Nomadness

Waterworks, Shacktopus, and Simplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:25:00 +0000

Work trip #3 was a short one, aborted by bad weather and flagging motivation. I showed up after dark with big companionway-hacking plans for the next day, hauled my table saw to the dock and covered it with plastic to keep condensation at bay, stayed up late faffing around online, then woke pre-dawn to a full gale with the Bosch threatening to take a flying leap into the drink. I lashed 'er down and tried to get back to sleep, but no luck. It rained all day, and the enormity of the whole project weighed on me until I shrugged and made the hour and half commute back home.

Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

Indeed, the hardest part of this is keeping a vision of the recent teaser voyage in the foreground of my consciousness whilst grappling with a lab full of poignant dusty reminders of projects unfinished, short cold days of a northwest winter, and winter moorage so far away that going to the boat is an event.

What this means in practice is that I have to take a modular approach, working on subsystems in the lab and then hauling them aboard to deal with integration. That's necessary anyway, given the minimal shop facilities on the boat, but it adds another layer of synchronization if I am to avoid surprises. There are three major modules in progress: communication console, outside helm nav station, and the waterworks.

Feeding the Tanks

As usual, it started simply. Last week, I took the Katadyn 40E watermaker to the boat in order to confirm the mounting location... assuming that it would just go in the big hole where the old one came out. It did fit easily, but I wasn't happy about the thought of servicing salt-water prefilters in the same equipment bay that includes the 115-volt AC breaker panel, so looked instead at the space under the galley sink. That could work, though it would be an awkward three-dimensional puzzle to install and will be very uncomfortable if I ever need to remove the electric pump and operate it manually due to a failed power system (one of my main reasons for choosing that model).

Right on the other side of the wall, however, is the aft head compartment, where the decommissioned Bosch propane-fired demand water heater is still hanging (it is being replaced by an Isotemp mounted behind the shower compartment). The available space is on the order of 24 by 34 inches, with a good 3-4 inches of depth before it would start to become annoying while interacting with the Lavac. Hmmm.

Suddenly the water-processing system snapped into focus. The reverse-osmosis watermaker and its prefilter will go there... along with a Water Fixer ultraviolet purification system. The old Bosch exhaust opening will carry a dock-water fitting and entry point for jugs or rainwater, and a system of valves will allow cleaning the water enroute to the tanks, or from the tanks on the way to the spigots around the boat. It will even support "water polishing" as I do with the diesel fuel (pumping from one tank to another through a Racor filter), and four channels of total dissolved solids monitoring will give me a quick look at watermaker output, ship pressure water, incoming dock water, and the super-clean stuff after the point-of-use filter at the drinking tap.

In the time-honored tradition of creeping featuritis, this continued to grow until it reached absurdity, then was pruned by the usual techniques of factoring, sanity-checking, and tossing out superfluities. It now includes a (locked) valve to permit slurping in raw water when I'm in river systems, a high-silt booster pump and prefilter for dirty brine, a way to route filtered dock pressure water directly to taps instead of into the tanks, and various other features. Naturally, the biggest design challenge is making sure that the user interface (14 valves) is clear enough to make sense some spring day five years from now when something is amiss and I have not just spent hours staring at plumbing diagrams.

This has to be self-documenting, so a hinged cover panel will carry a big clear graphic that makes it obvious what's going on. More webness to come on this topic as it develops.

Shacktopus

I've dusted off the old equipment box from Bubba-the-kayak, and am installing the Yaesu FT-817ND ham rig and the NUE-PSK modem. This already has 24 amp-hours of battery, sealed connectors, a dedicated 30-watt solar panel with charger, and related goodies... so in the salty Nomadness context this will likely become part of the new Shacktopus system (or at least a dedicated field radio station independent of the rigs built into the ship).

Shacktopus began as a sort of "communications laptop" that was under intensive development here in 2005 until my dad passed away and necessitated a 6-month expedition to shut down the old homestead in Kentucky. A small Linux board and a lightweight micro presented a webbish interface to a rather large suite of tools, including radio front end and a variety of sensors... and it could be accessed via a handheld radio using DTMF commands and synthesized voice response as well as a PDA or laptop. Reminiscent of the BEHEMOTH and Microship projects, audio and serial routing allowed all devices to appear as a single, simple user interface (here's the drawing, although the system was never completed).

I no longer need a backpack rig like that, but the design problem on Nomadness is very similar: lots of diverse capability that has to be accessible from a variety of places with a minimum of hardware. Since a lot of engineering went in to Shacktopus, I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how to dovetail it into the new ship while keeping the boundaries clear enough to allow product spin-off down the road. The key, as usual, is modular design.

The basic problem is familiar to almost any radio geek: lots of rigs and gadgets, all with their own ideas about power, speakers, microphones, operating procedures, and front panels. The result is usually a sprawling "ham shack" with dangling mikes, a snarl of cables, custom switch boxes and patch panels to multiplex scarce resources, an overall feeling of clutter, and a high likelihood of pilot error.

In a mobile environment, this is simply unacceptable... yet even here in 2008 there is no standard "bus" along the lines of NMEA 2000 that can tie radio modules into a single integrated environment. Most modern rigs do have computer-control capability... and there is even a comprehensive set of API tools called hamlib that creates a layer of abstraction between vendor-specific stuff and the broad concepts of radio operation. In Shacktopus, this is carried much further, incorporating Wi-Fi, local environmental and security sensors, mode-specific tools like PSK-31, location-aware applications, graceful adaptation to available network resources, power management, and so on... exactly what I want on the boat.

So the upshot of all this is that it has finally become clear how the Shacktopus concept maps onto the Nomadness project. Everything on the ship needs to be accessible at multiple levels: local dead-simple interface that works when the geeky stuff is broken or unfinished, web-accessible toolset that can be reached within the LAN or (more slowly) from afar, voice interface that can allow at least some functionality from any hand-held radio, and a clean local operating console that hides as much complexity as possible while encouraging application-specific activity. The waterworks mentioned above is a good example of the latter: associated with my drawing of the system is a chart that relates each operating mode to a set of valve positions (open, closed, or don't-care). I don't want to have to figure that out every time, for therein lies madness; the user interface needs to be modal and remotable, yet open enough to allow hacks and work-arounds when something goes awry.

Simplicity

Somewhere under all this is a sailboat, of course, and I haven't forgotten that. Old salts roll their eyes at this apparently gratuitous geekery and remind me that simple is always better on a boat.

Believe it or not, I agree completely.

The basic premise of this whole project is not the addition of complexity... that would be a failure. Instead, it is a layering of tools to maintain the simplicity of a sailing vessel while adding a range of useful capabilities that would normally be considered impossible in such a context. If that can be done without cluttering the experience with constant tinkering, then we will have succeeded.

Work Trip #2 - Tankage

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:29:00 +0000

In what is probably going to become something of a routine, I'm now on my second "winter work session" aboard Nomadness, blogging as I go. Since the last installment, I've done a fair bit on the home front, and also posted an introductory walkthrough of the boat... the first of what should be a large collection of articles by the time this is all over.

But this trip is largely about tankage... I came equipped with three beautiful Wema level sensors, another Maretron TLA-100 for the diesel tanks, the Katadyn 40E watermaker, and a SensaTank II for the new holding tank. It was the latter that I tackled first, as it would be a quickie.

Holding Tank Blues

Like anything on a boat, of course, this little project took about 5 times longer than it should have: find a nearby source of power, splice and run a cable, mount the panel on an unused bezel originally intended for a hot air duct in the forward cabin, locate and mount the three "Mirus" sensor cells on the tank wall after cleaning with Isopropyl Alcohol, wire it all, add labels, and test. So far, so good:

Time will tell how well it works, and if the cells stay attached; polyethylene is not the most chemically active substance. That brings me to the reason for the "blues" in the title above.

Back in August, you may recall, we parked in Port Ludlow for a few days to have some major plumbing surgery done by First Mate Marine. Bob took care of a number of tasks that I would have found difficult or impossible... including the extraction of old sewage hoses (ewww), installation of a new pumpout in the steel deck, and preparation of the Ronco 35-gallon tank for installation on a platform that I built under the forward berth. There were some glitches, but it was a big job with a hefty hourly rate and I was happy to have someone else handling it.

