Tales of an (ex)Intern

Last Friday I left Crystal Palace with 24 other cyclists on a sponsored ride across France to Reims in Champagne.

The journey was about 400Km and I mapped it with my Garmin though in places - ie where the straight lines are I forgot to hit start - oops.

The ride was undertaken by a real mixture of people - including one Woman who did it on a steel mountain bike with knobbly tires - Hardcore to say the least.

Day 1 was pretty much all in England - we took the London to Brighton route to Newhaven and then the ferry to Dieppe. I started the ride saying that i wasn going to drink until the final night when there was no more riding to be done - this went by the board on the ferry where i had a few pints.

The next day was a lovely short 55 miles from Dieppe to Gourney en Bray over some undulating countryside. At one point I stayed with the front runners and averaged 20 mph across one or 2 stages but this is no way to holiday - you dont see the country that you are cycling through so i hung back at a slower pace enjoying the company.

I found out something about myself on this trip - im capable of cycling some fairly serious miles with a skinful - this is not something that i would recommend as it hurts like hell but like i said this was a holiday!!!!!

This was a great oppertunity to meet some really great people and get some miles down on the tarmac - that is one thing that is truly fantastic about France - the roads are so so so so smooth - somthing that is more apparent when i came back to the UK last night and had to cycle 5 bumpy miles home :S

It is something that i would love to do again although next time i would love to do a mountain ride much like Chris.

Right that is enough from me for now - im off out on a bike ride

As i write this I am packing for a cycle trip to Reims in France that i have been banging on about for ages.

Annoyingly i have come down with a cold just in time for the start of this ride which is tomorrow - this is fairly typical for students who finish but even so a pain in the arse(lungs).

This time tomorrow i should be on a ferry having left Crystal Palace at stoopid o clock and cycled to Newhaven by a round about route.

Then i alight in Dieppe ready for the first days cycling in France on Saturday.

If i can then i shall post short updates on a daily basis but prob not as i shall just fall asleep in the evenings i think:D. ON arrival at the final destination i shall be getting nicely sloshed i feel before getting the train home the next day - possibly if i am feeling stupid then i shall cycle back accross london and home as well - it depends on the jellification of the legs:D

Well the time has come for me to leave Aberystwyth and all the lovely people that i have met here:( It hasnt really sunk in yet that this is the final time that i will be here as a student - i expect that will happen sometime in the next week or so.

Aber has been truly awesome for the 4 years that i have been a student here and i have made some amazing friends - you know who you are - there are too many to mention in one place - that and i am technically packing as i write this - now that is procrastination:D.

Ill be back in July to attend the graduation ceremony - and more importantly the ball for one last hurrah with my mates and then of course you can bet that i shall be back when i can to come out on more Riding Club socials - as long as the fancy dress is stupid then i am there:D

Basically then Goodbye to Aber and keep in touch to all the people that i know here:) see you all soon i hope and i hope that you all have an amazing summer:)

Chris

For the past few months things have been a little quiet on the blog front - this is mainly due to me having a high workload since being back at Uni.

I have been working feverishly on my dissertation - something that is now complete.

For those of you who I havent spoken to here is the gist of it:-

The title is “Water Sampling on an Autonomous Sailing Platform” and it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Dr. Mark Neal and Colin Sauze have been building various sailing boats that sail themselves and my project was to provide a proof of concept for one application - Oceanography.

The system that I built(with help on the hardware) effectively is a pump hooked up to a Gumstix embedded Linux computer which also has attached a Water quality monitoring sonde.

My software is written in C and provides the control to switch the Pump on at specific GPS waypoints - read from a UDP stream from the control software or it can sample at a specific time interval.

Once the pump is on it then starts the sonde which is configured to pass out NMEA strings over a serial line to the Gumstix. This is the taken and passed with location information to a series of scripts written by Claire to send this information to the base.
The pump is then switched off.

The main challange for me in this project was the learning of C as a language and the interesting ways in which hardware injects its own bugs in to a system.

So there are the basics of why you havent heard from me for a while - if you want to know more then ask me and you can have the PDF of my Diss.

Sad to say that my Final Year Project is in the hands of this man :-S

I think that it is about time that i told you what i am working on for my final project. Before the start of the academic year I was approached by dr. Mark Neal who had heard that i was looking for a project - to this end he offered me a project working on his Autonomous Sailing Boat that was in the News in September.

This project was always aimed at Oceanography but till now they have had to concentrate on getting the control software working with the boat. My project is to design and build a water sampling rig that takes samples and stores them in addition to running some tests while still at sea.

There are a couple of ways that we are looking of doing this - the first is to take the water samples that we have pumped and fill a container which houses a piece of equipment called a Sonde. This is a unit that will run tests for us and allow me to store the data. The second method would be to look in to using Solid Phase MicroExtraction to do a form of continuous sampling.

To build this system i am using gumstix (small embedded Linux systems), a bilge pump and some tubing. The basic idea is that the system takes GPS data from the main control software and wakes itself up, runs a POST and then goes to work before sleeping again - this is needed to keep the power consumption down.

This is just a very general overview but as i work on it i will tell you more.

Today started well - Leopard showed up and i Installed it - I have not really had the chance to fully play with it yet so reports coming later on. Sadly today we also had a lecture from Microsoft and i found myself liking something that they were showing us so much that i got home and tried it out straight away its called Popfly and it is built on their new Silverlight technology you need Windoze or Mac OS X to use it as it is a plugin for your browser but it allows you to create widgety things ridiculously easily - drag and drop stylee!! It is still a Beta but if you interested then head to popfly here.

Below is something that i knocked together in literally 3 mins (it is a little basic but proof of point!):-

BTW you need to install the plugin - i think?!?!

The time has come for me to tell you all that I have been very silly….. I have signed up for another cycling event however this time it is for charity.

I am taking part in the BHF Champagne Route Ride which will take me approx 300 miles across France in 4 days - something to give me another target to work towards.

Please just take a minute and visit my sponsor page here and give what you can - it is after all a worthy cause.

A lot has gone on since i last posted - i have been busy trying to get back up to speed with uni stuff etc.

Im now cycling most days to uni - something that my legs wont ever let me forget when i do this with a hangover :-S.

Im back in with the Riding Club here and have been out on the socials so far this year - good fun that they are they always end up in the Union atm for Reload - something that doesnt work well with my vow not to drink that much anymore as it is near impossible to be in Reload and not be Drunk :-(.

Now for the Bike Porn…

As I have barely touched my Full Sus freeride mountain bike in favour of the road bike i have gotten rid of it and replaced it with ….. a Trek Madone 5.0 double - a fully Carbon bike with Bontrager Carbon love in the way of seatpost and stem etc.

Initial thoughts are DRIBBLE it is around 6Lbs lighter than my other roadie and quick though adjusting from my triple is a little difficult esp around here with all the hills :-S

As I seem to have a massive aversion to hill climbing and seeing as I am in Wales I have come to the conclusion that i should confront this painful part of cycling head on - I regularly make a loop out round from mine to devils Bridge - a route that has about 7 miles all up hill to start with - the effects are noticeable as i have lost around 1 stone since being back here :-D.

There will be a post about my final year project coming along with Info on my Nas setup but i just havent had the time yet.