Microship Status Report 04/11/00

Issue 135

by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs


IN THIS ISSUE:

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into
nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
    -- Albert Einstein




PSST... HEY, WANNA SEE THE MICROSHIP?

Ahhh, Springtime. A young man's fancy turns to boats, road trips,
and high-speed network access. In the foreground is a To-Do list
that's becoming ever more tightly compressed into the 7 weeks between
now and the PerlWhirl; progress is happening, but the distractions of
project management keep drawing me away from project execution.

Still, we do what we gotta do. At the moment, that translates into a
putting together a speaking tour this coming August... with a keynote
scheduled in Asheville, North Carolina on the 16th and a few visits
in between. This is the opportunity I've been waiting for: we're
hoping to land enough gigs on either side of that date to justify
purchase of a new Wells Cargo 48-foot trailer to replace my wee
20-footer... which in turn means we can take the Microships cross
country as well as the bike! If this audacious plan comes together,
it will be the first speaking tour with the boat... and very likely
the last with BEHEMOTH before it lands in the museum.

Soooo, if you are involved with a company, school, event, or
organization that would like to host an on-site appearance... please
let me know right away! At the moment, just about anywhere in North
America is fair game, though as our travel schedule develops, the
constraints will grow tighter. The general plan is to head east at
the end of July to appear at the SolWest Energy Fair in John Day,
Oregon, then pass through St. Paul and Madison, aiming ourselves
toward North Carolina before reversing course, visiting my dad in
Louisville, and cruising west to Silicon Valley (maybe via San Diego)
with a few sailing days tucked in here and there. But there's lots
of flexibility in that, including the other two corners of the US.
If you'd like more info about my presentations, appearance fees, and
how all this fits with various kinds of audiences, please drop me a
line and I'll see if we can work something out.

Ooohhh, a 48-foot Mothership.... <pang>

--> SolWest Energy Fair: <http://www.eoni.com/~solwest>
--> Wells Cargo trailers: <http://www.wellscargo.com>
--> Perl Whirl: <http://www.GeekCruises.com>
--> Computer Museum: <http://www.computerhistory.org>


MICROSHIP LABCAM... NOT

Until this afternoon, we had a labcam serving hourly images to our
website... but the recommissioned Quadra stopped believing that its
disk can be read by its operating system version! I'll dust off an
old laptop and try again -- hopefully this will be back up soon...
it's quite amusing. The URL is below if you want to check, but at
the moment the image is static.

In other website news, Natasha is in the process of doing a complete
redesign. We're planning to have it online by May 15, which is when
the June Wired article should hit the stands. In addition to all-new
aesthetics and structure, a Perl script by Ned Konz serves a random
sponsor logo every time the front page is accessed, archives are
easier to find, there are more pictures, the Microship overview has
been rewritten to reflect the current system design... and the tools
are falling into place to support the virtual console and Steve
Dimse's magic tracker display. (I'll carry the APRS tracker on the
upcoming test sail, so you will be able to see real-time location
data and power system telemetry.)

--> Tracker test page: <http://track.microship.com>
--> Sample data collection: <http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?wu2z>


ELSEWHERE IN THE YACHTING SPECTRUM

We actually had a bit of Time On Water last month... a 2-day delivery
cruise aboard a friend's Morgan 41 Out Island from a boatyard along
Hylebos Arm (near Tacoma) to Whidbey Island. Actually, Tasha and I
jumped ship and dinghied to a Camano Island beach as I had a meeting
to attend, but that was just part of the adventure.

Jessica, the owner of the boat, had 'er shipped up from Mexico, so
the first task was to re-rig and get the systems back online after
thousands of miles of road vibration. A rigger and crane showed up
to step the mast (This is a stickup!), so all us swabbies grabbed a
shroud or a stay, with turnbuckles and pins at the ready and wrenches
in our teeth. But something went awry... we got the stick in and had
the backstay and one shroud attached, but the headstay was suddenly a
couple inches out. Odd... it looked OK a moment ago. I popped off
the backstay turnbuckle and they got the headstay in with no trouble,
but then I didn't have enough slack at the stern. It turned out the
tide was ebbing so fast that the boat was literally dropping out from
under the mast, which was still hanging on its crane!