A few days later, the smell began. Bob had used the best quality hose and proper double-clamped fittings, there were no shortcuts, and the tank is 3/8" thick rotomolded polyethylene and thus impermeable. It wasn't making sense, but the cabin would stink after sailing (or sometimes just while anchored in bad weather). More times than I can remember, I sniffed around in there, probing for a clue... even theorizing about air-pressure variations and using my Kestrel weather station to log the barometer a period during which the smell increased. No correlation.

I thought I had the problem solved when I spotted a dip tube fitting that had not been tightened... I managed to get two full turns out of it, as shown in this before-and-after photo:

Smugly, I buttoned 'er up, launched a good-natured jibe at Bob, and moved on to other projects. Only... the problem didn't go away, and it wasn't just residual stale air.

So, while doing the tank-sensor project, I continued the quest. And now I really do think I found it, though the fix may not be as easy. The major fittings were installed with a process called spin welding, in which a special hand-held router fixture spins them in place so fast and with such force that they melt together into a solid unit. That's the theory, anyway, but for some reason the dockside process didn't go quite as planned. Take a look:

I sent this to Bob and he suggested slapping some silicone on it, but I am not so sure... that doesn't actually stick to polyethylene (no goop that I know of really does), though since it only has to fill a void with quite a bit of surrounding material, it might form an acceptable plug anyway. I'm hesitant to try, though, since one thing I learned from my fiberglass years is that once silicone has been on a surface, nothing else will stick. Ever.

I welcome suggestions.

The big take-away from this is not the temporary problem that will certainly be fixable, or even my current annoyance with the contractor. It is the need to be more careful about blithely abandoning my Do-It-Yourself principles when a job looks hard or unfamiliar. $80/hour is more than I have paid for attorneys, and I am now spending my own time troubleshooting and fixing things... reminiscent of the steering pump installation by Anacortes Marine Electronics that included overfilling the fluid reservoir so dramatically that for weeks it streamed down cabin walls and ruined brand new bedding. I paid for that because I didn't know how to deal with the hydraulic fittings, just as I paid for this because it was messy and intimidating (and also because there were a few things, like, ironically, the spin welds, that I don't have the tools to do).

I am more annoyed at myself than anything, partly because I am noticing as I get older that a lot of jobs take longer and are more difficult than they were a few decades ago. Maybe this is normal for aging geeks, but I prefer to think I'm just out of shape... and experiences like this reinforce my lifelong belief that the old saying is true: if ya want it done right, do it yourself!

Besides, I am not part of the mythical deep-pockets "yachtie" demographic, yet the marine marketplace is populated by businesses that expect people to roll over and pay huge labor rates without batting an eye. It is way too easy to underestimate how long something will take, and here there be dragons.

An old lesson learned afresh.

Fuel Sensors, Take One

Moving on to diesel, I started with the tank under the aft berth... that's the easiest one, since it has an existing 5-hole pattern in an accessible spot (the other two will require surgery on the aluminum inspection plates). Of course, nothing on a boat is ever trivial... I found out why the previous sensor had been so liberally bedded in gaskety goop. Whoever did the original bolt circle didn't finish it.

Tapping a hole in an existing fuel tank is nerve-wracking, not just because of chip control but because I kept playing a mental slide show of all the times I've broken taps in stainless. But I proceeded gingerly about an eighth of a turn at a time, and got away with it:

Once the new sensor was snugged down onto its cork gasket, I connected it to the Maretron TLA100... the "tank level adaptor" that converts the 240-30Ω output proportional to fuel level into a PGN (Parameter Group Number) message on the NMEA 2000 backbone, thence to be displayed by whatever system has the capability.

The core device in that department is the Maretron DSM250 mounted at the lower helm. This is a beautiful gadget that can graphically present all sorts of on-board data, and indeed the somewhat random number that had been reported by the original swing-arm float sensor stabilized immediately at 90% (a believable value, as I had filled up just before the pre-election price drop).

At first, however, there was a disturbing phenomenon, reminiscent of some glitches associated with the B&G Network insistence sending 18-degree variation data and causing the compass display to glitch every few seconds. The fuel gauge started doing exactly the same thing!

I wrote to Maretron and quickly got an answer... and it is included here in the hopes that it might save others from similar confusion. When I added the third TLA100 tank-level adaptor, I didn't configure it with a unique tank number. Oops. The phantom "fuel tank 0" interacted with the real one, causing the phenomenon captured above. They are now properly configured as 0 (90-gallon aft), 1 (75-gallon port), and 2 (75-gallon starboard).

The fun is always in the interfacing, isn't it? It's a long way, both philosophically and technically, from a big tank of sloshing diesel fuel to a tidy little graphic that can pop up wherever needed.

Next daylight work session, I'll take on the port and starboard tanks, and I'm now considering the mounting environment for the watermaker and related equipment. I need good filter serviceability, access to valves, and a gravity-feed day tank... all while moving potentially corrosive water-processing equipment safely away from the AC electrical panel where the old one was located. Water corrodes; salt water corrodes absolutely. Candidate locations are the space under the galley sink and the wall of the aft head compartment (space freed by elimination of the old demand water heater).

More soon...
-Steve

Notes From Work Trip #1

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:17:00 +0000

I can already see how the winter is going to take shape, and it's going to take a major exercise of will to get through it. "Next steps" bubble to the top of OmniFocus and get flagged, I make a first-pass approximation of stuff needed and load up the truck, then drive far away and camp alone on the boat for a few days... chipping away at the more accessible items until they fall away, resist me enough to be postponed, or reveal themselves to be more difficult than expected and are thus factored into still more tasks. Thus does a to-do list become self-perpetuating.

Webcam

One in the latter category is what initially prompted me to mutter "I hate computers" and make the too-easy transition from doing to blogging. The Axis 210 Network Camera is a cool little stand-alone webcam with built-in server, and I have used it in the normal home router environment. Now it's becoming part of the ship's extensive security system, easing my mind a bit when I'm across the Big Water.

It took a fair bit of clumsy poking at admin screens, though, and even when it started to work I couldn't see it from here except within the LAN. Changing to static IP may have done it, or perhaps I just stumbled on the correct incantations. When you network enough computers together, apparently, their collective behavior becomes organic and unpredictable (though we must resist the temptation to anthropomorphize them; they really hate that.)

Interesting phenomenon, by the way. Firefox (version 3.0.3), once it starts displaying the streaming video from the camera, will not "let go" of whatever it's doing... even when the browser window is closed. It continues to gobble over 90% of a CPU, raises the machine temperature to about 170°, and causes iStat to report nearly a megabyte/second of download bandwidth. This continues until the camera is unplugged or Firefox is quit and then restarted... highly pathological behavior and probably bugzilla-worthy. (Ancient Mozilla 1.7.8 that I keep around just for Composer behaves properly and stops streaming video when I close the window that contains it.) Makes ya wonder what else is going on in the background...

Joomlafication

Other recent attempts to rearrange bits on disks have been a little smoother. The Nomadness site (where this blog lives as a subdirectory), was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, especially the old articles collection. As I mentioned in my previous post, a key part of the "business model" is keeping useful information flowing out of my head-banging on the boat, and doing it in my old creaky hand-edited HTML is a bit anachronistic. The site now has a proper content-management system; now all I need is content... as well as the continuation of a learning curve that is not as graceful as I would like, given the short bursts of attention on my end and the convoluted nature of the subject itself.

Plumbing

The new holding tank is working, though occasionally it belches foul gas. I found one dip tube fitting that the expensive plumber had forgotten to tighten (by 2 full turns!), but the source of the random eructation continues to elude me. The forward system is completely independent of the aft one with its still-nonfunctional LectraSan... though a neighbor here at the marina just gave me some tips on being much more aggressive with the muriatic acid. I'll try it.

In a much less stinky part of the plumbing system, I just replaced the Groco raw-water filter baskets. One was full of eelgrass when I checked it recently; the other was not blocking much of anything:

Pilothouse Thoughts

The weather is blustery here, and when I saw an Islander Freeport 41 named Tranquility heading in well after dark last night (just back from Alaska), I naturally donned my foulies and ran out to catch their lines... for I have lots of docking karma to repay after my occasionally, ahem, less-than-perfect maneuvers over the past few months. The new neighbors are interesting folks, and in 18 years of full-timing they have refined their boat in countless ways for comfort and efficiency.

