indoor jobs, all those geeky things that should be done by the time it's warm enough to embed them in a boat? I sit at my desk, unencumbered by the customary layers of insulation, doing everything that I could have finished over the winter: populating the store, databasing sensor channels, eBaying, writing a book, assembling McMaster-Carr and Digikey orders for overdue projects, designing a marine datalogger product, distilling decades of accumulated gizmology into a sleek kit that can fit in a mobile lab... and of course finding time to tweet about it all. Meanwhile, real birds are a-twitter in the forest and the boat tugs at mooring lines stiffened by the windblown salt of winter storms.

We did take her for a spin, though. 'Twas Mother's Day weekend, and we planned to sail down to Camano for a relaxed day of anchoring with Adventuress and welcoming friends aboard for a potluck. Up early, stowing things for the anticipated gallop in perfect winds, energized by that nervous excitement that precedes the unfurling of long-dormant wings. But then, quoth Sky at the stern: "Um, I don't think we're going anywhere today."

An epic accumulation of biology clung to the rudder, and after considerable effort, we detached a clump with the approximate dimensions of a cushy recliner. Crusty barnacles yielded with a crunch as we passed the back of a brush head over the reachable parts of the hull; clouds of smaller stuff tinged with bottom-paint dust floated off with every stroke. All this would only have slowed us down somewhat, but I was more concerned with fouling of the unreachable Max-Prop and the raw-water intake. Block the latter; lose the engine.

We thus spent a perfect sunny day at the dock, then the fellows from Waterworx arrived to free-dive the hull. An hour later, she had a clean bill of health with the exception of a fully-dissolved nose zinc on the prop (to be replaced this week).

By then it was too late to go frolic, but the next morning we fired up the mighty Yanmar and tiptoed out of the channel in a minus tide for a windless crossing of Saratoga Passage. Not a particularly memorable day on the water, but it sure hit the spot... and we returned to a new slip amongst the live-aboards, leaving the old one open for transients. New friends already.

But I'm looking forward to more days like this:

Video by Sky, October 10, 2008, sailing off Camano Island. Music is Aldo Ciccolini playing Satie's impertinent little "Etre Jaloux De Son Camarade Qui A Une Grosse Tête" from the Peccadilles Importunes. (The CD is available here, and includes the delicious Gnossiennes that I have been playing.)

Rambling Updates on Many Fronts

Remember the Reaching Escape Velocity PDF that I mentioned recently, for sale in my online store, detailing the process of launching a gonzo engineering project with the help of sponsors, media, and volunteers? I decided that it would really be better as a hardcopy book instead of something that can be forwarded willy-nilly and uploaded to various PDF servers (as has happened with other projects). This seemed a good opportunity to get familiar with the CreateSpace publishing process... and so far, I'm impressed. The book is now in the final proofing cycle, and if I like what I see I will click the button to immediately take it live on Amazon. Here's the cover:


Update on May 20: It is now orderable from this page at CreateSpace, or from my own online store.

I know the cover has a slightly disturbing religious feel to it, all lavender and rainbows, but dang, it works so well. I did try to come up with something a bit more on the "escape velocity" theme, but I lack the Photoshoppery skills to do it well:

That's my old school bus, in which Maggie and I covered 16,000 miles around the US back in 1988-89, hauling the Winnebiko II to speaking gigs and promoting the Computing Across America book (which I think I'll re-issue via CreateSpace, with lots of updates and photos from the era). I don't know the photographer of that gorgeous shuttle launch photo from 2005 but will of course take it down (or add a credit) if there's any objection.

Speaking of my little storefront, I'm now a dealer for Sparkfun Electronics, makers of all sorts of geek goodies. I've started offering Arduinos, sensors, and various related items that are in some way relevant to "Boat Hacking," but am most excited about some of the value-added projects that are enabled by their offerings. I'm just wrapping up the prototype of a sealed GPS datalogger that can be left bolted in an exposed location, remote-controlled from below, serving up its accumulated track files via Bluetooth.

Another is a little USB environmental sensor suite that is just plain cool... I'm repackaging that for harsh environments as well, but also sell the bare board. I fired it up at my desk the other day, and could look at a "verbose" report updated every second:

Humidity=58.36 %
SHT Temperature=065.77 F
SCP Temperature=019.0 C
SCP Temperature=066.28 F
Pressure=101073 Pa
Light=963
Batt=0
Count=000140

Or a terse version, suited to comma-delimited database applications:

#54.89,065.82,019.0,066.28,101151,989,0,000276$

For a fraction of the cost of the marinized models, this delivers a lot of surprisingly high-res data... though of course it would very quickly die if subjected to even one droplet of seawater. I'm more likely to use it for interior conditions, and deploy a Maretron WSO100 at the masthead for the N2K stuff.

I finally started a database to keep track of all this... a quick survey reveals that I should not be surprised if the number of "data points" aboard Nomadness reaches 1000. This is the implementation in FileMakerPro:


I used the tagging concept to label each point with searchable labels, and pull-down fields select the associated node and the class of object (sensor, computed value, output, manually switched power, and so on). This should be a useful design tool for what is becoming a rather complex data structure.

Retro Nomadness

These spin-off projects made me chuckle the other day when I was Googling for something or other and stumbled across this bit of humor from 11 years ago: NRL Expanding Operations. It was particularly funny at the time, going out to my 5000-strong Nomadness mailing list, as a few humor-impaired folks didn't realize I was kidding and actually troubled to flame me for the blatant sellout when I should be altruistically carrying the technomadic torch!

