MoominPapa

More on the numbering habits of the GUCo. The locks on the Leicester line are numbered contiguously from Watford Bottom lock to Trent Junction and beyond - the locks on the Erewash continue the sequence. Strangely, though, the bridge numbers seem to reset again to one at Mill Lane Bridge over the Mile Straight in Leicester. MP.

Hatton top lock is 46 and Camp Hill top lock is 52, so that's evidence that the renumbering happened when the GU bought the Napton and Warwick and the Warwick and Birmingham (1927) and NOT when the route was widened (1932). MP.

They do seem to have done so, with the sequence continuing beyond Bordesley junction down the Garrison flight and ending at Salford Junction. Lock 58 seems to have mysteriously disappeared from between Camp hill bottom and Garrison top. I'd guess it may be the number of the stop lock half a mile further on at the junction with the Digbeth branch, but it's not marked as such in my Nicholsons, actually it's not marked as a lock at all.

Ah. From the website Ray linked to: The Grand Union Canal shares it's watery passage with the older Oxford Canal between Napton Junction and Braunston Turn. There are no canal locks along this shared stretch of water but there are quite a few canal bridges. These bridges naturally show the Oxford Canal's numbering and naming system (Bridges 91 to 108) however they are also allocated bridge numbers in the Grand Union Canal's sequence although these are not displayed on the bridges themselves. So the A45 bridge in Braunston, as well as being Oxford canal bridge number 91, is Grand union (northern) bridge number one! Mystery solved. Thanks peeps! MP.

That's the southern section. Those numbers start with Butcher's bridge as number 1 and go south. I'm taking about the northern section which starts at 17 at Napton Junction and increases northwards to around 110 at Salford Junction. MP.

I known that the Wigram's to Braunston turn bridge numbers are Oxford Canal, as is the A45 bridge in Braunston because the first Grand Junction bridge is Butcher's bridge, number one. But why do the northern section of the Grand Union, the former Warwick and Napton and Warwick and Birmingham canals, start with bridge 17 at Wigram's turn? The bridge and lock numbers are contiguous past the bottom of Hatton, incresing towards Birmingham, so they were clearly renumbered when the two canals came under one ownership, but why did they start at bridge 17 at Wigrams and not bridge 1. WHAT HAPPENED TO BRIDGES 1-16? Enquiring minds want to know. MP.

Hmm. I'd quite like to hear the steerer's side of that story. MP.

One of the bottom gates is bulged in a way no lock gate should ever be. You need to shut the gates on a specific order to get them to close at all. At least that was the state of play last Autumn. I can't believe CRT have done nothing about it. Other problems noticed recently. There's a landslip at the North end of Shrewley tunnel which is slowly but steadily filling in the canal. (There are a couple of landslips in the cutting North of there too: the obstructions used to be marked by hazard tape but they've been there so long the tape has degraded and gone, but we still bounce over the deposited material.) The free board is so low in a few places either side of Preston Baggot on the South Stratford that the water is running away over the towpath. Some have been patched with sandbags, one has a rather fetching little dam of sticks and stones that's added to by passing children, like a cairn. There's also a substantial leak out under the towpath South of Lowsonford. One of the bottom gates in Braunston flight has substantial movement between the failed frame and the boarding when it's opened and closed. If that lasts a season I'll eat my hat., MP.

Just a thought. Did you pay attention to the polarity of the Tyco coils? They have built in snubber diodes and if you connect them the wrong way round the diodes will just shunt the coil current and nothing will happen. MP.

A switching transistor would be better. I used MOSFETs because of the low leakage current, but in reality bipolar would be fine too. MP.

The screenshot shows that I'm a grizzled old systems programmer, having difficulty finding my inner hipster web-designer. The chain is quite long. The serial port on the Arduino is connected to the console serial on the boat's internet router. via an opto-isolated half duplex current loop interface. The boat's router runs a little daemon which listens on a TCP port and copies data to/from the serial port. There's no protocol translation, so once the TCP connection is set up, the code to talk to this is identical to talking directly over the USB virtual serial line. The tools I had to talk to the BMS over the serial line got extended to talk over TCP. This is mainly useful because I don't need to plug my laptop into the BMS USB port to get data whilst on the boat now. It turns out that Three mobile internet still gives a real, routable, IP address, and the USB stick modem I use allows port forwarding. I use dynamic DNS to set a record in my DNS zone to the current IP address of the modem, and port-forward to the router behind it, so the BMS is now directly accessible from the global internet with the same TCP interface as before. I have a virtual private server in the cloud running Linux which has a web server on it and I just made a trivial CGI program which runs the data-access tool to get the data, and reformats the data as brain-dead html. So, the chain is webserver -> CGI -> BMStool -> internet -> boat router -> relay daemon -> serial line -> BMS MP.

Looking good. My latest battery activity has been to give in to Victron envy and put my batteries on the internet. I can access the BMS to get data from logs etc over the net, and there's even a web page with a summary status so I can access it from my phone. I draw the line at writing Android apps. MP.

There is no current stoppage for Ratcliffe, and the last email about it came on the 22/03, with the stuff about needing a crane boat, and above it, no less than four copies of "Work has been completed by our maintenance team and Ratcliffe Lock is now operational again." dated 9th March, 18th March (twice) and 22nd March. If CRT normally produced accurate and comprehensive stoppage notices, I'd just be confused, but as they don't I take the current state of affairs to indicate that it's fixed. MP.

There's next to no traffic on the South Stratford, but the new marina above Odd Lock was heaving with people boat polishing. MP.

How bad? One alternative is Lapworth/Hatton/Wigrams/Braunston/Foxton/Leicester and free. MP.

Not planning to go to the G&S that way, planning to use the Fossdyke/Chesterfield/NE canals as an alternative bolthole from the Midlands narrow canals when madness starts The Avon has got off fairly lightly, I think. MP

Would love to, but we want to be out of the way before everyone is let out. Will either go the Sharpness via Tardebigge, or maybe head northeast via the Trent. MP.

Musing on that, or another plan entirely. In any case, we have to go back up the South Stratford. Feels like we're never going to escape Lapworth...... MP.

From the "you couldn't make it up" dept. ANT have had information on their website for weeks to the effect that the river would be open from the today (29th). https://www.avonnavigationtrust.org/covid-19-information/ They've just announced that three locks are closed until further notice, so no boating after all. https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?u=dd70487f491f61a9edd4e5105&id=8abebd91f2 Grrr. That's screwed our plans to hide on the Gloucester and Sharpness when the everybody is let out. MP.

In the RCA cables. Eg. https://ebay.co.uk/itm/3-5mm-Car-RCA-Amplifier-Audio-Noise-Filter-Ground-Loop-Isolator-Channel-Tool/313465473734 MP.

A possible source of the problem is a ground-loop. The audio output of the DAC is referenced to the same ground as the power supply, so changes in the current used by the DAC and the PI get coupled into the audio by the non-zero resistance of the supply cables. The normal solution is an isolating transformer on the audio. MP.