Carr Mill Dam... ned

It's a masterclass in how practically any country is better for start-ups associated with locomotion than the one that invented the locomotive. My advice to anyone trying to do anything new here remains: to succeed in the UK, go to the US.

The earliest canals were built in China, though as precursor to an industrial revolution that began largely in Lancashire they enjoyed most commercial success hereabouts.

They don't go up hills though, and locks that allow boats to step up or down gradients require the re-supply of water... Carr Mill Dam was one such source.

Only tidal stretches of water are freely navigable in the UK, the Canal and River trust largely accountable for delegating use of inland waters. Key to access however is the ownership, and the land around Carr Mill appears to be owned by a company that is in process of liquidation and whose liquidators fail to return queries.

As indeed does the Lancashire Powerboat Racing Club, who along with the sailing club to which the Canal and Riverboat Trust refer me ~ beside the St Helens Angling assoc ~ appear to have remit to use the water, beside the land and buildings nearby.

The danger is in all of this is that instead of spending your time building boats, you're involved in an internecine struggle that Kafka would himself struggle to do justice to.

See? Sled!

Albert Hickman was widely acknowledged to be a pain in the ass, though he also set the pattern for most of what is necessary to move boats as quickly as possible across water. The above outline dates from 1914, though remains the state of the art whether you want to move ferries at the fastest possible speed, or anything else on water with the aid of a multi-hull.

Once there was sufficient power for boats to plane, although it changed everything it also changed nothing in many ways, in the way that for a number of years the car was literally a horseless carriage. Hickman effectively prioritised form over displacement in order to make running on water as fast and efficient as possible.

One hundred and ten years on, and with much of what moves over water being shifted toward drones as in air, there is less need for displacement again. Thus it is that flat-packed catamarans powered by propellers driving air (which is also more efficient) are set to change the paradigm.

Hickman was considered 'an eccentric and an annoyance whom most wished would quietly go away' and on that note, I've emailed the Lancashire Powerboat Racing Club.

Again.

The turbine was pioneered in boats much the same way, replacing most other means once introduced by Charles Parsons. Needless to say the Royal Navy did all they could to prevent its appearance at their review in 1897.

Re: Charge

I've plucked a couple of battery-packs from the conservatory (where if they catch fire they shouldn't take the house with them) and here is one of them on charge. Realise I'm teaching granny to suck LiPos here, but attach the cable to the charger first and reverse the sequence on the way out. Note the charger has recognised that it's a LiPo battery with six (3.7V) cells that amount to 22.2V, so we're cooking on gas. Or electric.

Why do they describe a 2.9 amp/hour battery as 2900mAh? It's really only to separate the geeks from normal people, and to make us buy calculators with bigger displays. But Google says a safe charging rate for a LiPo battery-pack is that same rating, meaning it should take an hour to charge at 2.9 amps. I've gone for 2.0 amps here as you can see.

BALANCE means each of the six cells is being charged in parallel, though it does bear a passing resemblance to my savings account.

Linkin' Park

First step here is to connect the battery-pack, which should produce a red light. You don't want one of these if you're flying airliners, but here they mean that you have at least fitted the connector the right way round. Then simply refer to p.41 of the manual and don't bother me.

This RX has happily been linked before in order to fly one of my super-scale drones. It was done elsewhere, but I know it's good to go because that red light turns green if I turn on the TX and turns red again when it's powered down. Houston, we are looking good...

Are You Receiving Me?

So the second of the recent problems in wiring one or other of the prototype builds was ~ the first being how to upgrade the transmitter's firmware ~ how to charge the batteries for the receiver. Turns out that I should have got a 7.2v six-cell NiMH pack, but this five-cell 6.0v pack will have to do. The charger also delivers seven times the permitted amperage and makes for a charging cycle so rapid that you don't want to go anywhere whilst it's happening.

I also found why originally it did not appear to work as advertised, having attached the connectors the wrong way round (but not letting them know that).

The thing looking like the top-end of a cockroach is a micro-receiver I returned with from the GoFly competition in California at the start of 2020. It took a little searching to find exactly what type, not least because the QR code was defunct, though it should do for the second prototype.

Happy days so long as you discount the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

Herman Hesse wrote during WW2 how artists continued to create much how flowers continued to bloom. I now think this is bollocks, and that crawling underneath a stone is a better response.

Futaban Futility

Developing prototypes, the devil is invariably in the detail. As the RC transmitter has been out of use a while, I figured the firmware ought to be updated. That's done with the SD card, which in turn required an adaptor for an Apple Mac beside a card of only 16Gb capacity... which itself is a rarity nowadays.

None of this worked when it came to the download, and subsequently I borrowed a Windows laptop that did. For whatever reason the Apple appears to unzip the file in process and in doing so, does it incorrectly by skipping the folder that represents the outermost shell.

For all those out there looking to download Futaba updates on a Mac ~ I know there are three of us ~ dropping the UPDATE folder appearing after the download into one called FUTABA should fix the problem.

Frosty the Droneman

With temperatures hovering around zero in the garage, it's no country for old men but nonetheless I remodel the 8' cat to exclude the side-panels to see if that makes much of a difference. Actually it doesn't, so long as two corners of each of picture-frame are braced with steel plates. These sub for tube-connectors that'll be used when I switch to tubular plastic or carbon-fibre sections.

There's a proverb to the effect that fools return to their folly, as a dog returns to its vomit. As if to prove its wisdom I've inset a photo of something I made in a hotel in Helsinki eight years ago while I still flew airliners. Laugh as you may ~ I am hysterically ~ you can see that the same DNA spreads across much of my work. Much like vomit.

Nonetheless eight years ago there was nowhere near the range of electrical equipment that there is nowadays, and drones were toys rather than a better way to do a variety of things... not least eliminating armoured vehicles. 

In time, even dog-sick looks palatable.