©
2004 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
IN THIS ISSUE:
This Microship update is dedicated to Alan Selfridge, who stunned
those
of us who admired and respected him by passing away suddenly on January
13. His brilliance and vigor were a constant inspiration,
not only through countless professional successes in ultrasonics and
piezoelectrics, but through his rare ability to dream big and then make
it come true. He was a creative man who knew how to play, and his
ultimate lab in the Santa Cruz Mountains is surrounded by giant redwood
trees, trails, swings, tunnels, high-quality craftsmanship, and a
loving extended family of which I am proud to have been a part for 15
years. Alan should have outlived us all... yet now there's a
black hole incongruously filling the space where he belongs.
When someone as alive as Alan can abruptly cease to exist, I feel quite
foolish slouched at my desk, websurfing for nothing in
particular. I've been much more focused on the project this past
week... though it should not have taken the demise of one of the people
I most respect to trigger such an obvious insight about the value of
time.
We'll miss you, Alan.
Documentation is famous for being the reluctant product of harried
engineers who would much rather make something work than write about
how it was done (or worse, explain how to use it). It's bad
enough in industry, where there is manpower a-plenty and a management
structure to kick butt when needed; it's next to hopeless in an
understaffed little enterprise like ours where doing one thing means
that everything else grinds to a halt. I've dreaded doing a
complete system configuration drawing for some time even though the
need
was obvious... largely because it required a tool that didn't exist.
The problem is that this is live documentation. I've done lots of
block diagrams in drawing programs like the venerable MacDraw Pro and
its descendants, but they don't behave like CAD files at all:
when I want to drag things around, connections break because they're
not really connections. And my favorite design program,
Capilano's
DesignWorks, is a spectacular schematic capture tool... but what about
random sketches of things like radio front panels and fanciful
speech-synthesizing lips? Both classes of apps do what they do
very well, but overlap little... and on top of that, I'd like the
output to be directly exportable as an HTML image map for use as a
front end to the documentation library on our site.
Imagine my joy, then, when issue #553 of TidBITS (always an excellent
Mac resource) introduced me to ConceptDraw from CS Odessa on the Black
Sea. It's not intended to replace CAD packages for real
engineering, or dedicated illustration programs for pure artwork, but
it's absolutely amazing at solving the multidisciplinary problem of
creating a "live" diagram with rubberbanding connections. As a
major bonus, individual objects are clickable to open related files,
even if that involves launching other apps like Acrobat, a word
processor, or a browser. It knows how to export a drawing to
HTML, creating an image-mapped GIF or JPEG that can be piped directly
to our site. And there's a lot more, including sophisticated
dynamic object behavior defined by tables... you can even use formulas
to customize them any way you like or add your own context menus.
The program comes with loads of object libraries, knows how to import
Visio files, and is available for Windows as well as the Mac. You
can download the demo from their site and try it if you need to move
beyond static drawings... this tool quickly becomes indispensable!
--> ConceptDraw
--> TidBITS review
I acquired a copy from the fine folks at Odessa and started playing,
and the result now fills 9 taped-together sheets in hardcopy.
It's even better on the web, of course, and you can find the drawing in
its entirety here...
--> Microshipnet
As you can see, I rather made a project of it... all those front panels
and other pictures are reasonably representational of the real things,
and it's as technically accurate as possible, changing as the design
matures. At this writing, 17 of the 90 or so objects are linked
to pages with additional detail and graphics -- including product
resources and downloadable datasheets. When I saw over 300 hits
in a 2-week period on that irritating little guy shoveling endlessly in
the otherwise vacant "Microship Technical Information" part of our
site, I knew he had to go...
I won't take space here to explain the whole drawing... that's getting
better and better covered on the site. It's still based on a
"Grand Central Station" of crossbars (audio, video, and serial), a bank
of power control bits, and lots of other I/O to perform data collection
and knit random subsystems into a homogenous whole -- pretty much the
plan all along. (Two of the crossbars are clickable on the
drawing, if you'd like to learn more about them.)
No, the big changes are at the high end -- the suite of computers that
will make the Microship a fun thing to use and render ongoing
development as amusing as possible. This calls for careful
selection of platforms, emphasis on open-source tools, and choosing
languages that are intrinsically entertaining. After lots of
consultation with our development team and many hours immersed in
research, we have, at last, a plan.
