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The User Instructions provide a reasonably simple and easily understood overview of what the ARMAC Fire Defence System is (and isn't) and how it is to be used . These Notes provide much more of the technical details of the ARMAC system in its current form. The content is drawn from actual planning documents used as the system evolved to its more final form. Some of the planning considerations have been included in order to assist someone wishing to build to their own situation but utilise some of the ideas here. It is intended both as a reference for current operation and as a living record that can evolve as the system itself evolves.
These Notes have been distilled in large part from a 150 page Development Notes log which I have compiled in the process of building ARMAC. To do that distillation I cut corners using two AI LLMs (Claude 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.2) to speed up the process. To be precise I gave Claude 4.5 the notes and the programming code and prompted it to provide a comprehensive essay on the electronic systems omitting no significant technical detail. I then followed it with some preliminary guidance and the notes and prompted it to provide a similar essay on the plumbing and hardware. I then integrated them, and asked ChatGPT to translate the result into PmWiki formatted pages. Finally I have gone through progressively and edited those pages including, over time adding more explanation, graphics and other detail.
To the extent that this process leaves these pages rather dry I apologise. I will over time go through them and try to improve the text's readability. But at least the process was comparatively fast, and ensures that the overall text is not unmanageably long and still contains the essential technical details.
ARMAC is a site-specific, home-grown system developed in response to the realities of bushfire threat, infrastructure fragility, and the limits of off-the-shelf solutions. Many of my design decisions therefore prioritise resilience, predictability, recoverability and economy over marketability, elegance or theoretical optimisation.
The Technical Notes are organised so that core principles and system structure are described first, followed by increasingly detailed discussions of plumbing, electronics, software, and testing. Subsystems under active redevelopment are explicitly marked as such.
You can find quite a lot more detail in the Development Notes. These constitute notes to myself which have developed over the period of design and construction and which I have attached in more or less original form.
What follows is best treated not as a formal specification, but as a reflective technical narrative: a record of what has been built, why it was built that way, and what has been learned so far.
If you have not yet read the terms on which this information is offered, do not proceed to subsequent pages until you have.
Jim Falk, February 2026
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