Adventures in a Geek Playpen

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Steve

Oh good grief… has it really been 5 months since the post about clawing our way off a lee shore with a failed anchor windlass? It seems ages ago, back when leaves were on trees, the sun shone late into the evening, and I was lulled once again into the complacent fiction that sweet summer would last forever. Time slipped away with too little sailing, too many lists, and not enough of the fun that really is the bottom line.

Now the forest is naked, it’s been dark since about 4 PM, Christmas just jangled by (as surreal as ever), and there is an impossible backlog of bloggage. I’ve let Facebook, Twitter, and my live page be the safety valve for news, and that has delayed the production of more substantial and enduring efforts. There has been good progress on multiple fronts, however, so let’s dive in:

Mobile Lab

It has become clear that I’ve been in a cushy trap for quite a long time – huge building for geekery and cozy little house in an isolated forest setting, my nautical escape pod too far away in a marina. This translates into absurd inefficiency, with infrequent “work trips” truncated by the need for parts or tools. Time… just… passes… and when I see ads for shiny new versions of yet-uninstalled hardware on the shelf, alarm bells go off in my head.

We did spend quite a while on a quest for alternative real estate near marinas, investigating purchase and rental options, but in this market the thought of trying to get a bridge loan is daunting and I’m not drawn to either side of the landlord/tenant equation. So after much time spent chasing around, that idea fell by the wayside; the goal is to move aboard, not shuffle home base facilities. We recently looked into the seemingly mad idea of getting a second (much smaller) boat for Sky and her dog, allowing me and my cat to wallow in geeky clutter aboard Nomadness until the cows come home. That still doesn’t solve the lab-far-from-boat problem, however, though it may become rational when tonnage-reduction asymptotes and we find ourselves wanting to seed the technomadic flotilla.

The real problem is deceptively simple: having workspace near the boat. So, as I discussed back in April, I’m building a mobile lab named Polaris that can be parked in a marina and provide enough R&D; facilities to get me through this project. Progress on that has moved in spurts, and it is shaping up well: the trailer now has insulation, shore power, breaker panel, general lighting, and all major furniture installed. I am about to start incorporating inventory, building a DC power system with the boat’s old inverter/charger, and adding a small machine shop in the stern with a dust-control curtain to keep flying aluminum chips away from ones made of silicon.

Here’s the power panel, built into a hinged door on the front wall where the nose cone provides plenty of clearance:


Those are Blue Sea Systems marine AC & DC breaker panels on the left, with a retro AC voltmeter in the middle. The right column is the Prosine 2.0 panel, LINK battery monitor, and Trace C40 solar charge controller. The black knob on the right is a Southco latching system with two rods that are guided into wooden receivers top and bottom; this allows easy access for service.

Shore power is a 50-foot 30-amp marine cable, with a pigtail at the distant end adapting it to the RV standard when needed. This keeps the hardware interoperable with the boat, and the whole lashup is a precise replica of a typical small-boat power system… providing a development environment for two of the Arduino-based nodes that are part of the Shacktopus network that runs the ship.

In the furniture domain, there is a beautiful steel desk at the bow (port side), followed by a massive wooden bench modified to clear the wheel well. On the starboard side, there is a combination steel file/drawer cabinet at the bow, followed by the man-door, a small cabinet for trailer-related hardware, a stainless tool chest, the “inventory bench” I built ages ago for a previous mothership, and the standing workbench that will carry power tools. All this is stuff repurposed from my lab, and has so far been free:


Once I finish bolting everything down and wiring AC and DC power to the benches, the fun begins: cherry-picking the choice bits out of my sloppy 3000 square-foot building and packing them efficiently into 6.4% of that. Obviously, my old “never know, might need it someday” criterion for what to keep will no longer apply. I may miss a few things, but it is going to be a joy to walk (imagine!) from Nomadness to Polaris, roll up my sleeves, mill a slot in a hunk of polycarbonate, solder up a cable, and saunter back to the ship to knock another couple of things off the to-do list.

Ship Power System

Aboard the boat, one of the most critical tasks has finally been completed: extracting the finicky old power-management system and installing an all-Outback solution. This consists of an inverter/charger, a control panel known as the MATE, a monitoring node with three shunts, a maximum power point solar charge manager, and an ethernet hub tying them all together. The MATE makes data streams from all components available via a serial port, so this will be a key data-collection project to allow observing the system from afar and plotting historical data.

I did a quick temporary plywood packaging hack where the old hardware was located, including an exit vent for new fans that can be automatically turned on when things get hot (a feature missing from the original system, requiring 50% derating during heavy charge).


Once this region of the power panel (adjacent to the Bridge) is rebuilt, this will be more elegantly integrated… but it’s great to see the batteries being managed properly. The old gear is not going to waste; it’s been reassigned to the mobile lab.

The Playpen

My plan ever since acquiring the boat has been to convert the original nav station into an equipment console, so much of the planning involved just how, exactly, to shoehorn everything into such a small space… yet keep it serviceable. Unfolding onto the chart table was the general plan, but I was dreading the cabling and general back-breaking access issues in what was basically a blind corner.