The boat needs something that is on all the time, and frankly, I'd be
happiest if that could be the "Big Iron" Debian linux box (most likely
a drop-in laptop with remoted keyboard and heads-up display). But
power issues always surface in this kind of environment... we can't
afford the continuous drain of a full-scale disk-based PC (though I
don't mind turning it on for navigation and productivity apps).
This forces us to have two hardware levels, though that does come with
a nice advantage. With Big Iron decoupled from the
moment-to-moment operation of the ship, we can be more free with
selection of that box, which becomes, essentially, the equivalent of my
desktop... right down to USB I/O and the most current software tools.
Given this distinction, we originally viewed the "Hub" processor as a
sort of grown-up replacement for the original FORTH Hub developed in
1995. But if the "Server" is usually off, then the Hub needs to
be more autonomous... so we started adding more and more functionality
to it and leaning toward a need for file storage (preferably
Disk-On-Chip), a 32-bit CPU, and fast communication resources.
This led us naturally to the "embedded linux" class of boards,
providing a robust multitasking environment, familiar tools,
open-source community support, and compatibility with our Server
code... while not requiring a power-hungry flat-panel display, active
cooling, or a spinning hard drive. Raw processor speed beyond 100
MHz or so is not much of an issue, as we're not running a
graphics-intensive GUI. All this suggests that we can get away
with something in the 1-2 watt range.
Numerous resources on boards of this scale are discussed here:
--> Embedded linux
We listed the tasks this little guy has to perform, and came to the
conclusion that the object-oriented, tightly integrated world of Squeak
makes more sense than dozens of random programs all yakking at each
other through sockets and files. Squeak is enchanting... it's
platform-agnostic, object to the core, fun, and amazingly rich with
potent development tools and a community of equally amazing developers.
--> Squeak
So what will this thing be doing?
Without a normal console, user interface becomes the tricky part --
the
native Squeak bitmap environment will be viewed via VNC server from the
Big Iron when I want to swill Jolt and engage in hackage. At the
other end of the spectrum, there's a dedicated serial LCD that will
mount above the power monitor screen on the console, allowing the
program to continuously report status, messages, alarms, live sensor
channels, and other basics.
But for primary interaction, my current plan is to scatter four Palm OS
platforms around the Microship fleet -- two hard-wired and sealed into
our consoles and two in our backpacks. The latter appear at the
distal end of 56kbps spread-spectrum radio links with 25-mile
line-of-sight range. While on-board, the control interface is via a
hierarchy of mini-apps (like PQAs) in the hardwired Palm that convert
pen events to strings and display responses/events either graphically
or as text. When I'm off-boat, a local command will transfer this front
end to identical code in the remote, waking up the wireless hardware in
the process. Most of the smarts here can be at the Palm end, so
to Squeak this is a simple text terminal... and the wireless tools also
allow boat-to-boat and backpack-to-backpack communication.
This moves just about all the essential Microship operations into
the
Hub, which begs the question: what is Big Iron useful for besides
off-the-shelf apps such as nautical software, database, web browsing,
documentation, archiving, MP3, number crunching, software development,
email, and so on? Well, it backs up the Hub's databases any time
it's told to, serves as a coding environment and documentation server,
and otherwise provides the services of deep disk space and rich
connectivity when we need them. Best o' both worlds.
The only remaining problem is figuring out where to put
the massive pile of I/O ports. If the Hub ends up being a PC/104
board (like the Ampro), there are dozens of stackable products that can
give us the 120 digital output and 48 input bits we need, though that
approach requires custom drivers. More likely, we'll go with what
Ned has been designing: a very clever PIC 16F877 solution that
lets the Hub access all the control bits with serial strings...
So we have a plan! A few component vendors need to be
established, but the architecture, OS, and development languages have
been chosen. Gee, maybe good documentation IS useful!
<grin>
I have to be careful here, because system issues are much more my
native territory than deciding how thick a piece of stainless rod needs
to be to handle worst-case landing-gear impulse loads without being too
hard on a chunk of quarter-inch vectran-cored line with a 45-degree
reversal. ("Ummm....") I therefore find myself working on
system design and learning Squeak, even though there's a wicked
mechanical to-do list that needs to be cleared by March.
