Sno' Movin'

We got some snow... 20+ inches... and then it changed to rain. The driveway was turning to slush, and the snow-blower was having trouble with the heavy wet snow. This, of course, means it's time to break out the big snow machine. Bill and Ollie got the battery hooked up and fired it up. The 3-53 runs like a champ!


Then we had to clean a path through the back yard so we could get the bucketloader into the parking lot.


By taking successive swipes with the bucket, we got the parking lot cleaned up to an acceptable level. We were worried that if the slush froze, it would leave 1 foot deep ruts in ice, making it difficult to get out of the parking lot. Here, we're just removing a lot of the slush and making a big pile across the road on the far side.

While the machine was out, we moved some snow around and made some little jumps in the backyard, which Ollie immediately took advantage of.

Computer Fixin's

Here is a sad G5 iMac. It is so sad that it can't even make the frowny-mac face. When you try to power it up, it doesn't do anything. Careful listening reveals that it starts to power up but then powers down within 1 second.

This, of course, means it's time to take it apart. As suspected (because of its age), some of the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply section had failed. These things typically only have a 1000-2000 hour lifetime, so it's not uncommon to see failures in older electronics. A quick order to DigiKey (about $20 worth of parts), a bit of soldering to remove the old caps and install the new caps, and it was ready to put back together. The knife block in the picture was used to lean the motherboard against so I could heat the solder on one side and pull the cap off from the other side.

Yay! A happy mac! It's very satisfying to fix broken electronics.

Tarden Timelapse

The first year of our Tarden (what you get when the Tards decide to grow a garden) has been fairly successful. Using an old (~1990 vintage) 8mm camcorder hooked up to my Mac Mini on the porch over the summer, we took some stills of the garden once an hour. After removing all of the "dark" pictures during the nights, I made a quick time-lapse video.

We finished putting up the frame with some help from my bucketloader. We used lag bolts at the top to attach to the frame of the garage. The goal is to have no support posts so that we can get the large vehicles toys (like bucketloaders and dump trucks) to the back yard. This video is our 2 hours of work squeezed into 2 minutes.

Fixin' up the garage

We're adding a little roof to the side of the garage to protect the short walkway to the side door from falling ice/snow. The bucketloader is helping us out here, as this section of roof is heavy. The frame is made up of wood recycled from another roof that we dismantled. We have some metal roofing (also recycled from the other section of roof) that we will be mounting to this frame.

Fun with LEDs and CNC machines

When my cousin Ian was here during the summer, he wanted to make something cool for a girl... It's amazing what boys will do for girls. He wanted to make something really cool and personalized. I, of course, saw this as the perfect opportunity to play with my CNC machine.

First, we used a super-tiny end mill (0.020 inches in diameter!) to engrave her name in a piece of acrylic.

Then we created a base from polyethylene. While it machines OK, it absolutely sucks to cut on the bandsaw (it just melts against the blade). It was so bad, I ended up using the mill to "cut" the piece from a larger block. Here, we've added an LED. This one is a green (because she likes green, of course) Avago 1W LED. We put one at each end facing towards the center where her name will go.
Here's a test of the unit. The green LEDs shine into the acrylic, and where it hits the engraving, it comes out the front. The picture is a little over-exposed. It looks way nicer in real life.We tucked all the wiring into the base and added a barrel plug in the back that hooks up to a miscellaneous DC "wall-wart" I had laying around. The barrel plug fit nicely into the hole we machined into the base, and there was a slot in the bottom for all of the wires and a resistor (to limit the current to the LEDs). The wires and resistor were kept securely in the base using H.G. technology (that's Hot Glue, for the unacronymned).

Tards repeated on 2 meter amateur radio

Aaron has constructed a 2m receiver and we finished aligning it. Ollie duct-taped a dual band whip base station antenna to make it vertical and we connected it to a vhf/uhf duplexer. The UHF side was connected to a 448.500 MHz transmitter at about 1.5 Watts. The receiver was connected to the VHF side at 147.740. The units were linked with a small PIC microcontroller that Ollie helped me build during the long winter. This provides Morse code ID, tail, and tailbeep, as well as timeout functions. This is all the features you need for a ham repeater which allows you to be rebroadcast from a good vantage point. After a cranky solder joint on the transmitting crystal was identified, I did a road test with KB1FLG with my HT in the car. I was able to go 4.5 miles up route 12 before things got scratchy, not bad for an antenna laying the driveway. This could be the basis of a system that is remotely located and/or solar powered. (BTW, in case you care, the TX crystal was from a toy walkie talkie at 49.830 MHz, which x3 and x3 is 448.5)