It occurred to me recently that there is no reason to cram this geekery into a restrictive space. I consider the system integration project to be central to the entire mission of the boat, and have decided to reawaken the spirit that drove the Winnebiko (photo) and BEHEMOTH (photo) projects. The bike became an iconic technomadic substrate because the incorporation of cutting-edge computing and communication tools was my primary design goal… not an afterthought or something that had to be tucked away discretely in packs.

Like the bike, the boat is a platform for my life’s enduring passion… and that is not something that can thrive when banished to a distant hobby room.

Sooooo, space constraints have relaxed. Here’s the area that is about to change dramatically:


I’ve never much liked this space, even though the table is beautifully made; I can’t fit my galumphing body into the end near the mast partner, and the seats are uncomfortable. It usually ends up being a storage space for clutter, cleared occasionally for dinner or a spirited round of Mexican Train.

The new plan is a complete inversion, with a swivel chair replacing the table, wrap-around desktop that does not interfere with existing stowage below the seats, and 3 or 4 sloping-panel consoles (maybe 19″ rackmount, though there is little reason to adhere to that standard). Integrated into the long part of the desk is a full-size digital piano (this one, since I already have it, although a sleeker/cheaper unit would be smarter in this environment), with a hinged cover that allows conversion between music studio and lab space.

The console segments are much more accessible than the one that was planned for the navstation space, each consisting of two or three surfaces: horizontal base substrate that can pull out from the cabinet for major service, hinged front panel that lays down on the desk, and optional top panel hinged off of that and supported at the distal end by rollers in mounted channels. I believe there will be three major enclosures, with a smooth segue into a fourth zone for test equipment and tools.

Most of the intense geekery is in the “System” console, containing the Linux server, Mac Mini, Time Machine backup drive, hierarchy of USB hubs and related serial stuff, EVDO router and other networking tools, local sensors, resource management, speech I/O hardware, video, monitor screens, and so on. This will be in the foreground on the photo above (I’d be facing the camera when using it), and the swing-arm LCD monitor will “park” on top of it and blend into the workspace. That monitor can also swivel to face the Bridge for charting use when underway, or land at the nav station desk for voyage planning and other pilothouse applications.

The second console, mounted at an angle to the first and in the forward left corner of the photo, is devoted to communications… voice/data radios and related tools. That turns out to be quite a bit of front-panel hardware, and also involves a few “black boxes” that need free airspace for cooling… those go in a loose enclosure on top, along with a coax patch panel, probes for the SWR/wattmeter, antenna analyzer, and so on.

Third, just above the piano and continuing the wrap-around console theme, is the audio system. This includes the stereo, studio mixer and control surface, podcasting studio equipment, and editing tools. Presumably, the swing-arm monitor can park close enough to this to be useful, as the Mac is essential for digital audio work.

Finally, the distant corner and far wall in the photo are spaces devoted to hackage, tools, test equipment, and other “workbench” activities. This should be vastly more pleasant than my current low “tool drawer” with everything in roll-up pouches; using that system is inconvenient enough that I end up not putting things away (and there’s no dedicated workspace).

This whole description is still a bit speculative, as I have not yet done the essential reality check of removing the table, parking a chair in its place, and using my CAD system (cardboard-aided design) to cobble an actual-size mockup of what my old friend Frank Feczko dubbed the Playpen. Things will get more clear once that “human factors” design is done and I’ve had a chance to sit and stare at it for a few hours.

Shacktopus

What is suddenly more real, however, is the overall network design. The liberating vision described above prompted me to do something that has been on my list for months: create a module-level drawing of the entire ship system. The granularity on this is 1:1, with each object on the drawing corresponding to an actual physical device.

The full-size OmniGraffle drawing fills 18 pages, though it prints readably on 8. Since I’m not quite ready to reveal all the details yet, I’ll tease you with a version that’s a bit too small to read… but once the project is physically underway I’ll publish it as a full-size poster:


The best part about this is an unexpected psychological effect… for months, I’ve had a background process in my brain that has been continuously refreshing and refining this system. Since it wasn’t yet documented, I couldn’t fully let it go. After about a week of work on this drawing, however, I was able to free wetware resources for other things (like console packaging). Mental backups are just as important as those of the hard-disk variety!

There’s enough detail in the clickable image above to quickly run through the overall design. Each of those five blue rounded rectangles is a major console zone: across the top are the three described above (Systems, Comms, and Audio); the bottom right is power, and bottom center is the pilothouse Bridge including NMEA2000 and navigation. Breaking from that organizational level, the graphic at the lower left shows the location of all the Arduino nodes around the boat, with a brief summary of each.

A big part of the system console is simply signal routing… those five long gray rectangles are USB hubs, and the ones owned by the red Linux board also pass through a switch that allows them to be picked up by the Mac. I have my software work cut out for me.

In a somewhat related aside, I drove to Silicon Valley last month for my favorite conference, and while there made a pilgrimage to my bike at the always-enchanting Computer History Museum and visited a few dear old friends. Enroute back, I spent an otherwise boring night in Williams… but chanced to go to a little Chinese restaurant. The food was OK, but the fortune cookie was perfect:

Firing up the TS-7800

The two serious computers in the console system are the Mac Mini with wireless keyboard and mouse (now in regular use here, since my clunky old MacBook Pro won’t accept a Leopard install) and the Technologic TS-7800 Linux board. We just fired up the latter for the first time a few nights ago, and are now in the early phases of that non-trivial learning curve.

