An Interruption Most Rude

 On Tuesday evening I was speaking about AMOS (over Zoom) to the Raspberry Pint group in London, England. It was supposed to be an update of the last 9 months of development work since I had presented to them previously back in January. I started off with a recap of the reason and history behind AMOS, and then got into the details of the recent improvements on the AMOSRemote wireless transceiver, the AMOS-IMU electronic compass, and then... my screen turned red. Entirely red. I was able to press the ESC key to view windows in the background, but the PowerPoint was still red. We decided that I should try to stop sharing, and then try re-sharing to get it going again. I clicked the 'Stop Share' button, and that's when the stream of porn and loud music started. The presentation had apparently been hacked by someone. A couple of the guys tried some things to resume control with unsatisfactory results, but then had a pretty clever idea: ask everyone to turn on their video. Anyone who didn't comply would be booted out of the presentation. I think this resulted in a few people needing to leave who didn't have working cameras, but the intruder must have also left, because I was free to continue my presentation after that. The "intermission" had been about 10 minutes, and I felt a bit weird for a few minutes after that, but I was able to finish without incident and answer the questions from the audience afterward. Hopefully it will be possible to splice together a video of my presentation at some point. Until then y    (Edit: Richard Kirby at Raspberry Pint has already edited the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHVf25cZ-AI&fbclid=IwAR2EUiuZ1--wo5dYfUvKESNI-UL03GPUu0JSVwXt4maH_EfZ_fMTm4NZLsI  )You can see the PPT slides here (guaranteed to be family friendly!): 

 https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/12L3EXMMcrxIQD2Ic7eXweo_RAyHzjQuS

This week has been fairly busy with meetings, but there has been a bit of time to work on the creation of a mold for constructing AMOS hulls out of two-part foam: 

The idea is to make a mold that will be lined with saran wrap and filled with a two-part foam mix that expands very quickly to make a foam with a density of ~ 2 lbs / cubic foot. Once finished, the mold will be in a shape that is a mix of the catamaran and surfboard prototypes. The hope is that it will be possible to enclose the electronics boxes (or wooden blocks of the same size) within the hull while the foam is curing. There will need to be some vent holes too, to prevent the pressure of the expansion from breaking the mold or the boxes.