Big issue this time -- much is happening! This report contains important information for all Microship project participants...

Contents:

Party Report
Upcoming Speaking Gig:
Microship Internal Frame: A Hot New Project Ready About!
Weather Satellite Graphics
Help! (but... How?)
Literature Received

Party Report
First, I want to thank the 25-30 of you who showed up here Saturday at noon and helped make our first general meeting a success. A lot of new friendships were formed, and both Robb Walker (Nelson/Marek) and Dave Wright (a visiting consultant friend) were there to help add industry perspective. We spent a couple of hours in mostly-loose general conversation, though I said a few words and introduced our project managers. For your records, they are:
Electrical Engineering: Dan Perry <dperry@UCSD.EDU> Mechanical Engineering: TJ Tyler <tj@cassfos01.UCSD.EDU> Computer Science: Jim Effros <jeffros@icogsci1.ucsd.edu>
These relationships are of course still quite new and may change or evolve as we get to know each other
Big issue this time -- much is happening! This report contains important information for all Microship project participants...

Contents:

Party Report
Upcoming Speaking Gig:
Microship Internal Frame: A Hot New Project Ready About!
Weather Satellite Graphics
Help! (but... How?)
Literature Received

Party Report

First, I want to thank the 25-30 of you who showed up here Saturday at noon and helped make our first general meeting a success. A lot of new friendships were formed, and both Robb Walker (Nelson/Marek) and Dave Wright (a visiting consultant friend) were there to help add industry perspective. We spent a couple of hours in mostly-loose general conversation, though I said a few words and introduced our project managers. For your records, they are:

Electrical Engineering: Dan Perry <dperry@UCSD.EDU> Mechanical Engineering: TJ Tyler <tj@cassfos01.UCSD.EDU> Computer Science: Jim Effros <jeffros@icogsci1.ucsd.edu>
These relationships are of course still quite new and may change or evolve as we get to know each other, and there's nothing absolute about there being only three of them, but it's a start. If you are a student involved in the project, please work with them as much as possible -- keeping them advised of status, interests, timing, availability, problems, team formation, and so on. It's rapidly becoming clear that I can't keep all the information under control myself! That's why I need the managers... they are information concentrators and coordinators more than intermediate bosses in a hierarchy.
Anyway, the party was a great ice-breaker -- Trang Luong made a junk-food run that added a bit of festivity to what might have otherwise felt too much like a "meeting." A group took the Linear Recumbent out for some trial runs, and I heard a number of earnest discussions about Microship matters various. Most important, I received many expressions of interest about a wide range of subsystems, leading me to believe that we'll start seeing some results in the very near future!

Upcoming Speaking Gig:

If you haven't seen the BEHEMOTH dog and pony show, you're invited to my talk (hosted by IEEE) in room 5101 of the engineering building this Wednesday evening at 6:30. It will be the usual bike show 'n tell, spiced with whatever anecdotes and philosophical commentary occurs to me at the time, capped with a general description of the Microship project.

Microship Internal Frame: A Hot New Project

One particularly noteworthy discussion that took place Saturday has altered the course of our overall ship design. The problem centered around the significant point-loading stresses that we would be imposing on composite structures -- specifically the masts, crossbeams, trailer hitch, and wheels. Dave Wright and I had discussed torsion-arm suspension and suitable web structure, but there's a problem with doing this all in what is essentially a monocoque hull: achieving theoretically possible performance characteristics in composite materials. The spec sheets tell what the material will do... ASSUMING an expert layup job. Coupled with the well-known dangers of point-loading such material, the four major stress areas have been of great concern.

Discussion with Robb yielded the interesting discovery that in the 80's, many racing boats were made with

In short, we're now planning on making a big trailer (possibly with TIG-welded titanium -- "are you going to recycle a Russian sub?" someone asked), then wrap a boat around it.
NOW is the time for us to start on this critical-path project! I received the following letter from Robb today:

>1. Trailer preliminary design: We need to define the basis parameters of the trailer mechanism ASAP, and then iterate on it as we progress with the design as a whole. At this point design/engineering efforts should concentrate on the connections (sockets?) which will hold the detachable wheels to the internal frame. The frame itself will be designed after the hull geometry is defined further. Of course, the trailer specs will depend on final weights, but for preliminary design purposes we can start with the following estimates: >Total Weight: 3000 lbs >LCG: 17.0 feet aft of bow >The designer will located the wheels (longitudinally) in order to achieve the correct hitch weight.
>2. Suspension concept: We need a smart mechanical design to define a conceptual design for the suspension system ASAP.
>3. Crossbeam (aka) concept: same as above.
>4. Kayak/crossbeam attachments: This mechanism is very important and must carry high load yet still be easily detachable without excess weight or complexity, either on the beams themselves or (more importantly) on the kayak. I do not yet have a concept in mind and this will be a good project for a smart mechanical engineer.