I've been getting a kick out of the sudden (re)discovery of the "Digital Nomad" or "Location Independent" lifestyle. It's all over Twitter and the blogosphere these days, and I just joined a friendly online group devoted to it. I tweeted a chuckle about all this to Howard Rheingold, and he added that Twitter is the first occurrence of social media, too. (He is a long-time veteran of online community and the Well, and we even crossed paths during a BBC Horizon TV filming via virtual space in 1992... using satcom, handlebar keyboard, and console Macintosh on my bicycle in Massachusetts while he was in Marin County... and I was just now astounded to find the show available online, with commentary. Drag the slider to 31:30 for my bit.)

Lest I sound like another creaky old fart who liked it better in the Olden Days, I hasten to add that back then, technomadics was a rather esoteric pursuit. It took deep hacking, big muscles to move ridiculously large machines, too much money for too little actual capability, calm patience to deal with marginal services and terrible comm links, and highly understanding clients who didn't immediately think "homeless bum" upon hearing a bearded geek raving about technomadics. People were still debating the radical concept of working at home; working anywhere, especially while in motion, was almost too much of a stretch. It did make for good media coverage for those of us who managed to do what today would be unremarkable, but it didn't scale well... "not ready for prime time," as they used to say.

Things have changed a lot. A more granular and less-hierarchical business climate rewards those with the physical and intellectual alacrity to respond quickly to needs. Digital Nomads or Location Independent Professionals can snag a gig in minutes, reposition to be near a client if need be, scamper around doing research, or just park in a gorgeous spot to hunker over a laptop and code/write/design. Some good friends are doing exactly this as we speak... check out Chris and Cherie of Technomadia.

Years ago, I quipped, "once you move to Dataspace, you can put your body anywhere you like." Despite the neologism that was quickly eclipsed by the catchier "cyberspace," that's more true now than ever.

It's always fun to reminisce about yesteryear's geekery, and in that vein I just found a photo from my house in Kentucky, back in 1977. A couple of months ago, I ran this picture from 2-3 years earlier; this is how my livingroom evolved:


That music keyboard should not, alas, suggest that I actually knew how to play... I just wanted to. In true geek style, my solution to that problem was not to take lessons, but to invent a polyphonic keyboard interface that scanned all the debounced J-wire contacts with a big multiplexer, compared current state to previous state in a TTL RAM, and delivered change notifications via a parallel port to a program running on the Cromemco machine that in turn ran a homebrew synthesizer. I never did learn to play piano until very recently, but that system made for a nice article in Byte in 1979 ("Polyphony Made Easy").

Ah well, enough retrospective... I need to finish the insulation of the Polaris mobile lab so I can move in and get to work full-time on the boat! I'll close with this image of Java and me, heading back to the house last night after a full day working together in the dog-free zone, keeping alert for the admittedly cute but oh-so-exasperating little Zubenelgenubi:


Cheers from the nomadhouse,
Steve

Cabling into Spring

About a half-dozen times in the past 24 hours, the Polaris mobile-lab project has been reinforced. This is going to be wonderful tool, I think... not only to bring R&D facilities within range of the system I'm trying to focus on, but also to add another nickel generator to the arsenal. A fairly comprehensive electronics, networking, communications, and light fabrication shop in the marina parking lot might occasionally attract a client... a potentially welcome distraction as we find ourselves ever more carefully watching cash flow.

The only news to report on the trailer front since last posting (other than ideas, which, as always, tend to outpace reality) is that the wall insulation is complete and the roof insulation is underway. The latter is nicely modular: strips of 1.5" rigid foam cut to fit between the ribs, slightly wider luan plywood sheets that meet edge-to-edge with their neighbors, and 3" wooden retainers that hold it the whole mess up with self-drilling screws. Quite a clean look, and easy to install... there will be more details with photos in the eventual article, I'm sure.

Boat Power Issues

But let's talk about Nomadness. I arrived the other day for a work session, and found the Inverter/Charger-from-Hell showing the dreaded "Low Bus Error" message. A couple of days earlier, it seems, there had been a brief shore power glitch. My ProSine 2.0 responds to this by latching into some pathological mode that, instead of resuming battery charging, actively kills the batteries by running itself from them (while other system loads do likewise, to the tune of 6-8 amps total). This has happened a half-dozen times since I bought the boat, but the most recent was the worst... battery bus was at about 9.2 volts and it charged at 50 amps well into the night.

Nice job, Xantrex. This failure mode isn't just a minor inconvenience; it drastically shortens the life of an expensive battery bank.

So the process of extracting that thing has moved way up on the priority list, and I won't miss it for another reason as well: it is the worst source of RFI aboard the boat. It breaks squelch well into VHF and beyond, though fortunately my steel hull minimizes the problem when the antennas are outside. I dread bringing SSB online, though, so the Prosine will move (along with the victimized batteries) into either the mobile lab or humble UPS service at home... where a human can clear the latched error condition whenever necessary by simply turning it off and back on.

In its place, of course, will be the superb Outback FX2012 and related systems including the MX60 solar charge controller. While installing this, I'll also take care of one of the more serious mistakes made by whomever installed the Prosine: a complete lack of ventilation. In normal service, it's not a problem; the unit is in the cavernous space behind the DC power panel and heat migrates out through a huge surface area. But when trying to bring a battery bank back from discharge, it overheats... so I have to prop the access panels open.