That problem solved, the six of us wired, fixed, cleaned, mounted,
stowed, and otherwise got her ready for sea. We motored north the
next day, giving me a chance to practice navigation in unfamiliar
waters, cruising up the west side of Vashon Island as night fell...
past the amazing lightshow of Seattle... dodging nuns while trying to
sort out the visual clutter of lights marking Bainbridge Island's
Eagle Harbor entrance with its interesting shoals. Entering an
unfamiliar channel in the dark is always a blend of white knuckles
and enchantment, and this was no exception... but we found ourselves
at last tied to a guest dock at the Yacht Club, exhausted but giddy,
swaggering in our foulies up to the pub in salty camaraderie.

The other oddity of the trip took place the next day, after a lovely
wing 'n wing run up Admiralty Inlet as I watched my pocket GPS with
increasing anxiety (the antithesis of proper sailing attitude, I
know, but I was fretting about my meeting). The wind faded and we
fired up the diesel, and at Jessica's preferred 2100 RPM maintained a
steady 6+ knot speed over water -- just enough to make it in time.
But after a couple of hours, I kept fretting that something didn't
feel right, and sure enough... the knotmeter read 4.6. "Faster!" I
urged, but Jessica was adamant about maintaining 2100 RPM.
Harumph... the speed log should be independent of current and there
was no wind to speak of, so I set off on a walk around the boat to
locate and free the forest of kelp that we were obviously towing.

But it was far weirder than that: a waterlogged 6-foot 2x8 plank was
perfectly balanced across the bow, churning up a wave! We were
trying to plow Puget Sound....


PHYSICAL FABRICATION: HOME STRETCH

In Issue #133, I reported that we were in the process of prepping the
aluminum parts for anodizing at Hytek Finishes, a project that
involved disassembly of 170 machined components followed by sanding,
polishing, and beadblasting of each. The landing gear, in
particular, required careful record-keeping -- with a total of 324
parts (including fasteners and suspension blobs), I didn't want to
end up with a confusing mess months later after forgetting how it all
works. Disassembly was thus documented with metal engraving,
sketches, notes, video, and photos... while I became ever more amazed
at the engineering challenge that was successfully met by Bob Stuart
while building these crazy things. It seems that adding
saltwater-impervious hydraulically steered retractable landing gear
to a canoe is not a trivial problem after all... especially with
Ackerman geometry, remote deployment, tuckaway stowage, and
independent suspension that can handle 4G shock loads!

(Speaking of canoes, a friend recently pointed out that if Lewis and
Clark had carried duct tape, it would have knocked a year and a half
off their journey.)

Hytek did a beautiful job, passing our batch of Microship parts
through the same processes used by Boeing and other deep-pockets
clients who insist on serious quality control and batch uniformity.
The pre-etch and anodizing steps were followed by a dichromate seal
to survive the brutal marine environment, giving the parts a hard
green finish that's incredibly functional in appearance... like
aircraft parts. To add visual balance, I've decided to abandon the
original drab "Pearl Grey" hull color and go with "Lemon Mist," which
is also compatible with blue Solarex panels and the red Sunbrella
fabric of the cabin top. Io should look right festive out there...
especially with lavender Europa rollicking alongside.

The big project at the moment is doing everything that has to occur
before painting, which translates into a massive collection of
hardware mounting jobs -- Globalstar satellite antenna, four whips,
GPS antenna, Mobri radar reflector integrated with sternlight, Guest
spotlight and Az-El camera platform, speakers and cable channels in
the arch, Delta anchor with rollers and tensioner, detachable
cowling-hinge and draw-latch retrofit so we can get at the console,
and so on. We're also nearing the Solar Integration Project, as Bob
is now vacuum-bagging the substrates on Saltspring Island and at some
point we must bond on the mounting fixtures and connector nacelles.