The first hurdle was silly, but difficult… the board’s little piggyback switching regulator (allowing a wide input voltage range) did not have its input polarity labeled. I was surprised to find nothing on the manufacturer’s website about this, nor even in the Yahoo TS-7000 group archives, and the board itself was surprisingly inscrutable. The cost of an error here is high, and finally, after much Googlage, I found a comment on a forum where someone had fried his protection diodes by guessing wrong. So here, to simplify future attempts by other people to solve this mystery, is the answer:

Looking at the edge of the board with the power connector, +12 goes on the left pin of the OP-SWITCHREG (closest to the PC-104 header), and GROUND goes on the right, close to the three jumpers… as shown in the photo:


Anyway, once we avoided letting the smoke out and made a backup of the SD card image, the board came up and booted Linux as promised… whereupon we set up user accounts, SSH, encryption keys, and so on. Unfortunately, it seems to have come with an older version of Debian Linux – old enough that apt-get doesn’t recognize the structure of the new archive – so we couldn’t install the essential sudo to allow temporary root privileges while safe in a user environment. The current status of this project is thus squarely in the sysadmin domain, trying to figure out how to update the distro and otherwise get to the point where the fun stuff can begin.

I did try a sensor hello-world with the on-board SPI temperature sensor, but got a segmentation fault when I compiled and ran the included demo code. Ahhhh, learning curves.

The funny psychology here is that I still think of a board this size as a lightweight microcontroller. It feels weird to log into it via the LAN, run top, and see it frittering away on tasks various; it’s vastly more powerful than what I would have considered “Big Iron” during the BEHEMOTH epoch. But more complexity means more head-scratching; here’s Linux wizard Dave Warman, muttering about the 2007 Debian version in a brand new board:


Miscellany

This is getting a little long, but there’s 5 months worth of catch-up. I’ll close with a few random tidbits.

First, in the process of fulfilling a Christmas gift hint from Sky, I set off on a quest to find a cushy hot-water bottle for cold Northwest nights aboard. Amazon’s most visible offering is the German Fashy brand, with various cover options, but it’s pricey; Etsy was iffy at best. But on eBay I found a friendly seller with two bottle sizes and a variety of fleece covers. I ended up buying a his ‘n hers pair; mine is the big plaid one and Sky’s is the cat’s paw 32-ouncer. Almost “body-weight proportional,” even:


Here’s a link to their current auctions for 72-oz hot water bottles (which I recommend). It’s a great way to pre-heat a frigid berth, ease the back pain, or just improve general coziness. I mentioned that I’d be sending them some linky goodness, and he said the first five sailors who order and mention my name will receive a gift (no idea what, but that sounds good to me!).

Speaking of selling things, my online store has been stable for a while now, though I’ve been lazy about populating the catalog beyond a few Arduino-related geeky bits, random parts, surplus gizmology, and my books. Three recent additions are worth noting, however – Sky’s getting into the nickel-generation spirit with some products of her own: Zuby Snax homemade bacon doggie treats, eye pillows with flax seed and lavender, and Booty Bench meditation stools (which I find perfect for holding a laptop in bed). Her little corner of the store is the Geek-free Zone.

I mentioned at the beginning of this long posting that I’ve had a safety valve for news in the orthogonal social media contexts of Twitter (@nomadness) and Facebook (where I prefer to “make friends” only with people I actually know on some level, though I’ve been known to accept invitions that suggest a good connection). This has been handy, and has reached the level of critical mass where I can ask a technical question and have a fairly good chance of getting an answer. I really miss the old Nomadness mailing list, which at one time was over 4000 people; I don’t think I ever failed to elicit useful information by simply mentioning a problem in an update. My Facebook and Twitter connections are each around 10% of that, but the easy low-granularity chat has made them useful… to the detriment of this blog, since I put something out of my mind once it’s “posted.” I’ll try to be better about that, since once things fade into the past over there they are effectively lost (except to Facebook’s massive data-mining servers, of course, which know all).

It’s rather sinister, actually, but fun and convenient. Isn’t that always how it goes?

Those two tools are at one end of the spectrum, this and my static content pages are at another, and in the middle is the live page that actually gets tweaked almost every day. Among other things, it now shows the most recent minute of the boat’s on-board security camera (not automatically updating, however; you’ll get really bored if you stare at it). I tried to include that here, but it spills over the column and breaks the page layout.

Anyway, Happy New Year from Nomadness, and I look forward to reporting more frequently on the developing geekery!

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Imperiled on a Lee Shore

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Steve

As in life, disaster at sea sneaks up fast. Conditions deteriorate in a downward spiral, quietly closing off options while you fiddle with trivialities, driving you inexorably toward a dead end long before you realize it. At some point, the vague dread you’ve been feeling all day snaps into sharp focus; it’s no longer a colorful NOAA movie of well-fletched wind arrows against a colorized map of gales in the Strait… it’s here and now. Buoys that were way over there are suddenly right here; forget lunch, start the engine, turn on the windlass breaker, throw me the leather gloves, we gotta get out of here or we’re gonna lose the boat!

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, of course. I had known for two days that Saturday was going to be feisty, and fully intended to get off our completely exposed “anchorage” against the lee shore of Camano Island long before it became an issue…


I had no illusions about any protection here, but it was close to the lab and handy logistically for the week that us cruising riff-raff had to vacate the marina to make room for go-fast toys in town for their annual regatta. It had been a mostly-calm stay but for an early lightning storm and a few gusty late-afternoon Force 4 northerlies that were only mildly alarming.

