Pat James.com - Page Updates

Autpilot Installation

Administrator (admin) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 02:14:15 GMT

Below Decks Autopilot

The big project for 2011 is installing a below-decks autopilot. Aeolus came with a Simrad tiller pilot which has delivered mixed results. When it works it works well, but it had a major repair and still is unreliable, usually weaving back and forth across the straight line course, and occasionally going nuts and taking a 90 degree turn. I think the root cause is the compass inside the tiller pilot. I kind of wish they would make one that didn't have a compass and just took its marching orders from the GPS chartplotter. In the grand scheme of things, a tiller pilot is at the "toy" range of autopilots, and who wants a mere toy when we can do better?

Also, since Aeolus has tiller steering, a below-decks autopilot has an additional appeal. When under way with a below-decks autopilot engaged I can tilt the tiller up and loosely bungee it to the backstay, creating a wide open cockpit while still having the tiller easily grab-able in an emergency.

Autopilot Selection

I selected a Raymarine X-30 Corepack with the ST70 control head, paired with an Octopus linear hydraulic drive. I considered a Simrad system, but was talked out of that by Mike Locatell who recommended Raymarine. He said all of the current autopilots perform well, but Raymarine has better service. This comment resonated with my personal experience: when trying to get the Simrad tiller pilot repaired, it literally took about a month to get through to a human who could help me. Their web site is abysmal, and I would typically wait on hold for 15 - 30 minutes on the phone with them only to be disconnected. So far, Raymarine's support is excellent. I asked a few questions through their web site and have always received an expert and informed response that completely resolved my question within 24 hours.

A below decks autopilot is not a cheap upgrade either. Just the basic parts for the above setup tips the scale at about $4k. The toughest item to bite off was the $110 expense for proprietary Raymarine SeaTalkNG cable, uggh. I would guess a professional install is about another thousand on top...work I will gladly do myself!

Installation

This will be my biggest DIY project yet on the boat. The tasks are:

Design and fabricate a mounting platform for the hydraulic drive and rudder reference sensor
Grind existing surfaces. Bolt and epoxy/fiberglass the mounting platform.
Remove the rudder quadrant and get someone to custom weld a pin onto it for the hydraulic drive
Install a new dedicated 30 amp circuit breaker in the DC panel
Run a new circuit of 8 gauge wire. Fuse protect it near the battery.
Install the autopilot's compass, probably in the galley cabinet under the sink.
Remove the B&G depth display from the instrument hood
Fabricate a new instrument hood panel from StarBoard to accommodate the ST70 control head.
Run SeaTalk NG cable from the ST70 to the X-30
Mount the X-30 corepack "brain" in the space under the propane locker
Install the S100 wireless autopilot controller
Connect the X-30 to the NMEA0183 multiplexor so it can receive NMEA sentences from the TackTick wind instruments and the Garmin chartplotter
Install the hydraulic drive and rudder reference sensor

The most challenging bits are creating a solid mounting platform for the hydraulic drive, and installing the ST70 control head. Access to the instrument hood is very challenging, especially so with the hard dodger. I am dreading the process of pulling the cable for the ST70.

Also all of the grinding, fiberglass, wire termination and X-30 mounting will be done in a space within the stern where I can barely fit my body, let alone get a convenient angle on all of the spaces involved in the installation.

Folklife

Administrator (admin) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:28:14 GMT

Videos of our friends preparing for the 2010 Seattle Folklife Festival

video clips removed, email me if you missed them and need them

Taste of India Sucks

Administrator (admin) — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:53:44 GMT

We've gone to Taste of India on Roosevelt in Seattle twice over the last couple of weeks. Once New Year's Eve and once on January 14. Conclusion: they suck.