The new system will have its own convective loop with a louvered panel down below, fan-assisted when the local node detects temperature rise.

All this has been on my list for a while now, but it has been hard to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of reverse-engineering all the undocumented power wiring. I guess it's time.

Speaking of Wires

This brings me to another issue with the boat. Not only was there inadequate documentation of the current state of the systems, but a beautifully done refit in 2002 rendered huge regions inaccessible. I was reminded of this over the weekend, when it took about 5-6 hours to install two cables from the new port and starboard Wema diesel tank sensors to their corresponding Maretron NMEA2000 interfaces. Of course, to some extent that just goes with the territory; everything on a boat is harder than it should be, and I'm not as fast as I used to be.

But there are actually two cavernous areas that are fully closed off, along with a number of instances of limited access to things that were presumably once easy to reach. The latter problem kept me from repurposing my old tank sensor cables... both were under flooring and would have required taking a saw to gorgeous teak/holly furniture. So I've been guilty of committing a sin that I preach against: spawning orphaned cable runs by disconnecting things and leaving them in place. This is bad for lots of reasons, not the least of which is more confusion down the line... it distributes stray potentials, threatens single-point grounding protocol, and makes the nightmare of a lightning strike potentially even worse.

Ah well. The only solutions are to build a boat (been there, done that; got the T-shirt), start from a bare hull (tried that and lost momentum), or rip out everything and start over (no way in hell!). The take-away lesson here, if you happen to be contemplating a nautical project, is to keep serviceability in mind at every step in the process. Seriously. Trust me, you'll be glad thousands of times.

All the muttering notwithstanding, I did finally manage to get those tank sensors wired... then conjured a trio of gauges on the Maretron DSM250 display. These are arranged logically: the top two are port and starboard 75-gallon tanks; the bottom is the aft 90-gallon tank...


At last, on to other things! That one had been awaiting completion for weeks, along with something much less fun: dealing with an intermittent stench.

You may recall my blog-moaning before winter set in, complaining about the random nose-wrinkling effect of a leak somewhere in the new holding tank system installed by First Mate Marine. This would lie in wait for weeks, working just fine, then suddenly... during a weather shift, hard sail, or winsome companions coming aboard for a day in the sun... the whole boat would reek like the inside of a porta-potty in need of service. I finally traced it to a sloppily done Spinweld, and although the plumber had offered to take care of any issues (before getting paid), he had only commiseration and apology when the you-know-what hit the fan.

I had a chat with Ronco, the tank maker, and they settled the question about how to go about sealing it. My suspicion was correct; no adhesive will reliably stick. It had to be done with heat.

This turned out not to be at all difficult, once I got motivated enough to deal with it. I took my heat gun and a butter knife, rendered the Spinweld flange saggy and wet, confirmed that the tank was softening, then mushed it all together. 5-minute job, not worth all the agonizing.


If it turns out I was wrong about the source (despite visible gaposis with dark stains) and the odeur manifests again, the diagnostic will be to close the vent stopcock, gently pressurize with the Lavac's Henderson pump, and slather all fittings and hoses with soapy water until I see smelly bubbles.

In More Fun News

I really shouldn't complain, though. Despite a yet-unacceptable cost-to-pleasure ratio, this boat offers delightful moments... sometimes without even leaving the dock. Just the other night, in fact, I was contemplating some bit of gizmology when I noticed an unusual yellow mast drift by astern. I prairie-dogged and saw the sweetest little Bristol Channel Cutter making a recon loop of the guest dock, and was delighted to see them aim themselves at an adjacent slip.

Thus began a thoroughly invigorating evening of conversation with Tycho and Kathy of Penguin, emigrés of Silicon Valley, experienced cruisers, and live-aboards. There were small-world moments galore, and I found myself savoring their relaxed demeanor and nautical wisdom while the geek banter progressed on many simultaneous levels. It's easy to forget, in the middle of to-do lists so complex that they need powerful software tools, that the essence of all this really is something quite simple (and already here, when I let myself appreciate it).

It was kinda sad watching them head out the next morning, as I contemplated a day of contortionism:


Nomadness should be stretching her wings pretty soon; now that networked microprocessors can collaborate to emulate analog fuel gauges, it's time to fill the tanks, putter out of the harbor, and shake out the winter-stiffened sails.

I think this year will have a somewhat different character from the last. Key projects are happening, but instead of letting the boat sit idle during the finest weather in one of the world's great cruising destinations, we'll alternate between boat geekery and adventure. The testing program should be fun, and the new systems will be a hoot to bring online.

Stay tuned! (That's easy to do these days, as my Twitter feed is automatically replicated over there in the left-hand sidebar of this page and I usually mutter something 2-3 times a day. There are always newsy bits at the legacy live page, complete with some decidedly retro-looking HTML, and this blogging contraption even has RSS.)

Cheers from the lab,
Steve

Polaris Mobile Lab

Here's a bit of technomadic geekery that has thrice attempted to burble to the foreground, each time falling back into obscurity as I chased more delicious obsessions like boat acquisition, network design, and even the occasional adventure. (Remember adventure? This song's about adventure...)

