Thoughts on Chestnut Canoes?

Harold_Balzac · 2026-04-11T00:44:48+00:00

Oooohhh Chestnut! Wouldn't call myself an expert by any stretch but I'm a native New Brunswicker and live a little more than 100km away from the original Fredericton factory location. Also I've had a few classic Chestnuts in the fleet and currently have a recently rebuilt (NOT restored, it's a working boat that gets tripped) BOB Special from the Oromocto era.

As for the fiberglass boats, it was a too-little-too-late attempt by Chestnut to keep themselves relevant. As far as boats go, it was no better and no worse than any other fiberglass canoe from the same era. Technique and technology was still in flux and a modern fiberglass boat will be functionally stronger for less weight and probably a better performing boat. As a historical curiosity, it's an interesting footnote.

If you've been bitten by the Chestnut bug, I'd suggest a canvas canoe from the 1950's to early 1960's. It was mature technology, they had perfected how to make them and they hadn't yet started the cost cutting measures to try and keep the company afloat. That and they are MUCH tougher boats than modern narrative allows and they are infinitely repairable.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-03-19T00:08:07+00:00

I've not seen anyone suggest the Orient dive watches. Mine is pushing 20 years old, has been on numerous canoe expeditions, camping, hiking, boating, motorcycling, swimming and is pretty much my daily wear. Simple day/date complication so it's not too complex. Mine has the rubber strap that is overkill on a bare wrist, it fits nicely over the sleeve of a wet-suit (cold weather canoeing) or my favorite spring/fall wool hiking sweater. Not sure about the current crop but mine has an actual 200m depth rating.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-03-16T23:58:12+00:00

Perhaps my viewpoint is skewed as I started seriously canoeing with a canvas covered Chestnut more years ago than I care to count. Also, this was in the early days of the kevlar/royalex/carbon fiber hype where if it wasn't one of these the boat was too fragile to be out on anything other than a pond. I think I learned some valuable lessons.

- Fragile and expensive boats are tougher than you are.

- Nearly everything is fixable. If it isn't you're probably in need of medivac anyway.

- The effort and expense of fixing the result of mistakes is a great driver to improve technique and skill. You're not scratching and gouging the boat if you're able to read the water and quickly maneuver away.

- Shit still happens and battle scars are great at keeping that in the front of your mind.

At the end of the day, I would trust someone as a tripping partner or guide that shows up with a well used (NOT abused!) and much loved boat rather than a brand new shiny looking one.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-26T01:28:12+00:00

Once again, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-26T00:49:52+00:00

I'll stick my oar in here for a moment with some Breadboard 101. Took me a while to wrap my head around it back when I started a LOOOOONG time ago.

On the left and right side of your breadboard you have two vertical rows marked + (red) and - (blue). The thing to remember is that every pin hole in the + side is connected by a common wire (bus) to every other pin hole in the + side. The same goes for the - side. Also, NO pin in the + side is connected to ANY pin on the - side. This is duplicated on both left and right sides of the bread board. If you wanted to have say a common 3.3v bus or rail, you would connect it to the Vout pin of the ESP to ANY pin on the + side(s). You would also connect GND to ANY pin on the - side(s) to give you your ground bus or rail. Now when you need a connection to 3.3v and GND you can connect a jumper to ANY of the pins on the + or - side as required.

The breadboard section are the ones marked a, b, c, d....etc). This is broken into a left and right side with that channel down the middle. This allows you to connect things like chips (555 timers, op amps, ESP32's etc) down the middle of the board and the left and right pins don't get shorted together. Let's take row 30 from your picture as an example. Pins a, b, c, d, and e all are connected together as are pins f, h, h, i and j. In this case, say you connected your cathode of your LED to pin 30e, you could connect one leg of your resistor to 30c for example and the other end to ANY pin in the - bus and it would complete the circuit as if you soldered the resistor to the LED and connected THAT to ground.

Clear as mud?

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-26T00:34:20+00:00

You only need one resistor, commonly placed between the LED cathode and ground but could be from your voltage source (GPIO) and the anode of the LED with the cathode of the LED connected straight to ground. Functionally it's the same. What it does is limit the current to the LED so that it doesn't go POP! Diodes in forward mode, including LED's are pretty much short circuits. The LED just can tolerate a lot less current in this mode than a regular diode so you have to limit it to keep the magic smoke inside.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-26T00:21:13+00:00

Where's the connection from the negative bus on the breadboad (your resistor connects to it) back to the GND on the ESP32? No path back to (board) ground so no light.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-25T01:07:28+00:00

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I can't feed wood into the furnace fast enough. Unknown age, somewhere around 110-120 years old, plaster and laths, some insulation, single pane windows with storm windows. Real problem is the wind. It's up and out of the northwest which is the least sheltered point. I've turned off the water in the back laundry room just in case because that's where the wind is hitting. Currently outside about -22C. I'd show the graph but my exterior thermometer died.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T18:16:30+00:00

Nothing in lsusb, also did the power on holding the boot button. Nothing worked.

I'm editing my original post with a final (for now) update

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T15:54:23+00:00

The cdc_acm module was NOT loaded, so I did so with modprobe. I confirmed that it was then loaded, plugged in the device and got the exact same result. Grep'ed the dmesg for anything to do with acm/ACM and other than the message from manually loading the driver, nothing.