Here's the deal... we're exhibiting the Microship at the ACM1 expo,
with the theme "Beyond Cyberspace." If the ACM97 show 5 years ago
is any indication, this should be GREAT -- more a grown-up science fair
of interesting research projects than a marketroid-driven trade
show. Even the layout of the hall is interesting... curves and
indirect lighting instead of aisle after fluorescent-lit aisle of
booths and suits. The boat will be on display at the San Jose
Convention Center March 10-13; if you want to see her and say hello,
please come! The exposition is free, though the concurrent
professional conference is not.
--> ACM1 Expo
Going to all the trouble to drag the 56-foot mothership down the coast
for a show strongly suggests that we linger a bit to have some fun, of
course, and this is a perfect opportunity to do a serious test
sail. I've learned painfully not to promise TOO much in the way
of detailed plans, but the general idea, assuming we can get Natasha's
pedal drive going in time and take care of the more urgent refinements
to my boat, is this: after the ACM expo, we'll launch in Palo
Alto, wander merrily about the SF Bay for a few days, and end up
somewhere in the Delta. We'll see...
In case you were wondering above how I actually sat still long
enough
to do all that documentation, I should confess that there was one
factor in addition to obvious need and the availability of a new
tool: I was an invalid during the last couple of months of 2000.
It began innocently enough: we flew to Florida to enjoy another
Geek Cruise (after the Perl Whirl in Alaska, we were hooked... in
November we did the Java Jam in the western Caribbean, and this coming
October we're doing Linux Lunacy). We spent a week with APRS
wizard Steve Dimse, immersed ourselves in Key West's always amusing
Fantasy Fest, and otherwise got the adventure off to a delightful start.
--> Geek
Cruises
The Java Jam was, again, about the most stimulating conference venue
imaginable, with a captive cadre of Java-heads widely circumnavigating
Cuba... stopping at ports here and there to shuffle with the cruise
ship population into the hungry maw of shore-excursion vendors and
shops. At Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, Natasha fell in love with
snorkeling, and thereafter endeavored to lure me into the water at
every opportunity. In Cozumel I was suffering from a minor cold,
but bravely flippered about with her for a half-hour or so, ogling the
parrotfish and other astonishing fauna while a docked fisherman did
likewise to us (OK, probably more to Natasha than me, but ya never
know). All in all, it was a pleasant snorkelation of Mexican
waters, but I tired quickly and headed for the beach to sniffle and
relax.
With but a few feet to go to beckoning sand, in water maybe two feet
deep, I realized I was crossing a rocky area instead of the sandy route
I had used to enter. I decided to walk to avoid scratching my
belly in the gentle surge of wave action, and struggled clumsily to my
feet. I took a step, and the flippers' resistance to being
dragged through the water promptly caused me to trip and fall.
Naturally, I extended my hand to catch myself.
The ensuing instant had lifelong implications, and was the most
intensely painful physical injury I've ever experienced (including a
half-dozen or so broken bones, lumbar compression fracture, road rash,
torn ligaments, and various other traumatic side-effects of an
adventurous life). My right index finger exploded in agony,
causing me to scream underwater, and when I pulled it from the depths
it was bloody, purple, and deeply perforated by about 25 sea urchin
spines... some of which included exit wounds.
I galumphed loudly through the remaining shore break (not unaware of
the possibility of more of the evil things lying in wait for my
flippered feet) and ran to the little shop where we had rented the
gear. The proprietor, Carlos, took one look and said "Oooo, looks
bad, man. You need to pees on it." I gripped my wrist in a
vain attempt to tourniquet the agony, while some guys at a taco stand
prepared a bowl of hot water to reduce the immediate pain and help
break down dangerous neurotoxins. Efforts to extract spines on
the beach were useless but for a hefty 1-incher that was protruding
enough to grab, so I hopped a cab to port and a tender to the
ship. Surely the high-tech medical resources on board would make
it all better, I thought, gritting my teeth while getting perverse
pleasure out of the retirees staring at my finger in horror.
The ship's doctor, a pleasant young fellow from Toronto, said, "Uh-oh,
that's amazing, eh? I've never seen anything like that.
Wow..." A bit of riffling through medical texts turned up an
informative chapter on echinoderm envenomation, and armed with this
knowledge he squirted it full of lidocaine and spent a frustrating hour
digging in futility at the fragile, deeply-embedded spines... managing
to extract only one. I finally suggested to his relief that this
might call for a shoreside surgeon, and, having read the literature
over and over in morbid fascination, requested antibiotics to
counteract my multi-site bacterial injection and a splint to prevent
fragmentation and internal damage from calciferous spines scraping
nerves, tendons, and synovial capsules with every hoisted Wang-Wang
(the theme drink of the Geek Cruises, justified now more than ever).
