Project, Sponsors, and Media Symbiosis (from Reaching Escape Velocity)

I was most delighted to find my little Reaching Escape Velocity book mentioned in the pages of my favorite magazine — creative makers were exactly the readers I had in mind when writing it. The book covers the art of working with sponsors, volunteers, and media in order to launch audacious gonzo engineering projects… and is basically a distillation of the meta-hacks that made my BEHEMOTH and Microship projects possible. It may be a short review, but it’s by Gareth Branwyn… so I couldn’t be more delighted!

DIY on Demand

by Gareth Branwyn, Make: Volume 21

When I first got involved in hardware hacking, in the late 1980s, a lot of what I learned came from a series of hardware “cookbooks” self-published by a guy named Don Lancaster. He desktop-printed and bound the books himself. It seemed like on-demand publishing was finally here. It wasn’t (for most of us), but it is now, with services like Lulu and CreateSpace. Recently I received four new self-published books in a single week, exploring different areas of making. Amazingly, they’re some of the best books to have crossed my desk in a while. —Gareth Branwyn

Gonzo Wisdom
Reaching Escape Velocity by Steven K. Roberts

Steve Roberts was also an early hardware hacking pioneer, writing his first self-published book, Computing Across America (in the late ’80s) literally from the seat of his tricked-out, gadget-laden, internet-connected bike. This new, deceptively slim volume contains 25 years of Roberts’ trade secrets on how to capitalize, publicize, and find support for your own “gonzo engineering” projects. It’s meta-hack project wisdom from the original high-tech nomad (see MAKE, Volume 06, page 28, “Tech-nomading from Shore to Ship”).

Access

Reaching Escape Velocity is available as an eBook, and this button will take you to PayPal and then provide a download link:

Or, more traditionally, I would be delighted to autograph a paper copy and ship it to you… this button will ask for your address and then email me the details:

It’s also available from Amazon as a Kindle edition, if you prefer, and there’s a bit more information about it in my Boat Hacking Store.

Random posts from the archives:

As with all images in this piece, you can click to embiggen.

This is one of my all-time favorite bits of media coverage, and not just because I love Make: magazine (both print and blog). The author of this piece, Howard Wen, really nailed the essence of my technomadic projects… including the wince-inducing irony of their tendency to explode fractally into a level of complexity greater than that which inspired their launch. He pulled no punches about any of that, yet the article feels warm and thoughtful.

In addition to quality writing, the photos are first-rate as well; John Granen is one of those photographers who taught me technique in the process of shooting an assignment. Getting good lighting in my lab is no mean feat, and he nailed it.  The combination of publisher, writer, and photographer really hit a sweet spot…

Tech-Nomading from Shore to Ship

Interview by Howard Wen
Make: Vol 06 – May 8, 2006
Photography by John Granen

Steven Roberts’ workshop is a mess. Nestled in the quiet woods of Camano Island, a small community situated by Puget Sound about 90 minutes north of Seattle, the 3,000-square-foot building is overflowing with miscellaneous electronics, computers, and gadgets. Tools are everywhere — on shelves, on worktables, on the floor.

Roberts tells me he’s in the process of eBaying most of these things. I notice a stack of Macintosh computers. They’re the really old “classic” models, the ones with the tiny built-in black-and-white monitors. The genial Roberts, a tall and bearded fellow, says I can take one or more of them if I’m interested. I politely decline, being one of those people who avoids collecting items for which I have no use.

I’m a little surprised by all of this stuff in his place. When I first contacted him over the summer of 2005. Roberts told me how in 1983, then 31 years old and living in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, in a three-bedroom ranch-style house, he worked as a freelance writer (reporting on technology and electronics), and felt trapped. “I was working my ass off to pay for things I didn’t want, a lifestyle I didn’t want. I was doing things I didn’t enjoy.” he recalled.

Seeing his workshop, however, I was reminded of an email in which he lamented: “Almost everyone I know is bogged down by ‘complexity’: Creaky but familiar tools one doesn’t dare replace; new toys not yet learned: incompatible power supplies: unlabeled mystery cables clogging drawers: lost documentation; and the vulnerability of it all becoming utterly useless.”

Back in 1983, back with all those things he didn’t want, Roberts yearned for simplicity and adventure. He had not planned on it, but he was about to become a pioneer of the “tech-nomadic” life: a man who used mobile technology to live on the road, to stay in touch with the world wherever he was, and to free himself from a dreary existence.

The Souped-Up Canoe

Roberts became interested in electronics when he was 8 years old and growing up in Louisville, Ky. His father was a mechanical engineer, and Roberts was inspired by him to build machines. As a child, he made numerous electronic projects, which he usually entered into the school science fair: an induction magnet that could pick up aluminum, a Morse-code translator, and a speech synthesizer based on his own vocal tract, taken from an X-ray of his head.

He shows me his latest project in his workshop, a souped-up canoe. Actually, “souped-up” is an understatement. It’s been totally overhauled with the addition of two smaller hulls, one connected at each side to the main hull where the pilot sits. Eight blue solar panels, four on each side, are set across from the smaller hulls to the main hull. This water vehicle even has retractable wheels. Why does a boat need wheels? Roberts felt it would be more convenient to move from shore to water if it had wheels, so he spent years designing and building this elaborate mechanism. [note: credit is due here to Bob Stuart, who did most of the landing gear design.]

This super-modified boat, christened the Wordplay, looks more like a starfighter out of a science fiction TV show than something meant for the water. This analogy isn’t too far off, considering the onboard technologies it packs: satellite and cellular phone, ham radio, and marine VHF. And this doesn’t even include the video cameras and other gizmos that aren’t mounted to it the day I visit. There’s a circular, triton-looking antenna set toward the craft’s bow that Roberts explains is an “ultrasonic transducer.” Once a second, each of the three forks communicates with the other in order to collectively measure the surrounding air mass, wind speed, and wind direction.

Yet Wordplay travels by decidedly low-tech means: by wind with a sail.

The Winnebiko

Roberts shows me around the rest of his cluttered workshop. One item catches my eye; it looks like a control panel ripped out of a jet fighter cockpit. It served as the control panel for his first tech-nomadic vehicle, the Winnebiko.

Back in Columbus, 1983. Roberts went to a party out in the country. That night, he stared into a campfire and then things “just all snapped into place”: why not combine the things he was most passionate about — computers, writing, travel, bicycles, and romance — into a new life?

He ordered a custom-built recumbent (a type of sit-down bicycle), then grafted on a RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop, a Hewlett-Packard HP-110 portable computer [the HP was added a year later], CB radio, and a 5-watt solar panel to power these gadgets. He named the resulting vehicle the Winnebiko.

Starting from Columbus, Roberts biked 10,000 miles, passing through small towns along the southern East Coast, through Florida, the South, Texas, and the Southwest, and ending in Silicon Valley in California about 18 months later. Throughout this trip, he continued to earn a living by writing articles on his laptop. He also wrote about his journey, which eventually caught the notice of people in the media, who wondered about this man bicycling across America on a “computerized bike.”

As fulfilling as this really long bike ride had been, he found it frustrating that he could not write while riding at the same time. “I had all this mobility, but I was just watching the words flow away, knowing by night, when I was camping or whatever, I would not capture these thoughts,” he says.