But there were unexpected complexities. Off the coddling of shore power for the first time in a while, my 8-year-old battery bank revealed the quiet disaster that resulted from the Prosine forgetting during a crash that they were AGM, charging them for months as generic gels. They were nearing end-of-life anyway, but this sped the decline, necessitating a somewhat ridiculous transfer of 560 pounds of new Group 31 Fullrivers off the beach via dinghy, followed by the same load in the opposite direction to shed the old ones. That was Friday, and I was playfully making jokes about A Salt and Battery while flexing long-dormant arm muscles, monitoring current flows, and planning the installation of the new Outback inverter/charger that has been patiently waiting in a box since fall.

Up next was a sailing weekend with friends, including an overnight of crabbing and dining in a protected anchorage, but watching the unfolding weather predictions I knew we were in for a blow. We had to get off the lee shore anyway, so might as well make an adventure of it, yah? If conditions get sloppy, we’ll just duck around to the other side of the island, drop the hook, and play there until the system passes.

All this carried a sort of energizing buzz of anticipation, but shoreside events conspired to delay departure into the danger zone. The lab security system was triggered by a spider having dinner in front of a PIR sensor at 1:30 AM, leading to a flurry of activity including a police visit, and twelve hours later, still trying to get out the door, a puddle that I initially attributed to the canine child-surrogate turned out to be the hallmark of an iced-up freezer that needed immediate defrosting (food was already mushy). More lost time, more hassles… and more rising wind.

We finally made it to the beach and undertook three back-to-back dinghy shuttles. I was knocked flat by a wave that dumped the boat on top of me, Bonnie got a leg caught and barely avoided getting slammed, Sky had a close call with a seawall, and Suzanne did quite well after being the first to brave the paint-chipping transfer to the stern of Nomadness, still stately compared to the dancing boatlets all around but starting to pitch in the building seas. While our guests worked to stow gear and food, Sky and I wrestled with the dinghy hoist, finally getting things tidy enough for what was obviously going to be a pounding.

That’s when I noticed that we were dragging anchor on 120 feet of chain, drifting into a bevy of little motorboats, the beach dangerously close astern. Red alert!

The Battle

I fired up the diesel, grabbed the headsets, threw one to Sky, donned leather gloves, and made my way to the pitching bow. “No time to change, screw the dog, we’re going now. Keep the bow pointed into the wind!” It began as it usually does; she got the boat creeping forward as I started to bring in chain. But something quickly went wrong… the bow was blown off to starboard, and we came up tight on the still-fast anchor. Coupled with the violent vertical motion, the force of this was enough to yank the chain free. The slipping windlass clutch was no match for the momentum of a running chain, and within seconds all 300 feet of it had flown off the bow roller while I yelped and tried (pointlessly) to slow it down by hand.

I’ve never even seen the bitter end of my anchor rode, and had no idea whether it would disappear completely – something normally considered a disaster. In this case, that would have actually been OK, since we could have sent a diver after it the next day and avoided being pinned to a lee shore. The more likely possibility is that the end would be bent to a length of line that is in turn made fast to an eye in the anchor locker, allowing the ground tackle to be cut away in an emergency.

But it was neither. I didn’t have time to examine it closely, but there was a big knot of chain, apparently seized or clamped; this slammed into the bottom end of the hawse pipe with a loud bang, and held.

Well, hell, now what? A quick glance to leeward revealed that we were between other boats and falling fast toward the rocks, and the only way out would be to recover 300 feet of all-chain rode and a 65-pound Bruce anchor with a failing Lighthouse 1501 windlass clutch and intermittent deck switch. Any attempt to haul the chain while 18 tons of boat strained against it was futile, so we had to work to windward to make slack, gain ground during the few seconds available, then hold it with the hook of a cleated snubber to keep from losing it again. This would have been impossible alone, and nearly so without the full-duplex hands-free communication afforded by our headsets (they’re not industrial quality, and are prone to noise and interference, but they saved our asses on this day… $60 well-spent).

I can only describe the process as brutal, hard on equipment and bodies. I tried to keep Sky advised of the angle that the chain was running into the water, but it was all she could do to buy us a few precious moments of nose to wind… and that frequently involved going around and coming up hard. At one point, I saw us starting to encircle a mooring buoy, which would have complicated things considerably by fouling our chain with theirs, and shouted orders to hit reverse and do a 3-point turn. Bit by bit, I hauled in slack and manually attached the hook to keep from losing precious links.

We must have created quite a show for the vacationing folks in their beach houses, cooking crab and drinking beer, especially since Sky had thrown on a temporary miniskirt to get out of wet clothes from the dinghy mishaps. We’re canvassing the neighborhood to see if there are any photos; if anyone stopped gawking long enough to grab a camera, I’ll post them here (unless they’re NSFW!).


Escape

After a 30-45 minutes of this ordeal, soaked by waves over the plunging bow and nearing exhaustion, the painted marks on the chain indicated 5 fathoms… meaning that we had broken free. Sky drove us to windward to get us off the deadly beach, slowing only when I got the anchor to waterline to keep it from flailing wildly. Once stowed, we powered up and headed for the lee of Whidbey Island, the anemometer clocking 30-35 including our own speed.

