Introduction to the Microshipnet Documents...
When you click past this page to the Microshipnet drawing, you're entering a complex network of documents that reflects the architecture of the Microship itself. A few quick introductory comments are in order...

Before I give you the "executive summary" of the design itself, please note a few protocols that apply throughout this part of the site:

  • When you click the face at the bottom of this page, you'll load the huge Microshipnet drawing, which requires both vertical and horizontal scrolling to explore. The whole thing is an image map, with every object (eventually!) clickable to open detailed pages about subsystems. Building all these documents is a large project, so please be patient... I'm adding a few every day.
  • The pages that open in response to clicks on the image map are descriptions of the various components that comprise the network, and are extensively crosslinked to simplify exploration of the Microship design without constantly returning you to the big drawing (although it should be cached in your browser and quick to load).
  • There are also dozens of links to vendor resources and other reference documents outside this site... these open in a new browser window to simplify your return to Microship documentation. Please note that we do quite a bit of "deep linking" to product-specific information within other sites -- this is more prone to broken links than pointing at front pages, and some people don't like it... but it's much more convenient when you don't want to spend time digging your way down through someone's whole catalog. Please let me know if you find any bad links (or you own a linked site and you prefer that I point only to the front door).
  • In some cases, it's appropriate to provide a link to a downloadable PDF data sheet or other material. To prevent casual clickage from accidentally inhaling files you don't want, these are distinguished by a PDF icon and are set apart from inline text. Naturally, you need the Acrobat Reader to open these documents.
  • Finally, I'll strive to keep this current as the Microship design evolves and gets more and more cast in silicon. My ulterior motive for spending weeks on this part of the site is forcing myself to consider the network architecture in detail, without vague little boxes labeled ATAMO (And Then A Miracle Occurs). This is live documentation, and every object on the drawing corresponds to a real component wired into the system.

Tech note on the document itself

When you click past this page and load the Microshipnet drawing, you're seeing the output of a unique piece of software called ConceptDraw, from CS Odessa. This has all the features of a decent drawing program, but also offers a few CAD-like capabilities including libraries, table-driven behavior, and the essential ability to make connections that persist and rubber-band as objects are dragged around. In addition, anything in a drawing is clickable to open local files or URLs, and the program can even export an HTML image map with every object linked to a file. That's exactly what we've done here, so as you scroll around the drawing, click on anything that interests you to learn more about it. Ain't technology wonderful? In the olden days <creak>, we had to do this by HAND.

(Having said all that, I'll also tell you that I uploaded the big drawing on Christmas eve, and have just begun writing the support documents... it will probably take a few weeks to finish the job. In the meantime, please enjoy mousing around the drawing in search of live links <grin>.)

Microshipnet Overview

The Microship system design can be characterized as the integration of a wide range of mostly off-the-shelf products into a hopefully harmonious whole. Since the individual components were never intended by their designers to interoperate, the core of this architecture is a set of tools that allow lots of random things to be interconnected on the fly under software control.

Unfortunately, very few products outside the computer world have convenient ethernet, firewire, or USB ports. Radio gear, sensors, cellphones, music synthesizers, navigation devices, tiny video cameras... all can be conceptually reduced to well-defined functional modules that possess some set of interconnections with the outside world: power, serial, audio, video, and maybe a few random bits. This leads directly to the core philosophy of the Microship design... every object in the system is tied to a trio of crossbar networks and simple power switching hardware, all wrapped in a layer of code that makes it feel homogenous. Atop this code layer are the system-level applications (telemetry, navigation, security, communications, and so on... all managed throug a single GUI).

The implications are significant. When diverse widgets can be tied together on the fly under control of front-end code in an off-the-shelf linux box, then operational flexibility and upgradability are unlimited. We don't have to wait for someone to build a USB compass sensor... we just take the NMEA output of a standard marine unit and plug it in to a dense panel of DB-9 connectors. If some client wants to know the ship's heading, a controller issues a command to conjure a virtual serial cable between the compass and the receiver. Same with audio and video channels... need to transmit a status report in synthesized speech via cellular phone? A quick command to the audio crossbar does the trick. And various video cameras and wireless links between boats can be shuttled around as needed for security monitoring, transmitting frame grabs to the website, or keeping Natasha provided with source material for her video production projects.

The point of all this is flexibility without having to design everything from scratch, as I'd like to actually get on the water, not spend the rest of my life trying in vain to keep up with technological advances. The Microshipnet is thus a huge interconnection toolset with a solid development environment on the front end.

OK, ready to explore the system? Click the face to continue....