I did a talk for the student section of ASME a couple of evenings ago, and it went well -- lots of interest from students in working on the system. Between that, today's all-day demo on the Sun God lawn, and the response from a flyer I've been distributing around campus, I now have a string of meetings set up with potential participants. Coming soon: the unfamiliar problem of having to manage a largely inexperienced but very enthusiastic workgroup...

Good progress on the user-interface front: InterLink, maker of force-sensing resistors, has an industrial-grade, submersible pointing device on the market! I haven't felt it yet, but they're sending one -- this may eliminate the need to design our own with the XYZ array that Ron Fellman took to experiment with a couple of weeks ago. I told the InterLink guy about that and he felt that their solution is easier (though I'm not sold on the concept of mapping force to velocity on what is essentially a zero-displacement joystick -- actual movement, with a Z-force-derived velocity multiplier, sounds more intuitive).

For the past couple of days, I've been trying to get a handle on all the developing sponsor and help relationships. I hate to have to say this, but paper is still more effective than computers for some things. In order to handle the full range of project-management issues including scheduling, people, sketches, musings, TO-DO list, and much more, a big fat binder turns out to be easier and more intuitive than all the database tools at my disposal. The latter involve the imposition of structure, and hide information in rather unbrowsable places in machines that have short battery lives and aren't always with me. The former is simple, non-volatile, endlessly expandable, and visual... what PDAs should become after they survive their infancy. <sigh>

Short on technical updates at the moment... I've been overloaded with the human help quest and a couple of writing projects. We're getting close to beginning hands-on work at last! Enjoy the weekend.......

LITERATURE RECEIVED

Practical Sailor, Oct 15 issue -- the Consumer Reports of sailing. This one covers boom vangs, belt-pack PFDs, and hand-held VHF radios.

Midnight Engineering magazine, Sept-Oct issue. A worthwhile resource focused on engineering embedded control systems -- this one has a good article on the Microchip PIC processor which is a strong contender for Microship distributed control.

Dimensional drawings on Qualcomm's new satellite terminal.

West System epoxy resin catalog and tech manual.

-END-