Wintry Notes from the Nomadhouse

I've never been much of a fan of Christmas, except perhaps when I was a kidlet in the nuclear family of mom/dad/me back in Kentucky, long ago and very far away from other relatives. Back then, the tree glittered and new toys appeared, just as they should (nothing has really changed).


Tinkertoys, trains, erector sets, the usual boring clothes and such... I was easy to please back then, and wasn't particularly aware of the lack of a big family network. I only met distant grandparents once or twice... they all died off before I was a teenager, and the news of their passing was somewhat indistinct and hard for me to visualize. Slowly learning of the family though the artifacts that have landed in my life, I deeply regret this; some of them were amazing people who had a lasting impact on their communities.

Now my parents are gone as well, and but for a recent delightful correspondence with my newly email-savvy 90-ish aunt, I have almost no ties to family history. Perhaps it's the reminders of mortality that crop up now and then (or maybe just the Seasonal Affective Disorder that's endemic in the Northwest), but this has recently started bothering me. It is weirdly disturbing being "the end of the line," though it does make letting go of things via eBay much easier. It's actually a relief when something leaves... one less thing to clutter the mental database, one less thing to have to deal with someday. Or bequest.

The timeline of life is one of cusps and subjective distortion. I played with this graphically the other day, using an online morphing tool to blend two images of my face... one a few weeks ago aboard Nomadness, the other in 1971 when I was in the Air Force (itself a surreal notion):



The image is weirdly oldyoung, which is exactly how I feel at the moment — tinkering with blinky gizmology for a Grand Boat Trek whilst muttering over the compounding manifestations of incipient oldfartdom. Memory of the space between those two images... my entire adult life... is anything but linear, and the morph is a good metaphor for the crazy tangle of overlaid passions and realities that have carried me somewhat randomly to this point.

There are linear clues, I suppose, but really, much of what makes up a life is the perception of phases delineated by epochs of love, place, travel, and work. And the relationship between those things and the calendar is rarely a 1:1 correspondence.

In my admittedly strange case, I look back at four years in a suburban house in Columbus (1979 to 1983). It seemed interminable at the time; I was a homeowner — a family man and employee for a while, then freelance writing full-time. Three books fell out of that era, including a Prentice-Hall textbook; so did a few dozen magazine articles and even a year of consulting writing for a corporate client in the industrial-control game. And yet, I remember it as a brief blip in my life, a strange interlude between a somewhat languid proto-geek youth and the quirky "career" of technomadics that followed.

In other words, while it was happening it seemed to drag, but in retrospect it appears fleeting.

The next four years encompassed something entirely different: 16,000 of the 17,000 miles I pedaled around the US on my computerized recumbent bicycle... the Winnebiko and Winnebiko II versions (complete with their construction, and a book about the adventure). This is kind of insane, when I think about it... those four years flew by in the youthful exuberance of romantic adventure, responsibility the furthest thing from my mind. But in retrospect, they appear huge, a disproportionately large percentage of my life.

The difference here lies in the anchor points. If I look at my lifeline as a long winding highway, Columbus was the 4-year space between two intersections; the technomadic adventure, though also 4 years, involved thousands of them. Trying to sense them as an 8-year continuous thread actually makes me chortle, so absurd it seems.

And it got crazier from there, by far... but you get the idea. The secret of life extension is the richness of change, yet if you have only change, you miss the sweet continuity of family. And that is something I regret.

Snowbound in the Lab

This maudlin poignancy probably has something to do with having been snowed in for a week, and with today's difficult experience of helping Sky through the last day of Lily, her much-loved 15-year-old Corgi. Please read her beautiful tribute to the little friend who has been a huge part of her life... that last tearful nod to the vet was the hardest thing Sky has ever done.