One of the more alluring ideas inspired by today's tour of their ship is the enhancement of my current cockpit with at least a hard dodger and perhaps a whole second-level pilothouse (a hard dodger with walls). Technically, I already have a pilothouse... the main salon of this boat includes a steering station and nice all-around ~~greenhouse~~ windows for solar heating and visibility. It's sexy and sleek, but the reality is that visibility isn't very good from below and I thus spend 99% of my on-water time at the outside helm (standing, for the most part, but that's another problem).

There are times, during which pictures on the front covers of sailing magazines are taken, when the notion of being enclosed while steering seems absurd. But a well-designed system with very broad openings on all sides would allow navigation and piloting activity to be focused where it is most useful, protect the helmsman from foul weather and excessive sun, improve security, add living space, and generally make life aboard more pleasant. I'm staring at it quite a bit while here, imagining a homebrew glass-over-ply assembly with decent windows and wide-open winch clearance, carrying the lines of the boat so she doesn't look boxy. We'll see.

Rust

Of course, there are more immediate and pressing issues. "Rust never sleeps," as Neil Young once observed, and I have lots of it: gudgeon-dings at the transom, bad installation at the windlass, trapped moisture at the toerail tabs, galvanic action at various fittings, and even a few random spots in an otherwise flawless expanse of Awlgrip. Today I was fortunate to have a visit from the local boatyard owner, and he gave me lots of advice on incrementally dealing with it. Next work-visit, I'm bringing the armamentarium of grinding/sanding/scraping tools, and he's setting me up with a starter kit of primer and other goo. This is a big sturdy steel boat; there's no reason to try for the "Bristol finish" (which I can't afford anyway)... the real key is staying on top of it enough to keep the metal protected.

Fuelish Thoughts

I just finished one of the major jobs that was scheduled for this first session: opening all three diesel tanks, specifying the new Wema level sensors, and getting them on order. It has been maddening during the recent adventure to have very little idea how much fuel was on board, especially since two of the tanks came with an unknown amount of diesel of unknown vintage. This translated into ongoing stress about bio-gunk clogging filters, sucking air at a bad moment and digging out the Calder book to tackle the engine-bleeding learning curve while drifting into a marina full of expensive boats, and lacking basic situational awareness about my own vessel.

A cheesy gauge, miswired, did come with the boat... and much fiddling with the Fluke meter failed to turn up any apparent correlation between assumed levels and the observed resistances of senders (even after taking the 90-gallon aft tank from empty to full, 10.0 careful gallons at a time). So I've been in the dark, like all this stuff:

I was hoping whilst poking around that the Webasto mystery would be solved in the process, and I even used the transfer pump to schlep a gallon or so from the aft tank to starboard... but no luck on that one, even though it did appear that the pickup tube is at or near the surface and might have inhaled a bubble. But at least the other task is complete... I've just ordered a trio of sensors (14, 18, and 20 inches). Data from these will find their way onto the NMEA 2000 network via Maretron TLA100 Tank Level Adapters, and thence to displays wherever needed.

Power System

One of the high-priority projects is elimination of the ProSine 2.0 inverter/charger and installation of the Outback FX2012, MX60 solar charge controller, and related monitoring equipment. Since the original power installation is in a closed equipment bay, cooling has been inadequate and the unit shuts down when trying to charge at anything over 50 amps (about half of what it should be doing).

Still, there's really no place else to put all this, and my fleeting thoughts of replacing the microwave with the inverter/charger just to have convective cooling were dashed when I actually looked at it closely. So the plan now is to use the same enclosure space, but add a large louvered vent at the bottom and a smaller one at the top (although the path up there gets convoluted) to allow convective airflow with fan-assist when the temperature gets too high. With proper thermal design, I can also circulate air through the cool bilge. Here's the environment:

The panel on the left is the inside steering station, and the one on the right is the DC power distribution panel. The gray box with yellow top is the Xantrex box; that spot will carry the solar charge controller. The new inverter/charger will live out of sight below the hinged panel, with the vent panel installed in that vertical wood surface.

Tonnage

Sky and I are establishing a rhythm in another key domain... if we're ever going to really cast off the lines for good and sail into the sunset, we have a lot of stuff to get rid of. Given that the economy is tanking and most of the advice I've gotten in that domain has led to painful losses, we're looking at the sprawling pile of artifacts in our Camano facilities as a state of energy that can be transformed into boat parts.

She is researching antiquarian books and various other things, taking photos and writing 'em up, then I do the eBay listings. The Microship General Store is finally starting to pick up again after a long hiatus. Want some stuff? Purely for the amusement, I maintain a list of the artifacts that have found new homes in the past 30 days, including price and destination, over here. It's actually quite satisfying for reasons that go well beyond the recovery of a few dollars.

Perspective

I am trying to remember not to take any of this too seriously. The list is just that... a list... and as long as we get the essentials done enough to complete the escape pod and make of life what we can, then the rest — or whatever is truly important — will follow. Nothing is permanent, especially at this age; I've already spent way too many years building elaborate machines to chase quixotic dreams, and now, freshly turned 56, am finding adventure and freedom much more alluring than gizmology for its own sake. (Of course, where the latter potentiates the former, it's a different matter entirely.)

I find this kind of poignant:

That was once someone's little boatlet, zipping around the harbor, probably with an outboard on the back, perhaps hauling laughing kids, lovers, crab pots, fishing poles, toys. Maybe it even hung for a while on the stern of a cruising boat and traveled around... but now it's slowly returning to the earth, just something to trip over on the shores of Utsalady Bay.

Someday, likewise, Nomadness will fall into other hands, sail other seas... then eventually she will become a fixer-upper, a project boat, an antique. At long last Mother Nature will win, and, deep in the arms of entropy, her elements, even the once-blinking geeky ones, will leech into the sea or the muck of an undredged and forgotten channel. It is my job to not only delay that moment as best I can, but also to ensure that her time as a boat... and mine as a human... are spent with maximum glee, here and now.

So. Those 621 miles we just covered were just a teaser, and, dear friends in the Vapours of the Net, please don't let me forget what's important. If you see this dragging on too long as has been known to happen at Nomadic Research Labs, you are hereby empowered to give me a proper kick in the pants.

Cheers from a sloppy, cold, windy night aboard... with wavelets slapping annoyingly under the transom, nearby halyards slapping, and seagulls squawking in the night...

Steve

621 Miles of Recognition

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:56:00 +0000

Nomadness has completed her shakedown cruise — covering 621 miles in 2.5 months. This is a languid pace, in geographical terms, but the experience gained was considerable... enough to induce a near-total inversion of the project priority list, satisfy a host of initial learning curves, smoke out the weaknesses of the ship, and advance to the next level of confidence. (The latter is no small matter, as the notion of seaworthiness applies at least as much to the brains of the crew as the bones of the vessel.)

The journey itself was mostly spectacular, underscoring the nature of the Pacific Northwest as a sailing destination. We've experienced everything from balmy days to 40-knot gales (docked for those, mercifully), felt the quiver as Nomadness put her shoulder down in 25-knot winds, puzzled over engine anomalies while drifting toward leeward cliffs, tangled anchor chains with a whimsical neighbor, cozied around the new woodstove on a cold night, probed the innards of the ship to reverse-engineer ancient mysterious subsystems, found new friends on exotic shores, dinked and paddled into various skinny places, circumnavigated islands, reawakened the technomadic flotilla plan, and solidified a clear concept for an integrated ship information system. Those mileage statistics... still ludicrous in boat-amortization terms... mean nothing in the context of the raw experience itself.

Still, we've done 621 miles. A good start. Here's the GPS track of the journey overlaid on Google Earth and stitched into a single big image (you can click the picture to see it larger, but there is also a clear, vertically scrollable version):

Maiden voyage of Nomadness. Yellow line is US-Canada border.

I'm no more a fan of straight lines than I was during the convoluted bicycle tour of the US; the tangled track is part of the fun, the live low-resolution version via APRS even more so. I'd get email while underway: "hey, looks like you're making pretty good time!" Seeing more and more tracking systems for sale in the marine marketplace, complete with $20/month fees, I think I'll throw together a quick how-to and use it to kick start the new article series for the Nomadness site.

Publishing

Ach, so many projects. It could easily spin out of control, but the pace of sailing has reminded me of my old adage that you can accomplish amazing things by simply moving in the same direction for a long time. Another trick is a twist on the rule-of-thumb that applies to anything taken on a bicycle or boat: every piece of work should be useful in multiple ways, in this case translating into a publication "product" that corresponds to any new design, hack, fix, or notable discovery. What this means in immediate practical terms is that the next few months should see a succession of boat-related jobs interspersed with online articles, PDFs, or print monographs detailing pieces of the system.

