Microship System Architecture

One of the things I've learned from the Microship project is that one should never start with the electronics when building something that will take over a decade to finish. I have some exquisitely engineered FORTH nodes that need to go on eBay, and let's not even talk about the video turret that represents over a man-year of work. While we were up to our elbows in epoxy, swinging sanders, and discovering first-hand why boats don't have wheels, all that high-tech gizmology just sat there and became less and less interesting. The original concept of a pressurized enclosure with a custom front-end system providing a hand-coded GUI to a multidrop network of a dozen or more nodes is no longer quite the envelope-pushing notion it once was... and the 3-4 new concepts that emerged over the years have all grown as dusty as the dotcom era from which they sprang.

No, things have changed. If I'm to complete the Microships in my lifetime and extract from them an amount of pleasure that comes close to justifying the massive dedication of time and money that went into them, then the key words wil become simplification and off the shelf. Fortunately, that doesn't imply boring, since the new design scales to kayaks, motherships, home control, and even technomadic backpacks.

The key realization is simply this: the user interface belongs with the user, not permanently wedded to a complex little trimaran that only marginally allows sleeping on board and thus enforces a protocol of syncing, mode changing, and remote linking everytime the pilot wanders ashore. There should be no need to do anything differently when moving from boat to tent to hostel to home base; the UI should simply adapt as it discovers resources in its immediate environment. If it is close to a Microship, then marine data collection and comm/nav/security tools should appear; if it's in my house, then it should offer the option to observe external cameras or talk to the heating system controls. Any one of those environments may also include communication links to the others, so in a flotilla, to use a favorite example, each pilot sees not only the on-board resources but also a subset of everyone else's (with command permissions suitably limited, of course, lest we start hacking each other's autopilots to carve our initials on the GPS track).

Fortunately, we don't really have to invent the core technology for this... for the simple control panels, a wireless browser will do just fine, talking with HTTP servers attached to any environment in which we might find ourselves. Those may be mini-ITX form factor boards, like the Squeak system from SolarPC, interface-rich and presenting "affordances" in a webbish framework to whatever client wanders within 802.11 or Bluetooth range.

The hardware implementation at the human end of all this will be a Tapwave Zodiac2 with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card. This dovetails nicely with my current developement of the "Technomadic Go Bag" that contains the stuff that's really, really essential... what you would want with you if for some reason you had to grab one thing and skedadle NOW. Function-to-weight ratio is critical, as are multiple communication modes, power system integration, survival basics, and a good suite of tools.

This design approach reduces Microship physical system integration to a single low-power processor atop a hierarchy of USB I/O, with a console presenting off-the-shelf comm/nav tools as well as a place to hang the Zode in its sealed Otterbox. That leaves only the new demountable crankset, solar array thermal retrofit, and hatch-cover hinge system in the critical to-do list for Wordplay, with a somewhat longer but somehow less daunting list for Art Throb. But the neat thing about this design is that it scales well... to a yacht, to going underground with only a backpack, or to hunkering down and living off-grid whilst coaxing edibles from the soil and making occasional stealthy kayak forays in the dead of night. The Microship project seems to be taking a pragmatic turn...

In other news...

Random bits

My printer problems are sidelined for now... the Epson Stylus C64 I bought from Dave Robb is working fine. Once I get the office insulated well enough to justify leaving one of those cheap oil-filled heaters on all the time, I'll move my theatre of desk operations back to the building (from the temporary house installation that has hopelessly cluttered a whole room), and presumably the next laser printer won't get killed off by a hard freeze.

Jeannie has also started working on the elimination of superfluities... she has a few things on eBay.

I am working up a sweat planting a closely spaced row of 20 embarrassingly non-native Russian Laurels, in order to build a visual wall between my once-private enclave and the house that's being erected in my face... despite the fact that the neighbor had 5 whole acres to play in <exasperated sigh>. At least he's a decent guy, and is not harvesting his forest for quick cash as so many people do around here (often claiming that it's for the "view" or to eliminate "danger trees")

Speaking of Camano Island, the current battle is to prevent trails in our wild areas from being closed to allow hunters free rein. It's absurd... we have dense population, beautiful forests that have been saved by the money and volunteer efforts of community groups, and a trio of county commissioners who don't even live here.

Items sold since last entry:

The Primitive Truth by Brent Lewis - $5.00 to Chicago, Illinois
Bach: Great Organ Works, Virgil Fox - $4.00 to S. Jordan, Utah

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)