Crazy stance... er... Corsa C!

Nathan has been hard at work over the weekend slamming his girlfriend's little brother's Corsa and giving it some crazy camber with shim washers to the hub-bottom. Nice.

Crazy Remote-Switch Setup:

One of the major clients at work has decreed that beacon-switches hidden away in coin-trays or under the dash are no longer acceptable as "the lads are having to take their eyes off the road to find them". I'm not sure why 'the lads' would be looking to turn the beacon on while on 'the road', as it is illegal to use them this way, but ho-hum, what a client wants a client gets and the powers that be have decided remote-switches are the way to go. This isn't a bad idea - it's less holes drilled in brand new cars that have to be sold next year, but they're dearer than normal switches and in its quest to be ever cost-cutting the company has gone for the cheapest, tackiest remote-switches you can buy.

These come in a plastic-box, Maplin style, where you have to drill your own holes for the wires. They also come with no instructions and were a nightmare to figure out, for me anyway. Someone with even basic electronics knowledge would probably find this a doddle, but I didn't frankly, so here is the setup:

The red live from the battery [top wire] is split to both the '12v' on the left-hand terminals and the one marked 'NO' on the right-hand terminals. The red live from the beacon (or whatever) [lower wire] goes to the terminal marked 'COM' on the right-hand block. The earth-wire from the beacon joins to the battery-earth and the left-hand earth-terminal, marked 'GND', joins to that somehow. Syncing-up the remote-fob is mad too. You have to bridge the right-hand two of the four pins at the bottom of the board, using the tip of a screwdriver or something. The board starts clicking. Press the fob button and it stops clicking, but the fob-button needs pressing another few times for the board to recognise it. Also, remove the jumper from the left-hand two pins, or the beacon will only work while the fob-button is being pressed... What a thing.

Ant's awesome Land Rover Discovery 2-Door mudder.

This quite rare-sight 2-door Disco is lifted and has knobbly-tyres, a snorkel and a rock-crawler plater over the front live-axle, which I never realised Disco's had. Now I know why people still like them.

His mate bought it for buttons two weeks ago and proceeded to get it stuck in a local pond, so none of that extra equipment made a blind bit of difference without a winch-bumper.

The thing was on its last legs from the outset, but the combination of the wheels hanging on the diffs in water for a day and the mud being churned through it, but a drive-shaft snapped on the front and the diff-lock got stuck in. Frankly, it's become a nightmare to drive on the road and is doing the Landy no good, but nevertheless it has tax, insurance and a valid MOT, so Ant is using it for work along with his Fiesta ST. It will be especially handy if we have the snow that is predicted.

WickTek MIDI2CV new build rather profesh board!

Thought I'd beat Wickham to posting a pic of his nicely made new MIDI2CV board.

1/12 Tamiya Honda NSR500 (Wayne Gardner 1986) Plastic Model Kit - old skool fun!

The stores guy at work collects these model bikes, he has a few on his shelf in the stores. I decided to build one for shits and giggles, then stick it on the shelf. It began as a comedy, do-a-crap-job thing, but I got carried away as I do with everything and ended up sinking 20 hours into building and painting it. Sadly, this made handing it over to the stores guy slightly homo-erotic and smug, rather than tongue in cheek.

Exploding Macbook Pro power adapter!

We've all heard of the fake iPhone and iPad chargers going boom, but this was a 'budget' one I bought for my Macbook Pro. Had I not been sat next to it and seen the black smoke rising, it could have torched me room!

Amazingly it still works, as in supplies power to the laptop, but ejects a shower of sparks from the hole every time it is plugged in. It then glows red and after 10 minutes the plastic begins to melt and bubble, but the fuse does not blow and it continues to get hotter...

Apple needs to take note of this in the same way as the fake iPhone/iPad chargers - looks like they're all  dangerous... Is this an unwanted side-effect of Apple doing something to devices to prevent the use of imitation accessories?!

Rather than buy another cheap imitation charger, I opted to once again repair my original Apple charger, pictured below, which now has exposed wiring and must be the crudest fix in the history of electronics - yet it has been working fine now for 6 months... eclipsing the entire working life of the fake charger by 5 months!

The next time this breaks, I'll be removing the split cable entirely and soldering in the intact one from the burnt-out charger - I would advise doing this from the word go if you buy a fake charger.

Wickduino Revision 1 in the etch tank!

Knocked up a single sided Arduino Uno clone in eagle. It should be 100% compatible with two small caveats:

1. It can only be powered from USB as there is no voltage regulator or external power connector on board. Because of this the VIN connector just goes straight to VCC so definitely DO NOT connect an external voltage to this unless it is a regulated 5v.

2. There is no secondary chip to handle USB/Rs232 conversion, so the chip must be flashed with USBaspLoader firmware. This firmware emulates the USBasp in system programmer on the boot section of the chip's flash, allowing you to write to the remaining space using AVRdude, Arduino IDE or any other AVR programming software that supports the USBasp interface.

 

There's a Zip file on the way with all the schematics, layout etc. Just waiting to get it set up and running so I can include the pre-configured bootloader firmware.