Perversions of an Engineer
As the name suggests…
Parcels galore! Dimension Engineering’s Dual 5A motor controller came in the mail today, as well as the USB to serial converter off eBay but most important of all another Shapeways order has arrived.
Disclaimer on video/photo quality – camera battery was flat so all photos/videos taken with HTC Magic phone…so might be utter crap…(Actually photos turned out ok…video is a bit dodgy).
Dead tired and sleepy but just a quick update post on project status.
mChumby is temporary halt as I tried to figure out why I’m not getting battery voltage over the DLC-2 connector, probably a fuse blown. Time to dig up the Mazda manual.
MFC has been decommissioned and the stationary trays are serving quite well holding components, nothing is wasted and everything is recycled.
The WL-520GU will be used again in MFC2 along with the batteries and camera. The relay board is being sold and replaced with a dual motor controller from Dimension Engineering called the Sabretooth 2×5. Very easy to interface to via Serial (with Pot, R/C control as options) and very fair ($2.50) shipping to Ausralia! The bilge pumps will be used again, but this time not as the crappy pumps they are. The motors taken out of their casing and impellers ripped off. Waiting for a pair of custom 3D modelled propeller prints to come from Shapeways or some tests.
Boat should come along nicely… similarly waiting for some custom 3D propellers to come from Shapeways as its almost darn impossible to buy such small props anywhere. Also printed a couple of shalf couplers, wonder how they’ll turn out.
After getting my EasySync USB-Can Adapter it was time to resurrect the mChumby project. The interface GUI design hasn’t changed much, namely because its been lying idle but I figured it is good enough to try putting it onto the car for a test run.
I didn’t want to fiddle around with getting power to the Chumby, so the test is simply using my trusty old laptop and the EasySync adapter. Only the speedometer, the tachometer and the accelerator pedal position is attached because again I’m too lazy to fiddle with my cable layout and as such its connected to the Mazda HS-Can bus only rather than the MS-Can where the goodie trip computer information is contained.
Almost every concoction of technology is used ranging from CAN, USB, PHP, HTTP, Shared Memory, XML, Flash, to an obscure programming language called HaXe. Here is the result :-
The teeny tiny fibre-glass hull’s have arrived! The beam is narrower than I expected but that’s probably due to being stuffed in the packaging, I’ll double check the scale beam width later.
Photo time! Standard SD Card for size comparison 😉
A few more photos…
Continue reading “Schnellboot $100 (S-100) – Part 2.1 Fibreglass Hulls Arrived!”
Just heard that the fibre-glass hulls are almost complete and I’ve still done really nothing about the little boat. A couple of areas of concern are :-
To answer the first one is quite easy by weighing the equipment I’ve already purchased in Part 1.
To answer the second one will unfortunately prove to the world I’m inherently lazy and still a kid on the inside.
Continue reading “Schnellboot $100 (S-100) – Part 2 Proof of Concept”
I had this planning post drafted up to help me in ordering the parts for a 1/144 Schnellboot remote control model, but a couple of sick days last week meant I went on impulse shopping online and all my parts have arrived before this is even posted! Sick days are bad for my wallet. Very bad for my wallet.
Yes, that is “Colour” not “Color” for all your Americans out there! 🙂
Simple super short post 🙂
HTC Magic tethering is possible with USB without requiring to ‘root’ the phone, simply with Azilink.
Simply follow the instructions on the page!
APN type also needs to be set to ‘default’ for 3G/HSDPA to reconnect itself, leaving it blank means it won’t reconnect 🙁
Glorious model warships pounding at each another with cannons, and in the midst of all that is my ‘floating camera’ contraption that didn’t work too well but worked…it floated, it took photos…it lived up to its name…madox Floating Camera…
The results weren’t too bad from the onboard video recording, just a few issues with camera alignment and disconnections when using my friend’s laptop (mine ran out of juice). Here’s a sample clip of the captured footage :-
And one more super nice video courtesy of Andy (aka not me) :-
Read on for more photos and videos
Continue reading “Australian Battle Group – National Battle Meet 6 June 2009”
It floats, it moves, its held together by duct tape!
Just a short photo/video post of a couple of test runs in the bath tub…
Read on for more videos and photos of this test run…