So, I've fixed every single physical problem on the boat. All that remains is to calibrate the autopilot and debug whatever is ailing it: at the moment, its response is too feeble to steer the boat, and it occasionally throws up its hands and says NO DATA. I suspect the latter is due to a misconnected ground wire. And the former can be fixed with some more calibration. The autopilot has some machine learning technology inside, and I need to raise it from embryo like a baby so it learns the right lessons. To date, no one has given it the attention is deserves, so it has turned into a wild child.
In other news, my laptop battery is dead, so there'll be fewer blog updates than normal (though position updates through the SPOT beacon remain unaffected) until I get to Barcelona.
In other news, my laptop battery is dead, so there'll be fewer blog updates than normal (though position updates through the SPOT beacon remain unaffected) until I get to Barcelona.
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| There is even a base full of firefighting planes nestled between hills on this island |
3 comments:
On a boat, do you just ground things to the surrounding electrolyte bath? Or is it mostly lower-voltage with a separate ground that ideally doesn't get wet?
The latter. There are no big metal parts running the length of the boat that can act as a common ground, so every device has a separate ground routed to it from the batteries.
Also, metal that touches seawater corrodes super fast. To control this, all boats except minitransats have a little sacrificial zinc plate that corrodes preferentially over other metal parts and slowly disappears over time, sparing the other metal parts. Not sure why minitransats don't have a zinc plate -- the keel is one massive piece of iron that could corrode.
Interesting. The sacrificial zinc plate is intriguing - how does the water know...?
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