Roberts upgraded the Winnebiko for an encore trip in 1986. The Winnebiko II added packet radio for email access, a security system with motion detection and voice synthesis, and a new, more sophisticated control panel. To enable himself to write as he pedaled, he hacked apart the keyboard of the TRS-80 Model 100, and rewired the keys to the bike’s handle controls. [actually, this was a chord keyboard with a 68HC11 controller that emulated the Model 100 keyboard]

His second bike tour ran from Seattle, along the West Coast, and across the country to the East Coast. He was accompanied by his girlfriend at the time, Maggie Victor, who rode her own recumbent. Together, they traveled 6,000 miles.

Behold the BEHEMOTH

The attention Roberts got from the media led to interest from corporate sponsors. From 1988 to 1992, he threw more things onto the Winnebiko II. A lot of things. Much like a succeeding version of a Microsoft application, the bike quickly became bogged with too many features, to the point of absurdity and uselessness. So many components were put on it that a trailer had to be designed to hold them, and for the bike to tow.

Renamed BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine… Only Too Heavy), it was assembled in Silicon Valley by a team of volunteers assisting Roberts. It had almost every piece of mobile and computer technology at the time: a hacked Macintosh and other computer systems, tons of radio communications devices, GPS navigation, even a radiation monitor.

“I got so distracted by the tech stuff,” Roberts admits. “I’d be reading a trade journal and go, ‘Ooh, ooh, I could use that!’ and then I would schmooze and get it.”

The media and public were enchanted with his journeys, and wowed by the technology-laden, though impractical, bike. Roberts was interviewed by many reporters and appeared on TV talk shows. But as public interest in his project was reaching its peak, the tech-nomadic biker’s passion for his original dream was dying. Ironically, to make public appearances and do speaking gigs, he traveled the country in a diesel truck that carried the BEHEMOTH in its trailer.

The Laboratory on an Island

Using the money he earned from his speaking tour for the BEHEMOTH, Roberts bought property on Camano Island, choosing the region for its variety of surrounding waterways. He put up the 3,000-squarefoot workshop to facilitate the research, construction, and testing of small watercraft that would utilize tech-nomadic technologies. He brought over the volunteer-community ethic of BEHEMOTH by inviting engineers and other specialists to take part.

The “Microship Project” began with the idea of outfitting a basic kayak with communications devices, but evolved into a pair of specially modified boats, Songline and Wordplay. These water vehicles expanded upon the embedded systems technologies that Roberts and his BEHEMOTH team developed, and which allowed the pilot to control almost every aspect of the craft through a Palm-OS PDA. [Note: the Microship project used a wireless Apple Newton for front-end control over a network of FORTH boards; migration to Palm OS did not happen until the Shacktopus project.]

In his workshop, Roberts shows me the inside of a thick plastic project box that’s sitting at one end of a worktable. It looks large enough to hold several hundred sheets of 8.5×11 paper. This is the power supply he designed for the Wordplay [correction: the power control system was designed and built by Tim Nolan]. It uses seven microprocessors to regulate and distribute 600 watts. While the boat’s solar panels alone can provide 5 knots to move the craft, this power unit was also designed to enable the pilot to divert all power to the thrust for emergencies (like quickly veering away from another boat).

Roberts took the Wordplay on a 132-mile ride through Puget Sound in September 2001. Though he still considers it to be in development, the Microship Project has gone through extended inactive periods over the years, as personal priorities for him shifted.

“When I started this ten years ago, I was perfectly pleased with the idea of taking out on a canoe-sized hull, spending two years sleeping in the bilge — it’s the size of a coffin. Now I’m 52, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to be that uncomfortable for that long!’” he says, chuckling.

Project Shacktopus

Along with a weakening tolerance for physical discomfort, Roberts has been wondering lately if maybe he has spent too much time over the past 20 years designing machines and not enough of it going out on actual adventures. He calls this consequence the “BEHEMOTH effect.”

Thus, last year he decided to create an all-in-one mobile communications pack, which he named the Shacktopus. He plans to make it the size of a notebook computer, or small enough to fit into a messenger bag. It’s the first project of his that he hopes to turn into a commercial product.

“Unlike the other systems [Winnebiko, et al.]. which were really lifestyle choices, this is much more ‘grab and go.’” he says. “With Shacktopus, I’m avoiding any more multi-year projects that tie me to a specific bike or boat.”

He shows me the prototype for the Shacktopus. sitting on the same worktable where he has the power supply box for the Wordplay. The Shacktopus is essentially a clear plastic project box with a medley of off-the-shelf communication and other computer components inside, bashed and interfaced together through a unified control system designed by Roberts. There’s an HF/VHF/UHF transceiver: a GPS system; environmental telemetry; internet access with wi-fi bridging; a lithium-ion battery power system that can be charged by a solar panel, automobile cigarette lighter, or AC outlet; speech synthesis; audio recording; Bluetooth interfacing to a notebook computer or PDA; and a deployable antenna array from HF to 2.4GHz.

For something that’s supposed to help simplify Roberts’ life, to free him from dealing with such technically complicated projects as the Microships, this early version of the Shacktopus itself already looks to be… complex.

While it stems from the restlessness that has been growing within its creator over the past few years, the Shacktopus also seems to represent the same conundrum. Roberts came to the woods of Camano Island with what sounded like a simple enough plan: build a boat and move on to the next big adventure. This didn’t happen fast enough. Apparently, it takes a long time to build a boat, at least the way Roberts likes to build one, thanks to fancy things like retractable wheels. Things became complicated.

“I want to get moving again, and I see Shacktopus as the way of making that happen — kind of short-cutting that whole process.” he says, perhaps hopefully. “I’m looking for a big boat that I can live on and do some world traveling.”

The Allure of Human Power

When I started talking to Roberts for this story last summer, I immediately noted that his technomadic vehicles — the bikes and the boats — shared the distinction of being small vehicles that relied mainly on people power. I wondered what the appeal in that was for him.

“I like the human scale of it. I find that when you cruise on a motorcycle or car, you’re really anonymous. You’re just somebody passing through on the freeway. Whereas, when I was on a bicycle. I was completely non-threatening,” he said to me back then. “Back in the early 80s when I was [biking through] small towns in the South, people would take me home. They weren’t worried about me. Also, it’s a lot more satisfying. Kayaking to an island is more exciting. There’s an old saying: the smaller the boat, the bigger the adventure.”

Afterwards, I mused for several months: what could be the thematic connection of a human-powered vehicle, or wind- and solar-powered one (as in the case of the Microships), to mobile communications technology? What was the appeal of the two brought together?

When I meet the tech-nomadic pioneer in person on a sunny afternoon in February 2006, I ask him about this. Beyond the fact that the two subjects have always interested him personally, he cannot come up with some profound, satisfying explanation for it all.

I climb aboard the Wordplay — or climb into it, to be more precise. At 5’8″, I’m much shorter and thinner than Roberts, so the inside doesn’t feel “coffin-like” to me at all. There’s a lot of leg-room. I fiddle with some of the levers and try to relax myself into the hard seat. I look ahead, out the canopy. A compass is affixed to the top of the dashboard, and beyond that I see a large marker board with technical-looking diagrams drawn on it, hanging from the wall in front of the Wordplay. If I were on Puget Sound, my view instead would be of the water rippling out beyond and into a backdrop of the mountain ranges of northwestern Washington, I imagine. But it also feels like I’m in a starfighter.

It then gradually dawns on me: there’s a unique feeling about being inside such a small craft that relies upon your own physical skills and wits to control. It becomes like an extension of your own skin, your own body. It becomes personal.