And there things sat for about a week... through the election night
fiasco, parties various, a Key West Pub Crawl, a beach day in Fort
Lauderdale, a miserable ordeal on United that included an all-time low
in airline food (a reeking, greasy, mashed cheeseburger that prompted
the guy behind us to use the Little Bag)... all followed by a
succession of doctor visits calculated to bootstrap our poor-man's
health insurance from a low-tier primary care provider up to a suitable
wizard in the field. After examining soft-tissue x-rays and a CT
scan, researching the literature, and consulting with his hand-surgery
peers, Dr. Woolley decreed that the situation called for
microsurgery... two of the nasty things were embedded in the flexor
tendon sheath and a host of others were in danger of becoming
granulomas in my ever-less-resilient flesh.
I'll spare you the grisly details, largely because I was under
anesthesia during a 2-hour microscope-aided operation (with follow-up
percoset) and don't remember a damn thing, but my most-essential finger
now sports a Bruner zig-zag scar from tip to base, with another at the
A1 pulley in the palm where he inserted a pediatric feeding tube to
flush out the tendon sheath (infection in there is a Very Bad Thing, as
it migrates easily and is hard to treat). While the finger was
disassembled on the bench, he removed a load of spines from the flaps,
irrigated profusely with saline and Keflex, then carefully reassembled
the unit while making sure that tendons moved smoothly when passively
flexed. I am SO glad I was asleep.
The whole contraption remains swollen and stiff, and exercise and
related tortures have failed to restore the full range of motion...
though my hand therapist assures me there's hope if I do my
stretches. Story of my life...
Basically, what I've learned from all this is that one shouldn't get
intimate with sea urchins. Recuperation has been annoyingly
protracted; unable to turn a wrench or even solder, I leveraged
enforced idleness to create the Microshipnet diagram. Now I'm off
to a sushi bar to exact my revenge on a plate of uni!
Moo-ha-haaaaa....
--> Sea Urchin injuries
I wasn't alone in my medical adventure during our tropical break from
routine. As a lark one evening in Fort Lauderdale, just before
the cruise, my sweetly miniskirted pal decided it would be fun to get
one of those temporary henna tattoos -- a sort of twining pattern
around her left thigh that would wear off in a week or two.
Vacation, you know...
The deed was done in a store called New Edition just north of Los Olas,
and it was amusing for all concerned. Tasha was delighted with
her new toy, and the evening morphed into one of dancing and frolicking
in the quintessential beach town of our hazy spring-break fantasies.
We set out on the cruise the next day, however, and the tattoo began
swelling, blistering, and becoming exceedingly painful. Within
three days it looked like someone had cinched barbed wire around her
leg... the tattoo itself was black/red/oozing, the flesh 2 inches on
either side puffy and inflamed. Now, 3 months later, there
remains a light scar in the original pattern.
I did a bit of web research on this, of course, and discovered that
what they called "Black Henna" apparently wasn't pure henna at all, but
included PPD, or Phenylenediamine -- a nasty dye with a long and
forbidding Material Safety Data Sheet. Some people have an
immediate chemical burn reaction, liver damage can result from skin
exposure, and heavy gloves and respirators should be worn if you
actually need to touch the stuff. The guy who did the job
(an independent working in a corner of the store), handled it casually
with bare, black-stained hands...
The lesson here is obvious: don't let strangers apply chemicals
to your skin in unfamiliar towns without first hauling out your Palm
VII and doing a quick web search! Sheesh. I notified the
local consumer affairs division and they've involved the health
department and FDA... apparently this is a common fast-buck freelance
biz in beach towns around the world, and more and more people,
including little kids, are having bad reactions and scarring after they
get home from vacation with what was to have been playful temporary
body art. As the stuff is sold industrially as a dye concentrate
(with proper handling warnings) and the temporary tattoo practitioners
are all random individuals, there's no easy litigation target... so the
abuse continues. Be careful out there.
--> "Black
Henna"
--> PPD MSDS
The hamshack here in the lab is becoming more and more a part of the
Microship system -- it will be one of the key pipes through which data
is passed from the boats to the net (via Starband satellite service,
which this week will replace our slow island dialup -- more on that
after we get it working). The current wire antenna is marginal
and tuner-dependent; we need something serious.