In this broken economy, the timing is good for this kind of micro-publishing... folks want to avoid the insanely expensive marine service industries, and for good reason. I've been burned already with overpricing, and even the guys who pull down big hourly fees don't necessarily deliver quality any better than one can achieve with some good old-fashioned DIY effort and a handy assistant. After having to fix two expensive jobs by professionals, I am feeling the need to do my part to distribute much-needed how-to material to offset an industry that has become increasingly intimidating. Manufacturers aren't making this any easier with their documentation, good tech support is hard to find, and there are marine dealers who are profiting hugely from the forbidding complexity of essential technologies.

So that's the Nomadic Research Labs business plan... becoming a writer again while fine-tuning the technomadic survival/escape/adventure pod. There's plenty of room in there for some proper gonzo engineering, methinks.

Imminent Geekery

So, what's coming up? Earlier I mentioned the inversion of the priority list; this translates into making sure self-sufficiency tools are in place before getting too carried away with seductive techno-wankage. Now that the ship has a wood stove (which works great, by the way - five fires so far), the immediate next steps involve the Katadyn 40E watermaker, Outback power management system, some kind of bow thruster, Isotemp water heater, enhanced comfort, the essentials of the communications console, outside helm chart plotter, and the on-board web server.

The latter might sound like it's straying into that non-essential category, but more and more of the problems come down to a centralized information resource. A dedicated Mac Mini will run MAMP, Joomla, Wordpress, and Ruby on Rails... becoming the core system for almost all ship operations (and it's small/cheap enough that in addition to continuous LAN backup I can carry a whole spare sealed away in case of disaster). I've already got Joomla and Wordpress running under MAMP on the laptop, and it's a sweet environment.

What justifies all this on a sailboat? Well...

First, the boat came with a very handy manual assembled by the previous owner, running through basic procedures for all on-board operations (it was chartered three times, for a week or two each). This has been helpful in my learning curve but is drifting out of sync with reality, so I'm re-doing that class of content in the form of a local Joomla website... one short procedural how-to for every action that has to be performed on the boat (emptying holding tank, starting wood stove, dropping anchor, starting engine, and so on).

A second menu tree in the same site carries technical information about all components and systems on the ship, including PDF documentation, drawings, and any other relevant material. This is augmented by the "NOIDS" devices-and-links relational database (in FileMaker), also published to the internal web.

The third section of the "static content" server is for ship's logs, maintenance records, fueling history, spares, inventory, and so on... though Wordpress might be quicker for updating logs and personal observations.

So far, this is all pretty traditional webbish stuff, and is almost trivially easy to set up. The next layer gets a bit more challenging: bringing together all the data sources into some kind of coherent view of the boat, accessible on the local console, any laptop in the LAN, or remotely via dynamic DNS.

Here, we have to pull together quite a mess of information. The NMEA 2000 network includes a Maretron USB interface; I haven't clawed my way into this enough yet to be 100% certain it can live outside the Windoze environment, but I'm betting it can... and it will feed all the PGNs corresponding to the network of devices around the boat (GPS, compass, masthead wind data, depth, power, rudder angle, fuel tank levels, and so on). At the same time, National Instrument 6008 USB interfaces slurp in analog and digital data points (hatch and other security sensors, bilge pump cycling, temperatures from all over, states of circuit breakers, dedicated system sensors, and other random stuff). What to do with all this?

Well, basically it all gets dumped into a database (SQL), along with time-stamps. This is where Ruby on Rails comes in, providing the framework for a "database-backed website" and allowing such niceties as overall power status screens, live display of the plumbing, detailed security sensor map, and historical plots of measurements to aid in diagnosing problems. Other clients of the same pile of data include the voice-response system that allows DTMF queries via handheld ham radio, selected telemetry transmissions as a function of available bandwidth, monitoring scripts for alarm conditions, and a simple command line interface that will work over very thin pipes (packet). There is also an always-on micro that sees a subset of everything I mentioned, capable of initiating an emergency response during times of extended power-saving when the Mac is powered off.

That takes care of the whole input side, but there's also a lot of active intervention necessary — the kind of stuff that usually translates into front panels full of switches. This will be done with USB latching relay boards which manage PTT-steering and control of the radios, power switching, video routing, and other tasks that involve direct control from the browser front-end or simple scripts. Video, for example, has to route 8-10 analog sources around the boat to three monitors, a recorder, and an IP video server that lets any of the channels be remotely viewable as a webcam. (I wish I had this right now, in fact... one of the cameras is a sealed miniature unit mounted atop a remotely steerable spotlight on the bow... it would be nice to peer up and down the dock from here in my office and occasionally turn around to gaze across the expansive foredeck, check for seagulls, and initiate a squawk from the hailer horn if so... or at least say hello with the speech synthesizer to startle passers-by. I know. It's a sickness.)

Finally, this Mac at the heart of the boat will run all the normal day-to-day applications, as well as MacENC navigation software, which has proved itself well during the recent adventures. With a Planar or Argonaut marine sunlight-readable display at the helm, I may end up completely removing "appliance chartplotter" from my shopping list.

So. It keeps creeping up in priority, this gizmology: a big part of the "mission profile" of this project is to integrate layers of complexity into something that feels as simple as possible, yet makes it easy to implement new ideas without having to build or buy more gadgets. Doing that means starting with a solid and extensible architecture, making sure everything is interfaceable, adding sensors to stand-alone units, bringing all signals into a central area (analogous to all lines returning to the helm), avoiding vendor or standards lock-in, and thinking it through before getting too far into construction.

There sure are a lot of ways to do this. I'm daydreaming about geekery even when at the helm:

Bow Thruster Redux

Finally (and briefly), the bow thruster issue is still not resolved. I got a $quote$ from Cap Sante Marine, the local experts who do this a lot, but communication fell apart when we were in Anacortes last week, and then the economy collapsed... they could have had me there, but now I am backing off to re-think cheaper alternatives. I do have one approach in mind, a hack that is a jump up from the original Redneck Bow Thruster idea but still a fraction of the cost of a tunnel thruster.

I have learned much more about handling the boat since the last time I wrote on this topic, including the technique of punching it hard in reverse and then dropping into neutral and using unbiased sternway to improve rudder response. I've even had a few sweet docking maneuvers, including one in Anacortes (naturally with no witnesses; isn't that always the way it works?). But the problems continue... especially when there is wind or current in tight quarters. I've grown very fond of anchoring, where this is never a problem.

Nomadness actually has a tight steering radius (100 feet), but it is damn near impossible to bring the bow into the wind without having some good steerageway. Tight maneuvering in marinas is thus dangerous, and I've gotten used to making sure before going in that there is a way back out. We used it yesterday, twice in fact, making multiple passes at a slip with about 15 knots of wind from starboard:

While I like to think of this as tying a ribbon on the journey, it was a bit tense until we had a line around a leeward cleat and the boat resting on her fenders. Eliminating these little dances at the end of an otherwise exquisite sail is one of the highest priorities over the next few months.

Here we go...

Cheers,
Steve

The Little Cod Wood Stove

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:12:00 +0000

The season is turning, that's obvious. We're pinned down in Deer Harbor with a frontal system coming through... 30-40 knots tomorrow, a brief respite on Sunday, another blast on Monday. We parked here to rendezvous with Andrew of Navigator Stove Works and get the black-enameled Little Cod wood stove installed.

The timing couldn't be better. My Webasto AT-5000 diesel heater chose this cold weekend to stop working, failing to start and presenting the 1-blink error message that means, according to the manual, "No start." Well, yes. I noticed that. But why?

There will be time to fix it (most likely a bubble or blockage in the fuel pickup line, which dips only into the starboard tank that contains vintage diesel along with a fair bit of biological gunk), but this is the week for conversion to wood. And quite the marathon it was! In the chautauqua below, all photos, as usual, are clickable for larger versions.