And of course we've been talking much of life, critters, and change... while the woodstove creaks, the wind howls outside, the lab roof groans under a foot of wet snow, and the boat's webcam shows a bouncing wintry harbor scene. But we eat and love well, here in our isolated little world, and visitors wander by now and again to brighten the moment. (photo by Sky Myers)


Despite everything, boat progress has been steady. All the waterworks components are in house and about to be mounted on their plywood substrate, the network design is continuing to stabilize, and — perhaps most significantly — I have cleared the clog of dormant clutter that was my electronics lab and set it up to be the "ship simulator" for this project. Packaging and fabrication will happen downstairs in the lab, which is now reasonably habitable thanks to recent insulation and other improvements; microprocessor tinkering and software design will occur upstairs (where it's warm enough for delicate surface-mount soldering and hours of keytapping).

Here's the Nomadness R&D facility:


The building is 10 years old now, originally constructed with the idea of quickly banging out a couple of Microships. I am still trying to figure out what to do with Wordplay... last night, needing a stable low-impedance 12-volt power supply for the lab, I contemplated crawling into the hull to cannibalize the deep-cycle battery (pic) and its charger. That's how it starts, and the realization was not without a few pangs.

The plan with this "simulator" setup is to provide a generous workspace around the console system, which includes the Shacktopus hub along with all the communication and audio gear. The dozen or so Arduino nodes, wirelessly linked by Xbee, will be cobbled together on the bench using Eagle and doubtless a few kluge boards, programmed using the Mac, linked to the hub, then deployed here and there with as many sensors as possible to create a realistic environment. The comm systems will involve coding as well, so I get the feeling I'll be spending quite a bit of time developing (and writing about) this system.

Nautical Gothic

Of course, what this is really all about, though somewhat hard to imagine at the moment for all the reasons above, is getting back Out There. I'll close with this photo of us by my dear friend and piano teacher, Bonnie MacPhail:


Happy New Year, my friends....

Steve

The Route through the Canal

This freezing week has been a time for system design work, the start of a new book, waterworks fabrication, and preparing my office for use as a ship simulator during the software-development phase. We did make one brief run to the boat last week, then got stuck in a nasty snowstorm enroute back... which turned the normal 1.5-hour drive into 3.5 hours. I discovered that NEWT, my Dodge RAM 2500, is very nearly the worst vehicle on the road when it comes to performance on icy roads.

As I crept painfully up hills at an angle of about 30° (averaging the crown angle and the grade), wheels spinning at the precise speed necessary to melt just enough to gain traction but not so much to spin beyond that, other cars and trucks of all descriptions easily cruised past. This happened on two long hills, and I was not impressed. I've driven in snow all my life, and this was just weird... probably the result of too little weight in the rear. The truck is supremely comfortable, but ya'd think, for that kinda money, it would stick to the road better.

Oh well, at least we didn't end up in the ditch, or worse. On to the fun stuff!

Waterworks Update

I've laid out the watermaker and UV filter system on an actual-size template of the panel that will be mounted to the bulkhead in the aft head compartment. For a while there was some doubt about making everything fit, given the constraints: horizontal RO membrane, placement of the prefilter below everything else so service doesn't splash salt water on powered components, hose routing out to the rest of the boat, general serviceability. The trickiest bit was the configuration of the valve system.

Here is part of it, still in rough tinkertoy form:


I'll describe this in much more detail when it's actually done, but basically the water out of the UV filter assembly enters at the upper left, and the valve to the right of that enables output to a local faucet as well as the pressure line to the rest of the boat. Heading down on the left side are two stopcocks to select filling port or starboard tanks; to their right are two more that do the same for reverse-osmosis product water. And the little 3-way in the middle is to select whether the latter is piped to a local beaker for testing, or into the system (with total dissolved solids metering).

This has been fun to lay out, and when it is done will allow pretty much any combination of features imaginable given the general mix of resources: pressure-regulated dock water, domestic pressure system, PowerSurvivor 40E Watermaker for converting salt to fresh, Water Fixer UV filter to render the dirty clean, two 45-gallon tanks, gravity feed rainwater collection, and quality/flow analysis. I can fill the tanks traditionally from the deck fills, use pressure water that is prefiltered, and even "polish" water as I do the fuel... pumping from one tank to the other through the filter system. A flow meter and pressure gauge will provide quick visual indication of activity, though at the moment the instrumentation is eyeball only (not interfaced to the ship network).

