Ramblings
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A cruise ship and a filter
The air intake filter has been replaced; the old one was in a shocking state, and I can only hope that none of it went into the engine. Thursday afternoon was brilliantly sunny when I left the house, and overcast by the time I dropped my mooring into the water. Still, made for a nice…
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Relaying a solenoid
As mentioned in a previous post, Blue Opal has had issues with the starter motor for several years – turn the switch, press the button, and nothing more than a click is heard from the solenoid. It’s intermittent, but I’d prefer to know that the engine will turn over on the first push. A proposed…
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MiniPlex and Linux – the socat edition
Getting the Windows executable for the MiniPlex configuration program working was pretty neat. What would be neater is being able to perhaps write a Linux-native (or platform-agnostic) program that can at least display the configuration and stream the activity. Perhaps even update the configuration, though new versions of the firmware would result in new features…
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MiniPlex and Linux
The folks at ShipModul (archive) who make the MiniPlex-3 currently provide software only for Windows and MacOS; though with the latest release of MPXConfig it’s only available for Windows. I happen to run Linux as my primary OS, though I do have access to Windows either via my work laptop or a virtual machine. That…
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Engine musings
Sunday saw me on Blue Opal for the afternoon doing an oil change, and then staying on board overnight to make the early tide to Malahide (to get the damage from launching dealt with). A bit of cleaning and tidying occurred too! I was in Malahide by 1030 hours on Monday (having left just after…
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Start of the 2023 sailing season
Blue Opal was antifouled on Thursday just gone, and lifted in to the water on Friday. We had hoped to bring her back to Dun Laoghaire on Friday, but the yard was rather slow in getting the process started – a late lift the day before had occupied the boat mover (a big yellow hydraulic…