Maybe that’s the connection: mobile communications, and vehicles like Roberts’ bikes and this boat, both evoke a personal, emotional bond between themselves and the user. The more physically invested the rider is in the direct powering of the vehicle, the more personal the journey becomes.

“My goal is not to spend my life in the lab building electronics,” Roberts says. “I got this beautiful place in the woods. It looks like it ought to be paradise, but I’m just itchin’ to get moving again.”

The last time he felt that itch, he was living in a three-bedroom, ranch-style house somewhere in the suburbs of Columbus. There was no eBay, so he was stuck with a bunch of unwanted stuff that he couldn’t easily get rid of.

But one day, he left it all behind — there were still dirty dishes in the kitchen sink — and didn’t even bother to lock the front door of his house. He just pedaled away on an odd-looking bike that he had slapped computers and mobile communications gadgets onto. “It was like I reached around the back of my head and hit the reset button,” he says of that day when his journey began.

Random posts from the archives:

Move House (Book Chapter)

by Sean Topham
Prestel Publishing, May 2004

Weighing just over 260 kilograms when fully loaded, Behemoth may be a heavyweight bruiser of a bicycle but it barely makes flyweight when compared to other mobile homes. Its predecessors Winnebiko I and II are even lighter, and with the three machines Steven Roberts pedaled over 27,000 kilometers around the USA. Unlike the majority of projects in this book, Roberts’s array of high-tech homes on wheels are not formed by a need for movable shelter but by a passion for communication.

The adventure started in 1983 when Roberts incorporated his interests in cycling, electronics, adventure, and ham radio into a pioneering mobile-home concept. He ditched his suburban lifestyle and took to the road on a recumbent bicycle dubbed Winnebiko. A portable computer, a six-watt solar panel, and the data communication link CompuServe gave Roberts the freedom to cycle around the United States while making a living from magazine assignments, consultant positions, and other freelance activity. Winnebiko came to represent a new type of freedom. Roberts described it as “a machine that eloquently symbolized the daring notion that people could indeed be free, follow their dreams, and break the chains that had always bound them to their desks.”

In 1986 Winnebiko was replaced by the much more sophisticated Winnebiko II, which satisfied Roberts’s main objective of wanting to be able to type while pedaling. Packed with switches, processors, and LEDs the machine earned Roberts a further 9,500 kilometers. His physical location grew less and less important. What mattered most was maintaining a presence in the online networks. “Home, quite literally,” says Roberts, “became an abstract electronic concept.”

Behemoth [Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine ... Only Too Heavy], the final incarnation of Roberts’s wired bicycles, was three and a half years in development, but he only used it for a further 1,500 kilometers. In addition to the computing facilities of a small laboratory, the bike and its trailer also carries a full suite of camping and life-support equipment. The road no longer held so many surprises for Roberts and in 1992 he switched his attention to water transport with the Microship project.

Random posts from the archives:

To that end, I am offering to loan it to a suitably audacious geek/sailor, someone with the same crazy technomadic passion that drove me to launch this project in the heady afterglow of the BEHEMOTH epoch. The story that follows has been dredged from the cobwebsite and dusted off to give prospective skippers a sense of what she’s like on the water.  This piece was written during the 132-mile MEME — the Microship Experimental Mini-Expedition, launched a few days after 9/11/2001. It was a strange time, but the boat performed beautifully.

The Microship Mini-Expedition of 2001

by Steven K. Roberts
October 14, 2001

I’m perched in Microship Wordplay, trapped in a Poulsbo marina by a small craft advisory, slowly adapting to life aboard this tiny craft as we near the end of a 2-week mini-expedition…

Suddenly my whole perception of the Microship has changed. The mercifully short TO-DO list that has fallen out of this first real test sail includes nothing fundamental… a few essential leak fixes inspired by a grim rainy layover in Everett Harbor, better gear organization, some cockpit niceties, an improved electric thruster (I can pedal faster than I can cruise with a trolling motor drawing about 30 amps!). But so far there are no “deal-breakers”: she sails dry, points high, and loves to fly. Even the dreaded on-water bivouac mode, though spartan in the extreme, became manageable once I got used to viewing cockpit clutter as a 3-D version of one of those sliding-tile puzzles and stopped expecting convenience.

The whole pace of life changes afloat. Projects are clearly defined and appear in singles or small groups, not as mutually dependent tangled threads with the collective flavor of Deadly Embrace and no sense of closure. Our days are ordered by current tables, NOAA weather broadcasts, random encounters, and the spacing of shore facilities… not by the numbing overload of life in the lab. It’s all an illusion, of course. I just got a book contract for Inside Microship, to be published next year by O’Reilly & Associates [note: the book project was aborted]. This is good, though if I understand the situation correctly, now I actually have to WRITE the thing.

But that’s all abstract at the moment, for I’m sitting in my boat with a laptop, living this 9-year-old dream for the first time, thunking my rubrail gently against a dock at the head of Liberty Bay as we catch eddies of the 25-knot winds frothing open water not so far away. We tried to leave yesterday, rising at 0600 to zoom downwind in time for a favorable current in Agate Passage. We poked our noses around Point Bolin only to get hammered… hard… driven back to the marina in a brutal upwind death march that took four times as long as the outward leg. All part of the amusement, I suppose. By the time we would normally be caffeinated and slouched in front of the day’s email, we had already tasted fear, slammed into Force 6 winds, pedal-tacked frantically off a lee shore, and flown deeply reefed across a wind-whipped watertop sparkling in the morning sunlight of a Pacific Northwest autumn day.

And so, things have become clearer. A few fixes and enhancements, solar array thermal retrofit and mounting… and then it’s time to conjure the console system that was originally (I thought) the point of all this. The good news is that we have spent enough years fiddling around with the nautical substrate that we can simply acquire much of the gizmology we thought we were going to have to invent from scratch… substantially trimming the task list and even eliminating entire computers (one of the best things to do with them, I have discovered). The biggest single project remaining appears to be software, though I won’t admit that when wrestling with console packaging.

Natasha has been remarkable through all this, and I’m not just talking about her ability to survive the toxic knuckle-busting rigors of boatbuilding and whip up fresh albacore sandwiches at the dock. I was particularly impressed this past Sunday, when we left Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island bound for Dyes Inlet. We bid farewell to friends new and old, cast off our lines, and sailed in tandem past yachts of all flavors, the manicured lawns of waterfront homes, and the Seattle Ferry loading up for a run. The boats flashed in the sun, hers bright red with purple Sunbrella, mine Hatteras off-white with enough Bristol gewgaws to stop old salts in their tracks and crinkle their faces with kidlike grins. A perfect day. But when we rounded the last mark and turned south in Puget Sound, the full force of the 25 knot wind hit us from the port quarter, and never have I had such a frantic broad reach. Surfing, fighting weather helm to prevent broaching, I watched constantly over my left shoulder to time my response to the waves… some tall enough to momentarily block my view of Seattle. I raced past Blakely Rock and toward Restoration Point, watching muscular seas toss me about and then break on the shoals a hundred yards to leeward… glancing every few seconds at the GPS to see how much more of this rather TOO exciting sail I would have to endure. I wanted to reef, but would have to head up to take the load off the rig enough to furl.

My real worry, however, was Natasha. She’s never done this before.

Perhaps because she didn’t know enough to be scared, she handled it beautifully, though at one point I saw her head up toward Seattle and had the mad thought that she was jumping ship, figuratively speaking. But she was just giving herself some sea room off the wicked lee shore: instead of responding to each wave as I was with her decreasingly responsive rudder (hydraulic leak), she was grabbing a load of slack in one big gulp. Good move.

