Hellmut1956 Introduction

Hi
I use to build model sailplanes as a kid. I purchased my last sailplane shortly before ending my time at the university in 1985. After an eventful and in summary very satisfying profesional time I lost my last job after the Internet hype exploded in 2000. After finally facing the grim reality as a former director of business development at a large us telecommunication company I decided to reactivate my activities building models. As money was and is a scarce resource I decided to go for building naval models RC controlled and to make a sailboat from scratch.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

I did choose this plan of a sailboat as working with wood has always been something I loved to do. So I started and made the wooden part of the hull. Later I decided based on a suggestion from my wife to build a complete detachable deck heavily using aluminium. As you can fully understand next was to get into working with Epoxy. Idid purchase a new RC system from robbe, the Navy version and purchased modules for the transmitter and receiver to multiplex 8 rotary knobs over a single channel of my 40MHz system. very expensive and with such a weak execution it proved to be worthless. Having worked for decades for US semiconductor companies I decided to make my own electronic boards using the AVR mega8 controller with the Bascom basic compiler. Here the link: https://www.mcselec.com/index.php?Itemid=41&id=14&option=com_content&task=view. The BASCOM software has extensive libraries that make implementing the software required for the functions I wanted it to realize on the mega8 very easy. In just one afternoon a friend of mine and myself made a small board with the controller and had it display the digitized values of all 8 channels of my receiver on a LCD 40x4 character display. We were really impressed how easy and fast this could be accomplished! Whenever you changed the position of any or multiple controls on the transmitter the displayed showed the digitized values, all at the same time. Being so impressed my friend build a tutorial aimed for total beginners to teach how to get from y circuite scheme on paper to the physical board. Goal was to open the black box that electronics mean for many naval modelers to add a technology n top of the big range of technics a normal naval modeler often show an impressive mastery. Unfortunately naval modelers proved to be very conservative. Only one person completed the course on a spanish naval modelers forum. It is amazing what he does since then. Airplane modelers not only adopted electronics but show an impressive and diverse use of this technology. Specially know were 2.4 Ghz and 5 GHz technology has replaced former MHz based offerings.

So including electronics and programming in the process of building the above model had the result that many ideas and concepts came to my mind leading to todays status were electronics and informatics are the main focus of my activities in naval modeling. Here a picture of my model were I wanted to see how it would look like:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Today my activities are far too slow due to big problems with my health. But the fascination of the multiple projects I am pursuing around my sailboat model named "Carina" keeps me moving and fighting the obstacles due to my health problems enabling me to have fascinated activities that push me to go to my workshop in the cellar and have a structured days activities.

I plan to publish here my report of building my model Carina from scratch and my work improving and organizing my workshop. I hope it will be of interest to you!

welcome to the site  Hellmut, and may I say that is a beautiful looking yacht you have there.

it is nice to see a change from power to sail craft.

hope you enjoy the site, and enjoy posting your progress on here. 

neil.

Problems with my health still there to be fought. Since my last posting, I had to go to the hospital due to having extremely high sugar values. Now, additionally, to the 13 tablets, I have to take every day I have to inject 3 types of medicines to get my sugar levels under control. A sensor/reader system from Abbott, FreeStyle Libre 2 helps me to monitor my sugar level. 2 of those injected medicines are due once a day, the short endurance insulin injection required to react to whatever I eat. But for about the last3 months an extreme need to sleep, easily 18 hours a day while being dizzy in my brain. So thanks to my hobby I have an engine that keeps me fighting against those problems.

To restart my electronics development for my sailboat model Carina, build report available in this forum, I am pushing forward my work to improve my workshop. The chaos is still there, but moving ahead to fix this.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Thanks for the information, Appreciate you write with patience , I love this model

I am working to improve my workshop for many years but I am finally approaching the point where I can restart my experiments around the topic of using stepper motors as winches and implement the control of the sails my way.