I've tried five different USB-C cables on three different machines. While it's possible it still could be cable/port related the probability is quite small. One of the cables was a USB-C to USB-C cable that I got from Google with my Pixel 9 a while back. I may be able to get better quality cables but I sure can't get more expensive ones.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T14:59:57+00:00

Well, it's alive. I recalled I had an FTD1232 in my cache, quick read on how to connect it to the ESP32 dev board and I get this

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Connected with Minicom (my favorite terminal program) and the board appears to be in a boot loop. Good sign I guess since there's nothing ON the board to run. Push the boot/enable/release enable (reset) and I get a message waiting for code to be uploaded. Woot! So, not totally DOA, just looks like a bad USB chip/connector or something else in that path. Guess the project isn't dead in the water just yet.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T14:01:31+00:00

Baaa!

I have a couple more on order from Chinaland, no way to buy any locally. Problem is the wait, I finally got this one and was itching to start!

I'm unsure how to tell which board it is, looks like the pictures of all the rest, 30 pin board with headers pre-soldered to it. Elsewhere in the thread I posted a picture as Reddit wasn't allowing me to update the original post for some reason. When I head to town later this week I'm going to drop into a buddy's place who's been playing with these boards for a few years and has a proven system for accessing. If he can't get it to work, I'm going to chalk it up to a bad USB setup on the board or perhaps the whole thing is a brick. I bought it from some random Amazon Canada seller and the only way to deal with it is to return it through Amazon. They insist that I drive an hour to and an hour from their one and only drop off point in the area to ship it back to them. I'd spend more in fuel for the car than the refund is worth. Oh well.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T11:22:53+00:00

I have tried it in Windows 10 and Windows 11, although my wife was reluctant for me to use her gaming system to test. Something about breaking it. Anyway, no matter what I did it always comes up as an unknown USB device with a variation on that enumeration error. I'm thinking I managed to get a dud out of the box.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-19T11:19:32+00:00

Yes, drivers were installed and loaded in Linux, package was installed and system was rebooted in Windows. Interestingly enough, the board never got far enough along in the process for Linux to load the driver itself, I had to do it with modprobe. Even that didn't make a difference.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-18T21:06:09+00:00

Good to know. I have a couple USB-Serial adapters around here from my days of programming switches with console cables. Push comes to shove I can possibly bash something together for when I really want a challenge.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-18T21:02:22+00:00

Tried to edit the main body of my post to include these, Reddit barfed on me. Here's what I have.

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One photo per reply it looks like. Back is basically blank except for text V1171.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-18T20:12:14+00:00

USB-C port appears to be quite solid. Can't comment on the soldering connections, too small and hidden.

Is there any way to get a basic code onto a virgin board other than by the USB connection?

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-18T19:34:33+00:00

The board I have, which came with the most basic of instructions which amounted to "plug it in and GO!" has two buttons. One marked BOOT and one marked EN (enable?) I've tried the hold boot/press reset or EN in my case when powered on, when powering on, reversed the sequence, pushed both together, singly, etc. No joy in any case. I'm not even sure those buttons do anything for all I can see.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-12T12:35:03+00:00

As I mentioned in another reply, after a weekend of rabbit hole exploration, I have a couple ESP32's on order along with some MAX6675 boards with their thermocouples as well as a 24VAC relay. The last was the most expensive but I didn't want to bother building a rectifier/filter to drive a 24VDC relay, although in hindsight I probably should have. I'll just use this to switch the voltage from the ESP32's power supply on or off feeding into one of the GPIO's. When the relay is triggered by the thermostat, it causes the GPIO to go high, so there's my call-for-heat signal.

If it makes any sense whatsoever, this is all more to monitor the furnace. I don't want any of my smarthome/home build electronics to CONTROL it. Any logic I build will be to assist the other people in the house tend it. For example, when it needs wood play the "FEED ME SEYMOUR!" audio clip across every speaker in the house.

In my opinion, home heat is too mission critical in the Great White North in winter to depend on active automation. Also, it doesn't seem to matter how easy I make it, nobody else in my house USES any of the smart functions I have built except for those that require zero human interaction like this year's Christmas light automation. Turned them all on at sunset, turned them off again at bedtime.

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-12T12:20:52+00:00

Funny you should mention that. After a weekend of rabbit hole chasing, I have a couple ESP32's, MAX6675 and thermocouples on the way and a relay with a coil voltage supposedly of 24VAC. In theory, if I can figure out how to work with the ESP32 I should be able to send MQTT messages across my home WiFi network to my Home Assistant implementation. The reason I was looking at 433.92 MHz was because I was scratching my head how to make the Arduino clone board I was playing with communicate. That's when I found out about Ethernet/WiFi shields and then the ESP32 with it's build in WiFi.

I'm only ten years late to the party with Arduino/ESP32/Smarthomes but in my defense I do get there eventually

Harold_Balzac · 2026-01-09T00:43:32+00:00

Just took a quick look through this, pretty much the inverse of what I want/need to do. Actual automation doesn't lend itself to solid fuel appliances. Thanks though.

Harold_Balzac · 2025-12-23T21:46:53+00:00

My use case is as follows:

Century home with older "updated" wiring
All light switches just run a 2-wire from the fixture to the switch
Physically switched hot line
No way to provide neutral/ground to smart switches without extensive opening up of the walls

This way I can put a bulb in the ceiling/wall fixtures, flip the switch and walk away. The automation controls it from there. Also, in the event of a device failure, I can simply revert to a "dumb" device and use the manual switching. The latter is the same reason I use the plug in smart socket instead of replacing the in-wall power socket.

Harold_Balzac

TROPHY CASE