The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

GPS+Voice Interface for Wouxun KG-UV3D: Circuit Hackage
Having had my old ICOM IC-Z1A HT stop working, most likely due to the innards finally shaking loose, I replaced it with a Wouxun KG-UV3D dual-band radio. Unfortunately, the interface box I designed to connect the Byonics TinyTrak 3+ GPS modem, the helmet earbud/mic, and the external battery pack to the Z-1A doesn’t work with the Wouxun. It’s all different:
- Mechanical interface to the radio
- Battery voltage
- Power control
- Mic level
- PTT interface
I modified the interface box from my bike thusly:

GPS-HT Interface Circuit Mods for Wouxun

Because the KG-UV3D uses the Kenwood HT interface with a single ground for mic, speaker, and PTT functions, there’s no need for galvanic isolation; all the optoisolators & the audio transformer will Go Away when I rebuild it.

The plug connections:

Wouxun KG-UV3D Mic & Speaker Jacks

Tip Ring Shell

3.5 mm +5 V Mic audio PTT

2.5 mm Speaker audio Buttons Ground

One distressing change: the IC-Z1A mic power was 3.5 V behind 400 Ω = 6 mA into an optoisolator LED, but the KG-UV3D puts 5 V behind 50 kΩ = 100 µA into a dead short. I think the voltage will suffice to drive a logic-gate MOSFET to switch the power through a PNP transistor, but, for the moment, I hotwired OK1 and “control” the interface power by unplugging the external battery. The radio runs from its own snap-on Li-Ion pack.

The PTT now has a separate logic wire and is no longer multiplexed as a DC current on the audio line. The hack on OK2 was the easiest way to make that happen on the existing board, but the TT3 PTT Out line can probably drive the PTT directly.

I’m not happy with the audio levels; the KG-UV3D requires more mic gain (which change doesn’t appear in the mods) and more TT3 output. Having tediously calibrated the TT3 for the IC-Z1A, I’m not looking forward to doing that again. I still like using an analog multiplexer to switch the audio signal, though, because it doesn’t mix the machine noise with the voice transmissions.

Bungied GPS Interface Box

There being no way to mount the box on the radio and no way to control the interface power if I did, I simply lashed it to the side of the pack holding the radio behind the seat. Obviously, that can’t last forever…

I think the KG-UV3D stuffs more RFI into the mic circuit, because that box is now in the only position that doesn’t result in weird voice audio dropouts. Given the precarious nature of the thing, though, I must look again after getting it in a box on the radio.

Earth to amateur radio manufacturers: seen from out here, it’d be perfectly OK to standardize some of this stuff!
2011-10-05
Toyota Sienna Bank 1 Oxygen Sensor: Replacement Thereof

So there we were, on our way to the Dutchess County Fair when I noticed the Check Engine light glowing beyond my right hand on the dashboard. We decided to not stop at the fair, drove through Rhinebeck, and returned home without turning the engine off.

The last time that light came on, my Shop Assistant and I were on our way to Cabin Fever in York PA one Friday afternoon in mid-January. The Mass Air Flow Sensor had just failed, rendering the car un-driveable: the engine ran so poorly we barely got off I-81 to drift into a parking lot. Although the local Toyota dealer was just across the road, I replaced that sensor on Monday morning in the Autozone parking lot, half a mile down the road, at 19 °F in a stiff wind with inadequate tools; said Toyota dealer being useless like tits on a bull during the entire weekend.

After the obligatory research, I put the van up on jack stands, crawled underneath, and discovered that the Bank 1 Oxygen Sensor lies behind & below the transverse-and-rotated engine, directly above and front of the chassis cross-support strut, where it cannot be seen or touched from any position. That’s why there are no pictures: there was no room for a camera and nothing to see.

I had to buy a 3/8 inch breaker bar, as the sensor position lacked clearance for a socket wrench, a U-joint, a T-handle, or a step-down adapter from my 1/2 breaker bar behind the special 22 mm Oxygen Sensor Socket. I eventually got the sensor loose and unscrewed it one painful eighth of a turn at a time, with the exhaust pipe preventing a full 1/4 turn, removing and reseating the breaker bar with my fingertips for every single one of those increments.

I ~~deleted~~ all over Toyota’s ~~censored~~ for quite some time thereafter…

It’s been a couple of weeks, the Check Engine light remains off, and I hereby declare victory.

2011-09-20
Too Many Deer: Consequences

Fawn eating kiwi leaves

The three pregnant does we’ve seen this season produced two pairs of twins and one set of triplets. That’s just for the does crossing our yard; we’ve seen many others around the area. The fawns are, of course, insufferably cute, but the deer have eaten everything growing on the forest floor, eaten all the tree leaves within reach, and are now working on vegetation that deer don’t normally eat.

Such as, for example, Mary’s long-suffering kiwi plants by the garden and various distasteful flowers in front of the house.

One doe maimed her starboard foreleg in an automobile collision; she was hobbling around for about a week before vanishing. Fawns, who don’t come out of the oven knowing that automobiles make fearsome predators, tend to die young; three of the seven have died on the road within walking distance of the house in the last two months.

