Author: Ed

Our Old Studebaker

1957 Studebaker in Police Livery

Thinking of my parents’ 1957 Studebaker President (in the context of our mixer leaking oil) prompted me to do a search on the obvious keywords, which produced this link. Search for “police unit” and you’ll find a nice picture of a black-and-white President with a gumball machine on the top. Here’s that picture, just in case link rot sets in.

That’s my parents’ car, right there!

Turns out that Mom sold it to a Canadian firm (probably Fawcett Movie Cars and a deep link there) that supplies cars to moviemakers; she’d put an ad in the Hershey Antique Auto Show flyer and it worked. A guy showed up with a trailer, money changed hands, and he hauled the poor thing away.

They transplanted a functional engine from a donor hulk, restored the dual exhaust system that my grandfather had the garage strip out (“Two mufflers cost too much!”), and did a perfect restoration of the rusted eyebrows over the headlights where road mud and salt always collected. While they had the hood up, they installed power steering; that thing always turned like a truck, what with a big iron V8 over the front wheels.

On the way to Rebound

The car appeared in Moonshine Highway in police livery and HBO’s Angel of Harlem (a.k.a. Rebound) in civilian dress. Here’s what it looked like on the way to the Rebound set.

A private collector in Ontario bought it from the movie folks and found a registration card in my father’s name stuffed behind the glove box. A bit of searching turned up me and now I know what happened to it.

So, if you just bought a nice black-and-white 1957 Studebaker President from a guy in Canada, there’s a bit of its history. I can tell you more, but nobody else really cares, I suspect…

2010-02-16
KitchenAid KSM90WW Mixer Oil Leakage

Oil in end cap

Our KitchenAid mixer gets plenty of use turning out bread dough, but it tends not to get moved around a lot, because it’s an awkward and top-heavy bit of gear. Mary moved it recently and discovered oil puddles underneath. The scene put me in mind of my parent’s 1957 Studebaker President: it had a bad rear main seal and the oil leaked out just slightly slower than we could pour it in.

Anyhow, it seems our mixer isn’t the only one to have a slight incontinence problem, as a casual search on the obvious keywords will reveal.

Rear housing view

I usually leave the mixer angled up, which caused the oil to drain to the rear of the housing, where it followed the main support strut downward into the stand. From there, it spread out and dripped off several local minima, forming perhaps four puddles. Most folks leave it horizontal, whereupon the oil evidently drips out of the lower cover into the bowl.

The rear view of the guts shows the oil oozing out both sides along the bottom of the joint between the housing and the end bell.

A rag and some denatured alcohol cleaned things up pretty well, but I do wonder what’s going on with KitchenAid… I’m not looking forward to replacing the piece-of-crap plastic bevel gear that evidently strips out after a while.

2010-02-15

ALSA Sound Samples Are Monaural

The Arch Linux setup guide uses the ALSA sound samples in /usr/share/sounds/alsa to verify that everything’s working:

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

Which, as it turned out, worked perfectly: a female voice front-and-center.

Flushed with success, I tried some of the other samples:

cd /usr/share/sounds/alsa/
ls -l
total 1212
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 137134 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Center.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 142128 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146990 2009-10-20 05:26 Front_Right.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 135202 2009-10-20 05:26 Noise.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 130096 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Center.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126064 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 146480 2009-10-20 05:26 Rear_Right.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 134868 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Left.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 129966 2009-10-20 05:26 Side_Right.wav

All of which played front-and-center.

Come to find out that they’re all recorded in Monaural mode, so the file names don’t really mean anything.

soxi Front_Left.wav 

Input File     : 'Front_Left.wav'
Channels       : 1
Sample Rate    : 48000
Precision      : 16-bit
Duration       : 00:00:01.48 = 71042 samples ~ 111.003 CDDA sectors
File Size      : 142k
Bit Rate       : 768k
Sample Encoding: 16-bit Signed Integer PCM

Definite disappointment, that… it’s not Arch’s fault, they’re monaural in Ubuntu,too.

2010-02-14

Cutting Pin Header Strips

Slitting dual-row connector

I needed a few strips of single-row pin headers, but the parts bin was empty.

I hate it when that happens.

The heap disgorged a handful of double-row strips and, of course, I Have A Machine Shop.

So: no problem.