The restaurant is cramped and crowded. The tables have insufficient room to hold more than 2 - 3 dishes.
They seem to under-staff, which requires their staff to rush about constantly, creating a general atmosphere of stress and making it difficult to get the attention of anyone to address their mistakes.
It is poorly heated. Last night all of us had to keep our jackets on throughout the meal (and I have a high tolerance for cold)
On New Year's Eve we had reservations, but needed to wait a good 20 minutes for the table.
On both visits drinks were ordered right away...but drinks took 10 - 15 minutes to arrive (only after reminding a server. Food came before drinks.
Butter chicken is indistinguishable from Chicken Tikka Massala
Asking for plates and serving food family style seems to confuse the servers. This happened on both visits. I suppose it is related to the problem of insufficient space on the table for just the food. On New Year's Eve, we sat staring at the food for about 5- 10 minutes waiting for plates.
I am accustomed to having Biryani served with an accompanying sauce to spice it up
We requested one dish (butter chicken) to be prepared "mild" for our daughter, and all of the other dishes to be prepared "medium". We went over this twice with the server. All dishes arrived mild and quite bland. Nobody checked how the meal was going until we were 3/4 of the way done, and as noted above it is difficult to get the eye of anyone as the rush to and fro. The manager (owner?) tried to justify things by saying "our standards of spiciness are low for American tastes" but we pointed out that we had ordered one dish mild and found them all to be the same level of spiciness. He offered to send them back to be spiced up, but we declined. We just wanted out of there at that point.

Greg and Katherine say they really like this place, and it is certainly not lacking for business. We won't be back.

Aeolus Photo Gallery

Administrator (admin) — Sat, 08 May 2010 23:06:19 GMT

Cracks

Grounding damage visible from the bilge, had to be ground out
Catan

Rainy day game of Catan with Betty and Laura at Bowen Island
Cathy

Catherine taunts her mother with her pink bunny blanket
Keel

Keel up on blocks. All 10 bolts in good condition
Keel

Another view of the keel
Ouch

That rock was a mean one, requiring about a month at CSR and a rather large insurance claim
Starboard

Starboard on the starboard side of the cockpit. Screwed on from below.
Starboard

Cockpit floor. Two panels remove easily. They are prone to irritating vibration when under power. Note I have a tiller (no wheel)
Starboard
Starboard
Starboard
Rails
Starboard
Starboard

I do have some wood :)
Starboard
Swim step and arch

Swim step matches the Starboard color
Arch

Top of arch. Arch carries dinghy, Garhauer outboard hoist, radar radome, FM antenna, two GPS receivers, and WiFi antenna
Going aloft

Repairing the VHF antenna at Telegraph Harbor
Going aloft

All the way up
Vancouver

The moon over Vancouver as viewed from our slip at the Vancouver Rowing Club...highly recommended moorage location and facilities!
Pirates Cove

Joe James and Joe Palena enjoying happy hour at Pirates Cove
Traveler backing plate
Traveler
Traveler

Main Page

Administrator (admin) — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:09:39 GMT

Welcome to Pat James.com!

Come one come all and marvel at the Talking Poker Timer

This is my personal dumping ground in the cloud. A place to keep track of and share my hobbies, interests, and other stuff I'm working on. It is updated very sporadically, and you will surely find lots of ancient garbage and an overall lack of coherent content organization. I've highlighted key topics in the nav bar on the left, but click through to the index of all pages or if you are feeling lucky, a random page because there are some hidden gems you won't find otherwise.

I've been running a wiki for my personal site for about 4 or 5 years...first on ASPWiki, then OpenWiki, and now ScrewTurn wiki. I like the ease of editing and organic structure...but it sure is a pain to move content from one wiki to another. Lots of the old stuff I just simply haven't migrated from OpenWiki, so you can still see that stuff on the archive site.

Hey, go check out the new business venture Kim and I have been working on at DoulaMatch. We think it is pretty cool. The only site where you can find a doula who serves your geography, and you can search by your due date to see if she is available....feedback is welcome and encouraged. And if you or someone you know has a bun in the oven, check out our educational and fun Facebook app, BirthWatch

One cool feature that this wiki has versus my old one is the support for comments/discussions on each page. I've opened this up so you don't need to register to post a comment. I've had trouble with spambots and vandals mucking up my wiki (can you say "goatse" ?) in the past...hopefully they don't figure this out and start spamming the comments. In the meantime, cut loose with comments and feedback.

Recent Tweets

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Funny Stuff

Administrator (admin) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:15:00 GMT

I find the following items amusing. Perhaps you will too:

Cryiak Does Teddy Bears

I'm Just a Hamster, Out on the Dance Floor

We Hungry Doggies

Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo

Jeff and Erin's Epic Save the Date Action Movie Trailer

(I don't know them, just love the work!)

Aeolus

Administrator (admin) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:30:59 GMT

Aeolus at Reid Harbor

Let's get this new wiki party started with some fresh content!

In April 2008 I fulfilled a long held dream of becoming a boat owner, purchasing a 1985 Wauquiez Pretorian, a 35 foot sloop rigged fiberglass sailboat.

