Home of the Hacking Tiger

Home to work

jaap — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:33:20 +0000

Very happy with the new office

Bicycle trip is very doable and refreshing.

Motor controller, charger and DC converter arrived.

jaap — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:30:08 +0000

Motor controller, battery charger and DC-DC converter arrived from china today.

Engine and saildrive installation

jaap — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:22:31 +0000

Got the sail drive installed and created an engine seat.

Graphics LCD library for JOS

jaap — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:23:06 +0000

Have been too busy to play around with my Arduino stuff lately, but my visit to Kesseltronics in Canada inspired me to spent an evening with the graphic LCD board I bought earlier and write some code for it to be included in JOS

First layer of paint

jaap — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:20:36 +0000

Finally, after many hours of grinding and filling and grinding and .. , I got to do some painting. The first layer of color made me happy and unhappy at the same time. The color is good!! … but looking closer this first layer isn’t smooth at all. So more grinding ahead…

Saildrive with electric motor

jaap — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:06:45 +0000

Just a few pics of the saildrive and motor.

New solar cells

jaap — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:52:30 +0000

I ordered a second batch of solar cells. Along with more poly crystalline cells for creating additional small panels, I got some mono crystalline ones also. These are quite a bit thinner than the poly crystalline ones though surprisingly not more fragile. I found them easier to solder as well! So I recommend these if you want to do DIY solar.

I intend to put a strip of 24 cells on each side of the boat along the side just under the gunwale, which I hope will protect them. When it looks like they might get damaged, I’ll laminate a thin layer of glass fiber on top like I did with the panels. I am very curious how they will perform. Obviously they will be useless in the harbor, but out on the water I hope that with the reflection of light from the water, they will perform reasonably well.

Ramp up the voltage

jaap — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 01:35:05 +0000

I’ve chosen to run the electric system on board “Wahine” at 36V rather than 24V. Mainly, so I can get sufficient revs. from the electric engine. In order to charge the batteries at this voltage, you need something like 41V. It’s a little impractical to have this as the output voltage of the solar panels on board and also the little wind turbine I bought (Rutland 504) outputs between 5 and 20V or so. So I set out to find a DC step up converter. After some looking and asking around and considering building one myself, I ended up on e-bay and bought this

It’s based on an LM2577, which I had already looked at, but it does a really poor job at large voltage steps (like say from 12V to 41V!). I’m not really sure why, but looking at the LM2577 spec sheet, it makes some sense. I am not enough of an electronics guy to judge.

So looking further on e-bay, I found these:

which were advertised especially for large voltage steps and they are excellent and churn out more than 1A at 41V at 85+% efficiency.

The output voltage is controlled by a manual pot meter. I would like to replace it with a digitally controllable one, so I can use an Arduino to do MPP for the solar cells and wind turbine, but those are just thoughts for now

No valley too deep, no mountain too high.

jaap — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:48:24 +0000

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”. Well, my sister did just that. She turned a perceived weakness of physical performance into an ability to be proud of. Anything is possible now. It may even be that pigs will fly or that everybody will live happily ever after. Respect from your brother!

Three names

jaap — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 23:35:27 +0000

Removing old layers of paint is like traveling through time. First, I’ve discovered the yard number of my Waarschip 730 is 61 and later that she was once called “Quator Spinae”, which I cannot figure out the meaning of, despite the couple of years of latin in school. As far as I can tell, it means something like four thorns or four difficulties. If the former owner ever reads this, please enlighten me!

When I bought her, she was called “Mujer” (woman in Spanish) and I renamed her “Wahine” (woman in Maori/Hawaiian/Polynesian)