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The Weather on Saturday was Crap. Raining and No wind. I felt really sorry for the guys over the hill trying to run a regatta, only one light race Saturday. Wrong time of year for this part of the country... Either No wind or a stinking wet storm. Sorry everyone, hope todays wind is better and you get some sailing done.

I woke at 2am Saturday. My Voice steering project is so close to raceable... Last Wednesday the delay was just to great from voice command to the rudder turning. So I was going to have to look deeper under the hood and find where my bottle necks were.

On a windy day the google offline voice did not think the conversation was finished due to other sailors talking and the strong wind noise. My design was only taking just the last two words of each sentence. The easy solution was to change the speech recognizer to pirated one, that could take any words as they passed by mid sentence. You know longer have to wait until the end, and this time saving was huge! Even if it now picks up a few unwanted commands while you talking to others while you and sail.

2. My Ai2 phone application was waiting for a reply from the Bluetooth module to let it know it received the last signal. Solution was not to care if it did or did not get signal. If boat does not turn, just say it again... It only saves a few milli seconds, but at the moment ever saving counts.

3. Another BIGGEE time saving was turn the Bluetooth 4.0 module up from 9600baud to 115200 baud rate. This made such a difference from 2 second delay to a 1/2 second delay (I did not except such an improvement). Hopefully in years to come, as the next generations of Bluetooth modules filter down, they might get even quicker, fingers crossed. I have now a couple of new Bluetooth 5 module from China on order, Only $10 but they are two months away. They may or may not faster on the A13 phone? Bluetooth is currently up to version 5.2, but you have to wait for the Phones and modules maker to catch up with this new tec. (Compared to Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth 5.0 can transmit eight times more data, at twice the speed, across four times the range.) Maximizing BLE Throughput on iOS and Android - Punch Through Hopefully these claim are true get rid of my 1/2 second delay ???

1pm Saturday I shot out the lake with my receiver thrown in the DM3plus IOM. To my surprise Nigel's truck was there and he was out in the rain too. I put together the Voice system and raincoated up. The system was 100 times better than my Wednesday J Class session and I sailed for half an hour without the need for the Transmitter sticks at all this time :) The boys got sick of me talking to myself, so I go the transmitter out of the wet bags and in the process put the boat in reeds while under stick steering. A quick retrieval and Myself, Nigel and Gary raced around the buoys in a nice light 1 knot breeze in the pouring rain for an hour. Still a great session, despite the weather and I am so happy with with where the voice steering has gotten too so far.

So where to from here??? is the Million Dollar Question ???

The single Stick steering input is still way superior than my Voice steering ! Way faster at responding with no time delays.

The big time saving have been made on voice recognition and only little gains going forward from here.

I might be able to cut some input times from two words to one word instructions increasing the speed half a second...

Maybe I could hardwire the cell phone and remove Bluetooth delay altogether but then how do I keep the USB microphone input?

Do I add facial recognition camera, or the mount the Cell Phone on a baseball cap and use the cell phone Gyro angle change to steer the rudder to compliment the Voice command system already working ?????? : ) : )

Much to think about. My goal is to have the system good enough to race, and be able to win a race using the final working prototype.

Sunday morning here, and Off shortly to put the 2nd layer of glass on Jarrod new J hull.

(hopefully layer one from last night has cured, cold wet night but not too cold...)

There is some blue sky here in Tauranga this morning, Hopefully the rain clears in Hamilton too

and wind comes in today for the boys over there on day two of there Waikato IOM Champs.

Happy sailing everyone