But now what? According to NOAA, this wind was going to be with us for a while, and there were no protected anchorages nearby (besides, at this point I was wary of anchoring; the windlass needs to be rebuilt). Cornet Bay, a cozy little nook at the east end of Deception Pass, was 3 hours away and likely packed with weekendeers seeking refuge… an assumption that was later proven correct when I had a chat with a friend who witnessed the gusty anchoring frenzy there. La Conner would be about the same distance and seemed alluring, but wind howls over Skagit Flats and the narrow channel is unforgiving… one error and we’d be aground on a falling 12-foot tide. I grabbed the VHF and called Oak Harbor Marina.

“I don’t recommend it,” the fellow said. “We have 30 knots over the seawall and the anchorage is all whitecaps.”

But after much discussion, I made the executive decision to go for it anyway: it’s familiar territory, help would be available, the anchorage would be a backup if docking failed, and if even that failed we could fire up the nav software and tiptoe out of the channel to motor around in the dark until things calmed down a bit. Set course for Red Buoy #2!

The Second Battle

Nomadness is a stout ship, and before she came into my life covered both coasts of North America, with a couple of Panama Canal transits and lots of time in the Caribbean. So I rather trust her, and the crossing of Penn Cove, where the gale in the Strait was only slightly attenuated by the narrow neck of Whidbey Island, was actually exhilarating. I drizzled a little hydraulic steering oil into the bouncing pedestal with a makeshift funnel, since the wheel felt bubbly after all the excitement, but otherwise all was well and the new battery bank was happily slurping up alternator amps.

The oil led to an amusing moment, however. I was peering around with the binoculars, trying to find the outlying buoy so I could keep it safely to starboard, when Sky called from the companionway: “Could you hand me the hydraulic fluid? Zuby really likes it.”

“No! I need it for the steering system!” It took me a moment to see why they were all laughing at me…

But we had a job to do. Alternating between VHF and cellphone, I contacted Mack the harbormaster, Jerry of the transient Mirador, and Frank of the resident Blue Moorea… making sure that we would have the best possible chance of getting our lines caught before the wind started having its way with my sometimes recalcitrant vessel (she does not behave well without steerageway, making close-in maneuvers much too exciting in wind and current). This was about twice the wind speed I had ever had for a docking attempt… and the force rises with the cube of velocity. Doubling the wind speed means 8 times the force on hull, rigging, kayaks, and everything else that would conspire to blow us off.

The approach was dicey. Three boats in the whitewater anchorage bucked and strained at their chains, and I was being directed to the unfamiliar north entrance that included a skinny sidewind romp along the seawall with a hard U-turn at the end. I swung wide, lined ‘er up, and was a little relieved to see the wind only a few degrees off the nose. OK, here we go…

Three women stood by to toss lines aboard the closing Nomadness; five men on the dock prepared to catch them. I nosed in and a bow line made it, but I timidly dropped power too soon and started to blow back at an alarming angle while the guys fought to hold us. More lines, bursts of power, fast cleating, straining muscles… and at last we were made fast.

The dock angels drifted into the night after shrugging off our hearty thanks, and almost immediately I got to repay a bit of docking karma with the next white-knuckled guy. Later that night, one of the boats in the anchorage dragged down on the seawall and some brave soul leapt aboard, deployed fenders, and lashed her to a pole to keep her off the bricks. This is the best thing about the nautical community.

It was surreal, after all that, to be cracking fresh dungeness crab, enjoying salad from our garden, and drinking much-needed wine with Sky, Suzanne, and Bonnie. Wind whistling around, warm feminine chatter, laptop aglow, instruments still on to attach numbers to the howling outside… all quite cozy aboard our little ship after a vigorous day that already seemed dreamlike and impossible.

Rigging the sailing dinghy the next afternoon. In the dink, that’s Bonnie on the left and Suzanne on the right; Sky is perched on the dock.
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The Zen of Geeky Boat Projects

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Steve

I’d like to welcome new visitors from Cruising Compass! Other nautical folk, if you haven’t seen this, it’s well worth a look – a great cruising-oriented weekly news source presented by Blue Water Sailing magazine.

I’m anchored north of Hope Island at the moment, the boat feeling much lighter off the dock, the rhythm of life distinctly more relaxed than the task-oriented staccato that has characterized the past eight months. There is much of the latter yet ahead, alas, but this break is a good reminder of why I’m putting myself through this.

As expeditions go, this is a minor one. There was talk of popping over to the San Juans, but my diesel is suddenly putting out black smoke above 1800 RPM or so and I have yet to diagnose the problem. (That typically means partially burned fuel from either restricted airflow, high engine load like a fouled prop, exhaust back pressure, or a bad injector.) I’ll deal with it, but for now I am more focused on remembering life aboard… the best part of which is the pace.

At the lab, I juggle management tools, nudging a dozen parallel projects ranging from eBay and homeowner stuff to enclosure fabrication and boat network design. It is never simple, never feels calm, and only rarely gives any indication that it might end someday.

