International WISclub Meeting

August 11, 12 and 13, 2006

The participants:
  • Ben Zijlstra
  • Dirk Pickee
  • Frank de Beer
  • Frans-Pieter Voncke
  • Franz Achatz
  • Ad Bos (guest)
  • Theo Kleyn (guest)
  • Jan de Beer
  • Jan Hermans
  • Jan Verhoeven
  • Jan Wagemakers
  • Klaus de Jong
  • Maarten Blomme
  • Ronald van Aalst
  • San Bergmans
  • Spouses and children
Friday 11 August 2006
On Friday, Maarten and Jan indicated to arrive around 3 PM. But at quarter past 2, Maarten called me on my cellphone: he missed the train in Mechelen and that caused a one hour delay. The problem was: Jan doesn't have a cell phone yet he was waiting at Kontich Army base railway station. So he could not be reached.
I tried to call Jan's land line phone, but of course he wasn't there. I mailed, in the hope that he would read it after having waited for some time at the station. I even tried to contact Kontich railway station in order to have a message broadcasted on the platform speakers. It all failed. Which I told to Maarten on his cell phone.
Maarten replied that his father managed to contact Jan's father and the latter drove to Kontich railway station to tell his son the train was delayed...

This one hour delay meant that the guys were destined to arrive around 4 PM. It took until 5 PM that the blue car pulled up towards the IWM HQ driveway. They had been in a major traffic jam between Antwerp and Breda, which had no visible cause. Yet, they were here and we unpacked the luggage and went inside.

It had been raining for the last two weeks (on and off) and today, we already got 15 mm of rain from noon until 3 PM. So this didn't sound very well. Since it was rather damp and chilly outside, we stood inside and chatted along. The rain had stopped.
Around 6 PM, San arrived and we discussed what to do for the evening. We had not bought extra food for the guests and it was too cold for BBQ-ing in the garden. So I made my guests an offer they didn't refuse: Let's dine outside at a fine chinese restaurant: Wah Sing which is around the corner. Or rather: around some more corners. It's a 1 km walk. Since I had not yet celebrated my 50th birthday this year, I said I would gladly take them out for dinner.

We arrived at Wah Sing around 7:30 PM and ate and drank there until well after 11 o'clock. There was ample food and drinks. We got two times 'drinks on the house' and we enjoyed a Chinese-Indonesian meal for six. The waiters were skilled. The drinks were fine. The food was excellent. It was worth every penny of it. When we were almost finished eating, San's wife Aimee arrived at the restaurant to have some drinks and taste some remnants of the fried duck.
We arrived around midnight at IWM HQ and decided to call it a day and go to bed. There was a busy day coming up. Quarter past 12 all lights were out. End of a nice evening.

Saturday 12 August 2006.
After a short breakfast with our belgian friends, I was preparing some things in my dungeon when the doorbell rang. Who could that be. It was only 8:45 so it could be one of the neighbours.

It wasn't.

It was U-smurf.

He wanted to be in time. Well, he succeeded. First of the day. Of course we showed him in and he sat among Maarten and Jan while Ria and I checked the boxes with food and drink, to be taken along to Diessen. During the next hour, the other paricipants arrived. Franz was also one of the very first.

Brabants worstenbroodje We served tea, coffee and miniature worstenbroodjes. Just for the taste and it's better than cake or cookies. Around 10:30, it became clear that Theo and Ad would go to Diessen in their own car and Frans-Pieter was delayed for more than an hour. So we boarded the cars and went to Diessen.