Tales of the MEME

The Mini-Expedition has now ended, and it diverged considerably from the original plan (mostly due to weather this late in the season). After a blur of last-minute work that is painful to recall and would be even worse to write about, we hauled the boats a mile down the road to the local launch ramp. This was the first test: how would the landing gear perform? Mine, in particular, have consumed entirely too large a percentage of this project’s overburdened budget, and the past few months of lab work have included a complete re-rigging of the deployment system — replacing all the original line with turnbuckle-tensioned 1/8″ black-jacketed 7×19 stainless wire rope with swaged-on thimbles, as well as a geometry-shift system to accommodate reverse and a new scheme for tensioning the steering wire inspired by old 3-speed bicycle brake barrel adjusters. I sorta decided somewhere in there that this is the last chance… if the gear still have intractable problems, I’ll switch to the system on Tasha’s boat (not something I would want to do: the job itself would be a nightmare and I’d hate to give up the elegance of lever-deployment… and besides, they’re beautiful). So the good news here is that the mile to the launch was absolutely uneventful, even with a few rough spots and encounters with gravel. Gravity was intense, but we can’t blame the wheels for that; I just have too much stuff.

The basic trade-off between the two design approaches is that mine are turnkey and profoundly geeky, with aircraft-grade fabrication and massive engineering geared to convenient and efficient operation. They also took nearly two years to build, and are easily the most expensive part of my boat. Tasha’s, on the other hand, are dead-simple, rock-solid, came together quickly, and handle much heavier abuse without threatening to fail… but they are far more troublesome to use (she gets wet and takes 5-10 minutes to accomplish what I do by pulling four levers from the cockpit, along with a cocky grin and the words, “you ready?”). In a serious crash, hers would break fiberglass and mine would break hardware. But I’d much rather haul hers down a rough road, and in Dyes Inlet at Greg Jacobs’ house I left mine on a mooring buoy while she easily beached — the stones were just too big. I hate trade-offs, don’t you?

So with the invaluable muscular assistance of Tasha’s mendicant philosopher pal Nick Routledge and resident wizard Ned Konz, we made our way to the launch and pushed off. Suddenly it all became surreal, as this was not to be another little afternoon test sail like the first four launches — we were heading out into unknown conditions for two weeks. This is the first reality check of any consequence, 4.5 years since the moment of radical re-thinking that spelled the end of the Hogfish era and the move to this design. Oddly, the stress level was low, but the sense of delicious madness was profound and the whole experience unspeakably beautiful… drifting quietly down the west shore of our island, seeing it at last from the perspective that lured us here in the first place.

The last leg of this first day was a short windless crossing of Elger Bay after rounding the point at the State Park, and we decided to try our electric thrusters. In short, they were a bit disappointing… only moving the boats at about 3 knots instead of the estimated 5.5. Part of the problem may be undersized wire from the battery 8 feet away (via a temporary switch); the cable gets a bit warm, which means significant I²R loss. The round fiberglass shafts also ventilate considerably, and I question the prop pitch and speed in this application. This will call for a bit of research… a lot of work has gone into the controller end (which, like many things, was not on board for this trip), and it would be a shame to skimp on the business end.

The first stop, reached well after dark with navlights and GPS backlight aglow, was Rick Wesley’s waterfront house with its huge flight of steep steps and a tent on the bulkhead. We made the rafted boatlets fast to his mooring buoy and dinghied to shore… not a convenient mode, given the need to schlep gear, but the only choice in this environment where the tidal range includes the bulkhead itself. Again, surreal… I climbed the steps in the morning and gazed down in wonderment at the delicate sunlit boats on their shared mooring: such a different perspective from the workstand under fluorescents. Tiny little buggers…

Songline under sail at dusk

Their diminutive scale became more apparent the next day. We headed south between Camano and Whidbey Islands, the wind gradually becoming useful, at last emerging into more open water to pass by Gedney Island on a broad reach to Everett. This was our first chance to get slapped a bit by waves and gusts, share the water with the big boys and those omnipresent wake-generating noisy powerboats, depend on the GPS to find an entrance buoy, pass a Coast Guard cutter on high alert, drift past a Navy base, and actually <gulp> enter a marina. That turned out to be a smooth process, and they were kind enough to let us share a slip and pay by aggregate length. What we didn’t know is that we’d be stuck there for the next three days.

Relentless heavy rain and high winds are profoundly demotivating when you’re in camping mode, and we hung around, dejected, making far too many long walks to the marine emporiums of West, Harbor, and Popeye’s. The goal became a vague melange of leak elimination and staying warm, and I compiled the first to-do list of the trip: places that have to be sealed to prevent rain from converting an already minimal sleeping environment into a miserable one. A friendly couple on a quirky 50-foot homebrew ketch took us in, so we did have two dry nights…

When conditions finally mellowed, we rose pre-dawn to ride the flood current south, and made Fay Bainbridge State Park at slack pretty much as planned. Unfortunately, despite the information in two of our four on-board references, the launch ramp had been removed a few years ago and the driftwood-strewn lee shore was not inviting even with a Cascadia Marine Trail campsite. Thus began the first “death march” of the adventure… a long, exhausted pedal against the ebb down the east side of Bainbridge Island to Eagle Harbor.

We parked at last in the delightful Harbour Marina (with its superb pub) and schlepped our gear to the home of Charlie Faddis. Now this was more the flavor of proper technomadics… hanging out with brilliant friends and partying with the live-aboards, not huddling in separate boats, miserable in the rain, making lists of leaks. Life improved.

Of course, the sunny morning that we left propelled us into that gonzo wave-toss’d reach down to the lee of the island… yikes! I felt the stirrings of fear, got a much better sense of the rigging stresses involved, and started worrying about solar array windage. But after this dose of adrenaline and harsh reminder of mortality, the expedition became a sweet blur — connecting the dots of friends and marinas, tweaking our plans daily as weather and random delays imposed scheduling constraints far more immediate than the normal influences of deadlines and calendar coordination. Through the locks and into the Seattle lakes to pedal with Michael Lampi and visit other waterborne pals? Up to Port Townsend for the Kinetic Sculpture Race, with a stop at Port Ludlow enroute to visit wireless data wizard Dan Withers? Looping back to Camano Island via Deception Pass, or maybe even Anacortes? None of those happened: delayed a day here, a day there, hemmed in by winds as the season turned, we soon realized that we’d do well to simply claw our way back upwind and get to work on the next phase.

We left multihull maven Greg Jacobs’ place in Silverdale, backtracked past Bremerton, than had a long pedaling slog up the west side of Bainbridge and into the trap of Poulsbo. Not realizing the implications of a northwest/southeast bay coupled with a southwest/northeast exit passage in an environment that offers a steady diet of northerlies punctuated by occasional southerlies (got all that?), we docked at the marina for what was to be a one-nighter in a cute town. Alas, this place had ludicrous pricing policies… while the other four marinas on the trip charged us by the aggregate foot, the Port of Poulsbo Marina imposed a $15 minimum per boat. This had us paying $30/night to dock two canoes, exactly the same fee for two coffins-worth of sleep space as the 60-foot Chris Craft Constellation yacht gleaming lavishly on the end tie. No attempt to point out the absurdity changed their minds.

