Trivial Pursuit

The boat is getting in such good shape that while I await news of my rudders, I am occupying my time with trivial pursuits such as repairing my autopilot. The model I have is an Autohelm 3000. The controller is broken, but the motor works. I also discovered that the manual override on the controller works. The manual override is a switch that you turn to make the motor turn (counter-)clockwise.

As you can see in the first picture, I attached a servo to the top of the autopilot and connected it to the override switch. A servo is just a motor that instead of spinning continuously in one direction, can be controlled to move only a certain number of degrees in either direction. In this application, it is acting as my finger on the switch, pushing the switch either right or left.

The second picture is of the micro-controller which contains the basic circuitry and programming to control the servo. The white rectangle at the top of the board is called a breadboard. You plug wires, resistors, LEDS and other electronic components into it to form circuits. On the board is also a microprocessor that you program to control the circuits on the breadboard. The whole board is then connected to my laptop by the white serial cable that you can see coming out of the left of the board.

On my laptop is a program I've written so that I can push a key to send a message to the the micro-controller to tell the servo to turn left or right. It's pretty cool to be sitting at my laptop watching my remaining rudder turn while I type at the keyboard. I have some more programming to do in order to create the logic so that the boat will stay on a certain heading. When I get the time, I'll write logic into the program so that I can plot a course in the morning and the autopilot will follow it throughout the day. I'll have a robot boat! I can just take a nap while the boat drives itself. I hope HAL doesn't decide that I'm superfluous and try to off me.

In other news, Muffy's gone - For what is likely to be at least two months. When I lived in Baltimore, we'd see each other about every two weeks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and two weeks went by in the blink of an eye.

When she rolled out of the parking lot this morning, I really felt like I was saying goodbye for a while. Two months is a long time.

On a brighter note, she's stopping to look at a house to buy in Virginia. I am ambivalent about the house. On the internet, it looks just about perfect: 5+ acres, old farmhouse that doesn't look to be in too bad shape, reasonably priced. But if it really is so great, it's going to be a real pain in the ass to go through the house buying process while I'm trying to have a sailing adventure.

The other good news is I can stop shaving again!