The concept 3D drawing has been completed!

I have a friend who has a copy of AC3D, a easy to use CAD package. With in an hour or so he had taken my hand drawn chicken scratching and drawn the concept model of what I was after.

A previous entry, discussed building the intial Digital Compass test circuit on a breadboard. Now it was time to design a PCB layout and etch it out. It's only taken 3 weeks to do. A lot of family time over xmas, but I still managed to fit in some time here and there. I had previously came acress a web site talking about using a laser printed image and an hot cloths iron to transfer the PCB layout onto the copper.

What a buzz! I managed to scavange some momentry switches, LED's, a Floppy drive power cable and a serial cable from some old PC's, so I could easily breadboard the Digital Compass circuitry.

I woke up this morning with an epiphany on how to join the superstructure onto the hull.  I had always intended to use PVC piping for the hull, but thought that I would perhaps make up a fibre glass superstructure... or something.

After a quick scout around on Google, and reading a few man pages, I had a go at compiling the Netgear's WG311 Window files so that I could use it in FreeBSD 6.0.

I extracted the WG311v3.INF and WG311v3.sys files, moved them over to the FreeBSD card, then ran: 

     ndisgen WG311v3.INF WG311v3.sys 

After working through a simple wizard, and selecting the defaults, I ended up with a file called:   WG311v3_sys.ko

To get the wireless network card going, I just ran:

    kldload ndis

    kldload WG311v3_sys.ko

I knew FreeBSD 6.0 was going to be released while I was away, however, it turned out it was released the day I left  :-)

Just after I got back I downloaded Disk 1, and did a fresh install on to the 512MB CF card.  I then extracted the config files from the Subversion repository, and uploaded them.  A quick partition ghost, and I am now happily running 6.0

There is a RSS feed now available on the lower right hand side of the web page.

While I am looking forward to the upcoming conference and some holidays, this also means I will not be able to work on the Mark I.  See you in two weeks time.

I am heading off on a conference soon, so I thought it was about time I had a go at Ghosting up the 512MB CF card. Using Barts Network boot disk, I made a ghost of the drive. This all went well, with no errors reported. As a safe guard, I also modified my 'config backup' script so it used scp instead of rsync. After backing up all the config files to my main server, I then uploaded them to the subversion repository for safe keeping.

It's been a power weekend.  I cut out the walls and assembled them together.  It would have helped if the base had been a perfect rectangle.  Oh well, just plane off a few more mills! 

During the week, I played around with ExpressSCH, a electronics design package.  As a test, I laid out my initial PICAXE test circuitry.  It comes up better in the original size.