I've moaned a lot lately about the logistically absurd situation here, despite having what appears on the surface to be an optimum playground in the form of a shop three times the square footage of my house:


I have lots of room to play and no shortage of tools, but it's a 3-hour round-trip drive to the boat, and with a daunting list of mostly-hard projects, that translates into a level of inefficiency that is intolerable. It goes something like this:

Arrive at boat, check lines, do a once-over. Tweak the to-do list. Get email. Pick the first project, drag out the tools, and start making a mess. Encounter a show-stopper like a wrong part or missing cable and pen a notebook entry for the next trip. Websurf. Eat. Pick another project, and proceed until I need something else from home. Visit with a neighboring skipper, have a drink, crawl into berth. Get a caffeinated start, try again, make a better list or some drawings, then head back to the lab with great intentions. Spend 2 weeks doing everything other than urgent not-so-fun projects, blog about it, feel the urge to check on the boat, update list. Repeat.

I feel like a wimp compared to Mark Hassall (read this boatbuilding tale sometime if you want to be astounded by sheer tenacity), but as the months pass, technology evolves just fast enough to keep me sniffing after ever more entertaining ways to layer gizmology onto my hearty steel ship. The catch is that I would like to start full-time voyaging while still spry enough to clamber to the foredeck in a blow. So last week, while driving around Port Townsend looking at alluring facilities close to a reserved 50-foot slip in a much-loved spot, I started getting the sense that I was off on another tangent... I don't need real estate; I need wheel estate.

Unless optimum digs magically materialize in parallel with some moneyed soul who wants what I have so I can have what I want, I'm back-burnering the shop quest and committing myself to whatever focused effort is necessary to get through this phase. And since I can't bring the 18-ton boat to the lab, I guess I'll have to bring the lab to the boat.

This is not a new idea here, and you can be excused for rolling your eyes if you've seen similar logic in my long trail of maunderings. In fact, I started the NRL Mobile Lab Facility page back in 2005, when I bought a 24-foot Wells-Cargo trailer (my third since 1991) to haul stuff cross-country after shutting down the old family home in Kentucky. It sat beside my house for 3.5 years, getting pawed through occasionally for eBay fodder, but not actually emptied until this week:


Once cleared, I started pulling off the walls and adding insulation... splitting R-13 rolls to half their native 3.5" thickness, removing the plywood to expose metal skin, and sliding batts behind the E-track all the way to the floor. The difference is acoustically dramatic, and will doubtless contribute to thermal comfort down the road:


The contraption really is an erector set, as far as simplicity is concerned; having it apart makes me cringe at what it cost, especially when I observed significant rust on some of the ribs from daylight-gaposis in the outer panels down near the wheel wells. Nothing a little sealant and a few pop rivets can't fix, but I'm keeping a close eye on things... and am no longer intimidated about chopping holes where needed.

Some of those will be up at the bow, where I opted for a fiberglass Nose Cone after having witnessed a compelling desktop aerodynamic demo long ago at their plant in Ogden, Utah. When I added one to my first trailer, fuel economy of the dually diesel tow vehicle took a 2 mpg jump and I became noticeably more stable in the blast of passing semis. Current plans don't involve cross-country jaunts, but I need a place to install all the systems without having to build enclosures. The Nose Cone region should be perfect, protecting a big hunk of wall with plenty of clearance behind... and RF-transparent for the antennas.


Hacking there should be easy, and I'll just cut away the original skin to simplify mounting on the plywood wall. For some strange reason, they removed all the screws under there (from skin to frame) before installing the nose cone, so this process will eliminate the mysterious floppy rattling sheet-metal noise that drove me crazy on the trip across the US... or even when just walking around in the trailer. Can't imagine why they would do this unless there was screw shortage that week... not a single screw remained inside the Nose Cone region, though they had clearly been there to begin with:


Anyway, a hinged plywood panel on the front wall will carry the display for the Prosine 2kw inverter/charger harvested from the boat upon installation of the Outback system, a Trace C-40 charge controller for the 120-watt PV array on the roof, AC and DC breaker panels, general lighting/ventilation controls, LCD for the Arduino status monitor, an IP network camera, router with WAN access, security sensors, and so on.

AC comes from a shore-power cable, the inverter, or Honda 2KW genset; it is used for the power tools, fluorescent lighting, soldering station, oscilloscope, and a space heater. DC is from the boat's old deep-cycle battery bank (charged by Prosine, solar array, or genset), and powers all the low-level lighting, radio gear, video, security, network, and other gizmology. Fortunately, it appears that I can do most of this with stuff laying around the lab or harvested during Nomadness upgrades.

The same level of "repurposing" extends to the furniture, some of which traveled over 100K miles in the previous incarnation of the mobile lab (nearly 20 years ago!). My sophisticated CAD model (Cutout-Aided Design) shows the first-pass layout, at a scale of one division per foot:


Basically, what I'm doing here is extracting the nucleus of my big sloppy 3000-square-foot shop and compressing it into about 10% of that space. It won't be painless, but as I walk around the former, I realize how little of the stuff is really in current use... and how much it has come to feel like an anchor. With the exception of big messy jobs like enclosure fabrication and redneck bow-thruster welding, all upcoming boat projects can be completed in this mobile lab. Parked close to the boat, Polaris should eliminate the insane 109-mile context-switch that currently takes place between every fitting and fabbing cycle.

It should also be useful long-term, not only for ongoing Nomadness development, but also for consulting spin-offs that may occur once the Shipnet is blinking.

