Panbo

Athena, and "ProBoat" good news

Jun 13, 2006

ProBoat Athena crop

This is the first wheelhouse photo I’ve seen of Jim Clark’s Athena, and it sure looks like the thoroughly PC followup on Hyperion we expected. I wish I had more detail on the electronics, but neither Seascape nor Royal Huisman is giving much away. In some respects, the most interesting aspect of the photo above is that I saw it at beautiful resolution (shown here) in the latest (June/July) online edition of Professional Boatbuilder. PB, or ProBoat, or whatever, is one of the best marine publications out there, I think, but it used to be damn hard to qualify for a subscription. Now the whole magazine is available online to everyone, and in a format that I find very readable on my various PCs. ProBoat has actually been doing this for a year, which means that Nigel Calder’s interesting three part article on “Networking: The three-cable boat” is completely available, starting with the Oct/Nov 05 edition (and also means, by the way, that I was wrong when I first mentioned the series here).

Posted by Ben on June 13, 2006 5:54 PM

Comments

the 3 wire concept is interesting and conceptually may save a lot of wiring in some installations. But in actual fact there would still need to be home runs to the trunk cable... perhaps not back to the panals and sub panels.

But what happens when one of these switches is not repsonding? How do you figue out whether it is a software matter of a hardware failure? Does this make taking care of these systems to a whole new level? Nowadays we can't fix our cars... they have to plugged into a computer which diagnoses and finds the faults.

Not being a ludite I like techie progress... but it is making understanding how things work very geekie and inaccessible and we become dumb users and button pushers. no?

Posted by: DefJef at June 13, 2006 8:26 PM

Leave a comment