Simulations

By Dermot Tynan, almost 5 years ago.

Carpenters like to say "measure twice, cut once." In the software world, we make extensive use of unit tests and end-to-end tests. But the North Atlantic is no friend to small boats, and there's not a lot of end-to-end testing which can replicate the vagaries of the wild Atlantic. To that end, we use simulations. Simulators can be used to throw all kinds of real-world problems at a piece of software, and measure the response.

• May 15, 2019
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Wing sails

By Dermot Tynan, over 3 years ago.

• August 23, 2020
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Connectors or solder?

By Dermot Tynan, over 3 years ago.

• August 23, 2020
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Towards a standard bus

By Dermot Tynan, over 3 years ago.

• August 23, 2020
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The Reboot

By Dermot Tynan, over 7 years ago.

According to the calendar, it is now 963 days since my last blog posting on here. A lot has happened in that thirty month period, but not a lot in terms of the robotic boat.

I’ve worked on a variety of designs of winged sail and I think I have a design which will work really well. More about that, anon.

You may also notice I redesigned the blog, and switched from Wordpress to Jekyll. I had originally planned to code a Ruby on Rails site, and this is mostly why there haven’t been any blog updates for the last couple of years. I wanted to incorporate automatic blog updates from the boat when she’s at sea, but trying to decide on a layout for the new blog was like trying to choose the paint colour for the bike shed. Eventually I just went with Jekyll as it allows me to have boat updates, and doesn’t involve spending months tweaking HTML and CSS.

The big news though is a decision I made last year, to switch away from my own hull design, which you can find here: [[56]. Chatting with Professor Paul Miller of the US Naval Academy, I came to the conclusion that the design he and his students had perfected, which they call the MaxiMOOP.

• August 28, 2016
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