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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:49:56 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: Part 49 of CAA #2
Nomadic Research Labs
#49 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Milpitas, CA
February 20, 1989
Copyright 1989, Steven K. Roberts
Well, I'm doing it again. I'm living that old familiar pre-launch blend
of terror, overload, excitement, and project management. Settled in the
fringes of Silicon Valley with the Vacuum Velocipodiatrist and Chip the fantasy
sculptor, Maggie and I entertain friends, build systems, work with sponsors,
and spend countless hours rearranging bits on hard disk. We putter in the
garden, chase off to speaking gigs, and even rent the occasional video. We
visit friends -- square dancing with little girls one weekend, creeping through
midnight woods the next, having business meetings the next. We make forays to
Livermore Labs to buy the cast-off furniture of America's national defense
establishment. And through it all, the window of fleeting opportunity that
separates past from future moves inexorably onward, onward, bringing us slowly
closer to our next abrupt escape into everything that Silicon Valley is NOT.
But for now we're Milpitian suburbanites pro tem, living in comfort with
friends. It won't last forever, of course, so we chuckle at our luxurious
space and flagrant energy consumption with only occasional twinges of guilt,
nuking the leftovers and waking to the gentle pattering of automatic
sprinklers. It seems an extravagance, even though this is the low-rent end of
the Valley (the house we wanted back in Palo Alto rents for $30,000 a year...
$82 a day plus expenses. For a ROOF!)
The reason for all this illusory stability, of course, is the Winnebiko --
that perennial obsession of mine, both mistress and tyrant... that vaguely
bicycle-like extravaganza of surface-mount circuit boards and gleaming
antennae. The machine is undergoing surgery so major that I have begun to
realize that it's becoming a whole new bike, constructed of treasures imported
from afar and mined here in the Valley, all layered together like a silicon
spanakopita atop my faithful old recumbent frame. I haven't told you much
about the new system yet, other than to hint at satellite communications,
expanded computing power, and wide bandwidth user interfaces. Since this
chapter is a sort of literary pivot between bike generations, perhaps now is
the time...even though it's dangerous to write about things that aren't done
yet. Changes are assured, for every new low-power bifurcated widgetframus that
looks even halfway bikeable sets my wetware CAD system afire with
system-enhancement fantasies. (There's the disclaimer.)
* * *
I suppose I should make a quick comment about the reason for all this.
You've already read the basics in previous CAA chapters, of course: ticket to
nomadness, agile computing tool, combination of passions, gizmological
door-opener, etcetera. None of that has changed; it's only grown more
ingrained over the years, part habit, part obsession. There are a few new
twists, though...
The next journey will be open-ended, and may well take us overseas where
rare is the access to modular phone jacks, power outlets, and the whole
automatic infrastructure of familiar American society. To do this right, I
want near-total independence in all domains: computation, communication,
electric power, propulsion, life-support, and so on. This instantly escalates
the Winnebiko system to a new level.
That, plus the bottom line: it has to be fun. The old machine is
obsolete. It's architecturally inflexible and much too hardware intensive.
Changes of function require a soldering iron instead of a screen editor. It
does too little for its weight. There's no computing horsepower of any real
consequence, there's too little solar power, setup of the radio systems is a
pain, and, well, it's just boring by current standards of engineering elegance.
And so the celebrated console system is being retired, consigned to a wood
stand under a dust cover in the CAA museum.
But rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the past is the Winnebiko
III...
* * *
I don't want to go into too much detail here, for it could, quite
literally, fill a textbook. But during the coming months, as these stories
ooze slowly from solder-burned fingers into a laptop buried in the clutter of
my workbench, you might grow impatient for real adventure. It's out there,
believe me. Lots of it. But first... the engineering adventure... a new
machine.
There's lots of power on this one: my current system with 20 watts of
solar panels, 12 amp-hours of batteries, and a plug-in charger could never
support all the new equipment. The new bicycle carries 118 watts of solar
panels, a regenerative braking system to turn hard-won potential energy into
something more useful than hot brake pads, and the ability to use any external
power source from a car cigarette lighter to 220 AC. All this dumps into a
charge bus, which is tapped by three dedicated controllers attached to three 15
amp-hour batteries -- one in the trailer, one in the communications equipment
bay behind the seat, and one up front in the console.