This is, I admit, not cost-effective, but it took about 15 minutes to slit the aforementioned handful of strips right down the middle and get back to soldering.

The trick is to use an ultra-thin slitting saw, rather than a regular saw. The one here is 4 mils thick and the better part of 7/8″ in diameter; call it 0.1 mm x 22 mm. I think it came with one of the Dremel tool kits a long while ago.

Cut about 1 mm deep on the first pass, then cut through on the return to avoid having the saw deflect too much. Run about 100 mm/min, 1000 rpm, and no coolant. Line it up by eye, type manual CNC commands into EMC2, and it’s all good.

The trick is finding a mandrel that doesn’t collide with the vise; my larger saws have a rather thick screw-and-washer arrangement that doesn’t fit. I think some padding (chopped-up credit cards?) between the longer pins, mounting the vise vertically, and grabbing the longer pins would fix that. The catch might be clearance between the top of the vise and the bottom of the spindle motor.

Better to just buy some single-row strips. Sheesh… but if all you have is a CNC mill, you have plenty of solutions.

Another slitting saw repair is there…

2010-02-13
Digikey Full-Line Catalog

For the first time ever, Digikey sent me a full-line catalog.

Digikey catalog

It’s 2778 pages long, three inches thick, and weight 2 kg.

Some time ago I made the mistake of replacing our large rusted-out mailbox with a much smaller one: the catalog presented a solid wall of paper when I opened the door.

Here’s a closeup…

Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae

Now, I’d love to have you believe I’m such a high-rollin’ kind of engineer that Digikey spares no expense on my behalf, but the only explanation for this embarassing situation I can come up with is that their customer service system blew a gasket in my general direction…

What makes it even more ironic is that they’d recently sent me a survey asking how I’d like to get their catalog. I’d emphatically replied that I did not need a paper catalog or a USB stick with the PDFs. Just let me do the on-line searching and occasionally refer to the appropriate PDF pages and I’ll be fine.

The damned thing is basically useless; I hate to just toss it in the recycling, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it around.

I just removed my mailing address from their list, presumably leaving my account info intact; we’ll see if that sticks.

2010-02-12
Disabling OpenOffice 3.1 Word Completion
I type well enough that OpenOffice’s default word completion isn’t helpful, so the first thing I do in the first document I open after a new installation is turn word completion off. Having just installed Xubuntu 9.10 with OpenOffice 3.1, I rummaged through the menus and couldn’t find that option. OK, I’ll let my fingers do the walking through the online Help.

Huh. For some inexplicable reason, the OOo help files aren’t installed by default in Kubuntu 9.10 or Xubuntu 9.10. I install them, only to find:

Word Completion
Set the options for completing frequently occurring words while you type.
To access this command…
Choose Tools – AutoCorrect Options – Word Completion tab
Enable word completion
Stores frequently used words, and automatically completes a word after you type three letters that match the first three letters of a stored word.

Which is absolutely correct, should you happen to be editing a text document at the time. Oddly enough, the Word Completion tab doesn’t appear in that dialog box when you’re editing a spreadsheet… but the setting applies to spreadsheets.

So.
- Save and close the spreadsheet
- Open a new, blank text document
- Do the menu dance just like the Help text describes
- Un-check the mumble Enable word completion box.
- Discard the text document
- Re-open the spreadsheet
There, now, wasn’t that obvious?
2010-02-11
TLC5916 Minimum LED Current

The TLC5916 datasheet seems to say that the minimum regulated LED current is 5 mA, but that’s painfully bright at, say, 12:08 in the early morning. Indeed, those 3-inch blue LED digits lit up the entire house from the living room… sometimes, a high-efficiency LED isn’t what you need.

This graph from the datasheet suggests that the current can be somewhat lower:

TLC5916 Current vs Rext

With that in mind, I replaced the 1 KΩ resistors with 3.9 KΩ parts.

The graph says the maximum current should be around 5 mA and, indeed, the formulas indicate 4.7 mA. The minimum current is a paltry 0.4 mA: lo and behold, the early morning illumination became bearable. After I put the LEDs behind some dark-gray polycarbonate, it’ll be just about perfect.

If it’s too dark, I can always solder another SMD resistor atop the 3.9 KΩ chips.

I figured out how to compute Rext somewhat more easily than the datasheet would have you believe and documented the process there.

2010-02-10