First, meet Andrew, shown here contemplating the surgery necessary to mount the custom stainless shelf to the side of my galley counter. This turned out to be somewhat less trivial than expected, as I had been rather cavalier with initial measurements... meaning that without a bit of additional fixturing the triangular leg would extend over the initial curve of the radiused corner. Fortunately, since we had to sacrifice the pole that went from rail to the cabin top, we had some perfectly finished mahogany to harvest for the application:

Once the overall scheme was signed off by all, it was time to start with the surgery. Any sailor knows the trauma of adding a new hole to the boat, even above waterline... and this one was a doozy: a very large opening in .2" steel topped with Treadmaster, backed with a very dense .75" marine ply, and blocked for the extricated pole amidst an expanse of foam insulation filling a grid of steel ribs. After much head-scratching and calling out reference marks 'twixt deck and pilothouse, we punched a pilot hole, then broke out the jigsaw. Here, Andrew's assistant Jeff from Indian Summer II is carefully slurping up any remaining steel bits to prevent future rust spots...

The guys headed back to the shop to conjure a few parts, including a trim ring that compensates for the 5° camber of the deck and supports the beautiful cast bronze deck iron. This was all bedded in place using screws for clamping pressure, prompting the first of many comments that it looks like it was meant to be that way:

This made for a nicely finished exterior appearance, but from below we could still see the wood "underlayment" - meaning that it would be exposed to radiant heat as well. The hole had been lined with copper sheeting as a first step:

In a flash of inspiration, Andrew conjured a pair of aluminum components that would further reflect heat while allowing cooling airflow. It also prompted one of many amusing photographic moments, given all the awkward angles necessary when working on a boat...

With the hole prepped, it was time to get the stove mounted. They used the cannibalized wood from the original pole to frame out the plywood wall at the end of the galley counter, allowing a clever hack in which a routed channel created clearance for a row of 1/4-20 T-nuts. The whole assembly is thus removable without dragging out the refrigerator that's on the other side of that wall... a process that is complicated further by having to remove the foot pumps under the galley sink to provide enough fridge-movement clearance to get an arm into the cavity. Boats are for contortionists, something I am most emphatically not.

When the shelf was installed, Andrew immediately insisted that I park on it to convince myself that it is sufficiently robust...

With that test passed, he added a stainless heatshield to protect the wood... and then the stove was centered and bolted to the shelf, its tripod legs insuring that no amount of heat-induced casting warpage would cause rocking. A few leveling washers induced general positioning consensus, then it was down to the final steps.

Pipefitting is something of an art, it turns out, and I was surprised at how fiddly this part was... but patience and collective insistence on perfection eventually yielded a smooth and well-considered run. Here we are eyeballin' and tweakin'...

Now you can see the final configuration of the deck-iron interface, with the heat shield spaced away from the headliner giving a strong sense of the etymology of stove-pipe hat:

Topside, we have a couple of operational choices. The smoke head can be plugged directly into the deck iron for a low-profile look like this:

Or, as is the case at the moment in the oppressive wind and rain of an incoming cold front, we can insert a 2-foot pipe section to improve draft and disperse the startup smoke above the level of the dodger:

And it's done! With the pipe all fitted and already showing a patina from the test-firing, here are three views of the finished Little Cod installation on Nomadness. From the passage to the aft cabin:

Lying on the sole looking up (with the draft damper visible in the angled section):

And from the center of the pilothouse, showing the loading door on the end:

And, you see those little holes on the front corners of the top shelf surface? One of the major issues here is safety — not just keeping skin off the dangerously hot stove pipe, but keeping fast-moving knees off the sharp shelf corners, one hand attached to a handhold at all times whilst bounding along in a seaway, and careening bodies off the stove itself. Removing the original pole, which was necessary to allow pipe to pass through the deck in the only available location, complicated the problem; it's a large enough cabin that one could get thrown off-balance easily without something solid to hold on to at every stage of a traverse from one point to another.

I'll add a few more strategically-placed teak handholds, but the central fixture will be a sort of "caging" of the stove by two 1.25" stainless poles from those shelf corners to the overhead. We'll grind the flanges to a soft curve, TIG weld 'em to fill the gaposis, and it should give the overall integrated impression of a smooth and solid structure while being strong enough to handle dynamic body weight.

The other huge issue, actually the biggest trade-off of this whole project, was the impact on engine and generator access. Massive sole panels have always lifted to the 90° position and locked in place with springs, but now they only make it to 60° and have to be held up manually... obviously inadequate, although the most-frequently serviced bits are still easy to reach (Racors, tank-selection valves, oil filters and dipsticks, the sticky shutoff rail on the injector pump that needs an occasional tickle, coolant caps, and so on). The raw-water impeller on the main engine, already a major pain to change, is now more so, and I shudder to think of having to change out the starter with this reduced clearance.

We'll immediately fashion a couple of latches to support the access panels from the stove shelf, but if serious surgery is necessary, it will be necessary to unscrew the hinges and lift the units completely out (removing the stove as well if major gymnastics are going to be involved). Fortunately, it's all serviceable by design.

Other than that detail, I am thoroughly delighted with this new life-support component in the technomadic escape pod. An efficient heat source is now readily harvestable, and even a small fire renders the cabin cozy without the Webasto roar or the shore-power requirements of an electric heater. And to anyone who Googled their way to this page whilst contemplating a stove for their boat... I can warmly recommend Andrew and his products. He exudes an old-fashioned sense of quality craftsmanship rarely seen these days, and this little stove of time-tested design is clearly going to outlast the captain of the ship.

A Boy and his Boat

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:14:00 +0000

We are now in Deer Harbor on Orcas Island, back in the US after 2 convoluted weeks in the Gulf Islands of Canada. This photo is from Montague Harbour on Galiano Island... we were hiking among the glacier-worn rocks, shell middens, and ancient madrona trees of Gray Peninsula, and Sky snapped this candid moment with Nomadness in the background:

(photo by Sky Myers, clickable for large version)

That idyllic scene already seems impossibly far away; tomorrow will see the cutting of a large hole in my steel deck for the Little Cod wood stove, along with the corresponding substantial change in the ship's interior. Among other things, we'll need to modify the engine access panels and add grab rails to minimize the potential for stumbling into a hot stovepipe. This is a critical life-support component... being able to scrounge heat without being dependent on diesel fuel is as essential as the solar panels and watermaker. A wood stove is cozy, too.

Canada was relaxed and almost dreamlike, though perhaps that feeling is partly a by-product of my own current perception of initiating a mode-shift into facilities-dependent complexity in a time of massive economic and political absurdity. Frankly, I'd prefer to just keep meandering around in my favorite traveling style of avoiding straight lines, as revealed in this GPS track of the past couple weeks:

As to the upcoming geek overload, all is not lost! My old friend Tim Nolan, who built the Microship's peak power tracker as well as a number of other interesting devices, is planning to come visit to take on a project or two. I welcome other techies to participate, and will try to keep a current version of the OmniFocus outline view here on the site as a sort of menu of gonzo engineering and gizmological goodness. We love company, as well as the stimulating synergy of building toys with kindred spirits.

It's quiet at anchor tonight, but tomorrow the steel chips will fly!

(PS: My partner, Sky, just did an excellent blog posting about self-sufficiency, with another take on the projects that are getting underway.)

Rafting and Focusing

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:50:00 +0000

A great mode shift is about to occur... re-entry into the US and a sudden whirlwind of projects to begin the final phase of making the full-time transition to water. I'm rafted in the rain to a mighty ketch in Saanich Inlet, headphones pumping An Tua, genset thrumming coulombs, Sky ashore with friends, Java padding 'twixt boats, tea steaming... and the thought of the upcoming commute between lab and marina with a truckload of tools is, frankly, ridiculous.

But it is going to have to happen. 2 months and about 600 miles have taught many a lesson and re-ordered my once-fanciful to-do list. If Nomadness is to move beyond the seasonal cruising level, which she must, then she has to go under the knife from stem to stern.

Much of it has already been discussed in these posts, the various systems that must be brought up to snuff and the layer of integration that ties them all together. That's the fun stuff, at least in principle, and I'm actually looking forward to it... the Inner Geek rubbing hands together in metaphysical glee at presiding over a system architecture reminiscent of TNG-era Star Trek, enhancing my primitive humanoid sensorium whilst linking ships into a fleet across multiple communication modalities and providing the tools of a long-range voyage of discovery. What's not to love about that?

It's the missing team of white-jacketed engineers and technicians swarming over the vessel to make it all happen on a tight schedule, that's what! I reminisce fondly on the BEHEMOTH era, the bikelab at Sun Microsystems a sort of skunkworks that attracted all sort of brilliant folk who took breaks from their real work to inject wizardry into something that became larger than any of us. ("Thanks for reminding me of why I became an engineer," quoth one fellow, beating me to the gratitude punch.) Part of the reason this worked so well, I believe, is that bicycles are accessible, and the sheer lunacy of BEHEMOTH technology atop a pedal-powered frame tickled the fancy of every grown-up kid who once pedaled the neighborhood with visions of rocketing onward, unfettered, forever.