Thanks to Cushcraft, the N4RVE skyhooks have materialized in the form
of two long boxes awaiting installation -- the R-8 and MA5B
antennas. The first is an 8-band vertical (6 through 40 meters),
28 feet tall. The second is a 5-band beam (10 through 20) with
17-foot elements, great directivity, and an amazing front-to-back ratio
on 10/15/20. Together, with switching, these will give the lab's
telemetry gateway station some Very Big Ears. We're currently
spec'ing a tower to support all this (about 50 pounds static, plus wind
loading). The lab is about to get a geeky new look, augmented by
the Starband 2x3' dish and a yagi for the data link to the house.
Hey, local hams... up for an antenna party sometime soon?
--> Cushcraft R8 antenna
--> Cushcraft MA5B
Speaking of big ears, thanks go to AFAB for their Personal Hydrophone,
a very nifty unit aimed at the kayak and small-boat market and
developed by the creative Robb Nichols. Drop the sensor into the
water, plug in your walkman headphones, and you have an audio window on
the world of cetaceans and anything else making noise down there.
We'll probably mount ours on the thruster deployment arm along with a
Fisheye color underwater camera...
--> AFAB
Personal Hydrophones
--> Fisheye
cameras
Our most recent new sponsor is an amazing guy named Brion Toss, whom
I've always admired from afar through his lucid and entertaining book
on rigging, "The Rigger's Locker." We met him last week at the
Seattle Boat Show, hit it off immediately, learned how to splice
braided line, and picked up a copy of his substantial new book, "The
Rigger's Apprentice," as well as his new Splicing Wand that helps
perform topologically impossible feats like making things go inside
themselves. If you want to know ANYTHING about working with rope,
this is the guy...
--> Brion Toss
And here's something nifty: For years now, I've wanted a way to
pipe images to my father in Kentucky... and the whole computer/browser
environment was a bit much to contemplate. I stumbled across the
Ceiva "internet-connected digital picture frame" around Christmas,
however, and knew it was a winner. For $200, plus a holiday
special of $100 for lifetime service (normally $50/year), this gadget
does one thing and does it well: every night, it dials up a
server and downloads the latest images I've placed there. The
frame displays up to twenty 640x480 color pictures at a time in
slide-show format, and there is basically no user interface to mess
with. It just does it, and pictures appear as if by magic... it
even LOOKS like a picture frame. My dad has fallen in love with
the thing, and heads for the den every morning to find the latest
images from the bizarre world of his faraway son. I highly
recommended this for anyone with non-technical parents!
--> Ceiva
The Microship project has had a bit of media coverage in the three
months since our last update....
A writer for Software Development Magazine, Dana Cline, was on the Java
Jam, and has a well-written feature about the cruise in the February
2001 issue. There's also a short piece on the online "DevTalk
Newsletter" at the magazine's site:
--> SD Magazine Story
--> DevTalk
The folks from Home Power Magazine were at the SolWest Energy Expo last
August, and did a piece on the show that included a couple of good
photos of the boat baking in the eastern-Oregon sun -- see the
December/January issue (#80).
--> Home Power
Magazine
If you're a hard-core follower of Microship media coverage details, you
may recall a brief mention about a year ago of an interview on Irish
National Radio. It's now online as a RealAudio file:
--> RTE Interview
Volunteer appreciation this issue continues to feature superstars Ned
Konz, our software guru, and Tim Nolan, master of all things
PWM-ish. We also welcome Chuck Harrison and Randal Schwartz to
our software brainstorming team, bringing the microshipdev discussion
list to 15 members. My daughter's friends Burton Honsinger and
Tim Bissell, visiting from Rochester, spent an afternoon building a jig
for the new stainless-steel crank assemblies about to be welded by Rick
Wesley, who is also fabricating a couple of landing gear replacement
parts to improve line and cable interface with the struts. Thanks
to all!
Finally, my recent work on the tech section of the website got me
curious about the amount of traffic it sees, and the numbers are
interesting. The abstracted totals for the last six months of
2000 show an average of 10,400 hits per day, with a total of 9.4
gigabytes transferred during that period. Our heartfelt gratitude
goes to Zocalo for hosting our site and carrying all that traffic!
--> Zocalo
That's it for this issue... and now that my finger works again, I guess
I'm out of excuses! Back to work....
Cheers,
Steve
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