Dead fawn at Deer Crossing sign

We recently heard a sharp bang! bang! out front, shortly followed by a police car accelerating along the road. It turns out the officer dispatched this fawn with two shots below the left ear; I think they carry a special .22 caliber gun for this very purpose. No, the fawn wasn’t standing around waiting to be shot; it had just starred in Yet Another car-on-deer collision.

This, according to the local deer huggers, is a much more desirable outcome than harvesting surplus deer and eating them. I haven’t noticed any deer huggers volunteering to pay for damages; that seems to be an externality to them.

A billboard up the road demonstrates their total lack of comprehension: a pastoral scene showing a buck (with a full rack) nuzzling a fawn. Pop quiz: who wrote that book? Bonus: how much interest do actual bucks display in their offspring at any time?

A previous rant on this subject is there.

2011-09-10
Windows 7 First Boot

OK, this resembles dynamiting fish, but I can’t help myself. A cute little Lenovo Q150 with a D525 dual-core Atom and nVidia ION graphics just arrived, which, perforce, has Windows 7 preinstalled. The first step is to get Windows activated, updated, and settled down… the second step being, of course, to shrink that partition to a nub and install Linux for actual use.

After a bit of huffing & puffing, reading (*) & clicking of many EULAs, and the first round of updates:

Windows 7 – You must restart your computer

Every time I see that, I think of the old dialog box joke:

Mouse motion detected. Windows NT must reboot to apply this change. [OK]

Then it had to update .NET, which produced this unbelievable body count of changes:

Windows 7 – Applying update operation

And then another few rounds of updates, the last of which evidently crashed & burned. The Get help with this error link was, mmm, unhelpful; it simply reported they hadn’t the foggiest idea what went wrong. Rebooting and retrying the automated updates presumably worked:

Windows 7 – Some updates were not installed

Doing all of that while puttering around with other stuff occupied the better part of a day, after which one owns a PC with an operating system installed. Yeah, you do get a UI that exposes IE 9, but if you want to do something with the PC, well, that requires installing applications.

I loves me my default Windows desktop background, from a long-ago crash inside a VM:

BSOD – fatal app exception

(*) Yes, I do read them, mostly for comic relief. The general practice of forcing you to scroll through a sheaf of typewriter-formatted pages in a 2×3 inch peephole centered in a huge monitor suggests that they really don’t want you to know what’s going on. Anyone who suggests buying commercial software because it has a reputable company standing behind it has obviously never gone to the trouble of reading the relevant EULA.

2011-07-20
Independence Day 2011

From our Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

We read the original document in DC a few months ago, while doing the touristy thing. These days, that means submitting to a search on the way into each museum; Mary lost her forgotten-in-the-bottom-of-her-purse Swiss Army Knife to the Smithsonian guards.

We left town feeling that something has gone badly wrong in the last decade or so.

2011-07-04
Wal-Mart Unit Pricing Amusement

OK, let’s see how well you do on this round…

In the Mysteriously Missing Label category, we find three similar products with only one shelf label. Which one is the better deal?

Caffeine unit pricing

You might think it’d be the Wal-Mart Equate house brand. In order to find out, you’d have to haul all three offerings down the aisle and around the corner to the price scanner, which would reveal it’s the one on the far left, by a considerable margin. Oddly, that one says “Double Strength” even though it has the same 200 mg dose as the others.

In the Bizarre Units category, we have two very similar products with completely different unit-price units of measure. Seeing as how a “fluid ounce” is a unit of volume and a “pound” is a unit of weight (or, for the pedantic, force), even the dimensions aren’t compatible. Clicky for bigger pictures.

Vanilla unit pricing – 2 oz

And, just to show that wasn’t a one-off mistake that could happen to anyone, the smaller size containers continue the theme.

Vanilla unit pricing – 1 oz

Given that nothing in a Wal-Mart store happens by accident, someone was directed to remove two of those three labels and another someone deliberately chose incompatible units.

Of course, anyone I’ve ever asked has no idea why that would happen…

Previous rants live there and there.

2011-03-07
Measuring Tape Crank Handle Repair

My Shop Assistant (who now merits a Proper Name) returned a fairly new measuring tape to the Basement Laboratory, reporting that the retracting crank handle fell off in “normal use”.

Stripped handle threads

Admittedly, this was a surplus find, but you’d think the build quality would be a bit higher. I’m sure I paid a minute fraction of list price: you could have bought it for much more in a reputable store.

Maybe this is why the whole lot got scrapped out:

Handle detail

I applied a bit of JB Industro Weld to the plastic (?) threads on the spool, twisted the handle in place, squared it up, then eased more epoxy around the top of the threads and let it cure flat on the bench.

Remounted handle

I’d say the original design wasn’t particularly good and the implementation left a lot to be desired. If the interior fittings have similar flaws, I’ll eventually regret applying JB Weld in such a cavalier manner…

2011-02-22