Conclusions system test

Wonderfully successful test.

Everything critical that could have failed did fail except for the fuel cells.These work great. And they are so easy to use. There is basically...well, about nothing to do really. Plus they are super super silent. Amazingly silent, except for the slurpy noise, like someone is drinking Coke with a straw and bad manners. I love these guys!

So very successful as when you understand why things fail early they are less likely to fail when it is much more difficult to debug them.

• Doomsday device stopped working
• Solar panels did not charge batteries
• NKE did not work

More details

• I practiced anchoring on my own due to lack of wind and not wanting to have to stay awake all night drifting near a lee shore. Worked great. Boat loved it. Anchor loved it. I loved it. I still turned on massive instrumentation, VHS, GPS, etc... to try to eat up as much power as possible and have the fuel cell decide it is time to take over. They pushed out over 2 Amps into the batteries and peaked at about 4 Amps when I really got cranking. Loved it.
• NKE didn't work. Looks like some miswiring somewhere. I just wouldn't initialize properly so would turn to port when it really should be starboard and vice versa. Really confused. Brian fixed that today. It seemed to initialize fine. Kept coming up with an error message this weekend.
• Doomsday device worked great on day 1 and stopped working middle of day 2. I hardly steered at all on day 1. OK, the top gust I saw was about 7 knots so perhaps not too demanding on the equipment but it certainly worked fine during that whole time. And power consumption was really low. It hardly drained the battery. I even had to force the fuel cell on as the AP wouldn't draw the batteries low enough before I wanted to go to sleep and anchored after running most of the afternoon and some of the night. Turned out (Brian checked into this) that a resistor 'melted' because my motor is too big (it is the standard minitransat motor according to NKE!) - so that's now fixed and will be fixed going forward.
• Solar panels did not charge: one defect in a connector to the big solar panel (now pumping 6 watts into the system when overcast) and the 40W seems dead. The 12W is just a topper and I wouldn't expect it to really charge up battery more to keep them topped off when the boat is not in use. Doesn't even push an 1amp.

The solar panel mount worked GREAT!!! Jason is a miracle!