In addition to the solar panels, quite a bit of other development
work is taking place offsite. In Madison, Tim Nolan is refining the
Peak Power Tracker boards that will let us extract maximal juice from
the solar array -- he's seeing consistent gain in the 15% range.
He's also doing final tweaks to the main power control board, which
gathers data from the solar arrays, battery, thruster, and system
loads in order to optimize battery charging while delivering the
magic number to the thruster controller that lets it track available
leftover power without impacting the battery. Blue Sea Systems just
sent a wonderful care package of shunts, circuit breakers, bus bars,
fuse blocks, and other goodies that will take care of the whole power
environment. (Tim has changed to high-side current measurement with
Blue Sea meter shunts instead of the Hall-effect sensors we started
with; while the latter work fine, they are fragile, draw significant
operating current that necessitates power-cycling with attention to
settling time.)

Meanwhile, the physical mounting problems alluded to a moment ago
forced me to think about the whole communication system, since
antennas occupy deck space, interact in interesting ways, have
biological exposure effects that must be considered, and in some
cases even require a counterpoise. I've been distributing the
various whips to accommodate all the trade-offs and water/land
modalities, but nothing was as messy as HF... especially since it has
to work in salt, fresh, and NO water. With brilliant email
brainstorming partners Ralph Wallio (W0RPK) in Iowa and Courtney
Duncan (N5BF) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs, plus occasional input
from Roy Lewallen (W7EL), the author of EZNEC antenna modeling
software, we have been going back and forth for a couple of months
refining the design while reluctantly rejecting the convenient
solutions one by one.

Basically, it appears that there will be a 102" stainless whip at the
stern, pushing against as much bonded copper foil as I can possibly
laminate below waterline in the aft hatch. In between, an automatic
antenna tuner will busy itself with matching, recalibrating when we
move from salt to fresh water or operate on land with an added ground
wire. None of this would have been very difficult if we didn't need
automatic operation, as there are some excellent antennas that
eliminate the need for a tuner (most notably the Outbacker, which
served me so well on BEHEMOTH). But if manual intervention is
required to change bands, we lose the ability to perform
server-initiated telemetry via PACTOR and APRS when the system might
have been left tuned for a 10-meter ragchew. All the numbers suggest
that this approach will work, so at the moment I just have to worry
about its impact on fiberglass... with the hope that our eagerly
awaited Icom 706mkIIG <swoon> will find itself in a happy RF
environment when we at last put to sea.

I should mention that while all this is going on, Natasha continues
to make amazing progress on her boat -- working solo much of the time
yet turning out some great layups. She has just contracted local
wizard sculptor/welder Rick Wesley to conjure her landing gear, and
is looking for volunteers who want to camp here for a while and help
with electronics, machining, and other packaging projects. Our goal
is to have Europa day-sailable by the time we do the August tour, so
we can take both boats with us to sample some of the waters that
we'll be traveling for real next year. In the middle of being a boat
builder, small-time chicken rancher and gardener, video producer,
webmistress, and endlessly interesting companion, she also stretched
her electronic wings last week by building the Paia theremin kit...
with the intent not only of making eerie music but also building a
gestural interface to the video crossbar to speed editing.

--> Hytek Finishes: <http://www.hytekfinishes.com/>
--> Anodizing photos: <http://www.microship.com/latestnews/images/images.html>
--> RF Exposure Issues: <http://www.arrl.org/news/rfsafety/>
--> EZNEC Antenna Software: <http://www.eznec.com/>
--> Blue Sea Systems: <http://www.bluesea.com>
--> Paia Theremax: <http://www.paia.com/theremax.htm>


ON THE SYSTEMS FRONT...

Speaking of volunteers, we made a key decision that should have
sweeping effects on the way Microship software comes together. As
you may recall, Ned Konz lived with us for a while and made
incredible progress in specifying the various modules that will
collectively present a consistent interface to the suite of
asynchronous and differently flavored data sources, with clients
ranging from real-time Java charting widgets inside the browser
environment to telemetry tasks that periodically gather everything
interesting and ship it off to our public server. All this is
wrapped around a database, presumably SQL-ish, and unix-domain
sockets take care of the interconnection between device servers and
the central switcher that routes channels to various clients. Most
of this data flows in via the serial crossbar or through the original
FORTH hub system, which is now an I/O manager that greatly expands
the Octagon board's already substantial set of ports.

