{"id":2,"date":"2008-02-25T03:17:53","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T10:17:53","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-06-24T11:32:30","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T18:32:30","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"

About the project contributors...
\n
\nMark R. Irvin<\/b>
\nSome of my friends and family know me to be someone who fantasizes about a variety of random projects that are often too far out there to ever become a reality.\u00a0 When I was a kid, one of those ideas was a sketch <\/a>I had made of a satellite that I imagined building and deploying to space.\u00a0 There really wasn't anything about the sketch or ideas that were new or innovative.\u00a0 I simply enjoyed the idea of making my very own satellite.\u00a0 I imagined all the kinds of sensors I would want it in, how it all might fit nicely in a Sputnik-like sphere, and how I might get it into space via a ridiculous number of model rocket stages or something naive like that.\u00a0 Obviously I never actually made my satellite and the idea never went further than the sketch itself.<\/p>\n

The internet has made it very easy to come across all kinds of interesting and creative projects. Many of these projects I've come across on sites like Make<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>, Gizmodo<\/a>, and Hackaday<\/a>.\u00a0 Seeing all of these projects day after day (over many years) has left me often jealous, but also very inspired.<\/p>\n

Several years back, a friend and previous co-worker (Chad, aka Sheado<\/a>) talked me into working on a project to try and enter into the 2005 DARPA Challenge<\/a>.\u00a0 This was a contest to create an autonomous, unmanned vehicle that needed to follow GPS way-points while avoiding obstacles through a journey in the desert.\u00a0 My former employer, Alphalogix<\/a>, decided to sponsor the project and away we worked on it.\u00a0 My contribution was primarily focused on creating the software to interface with the hardware mechanisms that physically controlled the vehicle (which was an old troop carrier tank by the way!)\u00a0 Ultimately our project did not make the final cut for the contest, but we did make a lot of progress on the project and I am very proud to have been a part of it.\u00a0 I learned quite a bit about interfacing with hardware which left me with a tremendous itch...<\/p>\n

Serenity is not exactly a huge leap from the DARPA project.\u00a0 I suppose some of the drive to make this boat is to feel a sense of closure from what started with the DC project.\u00a0 I also have some history with building remote control sailboats and a pretty strong interest in windsurfing.\u00a0 While a sailboat is not the most logical choice for an ocean roaming project that might encounter rough seas, it just feels like a fun challenge, and the right choice for my background.\u00a0 The idea of building and sailing an autonomous sailboat in the open ocean also promises the sense of finally building that wannabe Sputnik in my childhood sketch<\/a>.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About the project contributors… Mark R. Irvin Some of my friends and family know me to be someone who fantasizes about a variety of random projects that are often too far out there to ever become a reality.\u00a0 When I was a kid, one of those ideas was a sketch I had made of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5,"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/distantpulse.com\/serenity\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}