Well, it's been a while, but the SWASC wheels (propeller?) are still turning.

This afternoon I have been discovering how to use a Freeware GIS mapping program called MapWindows. At the moment, it pretty well does all that I need a GIS program to do.

I was running Drupal 4.6.x.  Upgrading took a while to work through the process, but it wasn't too bad.  Managed to loose all the pictures after I had upgraded, because I was playing around in a new module and I wondered 'what would happen if I...'.   Opps, you loose the link to the photo's.  Ok, lets restore from backup and try again 

Ok, this has had me stumped for some time, however, writing up the last blog, I had a flash back to the tourist Amity Brig down at Albany. The steering ropes and windlass are all out in the open, so the kids and dad's love to peer over the edge and see how moving the wheel makes the rudder turn.

This is my go at it. Well, at least it's a start.

I was concerned about the how well the Mark-I might turn with the motor mounted midship of the boat, so I decided to build a small 30cm model using 25mm PVC tubing. Out came the scrap pieces of MDF and hot glue gun. I had a CD-ROM drive lying around, so I dismantled it, and extracted the head positioning motor. Part of the case was cut up to became a dodgy looking propeller. The shaft was constructed from two 25mm nails, soldered together.

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