By the way, I found a couple of old photos that really needed to be scanned and included here. This is the unimaginatively named Mothership, circa 1992, during a 3-year post-pedaling speaking tour around the US with BEHEMOTH (the final version of my geeked-out recumbent bicycle). I built a mobile lab and office into a 20-foot Wells-Cargo trailer (4 feet shorter than my current one). So this is pretty familiar territory, and I'm going to reuse that homebrew inventory-storage workbench visible here:

The bike was well tied-down with slotted floor fixtures for the tires and ratchet straps engaging recessed rings. Those ropes from the ceiling are part of a little hack that let me sit on the bike (where the stereo sound was best) and use the laptop on a fold-down work surface. Underway, retaining rods kept all the inventory bins under control; plastic panels locked over the little parts cabinets to do likewise. The back door opened to the side, so I built a bike ramp that was stored in strut channels bolted underneath (always a nuisance). The office area was at the front end:


This system, like the original Winnebiko, was a sleek and elegant solution to the problem of maintaining technical productivity while on the road full-time. The next one, like BEHEMOTH, pushed the practicality envelope a bit... 44 feet of fifth wheel that dwarfed my old pickup truck:

(photo by Joe Tyner, as I arrived at a speaking gig in Minnesota)

Now we're back down to a reasonable scale, and I'm pretty sure I can avoid the temptation to get overly geeky with what is essentially a temporary support facility for the ship. Dear readers, do smack me upside the head in the comments if I get too carried away with this... I just need to get 'er done and tackle the to-do list!

For Celestial Geeks

In case you're wondering why I'm calling the mobile lab Polaris, it is not an acronym (nor even a backronym, though that is inevitable). You may recall that a small dog named Zubenelgenubi has recently been inflicted upon our once-placid environs, and while he is a cute li'l bugger, he has reduced the signal-to-noise ratio around here dramatically. Since he was named after the navigational star with a sidereal hour angle (SHA) of 138 and a declination of South 16°, and since I first started fantasizing about taking the lab to the boat one morning while Zuby was alternating between chewing on my shoe and bouncing off the walls, I thought I'd find an antipodal name for the new rig.

Acamar was the closest, favoring the azimuthal coordinate (SHA 316 and Dec N 40°) and it is even at the other end of the group of 58 navigational stars alphabetically, but it is just too obscure sounding to make a good rig name. Menkar (315 & N 4°) was next, but that sounds like, well, some male automotive fantasy. Polaris has a nice SHA about 180° away from the Zoob, though its Declination is naturally right about at the zenith (only 42′ away from the celestial pole) as one would expect and thus its SHA is really in the noise. Eventually the 25,800-year precession of the equinoxes will cause this to stray, of course, but by then it will no longer matter.

Anyway, Polaris makes a suitable name for the lab, and the backronymic possibilities are legion. Sometime when I've been swilling trimethylxanthine, I'll conjure one.

Publishing News

The Boat Hacking book is moving slowly, since the system that it is its primary focus is doing likewise... but I'm now in the process of producing a print edition of Reaching Escape Velocity (bombastically subtitled "Launching gonzo engineering projects 
with sponsors, media, volunteers, 
and other potent forces"). I'm using CreateSpace for this, but with my own ISBN block and Library of Congress control number. This is a bit of a learning curve, like everything, but at 77 pages it is a low-stress way to learn the process; I have quite a backlog of bookable material, and have been looking for a painless way to launch titles without having to tie up dwindling funds in inventory.

Heck, there will probably even be one about building and outfitting a mobile lab...

Cheers from the Nomadhouse,
Steve

Shipnet Architecture

I spoke at the Microhams conference in Redmond this past weekend... my first "gig" in quite a while. It went well, I met lots of interesting and creative digital radio geeks, and even managed to catch up a bit with some tech that I'm going to be using Real Soon Now.

Making a slide presentation for the event prompted me to stabilize the Nomadness network architecture enough to be able to discuss it comfortably. A half-dozen notebook sketches of varying quality morphed into a real architecture drawing, highlighting aspects of the design that were not really clear... but that I assumed would snap into focus someday. That day arrived in the form of a deadline.

Armed with my favorite drawing tool (the exquisite OmniGraffle Pro), I turned the past year of noodling into a high-level document that clearly expresses the Nomadness Shipnet. This will eventually find its way to the website as an image map, with each device supported by a block diagram at that level and further links to monographs of schematics and software. But for now, it's a blogworthy introduction to this crazy nautical system I'm building:


Clicking the picture opens a large version in a new tab or window, which should make it easier to follow along as I describe the major features.

Internet and LAN

The upper left is the WAN/LAN zone... with the primary connection to the outside world (at least in populated areas) being an EVDO router augmented by the usual armamentarium of WiFi tools. At the moment I'm using a Top Global 6800 for this, but that will change to a Cradlepoint sometime soon. A Dynamic DNS account allows remote access to on-board servers.

The router, as in a typical home network, supports a wireless LAN for the laptops and other connected gadgets... the EyeFi SD card in my digital camera is happy here, and a friend who came aboard with an iPhone wondered aloud at seeing a hotspot in the middle of Puget Sound. This also supports the IP cameras, currently a couple of Axis 210 units with motion sensing and FTP, alarm-triggered events, and single in/out bits for sensing and remote lighting control. These will be augmented by a 4-port video server that can handle waterproof analog cameras for the brutal marine environment.

