The PIKANTO is designed with a hull-depth very close to the maximum 60 mm permitted by the rules. Just to make sure we put our first hull in a tank today and looked at the depth. The hull weighs 600 g, so with a 2500 g fin/bulb combination and a 55 g rudder we added roughly 900 g of ballast to get just above the minimum weight of 4000 g. The measured hull-depth is very close to the design depth of ~59 mm.
No problems with the hull depth! Production will likely continue on Saturday.
These are the standard colours we have for coloring gel-coat for the Pikanto right now. They are from emc-vega. Hull nr1 was a mix of blue and white, hull nr2 a mix of black and white.
The SAILSetc links to this page http://www.llewellyn-ryland.co.uk/standardrange.html which has a lot of nice colours. Anyone know where (online?) to buy those?
On an airplane-forum someone mentioned using colour pastes for 2-part epoxy-paint, is that available in cool colours somewhere?
I put together this small computer which will be used to control the lathe. The components for this kind of box are quite inexpensive:
D945GCLF2 motherboard including 1.6 GHz Atom330 CPU, 76 eur
Codegen MX31 case including 420W PSU, 46 eur
2Gb DDR2 memory stick, 46eur
Samsung 320Gb HDD, 44eur
Labtec keyaboard + mouse, 17eur
Total: 229 eur (no display) parts from jimms-pc and verkkokauppa.com
The motherboard has one PCI-slot for a Mesa 5I20 FPGA-card which provides 72 digital I/O pins for real-time control.
Here is the D945GCLF2 motherboard. The CPU doesn't need a fan, but there is a small fan for the PCI-controller(?).
Realtime performaceshould be OK, I was getting about 10 us of jitter for a 1 ms thread.
Based on two slightly different MDF prototypes we made an aluminium mould for a bumper today.
In other news, hull nr 2 has been de-moulded and looks good. I'm designing the jib-support, the mainsheet-post, and the radio-mounting next. Then 2-part moulds will be milled for these components.