In Diessen, the tent was already erected and after we unloaded the BBQ's, garden chairs and boxes with food and drinks, the event could start. It took about an hour until the members were familiar with eachother. By that time, Theo and Ad were present and also Frans-Pieter had joined us.
The first event was Franz' Apple One replica. You can read all about it on Franz' site: www.achatz.nl. Franz constructed the A-One around an original 6502 processor but he used an AVR to generate the display signal and some other PAL and GAL chips to eliminate tons of TTL chips. The A-One fits a standard Euroboard (10 x 16 cm or roughly 4" x 6"). San rewrote his SBA assembler to be native to the A-One. He also rewrote parts of the monitor and the display routines.
The A-one was up and running for the full time of the IWM 2006. Many people played with it for some time. It is an interesting machine. We now only need a Modula-2 compiler for it... :o)

By this time, Ronald had prepared his model submarine. He bought a Trumpeter (www.trumpeter-china.com) Kilo class submarine which he retrofitted with a DC motor, WTC and remote control for motorspeed and dive rudders. Inside the vessel is a small microcontroller that regulates the horizontal position. More on the site of U-smurf.
We went to a specially prepared garden pool (5 meter cross section, 1.5 meter high) and Ronald gave a superb demonstration. The boat sailed, cornered and dived. It even surfaced again. We got a superb lecture about the pitfalls of RC submarining. At the end, some of the youngsters were allowed to drive the boat with the RC controls. Which wasn't as easy as they had anticipated up front...

After the sub, we went for the field. Maarten assembled one of his model rockets and he managed to get it airborn. Comapred to last year, now there was an altimeter on board. This added weight, so now the rocket didn't rise as high. Still, it was a spectacular sight.
In 2005, we lost the rocket in a corn field. This year we lost the rocket at landing. The parachute was scorched when it was ejected from the rocket tube. This caused the projectile to land with too much speed and it destroyed the rocket chassis. So in 2006, we also had one testrun... Still, it was impressing for the kids and parents alike.

Spread out all over the day, Frank showed around small groups of smurfs in his machine shop. He manages to collect worn out lathes and mills and 'buy' them for the price of transportation. At home, he takes the machines apart, overhauls all things that have worn out and adds modern CNC control systems. After some years, he built up a set of nice machinery. Most of it controlled by some form of personal computer.

Around 2 PM the table was made for lunch. A do-it-yourself lunch. We supplied bread, butter, cheese and some other spreads. If the smurfs didn't prepare it for themselves, they were to be hungry... It looks like everyone ate just enough to stay alive. Although many a smurf already had some degre of reserve built-up over the years.
Around 4 PM, Klaus arrived, with a crate of 'Groenloos'. He told us about the extremely bad weather over Rotterdam and the massive rainstorms until Tilburg. From there, it was sunshine all over and the road was dry in all places. No rain for the smurfs... Klaus brought along some of his projects and gadgets and soon many people were listening to his cattle stories and watching his BlueTooth gizmo's.

Weber gas powered grill In the mean time we lit the BBQ's (both of which are propane powered; one Weber Baby Q and one Tefal with lava stones). So they could get hot enough to start charring the dead animals. Never try to broil a live animal. They just won't sit still on the hot plate. Also, the hairs produce a terrible smell. Nothing beats dead animals for preparing food.
That being said, Jan kept the fires burning and pumped out a steady stream of deliciously broiled meat and vegetables. There was Cola, Ornage juice, beers and coffee. Chicken, beef and frikandellen. And hamburgers. I also arranged 24 pieces of a 'Broodje Unox' clone, but we didn't need to revert to them. There was enough food for everyone. Smurfs don't eat much, as long as we can talk about micro's.

After 5 PM, the first guests decided it was time to go. Jan Hermans had another party that evening and I think he stayed too long at our party to be back in Weert in time. I consider this a compliment. With pain in our hearts, we separated.
Also Websmurf could not stay until the end of the event. His family returned from a long holiday and there was a ceremony in his neighborhood he was expected to attend. So also he had to depart sooner than most of us.

