by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California May 17, 1996 “So with a trimaran, you actually have THREE holes in the water to pour money into…” — John Wharton, Stanford University, AMW, & Intel 8051 architect Actually, it hasn’t been QUITE that exciting, but we do have news of incremental developments and…

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SEXBAR wiring

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California May 2, 1996 THE SeXBAR IS ALIVE! Ah, the simultaneous joy and frustration of debugging: the joy of finding that a suspected problem is OK after all and the frustration of having absolutely no new theories about why the damn thing’s still not working. This…

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Microship Serial Crossbar

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California April 24, 1996 Oh Yeah… Wanderlust It’s a strange phenomenon, this technomadic life. The past few days, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting a couple of travelers who independently wandered by and crossed paths here at the lab. Ryan McKenzie is off on a bicycle…

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I do not speak Dutch, so this was an easy interview! All I had to do was sit there, and occasionally demonstrate something… this took place near Orlando during one of my speaking tours, and then aired in the Netherlands in April. Hoe is het Mogelijk – BEHEMOTH Fiets “How is it Possible?” BEHEMOTH on…

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Microship Control System

It is both delightful and scary to have so many knowledgeable people on this mailing list! No technical error in my tales goes unreported… in response to last week’s April Fools issue (#101), I received detailed explanations about GPS encoding from both NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs and the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at…

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Cruising World has always been one of my favorite armchair-sailing publications, and it was an honor to find my way into its pages early in the Microship project. This was during the brief period in which the substrate was Hogfish, a one-off folding trimaran built by John Walton and Mike Michie, predating the establishment of…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California April 1, 1996 (Issue #101 of the Microship Status Reports) Lots of developments since our last update! The recent infusion of investment capital from the venture partners has made a spectacular difference in our productivity here at Nomadic Research Institute, and we’ve just rented the adjacent…

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I was the keynote speaker at this electric vehicle workshop hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers… a most interesting event, including some brainstorming time with Amory Lovins. My talk covered the BEHEMOTH bicycle epoch, then shifted to peak-power trackers and monitoring/control systems (the Microship project was well underway). SAE Electric, Photovoltaic, and Hybrid Vehicles…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California March 26, 1996 Lab HF Station Alive N4RVE, bicycle-immobile, is back on the air! The great pasta monopole arcing into the Santa Clara sky still needs a few more tuned radials to optimize radiation angle per Dave Wright’s suggestion, but hey, it works. Perched precariously…

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by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California March 18, 1996 Non-sequiturs a-plenty I’ve been sitting here with the blank screen syndrome for a few minutes, and finally recognized the problem: Microship progress in the past 2 weeks has been on so many scattered fronts that it’s a bit hard to come up…

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