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The Thomas G Thompson Research Vessel is currently docked in Portage Bay, and Rob, Joe and I were lucky enough to take a tour. The boat is packed full of gear, and sports a pretty slick boat to boat wireless setup that they call swap. For Internet connectivity at sea, they use a satellite uplink which reaches T1 speeds. To know where they are at any given time, (and generate detailed topographic maps of the ocean floor), they also have several flavors of GPS (civillian and scientific/military). Sensors and communications antennas are scattered throughout the ship’s high places.

Back in 2003, I got to present what we were doing at SeattleWireless to UNOLS RVTEC, but I really had no idea what these boats were like. They’re impressive. The Thompson is a multi-purpose research vessel, and supports a variety of scientific research, including NEPTUNE, a project which intends to establish a seafloor observatory on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate to not only give us tectonic information, but really cool underwater videos!

This boat is no slouch in the wire department either. A deck above the diesel charged electric motors is a huge winch of steel jacketed coax that can drop a sensor or underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) some 16,000 feet deep.

I’ve posted my pictures (phone and high res digital) to iMob tech.

iMob now supports video preview of 3gp and mp4 encoded (phonecam) movies. Take a look at broke if you want to see people fighting with a broken sounder ticket machine.

Special thanks go out to Casey and Rob for the code on this animated gif nightmare!

This week’s HackNight was a busy one. I just got back from my midwest trip, so I gave the rundown on mobihoc, and shared some video of the Applied Interactives exhibit in Chicago as well as some flatland stories. Daniel Marsh brought his 32 LED Array cast in a plastic resin which will be used in his robot group’s ROV.

Darrin Eden from PersonalTelco showed up with his gumstix based GPS data dumper. Toby Martin and quite a few other Ship to Ship Ship to Shore Wireless Access Protocol (SWAP) folks stopped in and talked a bit about routing, on-ship wireless implementations and a little bit about buoys. Also, it looks like we may soon have a sailboat on LakeUnion (not affiliated with swap) adding a 50′ mast to the network.

On the iBook front, it appears that all is finally well, but the service description / parts list on the repair order just scares me.

• Add Spiral Tubing
• Install OS
• NTF (I have no idea what this is… anyone??)
• Replace BlueTooth device
• Replace Hard Drive
• Replace Logic board
• Replace Reed Switch board