The last couple of days I've been fighting a small hardware issue with the Tank Light and I believe I finally understand the one pin on the IC and what the definition of the pin means. I'm using all the pins on the processor and the one pin has been a real sore point. I was trying to use this one pin to power up the photo sensor and the battery voltage monitor circuit. If that was possible it would allow those two circuit to not draw power all the time and allow the daytime operating current to be around 5uA or less. The photo sensor network can draw up to 60uA and the battery monitor network draws another 60uA on 4AA or 100uA with 10V.

I'm ordering what I believe to be the final version that no longer has this feature. The daytime operating current will include these numbers.

The good news is I found a brighter LED. It's almost twice as bright as the Seoul in this application and low is now too bright. I will be testing it and I believe I will be dropping all the current levels in half. That means the runtime will nearly double even though the daytime (off) state idle will be higher. Low will most likely end up 0.25mA dropping for 0.5mA. That's 6,000 hours of run time and using a 12 hour night time number equates to 500 days before the batteries poop out.

I updated the PCB and made the 123 version. Both are in process now and will be here early next week.

The plastic spacer which I term frame works like a champ. I can use liquid plastic cement to glue the frame to the bottom of the top and then glue in the clear caps, turret assembly. Once the top has set applying a thin bead of glue around the top perimeter of the board and the top assembly is glued down. It goes together easy. The only hard part is the turret.

I've got the PCBs back for the final version of Remora, GDUP, anode GDUP. I have yet to muster the energy to start loading the GDUP nor started writing the code for the microprocessor.

The SOB is finally going to run. The first batch is for a client. After that is completed the shoppe inventory will be run and they will then be available on the shoppe.

I'm very happy with the Remora board and the functionality. Too bad there is no way to control the brightness to zero. Pulsing SOS is less than optimum and confusing.

I did a test the other day. Cindy had an opportunity to do a ride along with the SJ Police helicopter unit and they circled our house on the way from the airport to SJ and while circling I shined my Makita in SOS mode towards them. The light (during the day) was visible and was confusing. Cindy said she could make out the SOS pattern, but, that's only because she has used the light and has been part of my beta testing of the UI all along. The two pilots said it blinked a lot and they had no clue what the blinking meant. Before you start ranting I'm very sensitive towards pointing lights into the sky and towards planes and other flying objects. The pilot is CIndy's sisters husband and he buzzes our house every now and then. When he does I always shine the light onto the ground. It's more than visible and it's not directed into the sky.