The Microship, years later, held much of that allure (after all, it was a canoe at its core, and had pedals), though moving from Silicon Valley to the remote woods of Camano Island didn't help in the volunteer department. When that dragged on for too long with too little fun, it became a rather lonely enterprise, and the once-thriving network of technomads and exuberant fellow geeks moved on, grew up, settled down, kicked back, and put their attention elsewhere... constructively commenting on my postings, perhaps, but rarely pulling all-nighters to get me out of town.

Fast forward a decade. I'm still layering seductive gizmology atop mobile platforms, but it's now on a very different scale. Here we were a few days ago, in Genoa Bay (Nomadness is the petite one):

That's 56 tons of collective boat, one a delicious old ferrocement ketch with an interior built for comfort, the other a steel pilothouse cutter that's almost austere inside. The ketch is a gem, conventional wisdom about ferro aside, and her skipper has continually refined her with a sort of laid-back passion and an inspired thrifty funkiness that makes me embarrassed at how much I've spent on some of the blinky bits that still don't work properly.

I juxtapose these in the context of the BEHEMOTH bicycle to make the point that pulling together a project on this scale is a completely different game. It will never fit in a sponsor's trade-show booth, it won't roll onto a stage for an hour of engineering yarns and puns about unixcycles, and few folks grew up with one in the back yard that they could hop on whenever struck by a restless urge. People who do love working on these things already have boat projects of their own (or charge lots of money for their time), and the logistics of a skunkworks-style project are complicated by the remoteness of marinas or the bandwidth-limiting nature of the dinghy.

And so, it's likely to be a rather solitary venture, this upcoming winter of geekery. Sky is always eager to help and can wriggle into tight places like a contortionist, but I'm going to have to hold it all together.

That brings me to my favorite new tool, OmniFocus. I've always broken projects into Clearly Defined Tasks and made a science of project management, but in recent years the culture of Getting Things Done has elevated that to an art form and moved well beyond my own methods. I won't attempt to summarize GTD here, but will admit to having tried three pieces of Mac software over the years that purport to implement the principles... but none of them felt like home. As such, I've continued with my quirky blend of notebooks and outline files, fully recognizing that the occasional fleeting sense of having things under control was very much an illusion.

But OmniFocus is amazing. Although I've only been using it for a week, I am already seeing it as a lens that sharpens my awareness of what has to be done next. The myriad tasks spread over nearly a hundred projects each have modal contexts and priorities, and instead of browsing pages of to-do lists I just say, "OK, so I'm here with these tools, and in this particular mood, and I have about this much time. What would move me forward most efficiently?" As one who quickly crumbles into 100% context-switching overhead when trying to juggle more than two or three simultaneous jobs, this is brilliant... and the Mac integration is so smooth that it's actually sexy. I can even snag a task from the middle of an email and lob it over to OF without having to context-switch to "project management" by opening the app!

Here is an exported file showing the first clear tasks within each project group.

So, I was just on the verge of talking about some of those projects, but I'm going to resist that temptation... there will be plenty of time for that as I actually do them. This is still the moment for floating over a constellation of jellyfish, watching counter-rotating dinoflagellate bioluminescent swirls from dinghy oars, hoisting the sails for a long reach, fragrant curry and music jams with new friends, lazy rainy mornings with droplets spattering hatches, catching a lift from a tidal current, pulling off a tricky maneuver on the first try, landing on uninhabited islands, smiling back at my pal, and dreaming of the way it's all gonna be when OmniFocus tells me that there's simply nothing left to do except cast off the docklines...

Java, APRS, and Financial Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:16:00 +0000

How bizarre it is to be at anchor in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, confronting the daily challenges of field electronics projects and keeping up with battery/food/water usage while slurping catastrophic financial news via the Internet and trying to assess the impact. Talk about a cognitive disconnect... kayaking the harbor at sunset while numbers that affect my life careen out of control.

I rather envy Java's perspective on all this:

She's always walking on air in her mock-serious sort of way, and seems unaffected by everything that drives my life except where it converges with food acquisition (and she happily handles that on her own when not confined to a floating island of mouse-free steel). I try to emulate her detached attitude sometimes, but there is so much at stake... so much on the to-do list. Tonight I finally got the old B&G Network sensors interfaced through an h1000 and an AT10 to the N2K network, so the DSM250 displays wind and depth data. She slept through most of the excitement, grumbling when I commandeered the captain's chair to fiddle with my new numbers.

But the other night at anchor in Roche Harbor, I was out making the rounds of the mostly quiet setting (well, quiet except for the megayacht Discovery that always had an engine running; presumably shore power was insufficient). I returned to my modest little ship in glassy calm water with bioluminous puffs trailing from each stroke of the oars, and drifted up to the stern. Java was waiting.

I could see the thought bubble forming, but didn't expect her to follow through. She made her way down the steps and put a paw on the dink gunwale... it floated off a bit, alarming her, and she bounded back to safety. I kept telling her about it, offering a ride. Slowly she returned, and this time I held the boatlet firmly to the mothership. She hopped aboard, and I pushed off.

Rowing softly with the forward-facing system, we made a big lazy loop around Nomadness. I have always heard that one must really start with a kitten if the intent is to have a cat aboard, but she took to it beautifully... watching bright-eyed as our little magic carpet floated around the universe of reflected stars and anchor lights.

Tracker Magic

This blog has often carried screen captures of Google Earth with an overlay of recent tracking data, and I should say something about how that is being done (especially now that there are three separate data sources).

I've started capturing track logs from the MacENC navigation software that I have been using on the Macintosh - it is working so well that I'm about to install either a Planar or Argonaut sunlight-readable LCD at the outside helm, dedicated to a Mac Mini. This is now saving tracks, but so far I have only been using them as a backup.

The ones that have appeared here are from the GPS Datalogger that I threw together a couple of years ago, based on a tracker from SparkFun Electronics. I like those folks, and they have lots of interesting stuff to play with... this gadget reliably stores the lat-long fix every second of the trip into files on an SD card, then I take those and manually edit them into KML files that open in Google Earth.

Both of those methods only record here on the boat, so I compile and publish the results later. But I'm now also running an APRS tracker called the Rtrak, which transmits my location on an amateur radio 2-meter frequency every 90 seconds. It's only half a watt, so I didn't expect too much — the one I used on Bubba was 25 watts — but with a little Diamond mag-mount whip on the steel deck I am getting surprisingly excellent results. Here's the view of the past few days as displayed on the aprs.fi server:

In the Yahoo group for the product, I expressed my surprise at how well this was working, and another ham posted an amazing image that showed (for a the San Juan Island section) what stations had been receiving and forwarding my transmissions. As with all photos on this blog, you can click for a large version:

Image by Lynn Deffenbaugh

The red lines show the connections that made it as I sailed around, and the data payload they carried was then immediately piped through the net to various servers including the Finnish one noted above, as well as the venerable findu.com created by my old friend, Steve Dimse. You can always click that to see our current location with all the usual Google map features like satellite view and scaling.

If you are not a ham, and want a commercial version of this capability, I'm hearing good things about the Spot Messenger — though I have never tried one myself.

(By the way, speaking of sailing around - there are two Amazon 44 sisterships plying northwest waters. The blog of Ilari has some wonderful photos of the Queen Charlottes and the BC coast, and Mentor, owned by the broker who worked with me on this one, is home-ported in Seattle.)

Remember the Microships?

Back in the tonnage-reduction domain, there have been two elephants in the room for quite some time now: Wordplay and Songline. These are the amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans that, in various incarnations, consumed all available resources from 1993 until 2003 or so... a rather large chunk of my life. (Photos are in an album over here.)

When I finally got around to writing my will a few months ago, I directed that Songline should go back to Natasha... when we split in 2002, I assumed that there would be nautical continuity in the relationship domain and thus kept the Microships together. But that's not the way things evolved, and I recently decided that there is no point in making Natasha wait for my demise to once again enjoy the lovely little red trimaran that she worked so hard to build (in some cases learning from my own exercises in over-engineering). The boat is now back in her hands.