But now I’m swinging at anchor, a pasta in the oven, Sky off to give the dog a shore excursion, genset purring to slurp a few amp-hours back into the aging AGM bank, body pleasantly tired from unfamiliar exertions, a hint of sun-sting here and there, and really nothing I urgently need to do at the moment but write this blog posting. What a difference. One project can be the focus of a whole day, with time for a nap, a hike, a frolicsome dinkabout, and an eventful ride (complete with retrieval of a powerboat-pooped dinghy) over to Cornet Bay for ice cream with friends aboard Nereid… our buddy-boat companions on this little jaunt.

Projects aboard have more immediacy than the ones that involve Linux servers, distributed Arduini, and radio gear. Yesterday an intermittent in the engine-starting circuit blossomed into a full-blown failure, so I dug into the wiring harness, found a mashed-together butt splice that had not been properly crimped, fixed it, and vroom. It’s no big deal, but there’s a perverse, almost pleasant purity in having a single task in focus… and a real satisfaction in getting it done.

Especially when the engine starts again.


Random Thoughts on Boat Projects

This calls to mind a discussion that percolated on Cruisersforum recently… someone launched a thread on refit lessons and I was inspired to contribute. Given the focus of this blog, an edited version is worth including here:

1. Never hire a guy who hates his work… I’m still fixing messes left by the plumber-from-hell, and there were lots of clues while he was on the job that should have been grounds for termination. The latest discovery: instead of using the correct bolts for the SeaLand inspection plate, he just shot in some sheet-metal screws. This distorted the polyethylene Ronco tank material, with one screw even penetrating the sidewall of the oversize cutout… creating a gap that leaks under pressure and insufficient material for a proper re-installation. This hotshot charges $80/hour. Hiring him was a mistake even though some of the tasks were intimidating and I felt I needed his skills… but ever since, I have been chasing the leaks and cleaning up after him.

2. In that spirit, I’ve learned that DIY should always be first choice, with the hiring of professionals limited to cases of esoteric knowledge, true gurus, or jobs requiring expensive capital equipment. As I proceed with the geeking-out of the ship, my “business model,” although very casual, is publishing the designs and in some cases assembling kits. I think a lot of boaters are coming to the same conclusion, and the economy has a lot to do with it. (Speaking of kits, Navagear did a very nice post about my marine GPS datalogger based on the Sparkfun Geochron.)

3. To-Do lists are fractal. The closer you zoom into one item, the more it expands into a cluster of component items. I try to anticipate this with what I call “CDTs,” or Clearly Defined Tasks. Writing these out ahead of time may seem like over-detailing, but pays off when it helps avoid gross underestimation of time and costs.

4. Project management tools can make or break a job. I like OmniFocus since you can list by projects and then review by contexts (like, “what else do I need to do now that I’m aboard with wiring tools spread out?”). And Scrivener is very useful for keeping the sprawling collection of design documents in one cohesive environment… before that, I had stray files everywhere.

5. If a project requires n components, there will be n-1 units in stock (quoting an ancient collection of Murphy’s laws, circa 1969). It is really worthwhile to buy in bulk… and besides, you end up with repair inventory and trade goods. For hardware, McMaster-Carr is spectacular.

6. Tool duplication between home and boat is unavoidable. You’ll end up needing ‘em anyway. Expensive tools are usually good investments, though they sink just as fast as cheap ones (don’t be too macho to use a lanyard when leaning over the rail). The new Li-Ion Makita LXT power tools are awesome… I love them, along with the best drill bits I’ve ever owned. This felt like a crazy splurge at the time, but has already been a winning investment.

7. Document, document, document! Buy a cable-labeling machine (I like the IDpal from Brady) and ID every cable as it is identified. Take the time to do good drawings (I use OmniGraffle Pro for overall diagrams, and Eagle for detailed schematics). Start a binder for the known-correct information that you will want to be able to find again… sprinkled throughout project notebooks and random scraps, it gets lost. Dedicate portable file boxes to manuals and individual projects. Use your digital camera to chase otherwise invisible mysteries, and save the images. Take photos before closing off an area so you will know later where not to drill.

8. Save labeled core samples from hole-saw adventures.

There are a lot more lessons that fall out of all this, and I’ll share them as they occur. But for now, there’s a bit of catch-up to do; somehow I let 5 weeks get away since my last posting here.

Stove Cage

The Navigator Little Cod wood stove that was installed last year was excellent company over the winter, but one job remained unfinished. The exposed stovepipe, especially with the related sacrifice of a wooden pole in the cabin, was an accident waiting to happen: hot or not, a lurch into sharp sheet metal during a hands-free transit at the instant of wave impact could have devastating consequences. So I built a cage:


I’ll probably soften up the top rail and the upper halves of the verticals with St. Mary’s hitching some night at anchor, but even as it is we already find it pleasant to use as both a leaning station and a grabrail when passing through. The parts are standard 7/8″ rail and associated fittings, and the 60° angle of the struts both opens more rail to gripping and minimizes flexion of the top half.

Curtains

Another major lifestyle enhancement in the raised-salon pilothouse is a set of curtains… especially on the sloping front windows that make a highly effective greenhouse on sunny days. After months of frequent staring at the problem and a number of brainstorming sessions, we decided to take a novel approach and use high-power neodymium magnets sewn into the edges of the curtain panels… with matching ones attached to the window frame with double-stick foam tape. Our fabrics guru was not at all happy about trying to keep feisty magnets under control while sewing on her industrial steel machine, but eventually she got them all in there.

