www.holdentechnology.com

Here's my first arduino project, it takes the pulse from a paddlewheel boat speed sensor and makes an NMEA output on the serial port.  It should work with most through-hull speed transducers, and also with windspeed transducers too.  The NMEA stream comes from the arduino serial port, so if you have a USB arduino you can hook it up to a laptop easily.  If you want to hook it up to another NMEA instrument you'll need something like a MAX232 chip to take the TTL logic from the serial port pins and convert them to RS-232.  There should be lots of examples of this if you use the google.

UPDATE 5/22/10-- I tested it with a real transducer and it works (read on).

Firebolt is the official winner of the 3 Bridge Fiasco Blogger Division

I'd like to thank my competition, who have real blogs.

We finished the fiasco.  A great time was had by all.  Hey, this is turning into a blog, like EVK4 or tillerman.  Theirs are better.

I'm doing the 3 Bridge Fiasco this year with Jen, my wife.

 There is a lot of strategy to choosing the direction to round the marks.  Which way would you go?

Here's a link to a word document that shows the current from 10AM to 7PM.  Print it out and bring it along!

 Here is a chart showing the current at 11AM, our start is at 10:13 (PHRF 141).

More will appear here sometime.

I'm a family man.  Here's the family (Dec 2007):

Here's a picture of our boat, Firebolt (May 2008)