Wordplay, on the other hand, continues to be the centerpiece of the 3000 square foot lab that was constructed specifically for the project.... she sits there in mute rebuke, really quite beautiful but covered in a layer of dust and neglect. It's not right. I keep trying to think of what to do about this, and have a few ideas.

First, if a budding technomadling were to come along with the right mediagenic nature coupled with true core hard-core geekery tinged with a yen for adventure... and there were sufficient funding available... I would consider a deal that would include extensive training and some kind of early involvement in the mission profile. I'm not holding my breath, but ya never know. This isn't the kind of boat that lends itself to brokerage... insanely expensive amphibian micro-trimarans that hold one person are not exactly what one would call a "seller's market" these days.

Second, during this coming winter of extensive projects, Nomadness is going to be a few miles away by water from my home base. This is endlessly annoying, and last year in La Conner I was frustrated by the difficulty of maintaining any kind of continuity with a 2-hour round-trip commute between boat and lab. If I can find a waterfront home for the Microship and streamline her for the task, she'd be a hot little commuter... perhaps augmented occasionally by the sailing dinghy. If nothing else, the time on water would give me the sense of amortizing the project somewhat.

And third, Sky and I have been seriously exploring the flotilla idea, as discussed here recently. Technomads, Dramanauts... call 'em what you will... the idea is to assemble a spiritied community of adventurers who travel together and share skills and resources to maintain a creative and productive life of global voyaging. Since Wordplay was designed specifically for an earlier incarnation of this (and we now have a proper mothership), this could be someone's magic carpet... or even provide a seat for a slow turnover of participants. I like this idea a lot... selling the Microship just doesn't feel right.

This baby deserves better than long-term storage in a pole building in the woods!

Meanwhile, we are slowly winding down this adventure (444 miles at this writing), and are starting to feel the wrap-up events looming on the calendar: wood stove installation, bow thruster, bottom paint and rust repair, movement to winter moorage, a mad push to set up my mobile lab in order to have on-site facilities, and the timely resurgence of eBaying to help pay for all this stuff.

No madness indeed. This is crazy. Good luck this week with the insane economy...

Steve

Geeking in the San Juans

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:43:00 +0000

My head is a-swirl with data, extrapolated subjectively from imperfect measurements and flawed instruments. There's the Link 10 that randomly resets itself, forgetting the status of the batteries. The Xantrex inverter that would like to charge at a decent rate but overheats when I attempt to do so. The trio of diesel tanks that offer up level-sensor data that is apparently random, requiring me to monitor engine hours and estimates based on RPM. The Simrad AP24 autopilot that can take 15 minutes or more after being powered on to allow itself to begin actually piloting. An excellent bit of navigation software (MacENC) that runs on my laptop down below... not outside where I need it when driving. The new holding tank (still mysteriously stinky) that requires opening its stowage bay to observe the level.

All of these things are soluble, of course, and many of the imminent projects have to do with not only fixing bugs but going well beyond to build a homogenous layer of modeling atop the ship's many systems... allowing me to see it all at a glance from a browser. We'll get there. But in the meantime, there is an added challenge to voyaging that comes from receiving a flood of data that is often misleading.

That is tricky enough when trying to maintain an internal mental model of a huge old battery bank, but it gets downright scary when navigating in an unexpected fog bank. That's what happened the other day, as we plunged through Deception Pass from sunny Cornet Bay, headed for the San Juan Islands, not taking too seriously the NOAA footnote about "occasional areas of patchy morning fog."

(photo by Sky Myers)

But we rounded the bend and the bridge was nearly invisible... just a vague outline against a backdrop of thick soup filling the strait to the west. It was a narrow slack between two 7-knot current extremes, so with misgivings ameliorated somewhat by having been through the same waters a week before, I pressed into the murk, pulling foulies over my shorts and T-shirt. The pass itself required that we stay more or less mid-channel and avoid bumping into other boats or the cliffs on either side... but both were easily visible in the narrow channel and slack timing was spot-on. For a few minutes after emerging to the west I was able to visually keep a constant distance off the rocks to starboard, working around Lighthouse Point and into more open water.

But the fog grew still denser, with visibility soon down to 3-4 boat lengths. Suddenly our stately 6-knot speed felt really fast... yet there was a paradoxical desire to blast through it toward what appeared to be a lighter sky north of us, not timidly creep along with a lack of steerageway (urgently needed when random boats would quickly materialize and zip past enroute to the narrow window of rock and slack). Since we hadn't quite anticipated this, and had been prevented by current timing from hanging back to shift gears and think it over, we found ourselves scrambling to gather information.

It became a sort of dance, actually. One of us would stand at the helm, peering into the soup, as the other would run up and down the companionway to gaze at the charting software tethered to the nav desk, and gesture appropriately (sometimes with urgency, other times with a thumbs-up). With the intent of hugging the shore and entering Burrows Bay, I kept tweaking the course, sometimes a bit randomly... you can see the result in the wiggly track above). While all this was going on, we were discussing our strategy; turning left and heading directly across Rosario Strait would get us away from the rocky shore and be the shortest route into the San Juans, but would also take us into the wide precautionary area filled with shipping traffic (I could hear one large rumbling engine as well as the foghorn of another somewhere off in the soup). I was tempted to follow our previous course up to the head of Burrows Bay and out the narrow gap north of Burrows Island, but the currents would be swirling like crazy by the time we got there, and if still foggy that might be unpleasant.

We decided to compromise and tiptoe out to Allan Island, then hug its shore around to the west and cross the strait where the shipping lanes are narrower. Somewhere in there I remembered that I have a radar (all this drama had been taking place in the space of 20 minutes or so), so I smote myself on the forehead, dashed down to the pilothouse, and fired it up... along with the autopilot.

Radar is magic, of course, and we quickly started getting a better handle on the situation... seeing the ships out in the strait, the rocky shore receding behind us, the nearing wall of Allan... then YIKES, there it was looming out of the fog, just as predicted but real enough to trigger a hard spin of the helm and an epithet or two. Keeping a safe distance off and flying by impromptu compass courses and Sky's choreographically relayed news from the chartplotter, I kept fiddling with the Simrad WR20 bluetooth autopilot remote, a generally wonderful little gadget that chose this particular day to set a new record for the length of time needed to accept the command to get the hell out of standby and actually start steering. You can see where it finally did, up there, just to the west of Allan, where the track gets nice and smooth.

When the radar revealed an opening in shipping traffic, we headed west across Rosario Strait. Within a few minutes the fog cleared, and in sparkling sunshine we could revert to visual navigation, the fog already like a strange dream as we made our way behind James Island, through Thatcher Pass, up over Lopez Island, and eventually into Friday Harbor... where we have been anchored for 3 days.

While swinging on a chain and dancing in ferry wakes, I've been taking care of a few projects. One was the cabling of the pump that will allow the holding tank to be emptied at sea; another was the implementation of my long-awaited NOIDS (Nomadness Object Interconnection Database Server), implemented in FileMaker 9. This involved some painful relational database learning curves, especially since the book of choice didn't arrive from Amazon before our latest departure from the lab, and all I have is help files and late-night rum-sodden Googlage on generic terms. I've been a FileMaker user since version 3, but never delved too deeply into relational territory.

Although still primitive, NOIDS works beautifully! There are two tables in the database, one for devices and the other for connections. The former collects all documentation about each connected thing on the boat, including containers for PDFs and photos, clickable web links, power, serial number, location aboard, and so on. The latter provides a record for each link between devices. The auto-assigned device ID is the match field, and I found a trick that lets me have multiple instances so that buses and manifolds are supported. A portal in the device database shows all known links for a given widget, each connection record associates device IDs with their long names to make it more readable, and there are buttons for migrating back and forth, making new records, and so on.

This documentation method is orthogonal to the classic library of drawings, but since reality is a big mushy thing with lots of overlap between "domains," the database approach fits quite well and is easier to incrementally maintain. I think it will scale; so far I have only added the APRS tracker and holding tank stuff to provide a test dataset.

Cat on a Hot Tin Boom

Meanwhile, Java is adapting easily to the nautical life, seeming to enjoy the sensations of being afloat. In Cornet Bay we were on one of the mooring docks (little islands with no path to land), so in short order she hopped off Nomadness and found her way aboard Jacari Maru (whose owners, Larry and Nancy, joined us for an evening of nautical tale-swapping). Java spent much of her first couple of years wandering about 25,000 miles around the US during my BEHEMOTH-centric speaking tours of the era, so my fears of her objecting strenuously to seasteading are apparently unfounded despite her addiction to hunting the critters of forest and meadow.