Managing that is one of the myriad tasks performed by the bicycle control
processor (BCP) -- which is now a 68000 running FORTH, linked by SCSI bus to an
I/O expansion unit serving the whole bike and a network of other computers.
There are dedicated microprocessors for text-to-speech synthesis, automatic
transmission control, satellite and ham station control, local area network
management, security and remote operations, variable-reluctance motor-generator
control, and so on.
None of this takes care of the applications layer -- that's all to run the
bike systems. On top of the whole control environment is another network: two
DOS systems (a 286 and a V40) to handle CAD, satellite tracking, text,
database, and software development. One would be enough in theory, but the 286
board is power hungry... I use the little one when primarily waiting for
keystrokes and not interested in heavy duty processing horsepower. The two
share a 40 megabyte hard disk, a 3.5" floppy, and a tape backup unit. And
along with the obligatory math coprocessor, there may be an RTX-2000 FORTH
engine dedicated to image processing for video capture, hidden-line plotting
for topographic mapping, and other calculation-intensive tasks.
I carry a separate laptop in the new manpack, of course, but it's a
lightweight machine. When off-bike and needing file support (or wishing to
check status of autonomous subsystems), I can sign on via the UHF business
band. The bike first responds at a low BBS-like level, accepting a special
command to boot the BCP for remote FORTH command-line control of the whole
system. If I want to get into the DOS environment, another reserved word boots
the 286 and redirects console I/O via the radio link to my backpack system,
eliminating the need to carry heavy hardware anywhere except in the bike itself
(where there is space for good shock-mounting).
Any of the communications features can be accessed from any operating
level, whether in remote mode, from the handlebar keyboard while pedaling, or
from the maintenance keyboard while stopped. Cellular phone modem, packet
radio, local network control... all are essentially servers on the network.
The new console, by the way, is designed to be as flexible as possible.
Most of its real estate is given over to a pair of giant LCD panels -- one VGA
backlit display (640 X 480) and the other a more conventional laptop display.
A surface acoustic wave touchscreen covers both, and any processor can request
either... depending on power budget, ambient lighting conditions, and
resolution requirements. Typically, the BCP's status and maintenance functions
are on the little one, and graphics-intensive DOS (and, eventually, Mac)
applications are mapped to the big one. One particularly interesting project
is computer-generation of wireframe map models, showing from any viewpoint the
earth's surface in my immediate vicinity with road vectors overlaid in bold
strokes and my own location a blinking arrow. (The databases are on CDROM; my
location is derived from a GPS satnav receiver.) Entries from the contacts
database can then appear as icons, which, when touched, expand into text
windows. In addition, if time permits, there will be a helmet-mounted display
that presents text or graphics "in the sky" at a comfortable focal length. All
this allows wider-bandwidth I/O with the neuron-based parallel wetware system
under the helmet, with speech, three display spaces, a thumb mouse, handlebar
keyboard, and touchscreen as comm channels.
Other front panel devices include a miniature 300 dpi graphic printer for
sponsor referrals and business paperwork, digital instrumentation for speed,
cadence, altitude, temperature, time, and raw power measurements, and a minimal
assortment of switches and LEDs to provide low-level maintenance access in the
event of a major system crash. The important thing here is that everything on
the bike, except for basic safety equipment like lights, is under computer
control and thus completely hackable.
The architecture that keeps this from being an interface nightmare is the
key to the whole machine. I call it a "resource bus," linking as it does all
nodes in the system -- power, audio, serial, analog, and digital. The devices
on the bus are diverse: a MIDI music synthesizer, all dedicated micros, radio
equipment, cellular phone, stereo, digital answering machine, printer, fax
board, modem, nav system, speech synthesizer, audio function modules, and so
on. The bus is only a bus in philosophical terms -- up close it's a massive
FET crosspoint matrix with each junction controlled by a bit in a write-only
memory (finally a use for one of those!). The implications are interesting:
any interconnection is simply a matter of programming (SMOP), which at the
FORTH level is pretty easy. I'll be able to run phone patches between ham
radio and cellular while mobile, remotely redirect local audio through an RF
link to my pack if security is triggered, perform diagnostics, have the bike's
speech synthesizer beacon on ham radio frequencies live updates of it's exact
location if it's moved without the correct password, turn alpha particle hits
into MIDI boing events, fax out digitized video images, and so on... all using
the resource bus and some basic software drivers.