To the right of those is the Nav Station, a Mac Mini powered by a Carnetix P1900. I'm not yet sure what the display will be, but my current assumption is that this will be indoors in the pilothouse, with an "appliance chartplotter" at the outside helm. The Mac, of course, also takes care of the usual suite of productivity apps, assuming the operating position at the helm is comfy enough.

The system that will see most of the upcoming development effort is the box labeled "Linux Server," an always-on network Hub with solid-state disk. This runs the ship's database-backed web server, security/watch software, communication tools, and most of the other stuff that needs to be available on demand. The hardware selection is still not certain, but there are a few candidates; the key, given that pesky "always-on" specification, is minimal power dissipation. It doesn't have to be the fastest thing out there, just rock-solid reliable except during a lightning strike (then cheaply replaceable once toasted <sigh>).

NMEA 2000

The colorful lower-left section of the drawing is already installed and working well: the N2K network of navigation instruments and related nautical goodies. I use a Maretron backbone (and am about to add their excellent product line to my store), the Autopilot is Simrad, and the masthead is a trusty old B&G Network system interfaced to N2K via a 2-hop kluge that is still not quite stable.

All this is electrically CANbus, and talks nicely to chartplotters and the DSM250 display at the inside helm. A key requirement is a stream of all available N2K data into my database, and the current plan is to use the USB100 gateway. This is a Windows-only product, so an early to-do list item (unless a volunteer pops up!) is to see what it takes to slurp this into Linux... hopefully it will run under WINE.

Back Doors and Other Strays

The little cluster at the upper right doesn't need much attention right now; it is basically a collection of serial devices that need to interoperate with the server. Most critically, I need to be able to run a Winlink client via the overpriced (but essential) PACTOR box that, in conjunction with the Icom 802 SSB rig, will be the key link for global messaging. I was happy to hear at the conference this weekend that a Linux client exists, and now have some connection with folks who know the system well.

Ideally, proper client/server design should allow use via any of the laptops or the embedded Mac. But I'm straying into the domain of hand-waving here, as I haven't explored this part at all.

The zone of miscellany also includes the sexy Kenwood D710A, the serial feed from the retro stand-alone NAVTEX box, the data stream from the Outback power system, and some other gear. I prefer to use the Mac for all the audio stuff, however; an important subsystem involves Audacity, USB and FireWire interfaces, Garage Band, MIDI, and other musical goodness.

The Sea of Nodes

The big array of 15 boxes below the USB hierarchy is where most of the fun stuff resides... all Arduino-based, as far as I know at the moment.

Every node takes care of some logical grouping of I/O points, generally in some localized region of the boat. This minimizes cabling and keeps things clear, and some nodes are defined more by their location than any particular function (like Midship). Some are trivial, just picking up a few bits or analog sensors and turning them into variables that are periodically polled; others are responsible for actual control tasks.

A couple of them have some infrastructure responsibility. The Crossbar node is a huge array of DPDT latching reed relays driven by a long chain of SPI shift registers, and (unlike my earlier Microship crossbars) is completely signal-agnostic. Little groupings can be conjured to make anything from the serial switch in the drawing below to a sparse matrix or full-blown multiplexer, and they can handle audio, video, analog, or whatever. This physically resides in the Hub, and is making me wonder if the sexy audio mixer was such a good idea... gobbling panel real estate with non-marinized controls.

The other infrastructure node is the one that lets me get access to this whole system without having to go through the network front end:


This uses the venerable "Yaesu twins," the 290 and 790, which have the distinctive characteristic of sipping only about 50 mA on receive standby yet cranking out 25 watts on transmit. Every other robust VHF/UHF rig I have seen sucks about an amp when just sitting there, and, like the Hub, these need to be on all the time. They don't have fancy computer interfaces, but I don't need them here.

What I do need is a way to communicate with the boat from shore, using only waterproof low-power hardware (not a laptop). I always carry a Yaesu VX-6R submersible handheld rig in my pack, and like all modern amateur HTs it includes a DTMF pad for accessing telephone autopatches on most repeaters. Here, I'll just key the microphone and state my call to keep things legal, then transmit a short tone sequence that is decoded by a chip hanging on the Arduino. Depending on the command, it will then construct a serial string that is passed to a speech synthesizer... yanking the push-to-talk line on the rig until it gets the all-done signal back. "Main battery level is 72 percent."

The node is frequently updated with every variable on the ship (well over a hundred data points), and typical queries generate a summary of some subsystem, request a report on alarm conditions, or implement simple controls. One class of commands is piped to the hub, allowing a higher level of response (do I have email?), another is fun demo stuff, and yet another takes care of "back door" maintenance functions like rebooting the Hub or rerouting network connections. The hooks are even here to implement a complete remote-base operation on HF ham radio or other comm systems.

Similar functionality can be had via a vanilla packet radio link on 2 meters, or through the "Ethernet shield" on the Arduino that allows a connection via the Internet (with authentication, of course).

This is going to be a fun one. On the Winnebiko II and BEHEMOTH bicycles, speech interaction was one of the most entertaining parts (a Votrax on the former, and Audapter on the latter).

A Note on Complexity

Finally, I want to address a frequent and reasonable question (which came up during the Q&A session following my talk the other day). Even leaving out the maintenance issues with all this gizmology, is there a danger that the complicated gadgets will distract from the fundamental operation of the boat, negatively impacting seamanship?

