Fulton's Followers

Back about a decade ago, my neighborhood buddy from Cohoes, Ken, WB2TDG, got me involved in a group called Fulton's Followers. They were making a museum quality display of the inner workings of Robert Fulton's Clermont Steamboat for the Museum at Clermont, NY. They had a model of the entire Clermont vessel, but it was a static display. Pete observed that it was totally lacking as to how the engine works and wanted to create a model that moves and shows how a steam engine works. That begat Fulton's Followers! 4 of us worked on the project, presenting a preliminary design to the Board of Directors of the Clermont Site. We continued on to make a museum quality display for the Clermont Site Museum, presented May 12th, 2011. The display was a combined effort of all four of us.

From the left, my buddy Ken, Wb2tdg, Me, David Clark, a retired NASA engineer, and Pete Baker , a retired Rotron design engineer.

The original model to the left, and our animated model to the right.

The guts of the project with my animation controller.

The bottom right is the heart of the controller. A PicAcxe microprocessor board. Now, replaceable with the Raspberry Pi Pico!

A fun project with some really great people!!!

Jim K2BHM