Dave Howell, Nellie D. 37VT63
Technology is advancing so quickly. This point was driven home recently as I searched for a way to keep Nellie's Slurpee from running at night. The noisy ShurFlo pump, mounted under the stateroom floor, can wake the dead. Since the Slurpee's micro controller doesn't have a built-in clock, the search was on for one that I could add. Allow me to digress for a minute. When Bicki and I set sail for Mexico in 1995 it was at a seminal moment in history. Since the 1800's sailors have gone to sea with sextants. We had one too. But we also had a new fangled, handheld device called a GPS. For the princely sum of $800 it told us instantly and continuously our lat/long. An added benefit was that it could tell UTC time with the accuracy of an atomic clock. And this brings us back to the Slurpee and the solution to its real-time clock problem. Since 1995 GPS prices have halved and halved again. Today when the GPS pictured below can be had for $3.32.
Technology is advancing so quickly. This point was driven home recently as I searched for a way to keep Nellie's Slurpee from running at night. The noisy ShurFlo pump, mounted under the stateroom floor, can wake the dead. Since the Slurpee's micro controller doesn't have a built-in clock, the search was on for one that I could add. Allow me to digress for a minute. When Bicki and I set sail for Mexico in 1995 it was at a seminal moment in history. Since the 1800's sailors have gone to sea with sextants. We had one too. But we also had a new fangled, handheld device called a GPS. For the princely sum of $800 it told us instantly and continuously our lat/long. An added benefit was that it could tell UTC time with the accuracy of an atomic clock. And this brings us back to the Slurpee and the solution to its real-time clock problem. Since 1995 GPS prices have halved and halved again. Today when the GPS pictured below can be had for $3.32.
No comments:
Post a Comment