Under my father's guidance I've sailed off and on my whole life. Some of my fondest childhood memories are from our annual cruises in the San Juan Islands on the family Thunderbird #542, Thatuna. Dad sold Thatuna and bought a J/30, Diva, about five years ago, which we raced and cruised until he sold it in the summer of 2007. Being boatless simply wouldn't do, so I took matters into my own hands and started regularly checking the brokerage listings for a suitable family boat.

My Dad's priority had always been racing. He is currently the Commodore of Seattle's Corinthian Yacht Club which has the distinction of starting more races each year than any other club in the country (primarily due to their operating on both Lake Washington and Puget Sound). Diva was Corinthian's "Boat of the Year" for 2007, and was once ranked 8th in the top 25 racing boats in the Northwest by 48 North Magazine.

My priority is more skewed to cruising. We had a couple of selection criteria: Kim wanted a boat with an enclosed head where you can shut the doors, something Diva and Thatuna both lacked. I wanted to be able to stand up in the cabin so I wouldn't get a stiff neck and back while cooking and doing dishes, and I wanted a well-found boat that could handle more than I would be dished out in the Northwest for coastal cruising and have adequate performance characteristics.

The Pretorian fits all of these criteria, and is regarded as a very well built boat. It is a "go anywhere" boat...several have circumnavigated, and one local boat participated in the Vic-Maui race this year, coming in third.

Aeolus

The Name

The boat is named Aeolus, which is the greek god of the four winds. I felt this was a fine name, much better than the boat's original name of Phyllis Joann, and not wishing to incur the bad luck that befalls anyone who changes the name of a boat without following the correct ceremony, I kept the name as-is. I did change the hailing port from Bellingham to Seattle...a simple task of dropping by Prism Graphics on Lake Union.

The Boat

It's a Race!

When I bought her, Aeolus was already the most-upgraded Pretorian out there. Some of the many upgrades and refittings by prior owners include:

Custom aluminum radar arch/dinghy davit
Swim step
Dodger with solid windshield
Re-powered in 2006 with a Volvo D1-30
All thru-hulls replaced
Deck re-painted
Midship mooring cleats
Converted from wheel to tiller
All exterior teak replaced with StarBoard
All galley tile replaced with Corian counters. New stainless double sink. New stove.

The price I paid reflected these many upgrades and the generally excellent condition in which I found her. The brokerage actually had three Pretorians for sale at the same time, so I was able to make comparisons and do the math on what the upgrades were worth. I am guessing that they biggest upgrades' value are about $20k for the repower, $10k for the arch/swim step, and $5k for the dodger/windshield. These alone more than accounted for the price difference, so I decided to go for it!

Projects I completed in 2008 include:

New 15 gallon holding tank and all new sanitation hose
Replaced seized deck fitting for port freshwater tank
Corrected loose and rusted engine mount bolts
Installed three blade Max Prop feathering propellor (nice work done in the water by Emerald City Diving)
Replaced broken B&G wind instruments with TackTick wireless instruments
Installed Garmin 3205 chartplotter and depth sounder
Replaced navigation PC and connected to Garmin Chartplotter via NMEA 0183
Connected Simrad TP-30 autopilot to Garmin Chartplotter via NMEA 0183
Installed Xantrex XBM battery monitor
Installed Xintex-Fireboy fresh water and holding tank sensors and monitors

2009 projects completed and underway:

Haulout for bottom paint and replacement of B&G thru-hull depth sounder and paddle wheel with TackTick triducer
Dropped the rudder, honed out Delrin bushings that were binding to restore free (and silent!) tiller movement
Replace the two group 27 house batteries (185 amp hr total) with six Dyno 6 volt batteries (735 amp hrs).
Rewire battery compartment with AWG 2 cabling, install fuses where missing, install echo-charger for charging the starter battery
Replace faulty holding tank level sensor (yuck!)
Get Simrad TP-30 autopilot serviced, or replace with under-deck autopilot (ouch!)

Galley

Cabin

Sailing in 2008

This summer we worked in as many day sails as I could muster crew for. We also conducted the following overnight cruises:

Wauquiez Rendezvous in Port Townsend with Greg Janssen and Pat Okell
Family shakedown cruise to Bremerton
Family cruise of the San Juan Islands
Cousins cruise of the San Juan Islands with Elizabeth, brother in-law Troy Palena, and nieces Olivia and Sophia Palena

Relaxing at the dock

Summer 2009 Cruise

With the exception of a little run in with a rock in Howe Sound that resulted in a 6 week visit to the CSR boatyard, dropping the keel, removing the mast, and a big insurance claim, the summer cruise was a big success.