Well, not if I do my job right. The idea in all this is not to tinker endlessly with gadgetry, but to strike a balance between the kind of stuff I find most amusing and the practical needs of maintaining an 18-ton voyaging machine. None of this should ever be in the critical path to basic sailing and primary safety; it is instead a layer of "local situational awareness" that is intended to tag reality with additional information... and otherwise stay out of my way.

A good example is the Waterworks node. This has a centrally located flow sensor along with a way to see the position of every valve on the boat, so right away I get intelligent tank level monitoring, usage summaries, and other resource management. But with all that in place, it becomes trivial to solve a huge maintenance headache:

A sealed box with an LCD and very simple user interface is next to all the plumbing stuff. Anytime I perform an action like changing a filter, replacing the UV sterilizer bulb, or cleaning a strainer, I tell the node about it by stepping through a set of choices. This then becomes a "soft event" that is time-stamped and logged in the database. Now it's easy to keep track of the total number of gallons (or weeks) that have passed since each maintenance task, providing a dynamic PM schedule that doesn't require me to remember to check things that are properly out of sight, out of mind.

So it's getting fun. Despite all the absurd distractions (real estate?), this and the fundamental ship systems are now the prime focus... Spring is coming!

Now to go Tweet this and get to bed.

Cheers,
Steve

Son of a Sailor

This update is a bit of a divergence from my usual breed of randomness, which typically has something to do with S/V Nomadness, development facilities, technomadic gizmology, or random noodlings triggered by any of the foregoing.

I'd like to dedicate this posting to my father, Ed Roberts, who passed away in 2005. The trip to Kentucky to shut down the old family homestead was a huge 6-month project, and left me with a Wells-Cargo trailer full of artifacts along with unexpected glimpses into my dad's life, making me wonder why we didn't have far more conversations about his complex and passionate past.

I've always known that he had a sailboat before I was born, for example, but I didn't realize that it was a central fixture in his life for over a decade... beginning with the initial construction of Star #2011 (named Dabih, after the beta star in Capricornus - a rare visual double with all sorts of strange chemistry). The boat was built by Herman Lund in 1940:


This was 12 years before I came along to irrevocably shift family economic priorities, and my dad became heavily involved in the Star yacht racing scene while ramping up his engineering career at General Electric (including distinguished service to the Navy during WW2, inventing rocket launchers and nose cones using the newfangled Bakelite material). He often wore his old ISCYRA pin:


Here are some glimpses of Ed, Dabih, and the other Stars in the Lake Erie fleet...








A few years passed. I popped into the world in 1952, was put up for adoption, then arrived in the young Roberts family in early 1953. I think the picture of us below is kind of poignant, since he sold the boat shortly thereafter and moved to Louisville to design refrigerators at the new Appliance Park:


Through my childhood, my dad often raced Thistles and Penguins on the Ohio River, and a love of boats and engineering permeated my early conditioning. Yet I never saw these photos until just recently.

From the perspective of a child, parents are just part of the environment... always there, somehow absolute. It never occurred to me to probe for stories, as I would now with any random friend. This central relationship was almost taken for granted.

Only after my parents were gone, when ancient correspondence emerged from Deep Archives and bizarre historical artifacts peeked out from under decades of accumulated clutter, did I suddenly get a sense of the complexity of these lives that shaped my own.


Just a reminder, my friends. Get to know your parents while you still can.

Fair winds, Dad... and thank you.
Steve

Front Panel Retrospective: Intel 8008

It's freezing in the harbor, and I'm on one of my too-infrequent work trips... mapping my normal project-management context-switching into a form so jarringly physical that I have to take laptop breaks. This is not healthy; the ratio of those orthogonal activities should be inverted.

Still, I'm enjoying the night aboard, and the stove is cranking at a cozy Fahrenheit 451° (according to mechanical instrumentation which is urging me to "Burn One"):


The book-length to-do list would be a nice candidate for incineration. Sometimes it seems an end unto itself.

I arrived with a touch of anxiety. Monday night, as I was trundling off to bed, I took a quick peek at the boat's webcam, remembering that I had forgotten to re-enable the motion-sensor that responds to activity in the pilothouse by emailing me, texting my cell phone, and FTP'ing frame grabs to an off-ship server. It was dark, since I haven't yet installed the remote lighting control... but my blood ran cold when I saw that the camera angle had shifted significantly downward since I snagged a screen capture Saturday for an article I'm writing.

Here's what it usually looks like:


But on this night, the black grainy scene had two distinct window shapes at the very top edge, and a correlating glint revealing the angle of that railing in front of the wood stove. Yikes.

My mind raced. It's a long way over and back... and what could I accomplish at 2 AM? There was no current activity in the salon, just the steady refresh showing subtle movement in the harbor water outside... but it clearly had moved. Did someone come in and fiddle with stuff, nudging the camera on its mount? There had been recent north winds, and I tried to imagine the boat whacking the dock hard enough to overcome camera-mount friction. Nah.

I fired off a letter to the port and went to bed, but sleep was fitful... though somewhere around 4 AM, I concocted a theory that the temporary EVDO antenna suction-cupped to the window had fallen down, hitting the camera in the process.

In the welcome light of morning, things looked fine on camera. Other than the angle, there was no evidence of tampering, equipment removal, rifling, partying, nesting, or any other nefarious activity. Then I saw it! A cheesy little plastic stand, part of the antenna, lying on the nav station desk! My theory had been correct... and when I arrived today, there was the proof:


Guess I really oughta finish that sloppy installation. Sometimes incomplete information is much worse than no information.