Given the linux development environment and the remarkable culture of
our age, we've decided to put all this under GNU Public License... in
other words, open-source. We're setting up the project website,
mailing list, discussion forum, and CVS (version control) tree on
Sourceforge, and are now actively seeking other team members in
addition to the half-dozen who have been involved so far. If you
want to look over the spec, please go to our development homepage at
Sourceforge; if you're interested in getting involved, let me know!

--> Microship Development Homepage: <http://microship.sourceforge.net/>
--> Project Homepage: <http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=3233>

You know, it's funny... as this develops I can't help but reminisce
about the project's beginnings (maybe munging archive files for
Natasha's web project had something to do with it... I've posted 1.4
megabytes of textual updates in this series since 1993, enough for a
substantial book). I never would have believed back then that we'd
be writing real-time code in an on-board unix-based wireless network
environment distributed over two canoes and two backpacks, scattering
tens of gigabytes of disk around and maintaining parallel satellite
and HF telemetry pipes to a public server. Sheesh. We gotta get out
of here and start traveling...

One of the applications I'm finding amusing these days is music --
Tasha bought me a new Gemeinhardt flute and I've been jamming with
friends, and I just Ebayed my old Casio synthesizer and bought a Korg
X5DR. Even though I'm still a synth newbie, mostly just downloading
and playing General MIDI files, it absolutely astounds me how good
this little box sounds, how easy it is to view it as an accompanist,
and how far a gigabyte goes when you're storing MIDI data instead of
the shape of every waveform, MP3'd or not. This will live on the
serial crossbar, of course, just as accessible to system software as
any other resource. The only problem is that it makes me care even
more about speaker quality, and in the tiny cockpit I'm severely
constrained by magnetic fields that affect the hand-bearing
compass... EVERYTHING on a small boat interacts with everything else.
Looks like the little 4" ultra low magnetic field Poly Planars
instead of the hearty Sonys... <sigh>

--> Korg X5DR info: <http://cc.joensuu.fi/~jsimonen/korgypark.html>


NEWS UPDATES

First, the sponsor news... it's been over 2 months since our last
update and we have some exciting acknowledgments...

I mentioned Blue Sea Systems earlier -- I have long admired their
marine power hardware and even used a bit of it when rewiring Rick
Waldbart's Sea Pearl in Tampa a few years back. Waterproof circuit
breakers, robust bus bars, main fuse block, shunts, keyed main
switch, and more... we now have enough on hand to take care of all
our power wiring.

--> Blue Sea Systems: <http://www.bluesea.com/>

Some time ago, I reluctantly agreed to let Natasha build a structure
on Europa's arch to carry the video turret, the sealed 8" cylinder
containing a camera head with 450 degrees of rotation and an embedded
FORTH board running PWM motor-control code. As much as I love this
unit, she appealed to my vanity (or so goes the local myth), pointing
out that I will be the subject of the video far more often if please,
oh, please, she can mount it on HER boat <pang>. There's some logic
to this, as she's also carrying the Draco Casablanca video editing
system, but a lot of loving work went into that sparkling little
robotic widget and I'm attached to it. But hey, lately I've been
thinking that having elevation control would be even cooler, and
while we're at it, why not on-board IR illumination? This led
naturally to the search for a suitable Az-El remote-controlled device
that can handle the marine environment... and surprise... it already
exists in a very useful form.

Thanks thus go to Guest (which is now an affiliate of Marinco) for
their 100,000 candlepower 50-watt remote halogen spotlight! We'll
add position feedback like the scheme Tim retrofitted to the
Minn-Kota steering motor, then stack on a couple of waterproof
cameras from Supercircuits (one B&W with 104 infrared LEDs, the other
color) along with a Coherent 15mW diode laser in a third sealed
housing. The resulting Roving Eye module will be a remote-controlled
see-in-the-dark security camera with a few interesting features,
mounted on the starboard winglet near the mast.