>These are critical items which will drive many other aspects of the design (naval architecturally) and must be defined before we can progress on other fronts. I plan to work with TJ and his design team to refine concepts and integrate them into the overall design, however they will require intensive detailed engineering and analysis efforts and will be major projects in themselves. We will need the best people we can find for these projects, so I recommend that we try to identify the appropriate individuals as soon as possible.

Does this push your buttons? If you're a hot ME major and you want to get going NOW on a critical-path item that will help define the entire boat, please immediately contact TJ and me and we'll meet with Robb to get started. This will involve materials selection, structural engineering, finite-element analysis, and lots of CAD -- and will carry over directly into jigging, fabrication, welding, and working closely with the yacht designers.

Ready About!

Robb loaned me a book by an iconoclast of the sailing world, Garry Hoyt. Without going into too much detail, the essence of the book is that sailing has been hobbled for decades by stubborn adherence to antiquated methods, restrictive sailing rules affecting all levels of yacht design, and a sort of clique mentality that keeps it an exclusive and forbidding, mostly-male subculture. (Some of this sounds very familiar -- the multihull is to sailing as the recumbent is to cycling.)

Hoyt's book is a refreshing look at alternative ways of thinking about moving a craft over the water using wind power. If you are interested in the boat-design aspects of this project, you should drop by the lab sometime before I return this book to Robb and spend an hour browsing it.
(Incidentally, this reminds me: I attach notices of literature received to these postings for your benefit... please don't hesitate to take advantage of the substantial body of knowledge in the various books, magazines, and brochures cited here. As long as I'm around, you're always welcome to grab a piece of literature and relax in the lab to enjoy a learning curve.)

Weather Satellite Graphics

In the new toy department, I networked the PowerBook 170 and the Mac IIfx last night and began piping current satellite weather images off the Net to the JPEGview program (thanks to John Studarus for this, and for TurboGopher!). It's really quite astonishing, and is a capability we should make every attempt to duplicate on the Microship: there's nothing like an almost-live detailed photo of the earth to help make sense out of weather patterns. Maybe some enterprising graphics software designer on our team (hint, hint) can find a way to grab this data (typically 200K per image) and present it in a live context that overlays the boat's present course data, with optional chart graphics as well including live links to the databases. Talk about a hot potential product for the marine marketplace.....

Help! (but... How?)

Something is quickly becoming apparent here: a lot of student volunteers are ready to start thinking seriously about projects... and are asking me what to do next. I'm having a meeting with the triumvirate this Thursday evening in which we'll try to start matching people with systems, but it's not easy. One thing I am doing to help with this is subdivide some of the microcontrollers further to provide more entry-level controls/data-collection projects, but that still doesn't address the need of those who want to get started on something right NOW. I therefore offer the following list of tasks that are ready to go. EVERYTHING here is an important step along the way to some subsystem, so even if you're not already focused on a major project, grabbing one of these and taking care of it will help move us along while giving you experience and exposure. Some may be unglamorous or relatively trivial; some require various kinds of experience... but

ALL are necessary and well-defined.

1. Pick up or order coaxial cable from West Marine.
2. Research relevant state and federal laws to determine whether the 8.5-foot width limit for trailers is legal in all states, or if we should limit this to 8 feet. This is critical... I need the info ASAP since it affects frame design.
3. Spend 2-3 hours with me weighing things, looking products up in catalogs, or calling vendors to help complete the "gravity impact statement" that is a necessary input to Robb's preliminary buoyancy calculations.
4. Do the P-V calculations (James?) to determine pump and filter requirements for the equipment bays, and begin spec'ing components, check valves, sensors, and so on.
5. Interface the modem-disconnect ports of a couple of TNCs to Motorola RNET radio modems, execute KA9Q TCP/IP code somewhere, put up an antenna (an engineering building without antennas on the roof is EMBARRASSING), and present a wireless Internet reachable link that can be connected to our MCS system when it goes online. Given the scarcity and cost of this hardware, I'd like to either have someone with hardware experience do this, or participate somewhat myself.
6. Research multidrop protocols suitable for very small processors. Initial hints suggest that the I-squared-C in the PIC can only handle about 400 pF of bus capacitance. I'd like to find some appnotes on that protocol as used in industrial environments -- do people hang on bus drivers, or am I missing something here?
7. Find a copy of the full NMEA-0183 specification document.
8. Build and test lightweight solar still from plans in the Neumeyer book.
9. Research all legal lighting requirements for water and road modes.
10. Interface a Quantum 105MB hard disk drive to the Mac IIfx (need cable from SCSI IDC header to Mac, as well as power and a basic enclosure). This is the system that hosts AutoCAD, GeoQuery, and the JPEG viewer, and there's about 800K free...

Literature Received

Microchip Technology databooks, including a preliminary on their new PIC16C64 CPU. If you're going to be working on any of the microcontrollers, you need to start looking at this stuff (I have an older databook I can loan for a couple of days at a time, or you can hang here and read the new ones.)
_The Hidden Coast_ by Joel Rogers -- beautiful wish-book about West Coast kayaking, with many photos covering Alaska to Baja.