Back to the main event. The ladies prepared some ritual for Soldersmurf, Websmurf and Brilsmurf. All three of them turned 50 this year. Like Bill Gates. But these men are more famous and mean more to the world. So the ladies arranged some bubbly wines and apple cider. Chanpagne for the ladies and cider for the smurfs. Lucky for us, Freessmurf knew how to open the bubbly bottles and he filled the glasses very cunningly. After a short speech, the ceremony was over and we could get back to business.
In this case, 'business' means talking about computers, processors, programming languages and the like. In the mean time, bugs were removed from the A-One operating system, the SB Assembler and more. In a corner, Maarten persuaded Curlysmurf to switch to Slackware Linux, instead of Debian or (yikes) SuSE.

Around 9 PM, Klaus left for home. He had quite a drive ahead and he had been talking and eating for five hours in a row. Also Ad and Theo left home. Within the next hour, some more members from afar had to leave for the journey home. Which left us with the LWM members plus the sleepers.

Around 9:30 the tent was shut, to keep out the cold of the evening. A lamp was lit, some candles added and a cosy atmosphere After his departure things quieted down a bit. We had a relaxed evening until close to 11:30. Time to split up. It had been a busy day. As usual we didn't watch the transportation capacity. When we went to Diessen, we used a minimum car number. But around 11 PM, there was not enough transportation capabillity to bring the Tilburg members back home. Silly us. We were plain lucky that Frans-Pieter wanted to sleep in his camper on our driveway that night... So we had just enough cars to bring the lot of us back.
Back in Tilburg (IWM HQ) we had some more chats about Frans-Pieters career as a teacher. There were many parallel between him and Doceersmurf and Freessmurf. Apparently, the dutch schoolsystem is going down rapidly.
After a short tour through my dungeon where we discussed the merits of wire wrapping for prototyping and small runs of production series, it was time to hit the sack. So Frans-Pieter went to his camper, Jan and Maarten found their sleeping bags and we went to the bedrooms. What a day.

The pictures taken during this day are on the web at http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album=QCA4N7RX which is a commercial photo lab that allow people to park digital images on their servers in the hope that viewers decide to buy prints online. I don't yet know what the quality of the prints is, but I placed an introductory order through the website. See how it works out. I will keep you posted via this website.
If you are from abroad and still want to order some prints, the best thing to do is to click the link 'Opslaan', after which you can download the original high resolution picture (the original) from the servers of mijnalbum.nl. Just download as many pictures as you like and thereafter supply them to the photoprinter of your choice.

Sunday 13 August 2006.
After a short sleep (1:30 to 8:30) the diehards of the IWM appeared at the breakfast table. TI, Lol, Brillie, Krul together with Marjanne and Ria. After breakfast, we started to discuss soft- and hardware. Krulsmurf brought in his system and we watched him start some weird operating system we never heared of. Somethin with glasses or doors. Or windows. Forgot about it. Anyway, Frans-Pieter wanted to have Linux installed on the system and we could accomodate for that.

After an inspiring session with minor mistakes and major recoveries, we managed to get the system (DarkRoast.Coffeebar) running multiboot with Slackware 10.0 and a 2.6 kernel. When we were almost finished, Soldersmurf arrived because Maarten's bags were still in his van. And he brought the BabyQ back to us. More to come in due time.

Suddenly, it was 2 o'clock. Maarten still had a 2 hour train journey ahead plus a 1 hour ride by car. So it was time to get back home again. We swapped beer for Broodje Unox. I managed to have Frans-Pieter accept one of my surplus VGA screens. And then we split.

Multimedia.
This year things were different from other years. I already had a digital camera (Olympus C-860L) from 2000. But this was just 1.3 Mp so it was too coarse for general purpose picture taking. About a month ago, I bought an Olympus mju 720 SW camera (see also http://www.verhoeven272.nl/camera.html for a real-user-report) which is 7 Mp. Now that's something else! It does fine pictures and can record movies as well. I parked all of my IWM 2006 pictures at http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album=QCA4N7RX where people can see and download them for free.

The movies were parked at googles media site and you can watch them using the following links:

The movies were recorded in 320 x 240 pixels, with sound. By playing them you get an idea of the atmosphere of the event. It was like a gathering of technological boyscouts...
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