I was out for a month cruise in three sections:

10 days with Joe James, Joe Palena, and Roland Eisner (old farts crew) from Seattle to Vancouver, including a rip-roaring reach across the Straits of Georgia in 25 - 30 knots.
10 days with Kim and the girls, Vancouver to Howe Sound. Lots of time in Vancouver...Granville Island, Stanley Park, lots of fun
10 days with Greg & Katherine from Vancouver to Seattle. Swimming, hiking, and a run-in with a fog-enshrouded nuclear sub in the Straits of Juan de Fuca

Summer 2010 Cruise

Planning another month long cruise.

Looking for crew to join me to take the boat from Seattle to Vancouver, Aug 1 - 10 (approximately). Get in touch if you want to go! See the Summer 2009 crew recruiting page for approximate details on what it is all about. Ignore the dates on that page, the rest of the info is pretty accurate.

Kim and the girls will embark in Vancouver on or around Aug 10.

"So, what are you doing with yourself"

Administrator (admin) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:10:53 GMT

The Page has been deleted by admin.

Christmas 2008 Wish List

Administrator (admin) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:09:39 GMT

The Page has been deleted by admin.

Arduino Talking Poker Timer

Administrator (admin) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:58:13 GMT

Project Status

The Finished Product

The timer is currently undergoing final software adjustments and isscheduled for its debut on Monday April 26. Here it is in its final form. The digital clock is clearly labeled with the Most Significant Bit and Least Significant Bit, and the buttons for all features as well as the unlabeled "mystery button".

The thing in the bottom left corner is the small speaker, which does surprisingly well (much better in the case than just flopping around on a wire while prototyping). Next to the speaker is the power on/off toggle.

Here is the code

Features

Battery operated using rechargeable AA batteries
Set by default for 20 minute interval timing
Buttons to add or remove one minute from the clock
Pause/Resume timer button
Spoken announcements at 5 minute intervals, one minute, and final ten second countdown
Button to announce current number of minutes remaining
Button to speak a random phrase for general amusement, some of which pertain to poker
Visual display of minutes remaining in binary format using 5 LEDs
Blink LEDs when paused
At 50 seconds remaining, all LEDs light, and one by one turn off each 10 seconds

Problem Statement

A Typical Monday Night Game

My buddy Mike hosts a weekly no limit Texas Hold 'Em tournament with 20 minute rounds. Blinds go up every 20 minutes, and there is a high hand jackpot awarded after the 4th round, when re-buys stop. So keeping track of the time is pretty critical, and knowing when you are in the last minute or so especially so.

To date we usually use someones iPhone timer. This can be problematic when that person busts out and wants to slink away early (thereby missing out on the post-game festivities at Ed's Kort Haus). And you can't tell what time it is without asking the timekeeper. I've used a timer on my Nexus One as well, which some players enjoyed as it featured speech synthesized announcements of each 5 minute interval.

I've been looking for a fun Arduino project. I was going to build a lager temperature controller for my home brewery, but the loan of Dave's Johnson temp controller has removed the urgency from that project. For my birthday, Kim got me a copy of Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware, which features a sample project with speech synthesis based on the SpeakJet chip. I decided it was GO TIME for my first Arduino project, a talking poker timer.

Credit and Inspiration

Giving credit where it is due:

Overall project inspired by the book Practical Arduino
Arduino Duemilanove and Voice Box Shield purchased from Sparkfun
Daisy Bell allophones from the Speakjet Yahoo! Group
And of course those wacky Italians who gave is the Arduino project itself

Hardware Implementation

Prototyping and Debugging

As noted above this project was inspired by the speech synthesis project in the book Practical Arduino. I used the SpeakJet speech synthesis chip recommended in that sample project. The SpeakJet chip uses "allophones" which are elementary word sounds. For example, the word POKER can be said by stringing together the SpeakJet allophones PO,OW,KE, and AXRR. It also has some canned sound effects such as gunshots, R2D2-like squeaks, alarms, etc, and can vary the pitch and speed...so you can make it sing.