Governments don't always agree with the free movement of pets, however, so one of our reasons for parking in Friday Harbor had to do with getting an international rabies certificate to facilitate entry into Canada. We dinghied her in, and a delightful Cape Dory sailing vet named Tess made a dock call, did a quick exam, and slipped in a subcutaneous injection so gracefully that Java barely deviated from her habitual expression of bemused contentment. I rather envy her.

The binder of official ship's papers now bulges a bit more: documentation, fishing, communications, insurance, taxes, border permits...

What Now?

The fleeting and frustrating summer season is nearly over, as if it ever really began. September is usually the choice month around here, and it is looking promising, but all too soon we are going to be stoking the ship's woodstove, firing up the Webasto, seeking protected anchorages, dogging down hatches, warily eyeing incoming windstorms, battling humidity, and diving in to the rather intimidating list of winter projects. I feel a sort of urgency about this, not trusting the world situation or the economy, and deeply regret my slothful approach to last winter's epic to-do list.

The difference, of course, is that now I know the boat; the tasks that are truly important have risen to the top, and the "would be nice someday" projects have been relegated to the hobby level. Still, this is huge, and one of the biggest challenges has been setting up winter moorage with associated workspace and figuring out how to actually take advantage of it. Camano Island is pretty much useless in this regard... it's an island, technically, but it neither feels like one culturally nor offers anything in the domain of nautical facilities. I wish I had the time and budget to relocate the home base; this is going to be a rather intense period of complex system projects overlaid with the never-ending eBay marathon to convert static tonnage into boat parts.

But after that, if it's not too late, our little magic carpet should be ready for open-ended seasteading on a global scale. Where is the fast-forward button?

Cheers,
Steve

Layers of Information

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Roberts) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:48:00 +0000

Update: I have just added a live tracker to the ship in addition to the datalogger that has been recording detailed routes. You can now see our current location, updated every 90 seconds while underway. Sometimes the transmitted position reports don't make it due to heavy traffic on the APRS channel, or we may be out of range of a shore station, but during the initial tests today (Sep 3) it worked beautifully. More tech details on this later - just wanted to add the link.

Anyway...

We've completed the minor loop to Anacortes, driven by the meeting with the thruster folk, but the journey was richer in texture than might be expected for such a specific technical quest. Enroute north, we stopped for a day in Cornet Bay... the ideal place to pause and take a breath before plunging through Deception Pass. That's one of the rites of passage for a Northwest sailor, and though it's reasonably uneventful at slack, it does take careful planning. Flood and ebb through the narrow rocky passage can run 8 knots of swirling whitewater, and YouTube is rife with videos of boats doing, shall we say, not so well.

This can be exacerbated by gale-force winds from the Strait of Juan de Fuca (which have been happening a fair bit lately), so we just paused a day, went for a long hike in the woods of Hoypus point, luxuriated in a 50-cent state-park shower, rowed over to meet Tim Flanagan of Navagear aboard Two Lucky Fish, kept an eye on NOAA and Mr. Tides, then calmly went for it. Other than getting buffeted sideways a bit, it was smooth... and we emerged into relatively open water and continued through Burrows Bay and around Shannon Point toward Anacortes with only one ferry-dance to quicken the heartbeat (I ended up doing a loop to escape the developing collision course, though another sailor stupidly insisted on holding his own and got a nasty blast of the horn as the behemoth implacably turned across his bow and forced an untidy evasive maneuver well inside the legal proximity limit.)

After a brief provocative glimpse of the BMW/Oracle 90-foot trimaran (I couldn't catch her), we landed at Cap Sante Marine, which kindly let us use their dock for a couple of nights while another storm system passed. Unfortunately, one of our fenders got gobbled by a big diamond-plate-covered gap overnight, whereupon the 25-30 knot wind ground us steadily on a wooden beam as we snoozed happily. The good news is that my hull is steel, and although an ugly bare spot was already rusting by morning coffee, we didn't have to contemplate the emergency structural patch that would likely have been required with a fiberglass boat. But still. This really sucks, and it is going to be expensive to bring the Awlgrip back to a smooth uniform gloss:

The irony of this happening at a boatyard was not lost on us. Alas, there's no blame but our own... there should have been more fenders out to protect us from the ragged dock with large gaposis, and when the wind came up we should have popped out of the hatch to check on things.

The thruster meeting went well, however, and we'll probably return in October to get an 8" hole drilled through the boat below waterline. That thought should make any sailor cringe, and coupled with the trauma of haulout I'll probably approach it the way my stockbroker handles the current investment climate: "gin and xanax." Once done, I will have 213 pounds of lateral thrust at the bow, just a touch of the joystick away. That should make close-in maneuvering less traumatic.

Friends Afloat

The escape from Anacortes was on a day of howling wind and intermittent rain, continuing this Pacific Northwest summer-from-hell that has seen only a few short sunny stretches. We were joined by two of my dearest friends, and motored down through Swinomish Channel (past the marina that held us captive last winter) and out into open water for a bit of sailing before tying up to wait out the Labor Day frenzy that renders all nearby anchorages and marinas zoo-like. Time on water with people I love... now this makes all the hard work worthwhile:

This might be a good time to mention something that really needs a proper web page of its own, and soon. The community aspect of sailing is one of the most alluring parts of all this, and we are seriously working to rekindle the "technomadic flotilla" idea that has been threading through my projects since the early '90s and almost materialized in the Microship era. We are envisioning a mobile tribe of boats bearing kindred spirits, practitioners of skills various, geeks of many stripes, and a core that remains constant and hostel-like, even through a slow turnover of participants.

Sky and I are both coming at this from different but overlapping perspectives. She sees it as a wandering group of actors, writers, artists, and musicians (which we have dubbed Dramanauts, hence her blog by that name). I see it more as a self-sufficient technomadic community that has reached a critical mass of skills and tools, and is thus able to respond to changing world situations (or pure whim) by relocating on a global scale. The two notions are quite compatible, and reflect our own passions.

If you're interested, let me know. We'll be writing much more about this soon.

Reverse Engineering and Ship Documentation

Meanwhile, I sit here on the boat as it rocks and creaks in the relentless late-August winds (?), piecing together a data structure that addresses a huge problem: getting a handle on the complexity of this system. The boat came with a few old drawings that were made before numerous changes, and even those are incomplete. One of the first projects, before even getting too deep into my own, is to figure out what is here... and yet, if I take that to fruition, I won't have time to add the essential systems and upgrades that are waiting in the wings.

It's a mess, in other words, and attempts to make new drawings have been mostly frustrated by variations in granularity or encapsulation that render it hard to know where to begin... or when to stop.

I finally hit on a solution, which I am implementing now in Filemaker 9 relational database software. Every object on the boat (something that one would actually think of as a physical entity, not internal parts or vague systems) has a corresponding database record... and this contains all relevant documentation including PDF and web files, serial number, power, location, commentary, spares, and so on. Basically, it's an inventory, with each item having an auto-assigned numeric ID.

A second table has one record per connection, and that can take any form from a cable to a piece of plumbing. The record identifies the involved objects, and also carries descriptive text along with a "short name" that matches the output of my labelmaker. Each connection also has a unique ID.

Portals inside each of these layouts reveal the magic. An object like a GPS would reveal perhaps three lines in a table, one for each connection that enumerates it: power, NMEA 0183 for serial data, and a drop from the NMEA 2000 backbone that links it to the main nav systems. At the same time, I could pop over to the record for that serial cable and see two lines in its portal: the GPS and the 0183-to-USB dongle that interfaces it to my Mac.

The elegance of this is the separation between objects and connections, allowing things other than one-to-one relationships. Other files in the same system provide reference to the DC distribution system (what's on this "INSTR" breaker?), the crossbar and configuration management tools owned by a dedicated microcontroller, maintenance history, and so on.

Doing it this way is incremental and thus non-intimidating, it's easy to edit, and it associates all the relevant information with each device... rather than my current protocol, if you can call it that, consisting of a huge filesystem of randomly named PDFs, web locations, text files, paper manuals, sketches somewhere in the notebooks, and my increasingly flawed and Google-dependent memory.

This is coming together well enough that I'll probably publish the technique when it's done enough to test properly... and in the meantime it's helping me get a handle on just what I have here.

Fair winds,
Steve