Mechanically, the new bike is growing in sophistication as well. I've
never been happy with my brakes, so the new machine detects the first
displacement of the right-hand brake lever as a command to begin proportionally
drawing power from the trailer wheels via custom microprocessor controlled hub
motors. A hard squeeze invokes a hydraulic disk brake on the rear wheel, and
the other lever is a purely hydraulic link to a front rim brake. The
transmission is changing too -- from a 54-speed manual to a 36-speed automatic.
Here, the processor monitors speed, pedal torque, cadence, heart rate, and a
keyed-in "wimp factor" that expresses my subjective robustness... changing
gears to optimize the impedance match between bio-engine and wheels.
One of my big thrills in this has always been communication, ever since
those primitive few thousand miles in 1983-4 with 300-baud acoustic cups and a
CB radio. I've been carrying 2-meter and HF ham gear for a while -- now
there's a 10-meter rig built in to take advantage of the sunspot peak, as well
as 2-meter and 70cm multimode rigs. An HF station is still on board with two
antenna choices -- mobile vertical and wire dipole... and there are various
links between bike and backpack, my bike and Maggie's, and so on. But the best
part is the new OSCAR-13 station (modes B and J): I'll be able to stop the
bike, assemble a pair of crossed-yagi beams totalling about 10 feet in length,
fire up the satellite tracker software (it calculates Keplerian elements,
inputs my location from GPS or Loran, and displays a world map showing the
bird's location, azimuth and elevation values, doppler shift, and other
parameters). With this new satellite, I'll have a hemisphere of coverage at a
time during a half-dozen 6-hour windows a week from anywhere in the world, with
the ability to communicate via full-duplex audio under solar power. The uplink
is about 30 watts... and the satellite's orbit takes it out to 22,000 miles at
the apogee (2.8 earth diameters).
Let's see... what else? Oh -- what to do with extra solar power from the
118 total watts available in full sun (almost 10 amps of 12 volts)? Simple --
the software can either throw it into the trailer wheels for a 1/8 horsepower
boost, or use it to cool a Peltier-effect device buried in an insulated space
behind the seat. This should have some nice effects, including cold beer in a
hot desert (one of the world's great pleasures).
There are various standalone additions -- a miniature digital
oscilloscope, a butane soldering iron, and countless improvements to the
camping and touring gear. But you get the idea... this system is an all-out
effort aimed at creating a self-maintaining mobile autonomous information
platform, constantly in communication with a worldwide network while freely
wandering the earth's surface and providing unlimited fun to the rider and
companions.
And that's the kind of design spec I like.
* * *
Oh. I did mention the word "companions," didn't I? Two things are
happening that involve other people.
First, I've been putting the word out for a while that we're looking for a
few exceptional people to take up this life of nomadness with us. The
responses are trickling in... a lady named Barbara is planning to travel with a
high-end graphics and video system to develop her concept for "artitorials,"
and I've been getting mail in response to a recent usenet posting. There seems
to be a hunger for adventure afoot in the land. If you're interested in
knowing more, email me.
Second, the human intellects and energetic companies that are cooperating
on this new machine represent a truly dazzling resource of creative ability.
For almost six years, I've been collecting wizards... and with some of the very
best I am now forming an ad-hocracy with two linked goals: market Winnebiko
spinoffs and take on selected consulting projects. If this one sounds
interesting, give Nomadic Research Labs a call at 408-263-0660.
That's enough for now. As the months wear on and the weather turns
seductive here at the base of the Diablo Range... as the greening hills tease
me with thoughts of whistling descents and slowly changing vistas... as the
legs tense in rhythmic urgency here in my static space... I'll grow ever more
desparate for the road. It's out there, a near-infinite thing of wonder and
possibilities, unhurried, patient, waiting. I pound away on eccentric
machinery, implementing dreams, thinking all the while of that cold beer in the
desert. You'll be hearing from me at odd intervals: bear with me until the
adventure toggles once again from intellectual to visceral.
In the meantime...
Cheers from the lab!
Steve