New Bearings, Better Broadsides
The last few days aboard Stormy Sailors Maker Lab have been another mixture of useful progress, stubborn electronics, Linux tinkering, and ideas that started with the dangerous phrase, “I wonder if we could…”
IR Broadside Gets a Refit
The Tactical Pirate infrared system has received a substantial engineering pass.
IR Broadside v2 was tested against the bundled infrared database, which now contains 219 remote files. The audit found 381 unusually long RAW space timings but no oversized RAW mark timings, which helped identify exactly where the replay code needed improvement.
The revised system preserves those long timing gaps correctly, retains stored duty-cycle information, and only rejects a sequence when a mark genuinely cannot be represented.
The automated fixture tests pass and the firmware builds cleanly.
Physical hardware acceptance is still pending while an intermittent USB flashing problem is investigated. A successful compile is good. A verified device in the Captain’s hand is better.
The rotary encoder lighting has also been civilized. The RGB light now wakes during use and shuts itself down after roughly thirty seconds of inactivity instead of glowing away indefinitely.
Ships Hail
A new experiment called Ships Hail has also started taking shape.
The idea is simple: allow a message to be queued on the Stormy Sailors server and then picked up by an iPhone Shortcut for transmission as a normal text message.
The server-side queue, retrieval and acknowledgement system is working. The iPhone side still needs additional refinement, especially around phone-number handling, but the basic architecture has proven itself.
It is another good example of how projects around here tend to begin:
“Could we make this work?”
Followed shortly afterward by several terminal windows and questionable life choices.
Pop!_OS Returns to Duty
The HP Victus development machine has returned to Linux and is now running Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.
NVIDIA graphics are operating properly and the development environment has been rebuilt with PlatformIO, VS Code, Python, Git and the usual shipyard tools. Opera required some persuasion before video playback behaved properly, but that battle has also been won.
The Linux workstation is once again ready for Tactical Pirate work and the rest of the Maker Lab fleet.
Learning to Navigate Properly
There has also been a change of course beyond electronics.
With future cruising on the British Columbia coast increasingly in mind, work has begun on a free Canadian coastal-navigation training setup using OpenCPN and Canadian Hydrographic Service material.
The goal is not merely to learn which button makes the little boat icon move.
The plan is to learn chart reading, latitude and longitude, bearings, distance, position fixes, tides and currents, passage planning and electronic navigation properly, eventually using realistic Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands scenarios.
GPS is useful.
Knowing what the GPS is telling you is considerably more useful.
Next Watch
The Tactical Pirate still needs hardware acceptance. Ships Hail needs refinement. The F1 Pit Wall still needs its race-weekend sea trial. Navigation training has only just begun.
In other words, the project list remains completely unreasonable.
Exactly as intended.
Think Like a Captain. Play Like a Pirate.