www.astounding.org.uk

Welcome to Ian's half of the astounding.org.uk web pages, hosted by Amos the mbu puffer fish. This is Amos, he was a freshwater puffer fish, a member of the species Tetraodon mbu. Although he died in November 2001, he's still here at the top of my pages because he was the spur for me to create some pages, since numerous (well, two or three) people appeared incredulous that there could be a puffer fish called Amos.

What's here?

Fish, computers and hovercraft. My professional interest, bridges, has not been added yet. Presumably, in due course there'll be the obligatory homepage bit about who I am, where I work, and so on.

Contents

• Fishy things
  • My fishtanks.
  • Amos the mbu puffer fish, his life story and his photo album.
• Computery programming and electronics things
  • GPSion5, a program for the Psion Series 5 to talk to a Magellan GPS in order to manage waypoints.
  • RC5mX, a program for the Psion Series 5 to talk to a Lego RCX programmable brick.
  • Coffee roasting, using a microcontroller controlled popcorn popper.
  • Finite element analysis of a bicycle wheel..
• Stuff about my radio control model hovercraft
  • Mark 1 was my first attempt, and while it worked, didn't work as well as I wanted.
  • Mark 2A eventually met my performance aspirations, but wasn't very tidy in the propulsion arrangements.
  • Mark 2B had an on-board fly-by-wire PIC microcontroller mixer. It was interesting to build and program, but was too complex really.
  • Mark 2C turned into a bit of an experimental test-bed. About halfway through its life it was the most-finished of any of my hovercraft to date, but then it got hacked around some more.
  • Mark 3 is currently entirely speculative - I haven't started building, but there's some sketches, mock-ups and ideas.
• Compost
  • A DIY compost tumbler based upon a second-hand plastic barrel, some decking boards and assorted bits of hardware pipe and stuff I had lying around.

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To comment on anything (please do) email ian.web@astounding.org.uk