It giet oan
As they say in Friesland: It is going to happen. We left Harlingen at 19:10 local time!
Sailing around the world on Merrimac, a Stadtship 56.
Bearing given all clear
Ricardo of KM did an excellent job in getting the troublesome thrust bearing into shape. It’s not perfect but good enough for us to go. Here is the bearing in action, if you watch carefully you can see there is a …
Medical supplies
Better not fall ill in Harlingen for a while, we’ve cleaned out the pharmacy!
Departure delayed by a bearing
Last Thursday a final check-up was done by one of the yard mechanics and he found an issue with the thrust bearing (Dutch: stuwdruklager) which is supposed to transfer the thrust produced by the propellor into the hull. …
Almost ready for departure!
Tomorrow the yard will come by for the last check-up after we had some trouble with the overhauled drive train earlier. We’re also heavily loading up on food, I think there must be at least a cubic meter worth of …
L&S Ecopilot reduces hydraulic autopilot current consumption
I just installed an Ecopilot device made by Lecomble et Schmitt from France. Let me tell you what this does and how much of a difference it makes to our power consumption. Our autopilot uses a reversible pump that sends …
SRT proprietary AIS commands
My Navico NAIS-300, like most other commercial AIS class B products that have been available for a while, uses the SRT AIS class B OEM board. I know the same board is used in the Raymarine 500, True Heading AIS-CTRX, …
CANBoat Design part III - Choosing the server hardware
The server that CANBoat runs on was always designed to run 24 by 7. This means that it must be reliable and use little power. Power usage adds up over longer periods. Something that uses 3W will use 6 Ah @ 12 V per day. …
CANBoat Design Part II - why a website, and why TCP and JSON
One of the first things that people ask me when I show them my app on the iPhone or iPad is where they can download it from in the App Store. My answer is simple: you can’t. Nor do you need to. It would be bad …
CANBoat Design part I - A simple data viewer and boat remote control
Today I’d like to tell you a little more about the hardware/software stack that I have developed to control and navigate a small to medium pleasure boat. The basic idea is to re-use the mobile devices that most …
Navico yellow Ethernet cabling
The Navico ‘yellow’ ethernet connector used on new Lowrance devices such as the HDS series has the advantage of being watertight and easy to make a reliable twist-on connection: In case you want to use a …
Basics of Electrical units and quantities
I’m sick and tired of stories in the general boating press by confused writers that mix up electrical numbers and quantities. This is probably because electrical units are a bit different than the units used for …