That big cable-filled gaposis, by the way, is where an ancient Furuno video sounder used to live. That whole panel region is being replaced by the new console, and one of the key jobs on this trip is to cut and fit a template (I have always done better with a hands-on model than with a set of drawings... I've measured that space a dozen times, but it won't feel real until I can touch it).

I spoke in the last posting about the investment in boat parts that rescued at least some money from the doomed stock portfolio; compared to the latter, that pile of shiny gizmology feels like my own little dotcom boomlet, still worth something close to what I paid for it. Even more fun, it's about to get mounted on a big hinged panel, provided with numerous blinkies, and interfaced to every corner of the boat.

I have a long history of this.


A Front Panel from 35 Years Ago

Apologies in advance, for this is maudlin nerdly retrospective Writ Large. I was chasing something on flickr a while ago, and came across a familiar sight: my first homebrew computer on display at the Computer History Museum. Of course I knew it was there, but back when I made the donation digital cameras were primitive, and I never got a good photo. Laughing Squid did, however, and I'm delighted to present it here (clickable for more detail):


This is only part of the old machine, which also included a Scanbe "Rapid Rack" card cage filled with 60-socket Augat wirewrap panels, a keyboard enclosure with integrated card reader, and more... a 6-foot rack cabinet that dominated my apartment living room when I was 22.

This was in 1973-4, predating those newfangled S-100 Altairs and IMSAIs that kicked off the personal computer phenomenon, and it flickered to life after a few months of obsessive design and fabrication with only the cryptic Intel 8008 databook for reference. In some primal male response to those first blinkies, I started my beard that day.

Microprocessors were bizarre back then, and at first I considered it a brief break from the ALU-based mini I was designing (and never finished). I still shudder at the 4-phase 600 kHz clock and some of the odd things that took place during transition boundaries... like the magical fleeting appearance of the content of a register if you tried to move it to itself ("load B with B" and the like). This sort of thing enabled a number of outboard enhancements that let me overcome the 8008's intrinsic shortcomings... in particular, a hardware hack that added a data stack in outboard TTL RAM in addition to the limited 7-level return stack in main memory, allowing me to save context on a subroutine call.

The machine had 4K of 8-bit static RAM made of 2102s... I originally dedicated a wirewrap board to a mere 2K, but wanted MORE... MORE! So one night, I folded out all the chip-select leads of another 16 expensive 1024-bit DIPs, then soldered them on top of the first batch and wired the floating selects back to the address decoder. Wowzers! A whopping 4K. I was ready to compute the world.

There were 8 interrupt channels, 64 bits each of input and output, a graphics subsystem using a pair of 8-bit multiplying DACs outputting X-Y to my Tek 7504 oscilloscope from a DMA display list, and a painfully slow math co-processor made from a Taylor-Series calculator chip with kluged BCD and 7-segment interface (mostly because I was intimidated by writing floating-point routines). I remember the night it drew a lovely (sin X)/X curve... took HOURS and I had consumed half a bottle of Jack Daniels by the time it was done, but it was a thing of beauty, I tellya what.

Over its useful life, this machine also implemented Walsh-function waveform synthesis and a top-octave synthesizer for music projects, a hardware polyphonic music keyboard interface that I published in Byte, a one-shot Hollerith card reader that allowed me to boot-load with a multi-punched image instead of wearing my fingers out with deposit-next, Friden paper tape reader and punch to handle my Cybertronics mailing list, newfangled 1200-baud cassette interface hacked out of a Bell 202 modem, and right outta the gate, a hardware driver for the marvelous Model 28 Baudot teletype that I still recall with wistful fondness. (This latter circuit was my first published magazine article... in the July 25, 1974 issue of Electronics magazine.)

I still have the original file of 35-year-old hand-drawn schematics made with logic templates and lots of obsessive passion... I really should scan them.


I sure do miss front panels. This one got a lot of use, and my early "screen saver" was a 555 (associated with the black knob) that allowed variable-speed single-stepping and a corresponding hypnotic blinking of the address and data bus LEDs.

I remember one debugging night when address bit 14 appeared to be always on. I popped off the wire at the driver chip (a 7404) and it was still on, so obviously there was a short to ground between there and the LED pin (the other side went to a pullup to +5). So I casually removed the wire.

The light was still on... with only one wire connected. I poured myself a drink and stared at it for a long time.

It turned out that on my hobbyist budget, I had acquired a batch of surplus LEDs that failed some parametric test along the way... and this one had been dipped crooked in the plastic. The cathode metal was thus flush with the outside of the body, and made contact with my aluminum front panel (forever being known as the infamous "field-effect LED").

Ahhh, memories. <creak> <sigh>

In a masturbatory paroxysm of gratuitous acronymism, my friends and I dubbed the machine BEHEMOTH... for "Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical, and Thermal Hardware." Fifteen years later, a much larger BEHEMOTH would roll out of the lab, this one the "Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy." (It now resides in the Computer History Museum as well; here are three recent photos from the phrenologist photo pool: overall, console, seat.)

I think should coin a matching acronym for this new nautical contraption, just to keep things confusing in the spirit of Monty Python's Aussie philosophers.

Well, enough reminiscing; I have some new projects to work on. Hopefully I'll be looking back at these in another 35 years, wondering aloud, before nodding off in my geeked-out wheelchair, how I managed to sail with only a terabyte of disk on that old boat...