We were stuck in the otherwise delightful Poulsbo for $90 worth of dock time, making daily visits to Prototek, hanging out with a colorful albacore fisherman, and listening every few hours to the NOAA weather broadcast. It kept prattling endlessly about small craft advisories, with wind gusts to 30 knots and other unpleasantries. As I mentioned at the beginning, we got impatient on a seductively sunny morning and took a shot at it — broad reaching 5 miles down the bay and into Agate Passage where we were slammed by a funneled northerly that, coupled with current in our favor, generated remarkably peaky little waves with their tops blown into long streamers. There wasn’t enough fetch for the seas to be a problem, but the wind stopped us in our tracks. I tried to fight it for a few minutes, pedaling hard, then a gust shoved my bow around and I went careening downwind while Tasha went bobbing off toward Bainbridge, wrestling on the foredeck with a jammed furler. It took almost four hours to battle our way back upwind to town.

We escaped eventually, of course, and made two back-to-back death marches into relentless northerlies to reach Kingston, then Langley… both pleasant villages with friendly marinas and well-stocked pubs. The final run to Camano Island, 9 easy miles scooting 4-5 knots in a rare southerly, dropped us at our local launch ramp by noon… where we wrapped the whole thing up with a grueling, gravity-defying 1-mile haul of our collective tonnage up the wheel-sucking beach, up a nasty hill, up a long road, up another killer hill… well, you get the idea. It’s due to the Roberts Law of Aquatic Gravitation: water collects in low places, so leaving is always harder than arriving.

That’s true in a metaphorical sense as well. During those 2 weeks at sea, magical at some times and brutally difficult at others, I barely thought about terrorists, geopolitics, deadlines, resource-extractors and developers raping our island, or any of the other psychic energy sinks of daily life. There’s an immediacy in sailing that captures the mind and soul, and small wonder some people never come back. Already, a few days later, I’m embroiled again in complexity… dreaming of the expedition to come and further refining the project to streamline the path from here to launch.

I’d like to devote the rest of this update to a few comments on equipment performance. But first, some data points…

Statistical Interlude

Microship Wordplay
Number of blocks: 42
Feet of line: 225 (plus 185′ of anchor webbing)
Hydraulic cylinders: 13
valves: 13
fittings: 128
tubing: 150′
Weight: about 900 pounds plus me

MEME-1 trip data
Total distance: 132 nautical miles
Longest day: 28 nm
Average day: 14.6 nm
Highest speed observed: 7.5 knots
Pedaling speed: 3.5 knots relaxed, 4+ pushing hard

Equipment Performance Observations

In general, things worked beautifully. The following commentary addresses individual subsystems and components….

The trimaran itself: Surprisingly good. The ride is drier than I expected with this low freeboard, even in rough conditions, and she points fairly high (much higher if I’m also pedaling). I can complete a tack in 90 degrees with pedal-assist, about 130 degrees without. The aka hinges creak somewhat, but it feels good — there is plenty of bow buoyancy and she’s generally “on her lines.” The wake is clean, as the sleek Wenonah Odyssey canoe hull and the two Fulmar amas slice cleanly through the water with minimal turbulence. Even at over 1,000 pounds all-up weight, the boat feels light on the water (but not on land!).

Sailing rig: Not bad at all. The WindRider rig roller-furls around the mast, and I added a double furling drum to control this reliably from the cockpit (my original single drum was terrible). I also added a decent outhaul and split vang, both of which lead back to cleats on the aft port aka. These make deployment and retrieval much easier, and the vang flattens out the sail on a run by lowering the boom. And the Ronstan traveler track on the arch, though seemingly too short to make much difference, gives me a very noticeable advantage when pinching (sailing close-hauled to windward). The only remaining problem is stepping/unstepping, and we’re working on tabernacle and hinge concepts to make this less painful.

Spinfin pedal drive unit: Spectacular. This turns out to be a key component of the boat, faster than the electric thruster. It’s always available with a quick flip of the deployment lever, and not only lets me cruise at about 3.5 knots but vastly improves windward sailing performance. For close-in maneuvering such as docking, the Spinfin is a lifesaver. Early in the trip, I had clunking problems on the port side, but they were simply the result of misalignment in the crankset, easily adjusted with the Tran-torques once I stopped and paid attention to the problem. Afterwards, the remaining miles were silky smooth. Tasha’s boat uses a Seacycle drive — it’s slower and has more static friction than the Spinfin, but was still reliable. With both of us pedaling without exertion for an hour, I tend to end up about a half mile ahead.

Electric thruster: Further refinement needed. Speeds here were lower than pedaling, which doesn’t make much sense… I suspect cable loss and ventilation problems. Still, the units were immensely helpful, allowing us to justify our monstrously heavy batteries by getting a beautiful lift upwind and against the current. Tasha used hers for at least 5-6 hours, rescuing her knees from certain demise; I put about an hour on mine.

Landing gear: Much better than expected. As I mentioned earlier, this has been a nightmarishly complex part of the system, and my confidence level was low. But there were no problems on this trip, which included about 2.5 miles of often-difficult road time. I’m seeing some corrosion in exposed bearings and stainless components of uncertain pedigree, as well as minor initial stretch of the new cables (easily adjusted out), but nothing serious as far as I can tell without disassembly. The forward units do splash on a close reach in choppy conditions, but the one time it happened I was overpowered anyway and didn’t mind the drag.

Hydraulics: Excellent. I had one leak, in a chain of adapters associated with a temporary cheap pressure-relief valve used for rudder kick-up (the stainless one I want is about $200, so I got a bronze junker for testing). The Clippard cylinders distinguished themselves with trouble-free operation and no signs of corrosion, and the new bleeder system involving 26 ports solved the air bubble problem perfectly. My working fluid is a 50-50 mix of propylene glycol and distilled water, with red food coloring added. I just elevated a solar shower and gravity fed this into the system after first purging it with tap water (hence the coloring; that told me when to quit).

Communications: Needs integration. For this trip, we depended on handhelds for boat-to-boat use, and they were way too fiddly. Every day we had to deal with battery charging, sealed bags, trying to hear each other, and avoiding the loss of expensive widgets overboard. The radios themselves are excellent (Motorola Talkabout FRS and Alinco dual-band HT), but for marine use, all essential communication tools have to be integrated and the handhelds reserved for the backpacks. My boat also has a Standard DSC-capable fixed-mount Marine VHF. In the long run, of course, all my comm gear will be built into the console and accessible via the crossbar network. The most amazing communication device that accompanied us on this trip was the Globalstar phone… reliable even without the external antenna, and my key lifeline to the outside world. This, too, will become part of the integrated system when the console is built.

Cockpit Utility and Sleep Facilities: Cramped and challenging, but possible. This is definitely “camping scale adventure,” not yachting. There are about a dozen leak points that need to be fixed, and the most fundamental lesson is that there is no room for stray gadgets, bags, and random stuff floating around the cockpit. Everything needs to be either integrated into the ship or given an unambiguous and accessible stowage spot. Sleeping is difficult for me with my 6’4″ height and lower back problems, but it works surprisingly well — the Therma-Rest mattress is highly effective, and it’s kept above the always-wet bilge by .5″ cross-tube matting we found in the McMaster-Carr catalog (more flexible and prettier than the tile system in the marine supply stores). The fabric dodger is wonderful, though the side windows need work; the polycarbonate windshield is crystal clear, though I inadvertently disabled its essential fold-down feature with the cowling solar panel mounting.

