Back on August 24, I welcomed aboard a delightful visitor named Kristen Clark from IEEE Spectrum, and she spent the afternoon asking good questions… getting me to show her around the boat while the camera rolled. The article just appeared on the IEEE site yesterday, and the video is embedded below… a fun 3-minute snippet of the Datawake project, complete with…

Read More

by Steven K. RobertsNomadic Research Labs For the first few months aboard, every attempt to fabricate a part involved clearing a tiny space on the bench, plugging in a funky desk light, and trying to find tools that I had just seen only minutes before. This was demoralizing, so I finally fixed it. This post is…

Read More

Keeping my ear to the ground… by Steven K. Roberts One of the central themes aboard this geeky ship is expanding the sensorium. I’ve always been fascinated by data collection in all its forms… not just sensors that reveal system health or the state of the environment, but real-time information that shifts my awareness into a much larger…

Read More

News from No Pressure (formerly Nomadness) Saturday, Nov 12 – 3:00 PM Friday Harbor to San Diego transit complete! NOTE: this was live-blogged during their voyage, and is in reverse sequence with the most recent posts at the top. Saturday, Nov 12 – 12:45 PM – Arriving San Diego Saturday, Nov 12 – 10:30 AM Final approach…

Read More

by Steven K. RobertsOctober 2, 2016 I catch myself doing it again: waiting for closure on some project before writing about it, an old magazine-freelancing habit. Something should actually be done before you publish the details, right? Of course, this isn’t a single-threaded project. Subsystems and components are interleaved and interdependent, the objectives evolve with technological…

Read More

Vic Franck Delta 50 in her early years One of the little treasures I found aboard the boat now known as Datawake was a binder of photos from her youth. I think these are from the late 1970s (she was designed by Lynn Senour and built in 1974), and they are quite a contrast from my…

Read More

Witnessing an inter-species encounter photo ©2016 by Steven K. Roberts (All rights reserved – please contact for large version and usage info) Now available as a greeting card! Every now and then, a photographer gets lucky… the right palette of colors, a self-organizing composition, and a sweet vignette all align at the moment of shutter-release. This was one of…

Read More

by Steven K. Roberts 1 – Under Pressure by Rebecca Parks: an Exploration of Meta-Patterns With her “Under Pressure” series, Rebecca Parks expands Outsider Art onto the virgin landscape of the rural deck, exploring the dialectic contrast between Relaxation Spaces and the technologically mediated high-velocity streams of water with which she creates thoughtful, mandala-like representations…

Read More

Take it Outside, Kitty… Building a Boat Cat Litter Boxby Steven K. Roberts, aboard Datawake OK, so I admit it… I love this cat. Isabelle lives aboard with me, and her tubby cuddly awesomeness increases the quality of life in lots of ways. But even a quirky Russian Blue who pushes all the right feline buttons but lives…

Read More

One of my obsessions over the years has been collecting data, probing the radio spectrum, sensing outside my limited visual and hearing range, and deploying probes to expand my awareness of the environment. This leads to recognition of patterns, better understanding of how things work, and the voyeuristic thrill of peeking behind the curtains of technology or human activity. Tracking…

Read More