StormNet

 Chase 5 (formerly Chase 15) is in the midst of a major vehicle rebuild. I had a decent setup in the Tundra last year, but I was unhappy with how disorganized things got during a chase, and how frequently problems arose out of poor organization. There were also occasional equipment failures and malfunctions cause by power supply issues and interference.

 The Tundra has been stripped back down to stock, and is being reconstructed with all new (largely custom made) hardware. A whole new electrical system using careful RF filtering on all hardware will cut down on interference.  Complete integration of the inverter, emergency lighting, both laptop power supplies, all radios, and hopefully the video camera power supplies as well will ensure I never have to worry about cigarette lighter plugs or a million individual power leads tangled up on the floor.

 A new primary laptop and video streaming laptop will improve reliability and will also hopefully cut down on the amount of overload my poor little netbook suffered. It should improve stream reliability and quality as well.

 So far, fog lights have been installed, the 60 amp DC bus has been run into the cab, and emergency lights have been installed. Everything else is awaiting the arrival of the parts for a new custom designed laptop bracket from the machine shop, and a large batch of filter capacitors and ferrite chokes. Many many hours of work still remain, but it should be a hell of a package once its finished later this month! I'll be posting photos here every couple of days of the work as it progresses.

 The two features I've been working on for so long have finally come together on the site. We have easy to use, functional blogs for any of our team members who are so inclined. We can post in-line images, embed flash and streaming videos, and we have a very nice photo gallery that we can use in conjunction with these articles. We can also easily post these blog entries to our Featured Articles section on the front page.

 We've purged all of the user accounts except those of active StormNet team members. This is because we don't intend to have anyone other than team members contributing content, and we won't have any content that's off-limits to non-members. If you aren't writing articles for us, don't worry about creating a user account, everything we have will be visible to you!

 There's still a little work to be done on a few features of the site. I'd like to figure out a way to make our actual photo gallery accessible for members to upload photos themselves. A 'featured photo' box on the front page is in the works. I'm also hoping to work out a warning scroller using the NWS RSS feed, and incorporate Vimeo flash badges right into the user profiles.