The panels are a lush patterned dark blue fabric inside, and a special light-colored UV-resistant material outside. And while there is a little gaposis and sag, they are a huge improvement in quality of life aboard. Peeking out is easy: just pop open a corner, have a look, and slap it shut. It is much tidier than rods and associated hardware.


(The black contraption at the top wrapped in foam and gorilla tape needs to come out – it’s one of the old windshield-wiper motors. I’d like some, actually, but one of the three melted its wiring in the harness and I no longer trust them… and besides, they are head-bangers. One of these days.)

Bow Navlight Assembly

In my last post, I moaned about the mounting scheme used by the Aqua Signal Series 32 LED navigation lights, and I remain unimpressed… it should not have taken so much work to get them installed. One of the units, fresh from the clamshell packaging, had the key expando-plastic toy part fractured and useless, so any cop-out attempt to mount according to the nearly nonexistent documentation was out the window anyway.

Instead, I cobbled up a little machined aluminum assembly that bolts to the original mounting plate that carried a milky incandescent power-hog from yesteryear:


(That little black thing in the foreground is the broken critical mounting part, which is supposed to expand when a tapered knurled brass plug is pulled into it by the one and only mounting screw. I like my approach better… a longer #8 button-head, turned down slightly to fit in the metric-sized hole in the plastic, threaded into a block of aluminum. This might have to take green water over the bow someday.)

Marine GPS Datalogger Kit

Thought I’d insert a quick plug for our little datalogger kit; my enthusiastic tales about various incarnations of this technology have generated a lot of interest over the years, so I finally packaged my favorite logging engine along with a sealed enclosure, charge cable, SD card, mounting velcro, and expanded how-to. These things are a hoot, and provide all sorts of graphic evidence of adventures (and embarrassing oops moments like trying to dock in a cross-current). The marine GPS datalogger is now in my online store, and delivery is typically a week or so (I configure and test each one). The unit can live permanently in some out-of-the-way location with a sky view, and is acessible via Bluetooth. Over 6 months of continuous track logs (one point per second) can accumulate in the SD card before it starts to get crowded in there, and the retrieved files can be displayed in Google Earth, Google Maps, or other formats with a free online tool.

Nomadness at Anchor, Part 2

This posting has been idle for a while, though I have occasionally poked at it with a stick or added notes about stuff to add. I should just do short postings and not make each one such a multi-threaded repository of techno-philosophical musings. Old habits die hard; I still think of these as articles and use my vintage live page for short news bits of interest to friends.

(That page has a new feature, by the way: it now has a retro HTML table with the most immediate temporal layer scraped from the epic to-do list, presenting only the things that need to be done next across a landscape of 30-40 project categories. It’s a lot easier to grasp than the totality of All Known List Items, which get vapourous anyway when you try to look beyond the current wavefront of progress. Besides, all I really need to know when rolling up my sleeves is what needs to be done right now. I have made it public mostly to share with the NRL team, but also invite participation if something there catches your eye…)

Anyway, I’m at anchor again. A week or so has passed, and the big week-long regatta has taken over the marina where Nomadness has been moored. Us riffraff have been asked to vacate the docks to make room for all the go-fast toys, so for a while we will be gunkholing about, taking friends for long-promised sails, and returning randomly to the lab to keep the nickel generators sputtering along.

It has been a very eventful few days. Way back at the beginning of this post, I mentioned the black smoke above 1800 RPM. This was quite worrying, and I concocted a theory that the diver who replaced the nose zinc on my Max Prop had somehow fungled the pitch and increased engine loading. Only… it still went from forward to reverse so was not jammed, and an email exchange with helpful PYI tech support pretty well convinced me that such a phenomenon was not possible. I have the Classic 3-Blade model, shown here during the pre-purchase haulout before cleaning and zincage:


I was not happily contemplating either an engine service call or haulout with prop-removal… so, grasping at straws, I asked the diver to take a look even though it has only been a couple of months since the last cleaning. And guess what… this has been the worst year in memory for marine growth around here! It was fouled from bow to stern, the running gear covered with barnacles and other biology. They went back down the next day and polished her up, and yesterday I cranked the engine to 3200 RPM and purred along smoothly with nary a wisp of smoke. All betterz…

Feeling smug about a cheap solution to a scary problem immediately induced another one… I carelessly let the furling line get away when deploying the headsail, so at the end of the day, rounding up in a fresh breeze to anchor off a friend’s beach, the sail got stuck HARD when still about 30% out. No amount of fiddling had any effect, so I cast off the furling line, wrestled the drum around until I had a couple of sheet wraps, and tied it off to the pulpit with small stuff. All day today, with gorgeous perfect breezes and sails dancing in bright sunshine, we swung at anchor waiting for enough calm to drop the basket and untangle the mess.

I suppose there are worse things than a day at anchor since we had no place in particular to go. “Cruising,” quoth some ancient wag, “is the art of fixing your boat in exotic ports.”

