We have arrived

Just arrived at fort desoto and this year we dont have any boats to build or errands to run. Seems weird but the boat is ready!!!

Almost gone

Homemade USB Charger

Here is my usb charger i'll be trying out during the EC. Its a regular old 7Ah 12v sealed hobby battery and a car charger unit i found at walmart for about 10 dollars. Plus a couple of slide connectors and i put a switch in the side just for fun. Capable of charging 2 usb powered devices at a time. The 12v could easily be topped off with a small solar panel for extended trips.

Testing out mobile update

Ready for another fun ride down to Key Largo (knock on wood).

External GoPro Battery

I recently got a GoPro Hero 3 camera which is very cool but the battery life sucks. So for this years Everglades Challenge I wanted to have some extra battery power for the little camera so that we can turn it on for a couple of hours at a time or take a picture whenever we want without having to take a bunch of spare batteries with us. I looked around online for others who have done this and didn't find much other than some who are powering the camera externally while also pulling video off of it as a feed for use in RC airplane applications but I couldn't find anything that maintained the weather proofness of the camera.

For our application we aren't too concerned about the camera being wireless and if we did want to mount it out of reach and wireless we can just use the stock battery. So here is what I came up with. I bought the parts from www.batteryspace.com including a 10.4 Ah 3.7v Li-ion pack. The hardest part was the battery facsimile which is made of a small block of wood, some magnet wire, superglue, paper, black sharpie, needle-nose pliers, tweezers, calipers and Lots of cursing.

The resulting setup should give us about 10 times the normal run time of the stock GoPro battery (a mere 1050mah). The tradeoff of course is the umbilical cord.  This setup also seems ideal for long time lapse applications.

Nacra 20 Mast Repaired

Been working on all kinds of projects lately but most recently finished up the repair of a Nacra 20 carbon stick that broke albeit pretty cleanly and needed a little "reunion".