scottyau

So the last post left off here: Just like the thermostats housing before it, there were a couple of issues.  The bolt holding the lower anode in snapped when I tried to remove it.  The irony there is that it didn't need to come out to remove the lower section of the outboard.  There were also a couple more serviceable parts that needed to be replaced once I had the lower section off, which meant waiting a week or two for more parts to arrive.  Add to that a crazy couple of weeks at work and this past weekend was the first chance I had to get Dusty back together.  When the lower section came off a few weeks ago, it looked like this: First thing was to clean it all up.  There was a lot of sand and gunk in there, the seals on the exhaust adapter between the lower and upper section of the outboard had melted away and I needed to get that snapped bolt out to replace the rear anode (the anode was now loose and would have made a fair bit of noise vibrati...

So a few weeks ago now we took Dusty down to give him a run with his shiny new (old) VRO pump.  We put him in the water and once warmed up he was running really well.  Nice and smooth, humming along. After about 10 minutes at a decent speed the over heat buzzer went off.  My first thought was that I hadn't fixed the wiring like I thought previously.  However when I turned around to look at the outboard I noticed the telltale was spitting a bit.  So I cut the engine to have a look.  I thought maybe I'd sucked up a plastic bag or something and there wasn't enough water getting through.  I pulled the engine up and there was nothing visible on the intake.  I dropped the engine back down, pulled the cowl off and started it again.  The buzzer was still going - and checking the wiring it was definitely one of the temp senders this time (not the low oil) that was grounding to sound the alarm. It was at this point that the telltale got worse, not ...

So September has seen a bit of a change, in that instead of spending the little bit of time I get at the bench, it's been spent outside doing a bit of work on the boat getting it ready for a summer on the water!  The following happened over the last 3 weekends, and a little bit here and there during the weeks in between.  It was all kind of going on at the same time - but i've written it out as if it was one after the other. We inherited the boat from my wife's granddad.  It's a fibre glass runabout with a 1985 Johnson V4 90hp oil injected two stroke.  The Johnson was one of the first models that used a Variable Rate Oiling or VRO pump.  These VRO pumps are a real sticking point on the internet and at the jetty alike.  People seem to give them a real bash for being unreliable and causing an outboard to have running problems or worse still - kill the outboard altogether (due to lack of oil). We've only had the boat for a couple of summers, but it's been ...

This week my 1541 Ultimate arrived: This thing is nothing short of amazing.  Sure they are not super cheap - but they are awesome, and I can only imagine the man hours put into the design of this thing.  I like supporting people that have built stuff on their own in their spare time and have come up with something great.  I've only spent half an hour or so using the 1541U and it works exceptionally well.  I know there are other things it does - I'll need to spend more time getting to know it better.  So what did I load first with this thing?  Games of course!!!! Next on the list is the right adapter/cables so I can get some sound, and a joystick or two!

I got my hands on a Dell 2408wfp at the end of the week.  This guy has an S-Video input, so I could remove the S-Video - VGA converter I was using in the previous post.  I plugged it all in and flicked the switch: Much better! GO64: Not sure I will get it much better than this - open to suggestions though.  Now that I have a working setup I can start to look at what I might run/do with this thing, I've got a few ideas.  More to come!

tl;dr  It works!  Read on for detail. So I finally received enough bits to connect up the 128 and power it up and see if it works.  First up I needed a power supply, so I ordered one from Ray Carlsen.  Ray makes a replacement 64/128 power supply with new parts.  The design is available but as Ray mentions, sourcing all of the parts wouldn't have worked out much different to buying one from Ray.  He's a great guy who's been repairing Commodores for a long time.  Pretty impressed with the supply, and its good to know that I won't be troubleshooting any issues with the power supply side of things.  It is setup for 240v - but it still has an American plug on it.  I'm using an adapter for the moment, but once I have a setup i'm happy with i'll put an Australian plug on it: With the power side of things covered I needed to look to video out.  The 128 has three ports for video out, the round DIN connector, the RF connector and the ...