Pack System: Effective but hard to use. Almost everything is stored in Cascade Designs dry bags, which are excellent and reliable… but I only have the tiny forward and aft compartments in the canoe hull, accessed through hatches. There’s just not much space, so doing anything involves a bit of a juggling act in cramped quarters. On this trip, the Mac laptop was in a Pelican box… too heavy and bulky, though I certainly had no trouble trusting its waterproofing effectiveness. When the console is done, the iBook will live in a sealed docking bay and move to my backpack when I’m off-boat; the Pelican box, if used, will carry instruments, spares, and documentation.

Navigation Tools: Good, but more needed. Besides the Marine VHF, the one always-on unit on this trip was the Garmin GPS-12XL. Wired to system power, it worked perfectly and has an efficient user interface. What is really needed, however, is a console-mounted chartplotter… my paper charts and manual nav tools (dividers, protractor, etc.) were a nuisance to use in the cockpit. In the long run, the handheld GPS and paper charts will be backups, and all routine navigation will be via the chartplotter (not PC-based nav software as originally planned; this is one area where single-point failure potential and power budget have to be taken seriously).

Lighting: Power hungry and a pain. The navlights are good (Aqua Signal), but are about to be retrofitted with stunning red, green, and white Luxeon LEDs driven by a board designed by Ned Konz. This will lower my 15-watt navlight budget to about 3-4 watts. In the cockpit, I’ll use diffused white LEDs; the current floating headlamp, flashlight, and candle system is ridiculously clumsy. Reducing dependence on stray gadgets is essential.

Power system: Good, but getting better. On this trip, I used a single Group 27 battery, proper bussing and distribution with Blue Sea Systems products, and charging from a 30-watt Solarex module as well as a Statpower AC charger. The latter appears confused and blinks an error light at full charge, and draws 30mA from the battery when not plugged in… it will be replaced by a dedicated line-operated switcher piped through Tim Nolan’s power management system. Tasha’s boat used a 3A Guest clip-on charger, but its setpoint is halfway between flooded and gel values (though it is much more waterproof than mine). The solar panels were not given proper charge controllers for this trip, just Schottky blocking diodes. All this will be upgraded as we turn our attention to systems integration.

I’ll add more notes as I find them, but this should provide a look into how it felt to spend time on water in the Microship. I can’t believe it’s been over a decade!

For a bit more information, here is a photo album with 52 pictures of the boat… and here is an article about the physical substrate, geekery aside. And the blog post about the Microship availability for all or part of a 2012 loop around Vancouver Island may be of interest to the intrepid adventurer!

Random posts from the archives:

This is a bit of a departure from the main content thread on this site, but is included in the interest of completeness. When I bought a house and built a lab in the woods of Camano Island, I unintentionally took on a very protective attitude toward that beautiful and fragile place… a slender slice of paradise in Puget Sound, one of 68 sole-source aquifers in the US, and a frequent battleground between commercial loggers and those who value their quality of life. Published a week before 9/11, this letter to the local paper captures my antibody-like reaction to one of the more active local resource-extraction enterprises.

Islands Are More Fragile

by Steven K. Roberts
Stanwood/Camano News – September 4, 2001

In his letter to the Stanwood/Camano NEWS last week, Daryl Jones raised a valid question. If I may paraphrase, he accused those who object to his logging activities of having a double standard, consuming wood and paper products while complaining about the very industry that provides them.

I must admit that I am troubled by this — I live in a beautiful wood house, pursue my work in a pole building, and consume far too much paper (though I keep trying without much success to convert this sea of documentation into an all-electronic form).

Like most people, I am in no position to claim that timber should never be harvested; I use “miracle fiber W” in countless ways.

So how do we reconcile this apparent hypocrisy? By Mr. Jones’ logic, I should be encouraging those who log Camano Island.

But there is a distinction that has to be made, and it goes beyond the obvious and common NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitude.

Islands are fragile little ecosystems in all sorts of ways: a timber harvest that makes but a tiny dent in the vast forests of the Cascades would completely ravish Camano Island, and the DNR rules governing forest practices are scaled to the former.

But destroy a few dozen acres here and you completely alter the wildlife habitat, irreversibly impact aquifer recharge, and degrade the character of the place to the point that it even affects the tax base and tourism.

A slender island in Puget Sound is not the place for commercial logging. Our wetlands are scarce; our balance of development and nature is delicate; our appeal as much aesthetic as resource-based.

When I see abominations like the slash-pile wasteland south of the state park (“Old Homestead Road”), I cringe at what current land-use practices imply for our island’s future.

It’s all about greed, especially in today’s political climate; a few people profit while the community suffers.

Yes, we use wood products. We also use automobiles, but don’t want Ford to set up an assembly plant in the heart of Camano Island; we consume industrial components, but the tantalum mines and silicon foundries can stay put.

Every action involves a trade-off of benefit versus cost, and some environments suffer more from a given level of abuse than others.

Someday, we’ll use nanotechnology to assemble everything aiom-by-atom from the ground up and ditch dirty industries altogether, but in the meantime let’s respect the unique delicacy of where we live, even as we participate in the global economy.

I understand how this can sound hypocritical to one in the business of logging. “Let’s gobble resources, but make sure they come from elsewhere!” But harvesting our own fragile little island is akin to selling off one’s organs to pay the bills: a painful short-term fix that is ultimately self-defeating.

We own 11 acres of forest, but even in economic down times it never even occurs to us to sell the timber… we care about our neighbors and the future of the island.

To be fair, let’s approach this from two angles: reduce logging impact on the island, but also recycle and increase efficiency to reduce our demand on the world at large.

Steven K. Roberts
Camano Island

Random posts from the archives:

One of the phenomena that figured prominently in my ongoing media coverage was the very simple fact that I was in the same business. It was not uncommon to go into an interview with a reporter smirking at the bearded eccentric on a bicycle, then watch the dawning realization as we conversed: “Damn… this guy is doing what I do, but he gets to have FUN at the same time!”

I can’t speak for Danny, as we have unfortunately never met, but I get the impression from the tone of this back-page piece that there was much more to it than a simple technology story. This appeared just as the Microship project was nearing its too-brief climax. It makes me feel a little wistful…

On the Road and Always On

by Danny O’Brien
Sunday Times – “Doors” Magazine – June 3, 2001

Friends, I know, look on with concern when I scrabble around for an internet connection on holiday. I have ducked into cybercafes in Marrakesh, scouted for possible internet service providers in the Basque country, and pinged home pages in Madagascar. “Can’t you leave the net at home?” they wonder. “Can’t you, just this once, put that modem down? Or at least stop hitting me with it?”

Yes, and yes, and yes, I suppose — but I’m not happy about it.

It is not what you think. I am not, as a platoon of ex-employers will unhappily confirm, a workaholic. I can, despite what one might guess reading these columns, turn off the net for more than 45 seconds (okay, 40). Most vitally, I do not hate holidays. No: ever since I was seven, I have hated holidays ending.

I do not want to get away from it all this summer. I want to stay away from it all. That is why I spend all my time checking out how the net works in foreign countries. Because if I fall in love with an exotic holiday location, and it has decent connectivity, I do not need to go home at all. If I can get online, I can work. And if I can work where I holiday, why holiday at all?

It has never really panned out for me (except for here in California, and if Silicon Valley is a holiday locale, then they should start laying on package tours to Dagenham), but it has worked for others. I have shared distributed offices with telecommuters from Turkey, from Spain and from the south of France. Not rich folk, either. Thinking about it, all of them have been notably frugal, either living off a small wage or returning to jobs only when their reserves were running short. And they never had to pay for lunch, either.

