Adrian here, and despite the title I’m not planning to run away and join the navy. I have been “looking” out to sea a bit and am a fan of this quote by Saint-Exupéry, from The Wisdom of the Sands:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. As for the future, your task is not to forsee it, but to enable it.”

More on my sea-gazing later, first to the meat of what Chris and I got up to last week.

We had another session of planning to follow up on things we didn’t cover the week before. This one was more focused on Museum in a Box. We’re getting near to the end of the current production batch, and so need to start ramping things up for the next one. This was a natural point to consider whether there were any bigger changes to make before we go ahead with that; and the answer is more of a yes but…

There are things we’d like to explore, but they aren’t things we’ll get done quickly—at least some of them aren’t. There are one-off costs to any changes, for example the tooling for the PCB manufacturing, so it doesn’t make sense to incur those twice: once for the quick changes; and once again for any bigger, longer updates. So the next batch will be the same as the current one, and we’re planning out the work on the more complicated changes so we won’t just be in the same situation when the next batch sell out.

One of the things we want to look at is the case. It’s currently laser-cut and then we glue them up in-house. Injection-moulding would be the obvious next step to make, as it would reduce the labour required for each box and—once the expensive up-front tooling cost was made—be cheaper per-unit. However, we’d much prefer to be moving away from generating more plastic in the world. So we’re going to at least explore and experiment with more sustainable options.

It’s still a pretty cost-sensitive product, so we realise we’re likely chasing an impossible cheap/sustainable/looks-good trinity; but it also feels like we should be at least trying. We used to have a laser-cut plywood option, but since the Russia-Ukrainian war plywood supplies aren’t as good and it could always have done with a sealing/varnishing step that wasn’t cost-effective to implement.

Maybe it’s injection-moulded recycled plastic. Maybe we can find other materials that are sustainable and mouldable. Maybe there are new low-volume production techniques. We’ll be sharing here as we go, naturally. And if anyone has pointers to options, people we might work with, university research programmes, or grants to help fund the exploration, then please hook us up.

Aside from planning, Chris has mainly been packing up new Museum in a Box orders, and providing ongoing support for exisiting customers. On the Mermaid-based help system he’s been working through making the interactive elements. Mermaid allows for ‘Click events’ that bind to a callback function but it involves a bit of DOM navigation. He has also been reading around sustainable materials for a potential redesign of the Musueum in a Box box.

There’s been a bit more progress on my Bluetooth Auracast experiments. I can now get regular readings of the signal strength of the broadcast on the receiving device. That will let me add a visual indicator to let the person with the transmitter monitor what the range is like.

And returning to the sea, that was my weekend’s distraction.

Inspired by fellow-weeknoter Michael Dales’ explorations with AIS I’ve dug out the antenna and RTL-SDR dongle I was using a while back and got it set up again to monitor the AIS messages being sent by the ships on the Mersey.

A screenshot of the AIS Catcher map showing Liverpool, the Wirral, and some of North Wales with the data from my AIS receiver overlaid. It's mostly clustered around the Mersey estuary, along the docks and around the Pier Head, but there are a couple of outliers, which are also not in the water. Presumably those stations have slightly more powerful AIS transmitters, and I guess they also act a little bit like additional lighthouses/reference locations

Things have moved on a bit in the intervening six years: OpenPlotter has simplified the software side of things; and I’ve moved house and am a bit nearer to the mouth of the river and higher up the hill.

I’m not sure if I’m seeing all of the traffic on the river—I haven’t spotted the pilot vessels yet, although it might just be that their mooring is in a radio shadow for my antenna—but it’s a nice step towards updating the Merseyshipping bot and bringing it to the Fediverse.