I found that SparkFun sells a pre-built Arduino shield (called the Voice Box Shield) with the SpeakJet, including a low powered audio amplifier circuit and speaker connections. It was only $15 more than the bare SpeakJet chip, so I figured it was worth it to avoid building up the amplifier myself and having it mount easily on the Arduino. Just a bare prototyping shield is at least $10. So $5 to get the amplifier and save myself some soldering was a good ROI.

I did find the Voice Box Shield has what sees to me to be a bit of an oversight, the lack of a connection to the SpeakJet's Buffer Half Full pin. Monitoring the state of the SpeakJet buffer is critical if you are throwing much at it. The buffer is 64 bytes, and if it is full and you keep throwing allophones at it, it throws data away. No biggie, I just wired up my own connection.

So to hook things up I needed to:

Wire up the SpeakJet Buffer Half Full Pin (pin 15) to an Arduino pin, with a resistor inline
Wire up 5 LEDs for the binary clock display, again with resistors
Wire up 5 momentary push buttons (start/pause/resume, add a minute, subtract a minute, announce time remaining, utter a random phrase)
Put a power toggle switch between the batteries and the Arduino

Pretty basic stuff as far as Arduino goes. This is only my fourth real custom electronics project though, and my soldering skills are still developing, so it seemed about right for my skill level.

What's up with the binary clock you may wonder. Sure I could have put a numeric LED or LCD display into this project, but that seems too easy and not quite high enough on the geek street cred scale. And most of our poker players are versed in binary. We do have a union boss and high school English teacher in the group...they can press the button to announce the time.

Software Implementation

Code speaks for itself right? Here is the code

I got the allophone codes for Daisy Bell from the SpeakJet Yahoo! Group, which is a great resource for tinkering with this chip. Not a lot of Arduino traffic there though.

Hacking this up in C was a trip down memory lane giving me deja vu of 1990 and coding for OS/2. I had forgotten all about having to deal with pointers, null terminating strings, and the nuances of accessing the size of a given byte array when given an array of pointers to those arrays of byte arrays. That last one sent me running to Stack Overflow for answers to this question.

I'm sure there is some clever way to do the binary clock LED updates in just 3 lines of code, but I was proud to employ the bitwise '&' operator one digit at a time.

I was concerned about keeping the time accurate even with events like the announcements taking varying amounts of time out of the loop. I started off using the Time and Alarm libraries, but bailed on them because they were losing time whenever the SpeakJet spoke. I switched to manually tracking milliseconds elapsed and remaining using millis().

One thing I vacillated on was whether to display the minutes remaining last announced, or the "true" minutes remaining. So for example, if there are 14 minutes 15 seconds on the timer currently, should the binary clock show 14 or 15? I decided to set the LEDs to show the minimum number of minutes remaining, which is consistent with what you would see on a timer that shows minutes and seconds, but with the seconds not displayed. Nobody really cares too much about the time until we are in the final minute, which is announced and then followed by LED indication of the final five 10 second intervals passing, and a final 10 second spoken countdown. And if all that is still too confusion for mere mortals, I made the time announcement button say "between x and y minutes remaining" to clearly communicate where we are in the countdown.

Lessons Learned

I learned a ton, some of it being stuff I really wish I learned earlier in the execution of the project.

I wish I learned earlier about the internal pull-up resistors on the Arduino pins and how they can be used with input switches to avoid the need to wire up an external resistor. The Arduino tutorials should be updated to expose this simple solution.

I wish I purchased a PanaVise earlier. I have a "Helping Hands" thingy with a magnifying glass and adjustable clips to hold parts, but it pales in comparison to the PanaVise for securely holding parts for soldering. Also since I love my magnifying visor, the magnifying glass on the Helping Hands was superfluous to my needs.

Stupid item: plumber's solder is no substitute for electrical solder. I had a devil of a time melting plumbing solder even with my soldering iron cranked up to 700 degrees.

Next Steps

I am still working on implementing a Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm to randomize the sequence of playback for the random phrases. Until then they will always play in the same order.

I want to try implementing something to read the battery charge state and announce it so we know when to change the batteries.

I'm sure I will also be tweaking the speech codes to make them more intelligible, and adding many more "random" phrases. My intention is to fill up the remaining memory on the Arduino with phrases. I've used about 8k of the 30k available so far, so there is plenty of room for more.

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Poker Timer Code

Administrator (admin) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:53:10 GMT

The Page has been deleted by admin.