Shipnet Update

Speaking of which, the boat's "nervous system" is getting closer to reality. I've been playing with an Arduino board via a laptop USB port, and three more are arriving this week along with some prototyping shields (daughter boards that expand I/O and provide a little prototyping space). The architecture drawing is actually looking rather stable, with 13 nodes scattered from bow to stern.

Part of the design that held me up for a few days involved the pesky always on requirement for all this, a constraint that made me turn back (with great reluctance) from the idea of using a Mac Mini here. It would definitely be my embedded platform of choice, but it slurps 15-20 watts when idling... tiny compared to a desktop, but still nearly 50 amp-hours per day from the perspective of my 12-volt power system. "But hey," I thought, "why not keep the Mac and let it sleep much of the time, using a little embedded board to poll nodes, watch for alarms, and accept connections from the back-door comm channels?"

This launched me into an entertaining flurry of design drawings that ultimately resulted in a separate hub system, quite capable in its own right, multitasking vigorously and maintaining a little database of points. Ooohhhhh...

Oh, wait. That is the whole point of the central server. Having a little one just doing part of the job for power-management reasons introduces all sorts of modal ugliness when the Big Iron comes and goes, not to mention design complexity, synchronization whenever the map changes, and other cruft-fodder.

So we're now back to a streamlined system, with only one low-power "helper" adjacent to the Hub. Like all the nodes, it is an Arduino... and one of its jobs is to allow me to reach in through the back door and give the main machine a THWACK if necessary.

Actually, the back door is one of the most fun parts of the boat. The theory here is that the main pipe to the world might not be 100% reliable: that's a lot to ask of an EVDO router with cellular connection and fail-over to opportunistic WiFi, an Ethernet hub, and a Linux box with a lot of custom code. I will hopefully be spending a lot of time in the boonies, and besides, I may not always have a laptop and net connection handy... so there are three other ways to interact with the ship from afar.

• First, another ethernet pipe, using a WIZnet or XPort module piggybacked on the little Arduino board. If the server isn't responding but I am getting in to the ship, I can connect to a terminal session on this widget, check for alarms, then stretch a languid electronic finger out to push the reset button on the Big Iron.
• More in the vanilla zone, a terminal session will be avaiable via packet radio, probably using the venerable Yaesu 290 and the Kantronics KPC-3+ terminal node controller. The beauty of this is that when not explicitly configured for packet use, it doubles as an efficient 25-watt APRS tracker, which I originally used on Bubba the kayak. Already in-house and done... that's an interesting twist.
  
• The most common back-door connection will probably be DTMF (touch-tone) commands from the submersible Yaesu VX-6R that is always in my belt pack. This doesn't allow a very verbose command set, but it's good enough... an MT8870 decoder chip is owned by the Arduino, and a little monitor program will parse my short numeric sequences and respond by sending serial strings to a V-Stamp text-to-speech board whilst yanking the push-to-talk line of the Yaesu 790 (twin to the above, and sharing a dual-band whip via a duplexer). Naturally, the boat can also initiate contact, calling me if something requires the skipper's attention. On the UHF ham bands, such "auxiliary operation" is legal with proper ID and non-commercial intent.

I'm also looking at a minimal LCD/touch user interface at the console, but that may prove to be superfluous if the hacked-netbook idea proves successful.

It's still a bit early to go into much more detail; I have a bad habit of publishing lots of specifics of things before they are built, thus propagating eternally googlable data that is dead wrong. So I'll resist the temptation to prattle on about the pretty pictures spread out before me on the desk, other than to list the current crop of nodes by title only:

• Water
• Companionway
• Galley
• Helm
• Arch
• Dinghy
• Midship
• Engine
• Sewage
• Bow
• Communications
• Power
• Monitor

Each of these has a small cluster of local sensors, and together they serve as a distributed data concentrator to minimize the snarl of cabling and poor noise-immunity that would otherwise result from a centralized system. Some also have output capability where useful, in a few cases even running local control tasks.