The model of how I want to spend my summers, and winters, and everything in between, is Steven K Roberts, the technomad (microship.com). In 1983, Roberts sold his suburban house and started to build a string of computer-enhanced bikes, upon which he would ride across America. He aimed to write, program and run a tech consultancy on the road, working from his bicycle-office. A few years ago, he stepped down from the Behemoth, a solar-powered, satellite-connected bike (complete with a Mac, three computers and a Sun SPARCstation onboard) and stayed still long enough to plan the next phase: a person-sized floating home. He is still at the demo phase right now, but this next generation of technologically enhanced wanderlust will take the form of a small flotilla of canoe-sized trimarans.

Steven and a willing friend are demoing these across America’s western seaboard now, I guess to prove that you do not even need solid land to run a successful freelance business. I am not sure I’m hardy (or hard-working) enough for the endless touring beloved of the true technomad, but I keep looking. Holidays are to discover what you will do next, not to inure you to what you will do for ever.

Random posts from the archives:

QST

From Behemoth to Microship – Book Review

by Steve Ford, WB8IMY
QST – June, 2001

Kirk Kleinschmidt, NT0Z, first introduced QST readers to Steve Roberts’ nomadic vision in an article titled “Life on a Megacycle” that appeared in the April 1992 issue. The Behemoth was Steve’s unique creation—a recumbent bicycle loaded to the gills with computer and communication gear, including Amateur Radio. With the Behemoth Steve toured the US, using its technology to remain connected to the rest of humanity. In effect, he had no permanent home to speak of; his home was the highway. And it was more than just a pleasure journey. Thanks to the technology contained in the Behemoth, Steve was able to maintain an active freelance and consulting business while on the road.

In From Behemoth to Microship we have the story of the evolution of Steve’s “techno-nomad” ideal. The book is part hardware essay, part philosophy. Portions of the book reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, especially where Steve goes into detail about the concept of becoming a technological nomad. He sees his pursuit as the achievement of true personal freedom, a no-compromise approach to living the lifestyle you choose. In his case, he chooses to be in a state of almost constant exploration while still being entirely accessible thanks to the Internet, commercial communication and Amateur Radio.

From Behemoth to Microship chronicles the various designs he has tested and the technological hurdles he has overcome. Take power systems, for example. He relies primarily on solar energy and depends on human pedal-powered propulsion. To that extent, his nomadic vehicles are quite environmentally friendly. The latest project is the development of the Microship — a waterborne version of his tech-heavy cycle. Steve intends to take his roving lifestyle to the coastal and inland waterways. Among the technologies on the Microship are a Globalstar satellite telephone, embedded Linux servers, video production tools. Amateur Radio and much more.

This book spins a fascinating tale, as uncommon as Steve’s vision. As I finished. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. Many people pay lip service to the notion of taking “the road less traveled.” but Steve Roberts made it reality. You don’t encounter that sort of focused passion very often, although having a foundation in ham radio no doubt helps!

This review was written by Steve Ford, the author of three excellent books from the ARRL: the Satellite Handbook, the HF Digital Handbook, and the Emergency Communication Handbook.

Random posts from the archives:

The BEHEMOTH

CORE 2.1 – March, 2001

BEHEMOTH. Big Electronic Human-Energize Machine…Only Too Heavy (1983-1991), L2003.2001. Loaned by Steve Roberts

After speaking at a Museum lecture on Sept 7, 2000. Steve Roberts presented BEHEMOTH to The Computer Museum History Center as a long term loan.

In the early 1980s, feeling trapped in his suburban lifestyle, Steve Roberts began to reevaluate his life. Roberts, a freelance technical writer who had published articles in magazines such as Byte, decided to tour the country on a recumbent bicycle of his own design, the Winnebiko. During his trip, Roberts made his living publishing stories and writing a book as he went along, using his on-board Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 and a CompuServe account to email his stories to publishers.

After redesigning the bike (as Winnebiko II), Roberts went off in an entirely different direction, devising BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine…Only Too Heavy): a 580-pound, 105-speed recumbent bicycle with a four-foot yellow trailer solar panel array that allowed the incorporation of many more technologies than on previous bikes. Roberts envisioned a project where a “computer and communication tools rendered physical location irrelevant.” BEHEMOTH sported antennas for communication over various amateur and public radio networks, several networked computers (including an Apple Macintosh and an Intel 386-based laptop), a special keypad on each bicycle handle to allow typing, and a security system that would alert police if the vehicle were disturbed. The helmet is perhaps the most futuristic-looking part of BEHEMOTH, with its heads-up display, motion sensors for cursor control, lights, fluid heat exchanger to keep the head cool, and audio system. A complete feature list is shown below.

Roberts logged over 17,000 miles on BEHEMOTH and gave hundreds of radio, television, and print interviews over the several years he was on the road. This wide exposure points to BEHEMOTH as an important milestone in the integration of technologies for recreational use, as well as a highly visible artifact of early wireless mobile networking. Roberts retired BEHEMOTH to begin a new project called the Microship.

INTEGRATED EQUIPMENT

Console (forward enclosure under fiberglass hood)

• Macintosh 68K (control GUI and primary workspace)
• Bicycle Control Processor (FORTH 68HC11)
• Ampro 286 DOS platform for CAD system
• Toshiba 1000 repackaged laptop for scrolling FAQ
• 80 MB hard disk space
• Audapter speech synthesizer
• Speech recognition board
• Trimble GPS satellite navigation receiver
• Audio and serial crosspoint switch networks (homebrew)
• PacComm packet TNC (VHF datacomm)
• MFJ 1278 for AMTOR (HF datacomm)
• Diagnostic tools (LED matrix, DPM, etc)
• Handlebar keyboard processor
• Ultrasonic head mouse controller
• Icom 2-meter transceiver
• Radiation monitor
• Cordless phone and answering machine on RJ-11 bus
• Folding 6-segment aluminum console
• Fiberglass fairing

RUMP — Rear Unit of Many Purposes (white enclosure behind seat)

• Stereo System (Blaupunkt speakers, Yamaha 18W amp)
• 10 GHz Microwave motion sensor (security)
• UNGO physical motion sensor (security)
• Rump Control Processor (FORTH 68HC11)
• Audio crosspoint network, bussed to console
• Ampro DOS core module for heads-up display
• LED taillight controller
• Motorola 9600-baud packet modem for backpack link
• 7-liter helmet-cooling tank and pump
• Personal accessory storage
• Air compressor for pneumatic system
• 15 amp-hour sealed lead-acid battery (1 of 3)

Helmet

• Reflection Technology Private Eye display
• Ultrasonic head-mouse sensors
• Helmet lights (2)
• Life Support Systems heat exchanger for head cooling
• Setcom headset with boom microphone

SPARCPACK (aluminum case atop RUMP)

• Sun SPARCstation IPC with 12MB RAM and 424 MB disk
• Sharp color active-matrix display
• Motorola 9600-baud packet modem
• 10-watt solar panel

Trailer (WASU — Wheeled Auxiliary Storage Unit)

• 72-watt Solarex photovoltaic array (4.8 Amps at 12V)
• Qualcomm OmniTRACS satellite terminal
• Ham Radio station:
  • Icom 725 for HF
  • Yaesu 290/790 for VHF and UHF
  • AEA Television transceiver
  • Audio filtration and Magic Notch
  • Antenna management and SWR/power meters
  • Automatic CW keyer
  • Outbacker folding dipole antenna on yellow mast
• Dual-band VHF/UHF antenna
• Telebit CellBlazer high-speed modem
• Oki cellular phone, repackaged and integrated
• Telular Celjack RJ-11 interface
• Credit card verifier for on-the-road sales
• Trailer Control Processor (FORTH 68HC11)
• Audio crosspoint network, bussed to console
• Bike power management hardware
• Two 15 amp-hour sealed lead-acid batteries
• Security system pager
• Canon bubble jet printer
• Fluke digital multimeter
• Mobile R&D lab, tools, parts, etc.
• Makita battery charger (for drill and flashlight)
• Microfiche documentation and CD library
• Camping, video, camera, personal gear
• Fiberglass-over-cardboard composite structure
• High-brightness LED taillight clusters

Bike and Frame-Mounted Components

• Custom recumbent bicycle
• 105-speed transmission (7.9 -122 gear inches)
• Pneumatically-deployed landing gear
• Pneumatic controls, pressure tank, air horn
• Hydraulic disk brake
• Under-seat steering
• Handlebar chord keyboard
• CD player

More thorough details, along with information about Roberts’ Microship project, may be found on the Nomadic Research Labs website.