While I have been reading and building a few things on my own, process is a little slow going due to time constraints.  It's probably going to be a little while before I have any boards in hand that are of my own design.  So to scratch my soldering itch I ordered some very cheap kits off eBay a little while ago.  No other motive in mind with these other than just a bit of fun putting them together.  There are kits available locally, but none of them are this cheap.  If they were things I might put to use I'd be happy to spend a little more, but as these will probably just got on my shelf of bits - the cheaper the better.  The first two were through hole clock kits, $5.60 and $7.70 respectively (including postage).   They actually arrived quite quickly.   Kit no. 1: Both kits have a PDF with schematic and contraction details.  The PDF is not required for construction though thanks to the detail on the silk screen.  Kit no. 2: ...

I bought something off eBay about 2 weeks ago now and it arrived yesterday: As the title suggests - a Commodore 128 .  I've wanted a Commodore 64 or 128 for a long time but they always seemed quite expensive on eBay.  This one is a complete gamble.  Sold as is - untested - due to there being no power supply and video cable to test with.  It was however priced appropriately for a change and in Australia.  So I rolled the dice.  The auction included just the unit itself and a copy of the Commodore 128 System Guide: The outside cover is a bit poor but the inside pages are like new.  Interesting British stamp printed on the front.  I also found a note inside the guide on a bit of paper about how to load a program from disk.  What was interesting about this hand written note was the paper the note was written on: Check out that offer expiry! I have a power supply and video cable en route which I'll put some more inf...

I finally pulled the trigger and bought a bench power supply.  Up until this point I have just been using the ATX breakout board .  I've been looking around for a while, trying to way up price vs features and finally settled on the Siglent SPD3303D . The supply has 2 fully adjustable channels that can work in independent, series and parallel modes.  The 3rd channel switches between 2.5v/3.3v/5v at 3A.  The display only covers the first 2 channels, the 3rd channel just has the LED displaying CV/CC mode.  The 2 adjustable channels also have a timer function which can be programmed either on the supply itself or via USB using the included software (just like other features). I settled on this guy because it ticked all my boxes - and physically was the right size for my shelf as well. There is quite a lengthy thread on this particular supply here  on the EEVBlog forum.  This thread mentions two issues found with the supply - namely: Spikes / ov...

Just like playing with micros I wanted to get my hands on and play with come CPLDs so I went hunting around for some tutorials.  The one I settled on to start with was this one .  It uses a CPLD from the Altera MAX II family.  The chip itself is not overly important but the branding on the chip is - as this is basically an exercise in learning how to use a the associated vendors software.  I found the same boards used in the tutorial here , ordered and waited for delivery. Once the boards turned up I opened one up and noticed that the board was not very clean.  There was a lot of extra flux and other gunk on the board.  It worked - it just wasn't clean, so I thought I'd have  go at cleaning it. After googling around I found a lot of people using a lot of different ways of cleaning their boards.  At lot of people talked about just washing it with some warm soapy water, or even putting it through the dishwasher.  I found this completely wei...

I've been playing quite a bit with Arduino based stuff over the last while.  It's an awesome way to get started without a huge amount of low level knowledge of the micro required to get an LED to blink.  I wanted to try some bare bones bits though with some ATMega's as well.   I found a few different tutorials online that explain the gap that the Arduino bootloader fills.  One of the ones I liked the most is the Hack a Day series on AVR programming . I ordered a few ATMega168 's from Core Electronics .  I've been buying a bit from them lately.  They are here in Australia, with pretty good prices and very fast shipping. As for the AVR programming hardware I decided to use my BusPirate (fully supported by AVRDude). So I read through the tutorials and got to the section in Tutorial 02 where it's time to connect up and program the ATMega168.  Dangerous Prototypes have a full page on using the BusPirate as an AVR programmer . There were two bits tha...

Ok, so I've been a bit slack while on leave and let Scotty down by not posting up my speedometer. I swear I will, however, today is more about server administration than an electronic project. The reason I am writing about this is that it took me a while and a lot of reading to get everything I needed to grow, repair, destroy and create (in that order oddly enough) a RAID5 software array with and overlaying Logical Volume. A while back I purchased a HP micro server and with the assistance of a mate got it up and running with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The OS runs of a USB key inside the server, while the RAID5 array sits in the bay drives. I needed the help originally as I had no real idea about LVM ‘s (or for that matter any real working knowledge of a RAID) – so to begin with I had four 2TB hard disks, which gave me about 5.4TB of usable space on the array. As with all things, I 'had' to tinker with my Micro Server. The plan (as suggested by said friend), install two ...