A Critical Comment

This is a good time to answer a comment from “Anonymous” that came in response to my blog post of a few weeks ago. Every now and then, someone will write a stinging criticism of my peculiar blend of passions, usually from the perspective of the traditional values associated with the most visible substrate. Someone in 1989 told me that I was “bastardizing the simple, beautiful act of bicycling” with the BEHEMOTH project, and a few years later, a guy in Arizona lambasted my transition to the Microship… insisting that I remove him from my mailing list since I was “abandoning my bicycle roots.” One needs a bit of a thick skin when making a life public, and I was initially going to just ignore Mr. Anonymous. But he actually makes a valid point that I should address, even though he did not do so very kindly:

So mr nomad how’s outfitting the space shuttle going? Excuse me for being skeptical, only you seem stuck in the yuppie yesteryear of “too much is never enough.” Complex systems galore, oh…and you’re going to swing it by going global and what… tweeting from fiji?

Salt water, the motion of the ocean, an unrealistically long supply chain combined a global depression will have the final word on your work I feel.

Really, go cruising and report how the multitude of systems are holding up… that is if you aren’t too busy maintaining broken systems. I’ll give your techno path some credence if you can go a year or two of cruising without giving up in exhaustion.

There are a few things this fellow is overlooking, though his perspective on complexity is not uncommon in the cruising community and is not entirely irrational.

First, and I think most of my readers know this, my primary source of geek pleasure is the blending of passions. From my ancient 1983 “computerized recumbent bicycle” to this crazy starship-to-be, what has kept me going for a quarter-century has been the integration of geek delights into adventure substrates and then (usually) spending quality time playing with the quirky combination. So my initial response to his comment is that I am not just getting distracted by technology in what is fundamentally a cruising project; the whole point here is the combination of the two.

Of course, he is absolutely correct in pointing out the potential fragility. “Water corrodes; salt water corrodes absolutely.” Systems crash, parts can be hard to get, and complexity is anathema to reliability. A purist would have already snorted at my furling drum problem; a hanked-on jib would never “jam.” And if I do find myself dealing with constant electronics failures, then I have not done my job well, since a rather large percentage of the design is related to robustness, sealing, serviceability, isolation, backups, and easy replacement if it’s all toasted by lightning.

But beyond all that, one of the fundamental design standards here is that none of this gizmology can be mission critical… at least in the sense of disabling basic ship operation if it fails (like requiring power to move a swing keel on a high-performance race boat). I still pull strings for sheets and halyards, there are TWO independent hydraulic backups to the autopilot as well as a wind vane and emergency tiller, I have an Astra IIIB sextant on board that will still work when the GPS toys crap out, I don’t use microprocessors to control navigation lights, and safety-critical things like the marine VHF are not dependent on crossbar networks to get audio in and out.

So why, one might cynically ask, am I farting around for years with lab-logistics and development tools when I could just go cruising (other than the fact that I find the geek stuff fundamentally entertaining)?

In a purely practical sense, the systems that I am building address a very specific need that is not well met by existing tools. When I am off the boat, I want to be able to see it and scan sensors. When I am in bed and it gets bouncy, I want to reach up to a display and take a quick reassuring look at GPS guard zone, depth, and wind data. When batteries are sagging, I want to know why. When I forget how the 20 or so valves related to engine fluids are configured (3 tanks, 2 Racors, transfer pump, oil changing system, coolant loop pickoff for water heating), I want to see a live drawing with active lines a different color than inactive ones and relevant flow sensor values displayed in context. When I’m tired and try to fire up the macerator pumpout without first opening the tank vent and seacock (duh), I want something to yell at me very loudly. And so on.

None of this suggests that I should get lazy and hand all responsibility over to systems; instead it is an attempt to bring the insane complexity of a modern cruising yacht’s systems into a user interface that looks and feels like a simple website… accessible from anywhere on or off the boat. If that fails, oh well. The boat still works.

A secondary benefit of all this, besides my finding it intrinsically fun and justifiable on that basis, is that a lot of other people are interested as well… so there is an associated business model that yields publications and kits.

Finally, a bit of broader perspective… sailing itself is not low-tech, even though it has been done for centuries. We’ve come a long way from square-riggers and tallow-tipped sounding leads; by the time you throw in N2K navigation networks, watermakers, high-brightness LEDs, windvane self-steering, carbon composites, FLIR, forward-looking
sonar, broadband radar, and MPPT solar charge management, a cruising boat is a masterpiece of multi-disciplinary engineering. But I think I understand Mr. Anonymous’ objection to complexity: it is anything that is not already a turn-key product.

Footnote: Life Under a Lightning Rod

I was just about to send this via the trusty EVDO link when I started seeing flashes outside, and emerged to observe huge cloud-to-cloud lightning displays covering many miles (with occasional ground strikes). When you’re in a steel box with a 60-foot aluminum stick in the air, the tallest thing around with a hook down just off a lee shore as reversing wind gusts whistle the rigging, this is somewhat disconcerting.

The dilemma: stay aboard, let more chain out, and watch the sky show… even though swinging then becomes dicey if the wind shifts to the west… or hop in the dink and paddle to the home of an out-of-town friend. We opted for the latter, and have been watching my anchor light drift back and forth like a motile Venus against a backdrop of lightning-streaked clouds and distant shoreline.

A nice, primal footnote to all those existential questions about the essence of technomadics…

Fair winds,
Steve

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Straining Toward Nomadness

Posted on May 31, 2009 by Steve

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.







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Digital Nomad Redux

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Steve

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 FSCP
Temperature=019.0 CSCP
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

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