Resources

You may download a 2-megabyte Searchable PDF of this article:
The BEHEMOTH – Computer History Museum CORE

I have 4 extra originals of this complete 18-page issue (in addition to the one in my permanent archive), and they are in excellent condition. As part of my ongoing fund-raiser and tonnage-reduction, I’m selling such things… these are $8 each including first-class postage, mailed flat. I would be happy to autograph it to you or anyone you designate – please specify in the PayPal comments field:

Random posts from the archives:

Usability Professionals Association, 9th Annual Conference

Keynote Address by Steven K. Roberts – August 16, 2000

“Art without engineering is dreaming.
Engineering without art is calculating.” – SKR

A Brief Rhapsody on Art and Engineering….

When designing a complex system, you must spend some relaxed time fantasizing about what it will be like when it’s done. After all, this is what drives the process of engineering: at some level between rigorous and fanciful, you need to hold an image of the finished product in your mind, savor it, and examine it from all sides. Only after this playful interlude (which, to a manager, may be disturbingly indistinguishable from unproductive wall-staring) can you decompose the design into subsystems, tasks, and packaging.

Trying to shortcut this process by starting on Day One with formal design methodologies can have the catastrophic effect of committing one to an ill-defined goal state, whereupon the end result is shaped more by design tools than the supposed objective. That’s why so many products seem malformed, patched, and otherwise inelegant; the industry loves formal tools and generally looks askance upon such frivolous notions as approaching product design as a delicate blend of art and engineering. The exceptions, when they occur, are a joy to use. The rest simply miss the point, no matter how stylish their exterior or how sophisticated the underlying technology.

During this talk, Roberts will present BEHEMOTH on stage along with Microship work-in-progress. The machines will be discussed in broad detail, with close attention to the usability issues that drove the design process. Integration of a multi-layered computer system into a tiny mobile platform created many interesting challenges, not the least of which was maintaining an effective physical interface while dealing with a potentially fatal real-time physical environment.

This calls for massive design effort in blending the substrates themselves with wireless network architecture, automated data collection and telemetry, solar power optimization, user-interface design, audio/video routing, browser-based front-end and communication tools, harsh-environment packaging, well-behaved embedded control systems, and more. While on stage, Roberts will describe the growing phenomenon of technomadics, the blending of art and engineering, Internet collaboration, the critical importance of generalists in the design environment, and human factors issues in a complex multipurpose system… all tied together by spirited tales of a passionate high-tech adventure that began as a bike ride and somehow became a career.

From 1983 to 1991, high-tech nomad Steven K. Roberts pedaled 17,000 miles around the United States on a computerized and networked recumbent bicycle that allowed him to remain connected and productive while wandering freely. This complex blend of adventure and technology inevitably led to books, hundreds of articles, and consulting spin-offs – but Roberts has retired the $1.2 million BEHEMOTH to build a pair of canoe-based amphibian pedal/solar/sail trimarans known as Microships. This fall, the bike goes on open-ended loan to The Computer History Museum; in early 2001, Roberts and his partner, Natasha, will launch a multi-year coastal and inland expedition aboard their tiny Linux-powered boatlets.

Prior to Roberts’ life as a technomad, he owned a consulting engineering business in the Midwest and published three books on microprocessor-based industrial-control system design. After casting off the bonds of suburbia to seek passion and adventure, however, electronics became more a liberating tool than a business. His technomadic machines represent the creative contributions of hundreds of industry volunteers and sponsors, and his once-radical notion of “nomadic connectivity” has become a trend as computer and communication tools become ever smaller and more powerful.

Random posts from the archives:

A Modern Odyssey

by E. J. McGregor
Sports Illustrated – April 24, 2000

ONE DAY IN 1983, STEVE ROBERTS left his life as a Columbus, Ohio, computer consultant in the rearview mirror of his homemade recumbent bicycle. When he pedaled into a small Ohio town the next day, a farmer inspected the high-tech bike, bedecked with enough gadgets to launch a space shuttle, and asked, “You with NASA?”

So began the adventure of a lifetime. Throughout the 1980s, Roberts traveled 17,000 miles across America, meeting locals and piling up stories.

“At one point I realized, I’m doing things I don’t like, to pay for things I don’t want,” says the 47-year-old Roberts, a self-described technomad. “I just decided to hit the reset button of my life.”

Roberts supported himself by writing articles about his odyssey, which eventually became a book, Computing Across America. As he gained notoriety, volunteers and companies began offering help and equipment. The third and last version of Roberts’ creation (dubbed BEHEMOTH, an acronym for Big Electronic Human Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy) featured more than $1 million in communication and navigation equipment. It was eight feet long, had 105 gears and weighed 580 pounds, but it didn’t protect him from wind, rain, cold or loneliness.

Roberts’s most memorable encounter occurred while overlooking an I-70 truck wreck near the Maryland-West Virginia border. Suddenly, he was surrounded by “five of the biggest, meanest, toughest-looking men I’ve ever seen.” When one of them asked about the bike, a nervous Roberts said he was in a race and needed to go. Instead, the men—convicts on a work crew cleaning up the contents of the truck—led him into the woods.

“We went to a clearing, and there was this big tarp,” as Roberts tells it. “Underneath was all the stuff they were stealing to take back to prison. It was a giant mound of Sara Lee pastries they wanted to share with me. These murderers and bank robbers were taking stuff off the pile and shoving it into my arms. ‘Have some walnut cake, my man. Take some cheese danish.’

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“I’ve met a lot of strange people, but the convicts take the cake.”

In the early ’90s Roberts garaged the bike and moved on to Camano Island, Wash. In his Nomadic Research Labs, he’s building Microships—19-foot trimarans equipped with, among other gadgets, shortwave radios, solar panels, video cameras and a wireless Web connection. In June he’ll sail Northwest waters in a test run for a 10,000-mile trek next year with his wife, Natasha, a Londoner he met on the Internet. She’s building her own vessel.

“When you’re up to your arms in epoxy resin, it’s hard to imagine what it will be like,” she says. “But I think it’s going to be like an episode of Star Trek. I try to be surprised rather than expecting of my future.”

Nearly two decades into his new life, Roberts has never looked back. “When you throw yourself out on the world, and get out of the normal patterns of life,” he says, “you never know what will happen one day to the next. But it’s usually good.”—E.J. McGregor

“At one point I realized, I’m doing things I don’t like to pay for things I don’t want. I decided to hit the reset button of my life.”

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A Modern Odyssey – Sports Illustrated, April 24, 2000

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