--> Marinco: <http://www.marinco.com/home2.htm>
--> Guest Spotlights: <http://www.guestco.com/guestco/spotlights.html>
--> Supercircuits microvideo: <http://www.supercircuits.com>

One of the most common bits of advice you hear when contemplating
extended travel in tiny boats is, "Carry a radar reflector!" This is
fine in theory, but the standard 12" spherical corner reflectors are
too big and clunky for use in the Microship environment. The
solution is a sleek cylindrical unit from Euro Marine Trading, called
the Mobri -- available in 4 configurations for various sizes of boats
and different mounting constraints. I chose the M2, which is 2"
diameter and 23" tall, and am mounting it on a block that also
carries a little Aqua Signal sternlight (to be retrofitted with white
LEDs, of course!). Thanks to:

--> Euro Marine Trading: <http://www.euromarinetrading.com/prodo3mobri.htm>

The deck-completion project led me on a long quest to identify all
the skyhooks that will comprise the antenna farm, and one issue was
cellular. The Globalstar satellite phone (a whole section on that
will be in the next issue, once I have some experience with it!)
cycles through three operating modes as needed -- digital cellular,
analog cellular, and LEO birds. The satellite radome is on the
stern, but we needed a cellular whip -- preferably dual band so we
have the option of 1900 MHz PCS as well as 800 MHz service. The
perfect unit, only 4' tall, turns out to be the 5410-XT from
Shakespeare, for which we are most grateful!

--> Shakespeare: <http://www.shakespeare-ce.com>

Our final sponsor-huzzah this issue goes to Don Douglass and Reanne
Hemingway-Douglass, an amazing couple over on Fidalgo Island who
publish the "Exploring" series of cruising guides to the Northwest...
replete with hundreds of waypoints. They've spent years exploring
every anchorage between here and Alaska aboard a Nordic Tug, and have
captured massive detail without sacrificing readability (this is
quite an art, for many cruising guides either put you to sleep or
rhapsodize without useful content). Their book about GPS is also the
best I've seen (going far beyond the usual basics), and other volumes
in their nautical product line include the gripping tale of
pitchpoling near Cape Horn. Great stuff!

--> FineEdge: <http://www.fineedge.com>

In media news, we're keeping a low profile until we're ready for
on-water photos, but we're excited about the upcoming piece in Wired
that is now tentatively slated for June. I'm also pushing deadline
on a mobiling feature for the June 73 Magazine, and we won't even
TALK about how late I am with a series for Dr. Dobbs Journal...
suffice it to say that we've been waiting for the server design to
stabilize, which is actually getting close. I suspect the upcoming
rollout and 2-week test sail (the long-awaited "Previews of Coming
Attractions" tour) will spark a succession of news bits. I'll keep
you posted...

The Nomadic Research Labs homebase has grown significantly since our
last update. Not only have there been major lab improvements (most
notably a 115,000 BTU heater and a layer of R-19 atop the original
R-13), but we also have more land. This wasn't our plan, but we
discovered that the owner of 5 wooded acres immediately adjacent to
our long skinny 6-acre parcel was considering offers from loggers...
including the horrifying possibility of a new neighbor from hell
clearcutting the 100-year-old fir/cedar/alder forest to pay off the
land and then plopping a doublewide in the resulting stump farm.
This was too horrific to contemplate, and the owner was incredibly
gracious about giving us first right of refusal despite higher offers
from the land-rapists, so we agreed to buy it.

For hand-to-mouth freelancers with infinite cash sinks called "boats"
this is easier said than done, but between Natasha's old investment
account languishing in the UK and my luckily timed purchase and sale
of SCON, ISCO, and NGEN, we managed to pull it off. We now have 11
acres of forest, and I'm wearing a wrist brace to ease the RSI I
contracted from over-exuberant trailblazing with hand tools. (Our
trail network is comprised of Edward Boulevard, Superconductor Alley,
Titcombe Lane, and Anchor Rode.)

Hey, don't forget our Geek's Vacation program! We welcome
volunteers, and a long-term fantasy is to have treehouses for guests
scattered through the woods, connected, of course, by a wireless
Intreenet.

Finally, we have two random interesting links for you this time.
Thanks to Peter Mui for pointing out the Sun skunkworks where the
Java Concept Car is being developed:

--> Java Concept Car: http://java.sun.com/features/1999/06/concept_car.html

And if you want to know your lat-long and don't have a GPS, try this
amazing widget:

--> Eagle Geocoder: http://www.geocode.com/eagle.html-ssi


Cheers from the Microship lab!
Steve