One of the primary jobs of the Hub is to continually inhale all this and maintain a current table of values which are then available to the web server, monitor tasks, archiving/graphing software, and so on. It should be no big deal to do something like browse to the boat (whether aboard or not), check the main status page, notice that the fridge is a little warm, plot the last week of temperatures, add markers for all the opening events, correlate that graph with power and ambient temperature for the same period, confirm that the water pump for the heat exchanger has been cycling, and decide whether something really needs to be fixed or if I just bumped the thermostat that time I clumsily returned a bag of carrots to the drop-in. All that should only take about as long as it did to type and edit this paragraph.

Indeed, the key to all this is improving the ease, comfort, and quality of life aboard. If it's not fun... if it imposes complexity that gets in the way of enjoying the voyaging life... then I'm doing something wrong. There is a long-recognized truism about the virtue of simplicity on boats, and at first blush this might seem a wild excursion in the opposite direction.

But if, as intended, the details fade into the background and my "situation awareness" grows to encompass parts of the ship that are normally only noticed in crisis-management mode, then we will ll have created something sweet. Which brings me to...

Boat Hacking

I've written 5 books over the years (6 if you count one that is still only available as a PDF, though Lulu calls), and every time I do it I swear I'll never do it again. I've dealt with the absolute nadir of publisher ethics and am still owed money for ancient royalties on Computing Across America, I've been orphaned (twice!) by editorial musical chairs at Big Famous Houses, I've hired and fired an agent who covered his own ass when I had legal trouble with a New York publisher, and I've self-published with visions of grandeur... only to see just another nickel-generator. It's not easy, and each one takes many months of work.

I've also had a few that were stillborn. One that makes me wince even after 17 years was the BEHEMOTH book, lovingly outlined in a fine-print 2-page spread stapled into the Journal of High-Tech Nomadness back in the early '90s. Geeks and fans were pre-ordering copies, and "Real Soon Now," honest, I was going to stop traveling and dig back through 3.5 years of sketchy notebooks and heavily edited schematics to explain every part of the celebrated bicycle in a playful-yet-thorough fashion. Really.

I don't think I ever even wrote one page. I ended up sending folks collections of printed monographs and other material to compensate for their deposits (and refunding a few).

The problem, of course, is that documentation is hard enough without trying to go back later and make it sufficiently exuberant to hold its own as a book. It should have been done while the bike was under construction... I certainly had the time, and it would have sold well.

I still had not learned the lesson during the Microship era, though I did publish about 140 status reports, plenty of stand-alone articles, and a couple of design documents. The direction kept changing, geeky bits conjured in the early years were obsolete by the time we were slinging epoxy, and motivation faltered as relationship-demise doldrums struck in 2002. Again, no book, although I did begin one that segued into the Gonzo Engineering theme before becoming sidelined by the aforementioned musical chairs.

It's a jungle out there.

But I think I have it figured out now. As I'm building all these systems, I need good documentation anyway... and it's not too big a leap to make it read well (I used to do that form of "consulting writing" for corporate clients anyway, translating mind-numbing engineering text into something interesting for clients to read). If I write about the components while they are fresh in my mind, including complete hardware and software designs... then there is plenty of material.

Upon reflection, I realized that this is my niche. The boat-book marketplace is already well-served by experts in engines, electrical systems, navigation, and every other nautical topic imaginable. But I have yet to see one on Boat Hacking, which is the title of my new book.

Oh, and please don't order a copy just yet! I've learned that lesson. It is in progress, though, about 25 pages along, and sample chapters will appear occasionally on the Nomadness web site. In fact, there is an easy one over there right now.

The Root Canal

If you were wondering what any of this has to do with the obscure title of this post... well, I had gutta-percha installed in a tooth today, retrofitted under a crown that didn't magically make the persistent pain go away. Here's the result, snapped on the sly during the clean-up phase:


It was not much fun at all and I sometimes really hate being biological, although the iPod and nitrous certainly helped. (I have never been able to transcend dental medication.)

JUST SAY N₂O!

Cheers from the murky zone of throbs and painkillers...
Steve