Why?

I have been an aeromodeller for many years and have always been fascinated by the more unusual projects. However, this story does not start there. Instead it starts 25 years or so ago when my father bought me a small radio control Tug boat, Tug Alfred.

This suffered the usual trials and tribulations of being owned by a 10 year old boy and has been sunk, holed and damaged many times. As I went through college it was relegated to the attic and, when I joined the military, it moved attic every 2-years or so, sustaining yet more damage. Finally, I decided that I either had to throw it out, or restore it. I didn't have the heart to throw it out, and here the story begins. If I was going to restore it, then I was going to go all out and add as many scale features as I possibly could such as working winches, lights, smoke, turning radar etc. As a mechanical engineer I initially created multi-position rotary switches operated simply from servos to control everything, but these proved unreliable and liable to cause interference. As I researched simple electronic switches on the internet from such wonderful sources as Ken Hewitt and Michael Norton's page I kept stumbling upon terms like PIC and Flash devices. Having built a couple of simple switches and acknowledged that they were not sophisticated enough for my needs, I eventually went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought '123 PIC Controller Experiments for the Evil Genius'. From this I taught myself enough 'C' programming language to do simple applications and over the following years gradually increased the complexity to the projects within this website. The full story of "Alfred" is chronicled below with the various generations of electronics and gadgets. The sequel is detailed throughout these web pages.