It will be a day long remembered

I voted this morning, early, to avoid the rush (which we did).


Remember--this day may complete a saga that has been 500 years in the making. The framers of our constitution considered outlawing slavery, but didn't because it would have destroyed the Union at that time. The US fought a war over it from 1861 to 1865, and pretty nearly fought another one in the 1960s and 70s. And now a black man may well be elected to be the president of the United States, one of the most powerful political offices in the world. Lots of problems in the world, but this is a big step forward.

I had to figure out a bunch of stuff to post that photo. I took the photo in the voting booth, not for sure knowing that I could upload the photo somewhere useful. As it turns out, the Treo 650 phone application can save photos to an SD card:


(I spent over half an hour looking for my SD cards this morning; it turns out they were right were I expected them to be, but under a box).

put the SD card into the SD card reader which only took me a couple of minutes to find



which my laptop mounted like a USB storage device



Ta-Daa!

don't worry; I won't let it go to my head

I finally got the brake system warning light in my beetle back to something like working condition. In the photo below, I have turned the key to "on", so the two red warning lights at the bottom of the speedometer are on (left side of the photo). What's new is that the brake system warning light, which tells you if you have lost the fluid in one of the brake circuits, is now working and thus is lit up to test with the other lamps. It's in the upper right part of the photo, just to the left of the headlight switch.


A major amount of work to score a minor victory--but as a result there are several more electrical circuits on the car that I've crawled through.

Doctor Henry would be proud

One of the things about my Beetle that hasn't worked and really bugs me is the brake system warning light. I'm not sure why this has obsessed me so. It's a minor system after all. I guess it's a little bit like getting into playing Lemmings; it should be so simple, so you spend way too much time trying to make it work.

I placed a classified ad on the TheSamba VW site (a fantastic Volkswagen resource by the way), and someone taking a beetle apart sold me one. I didnt' want to go soldering on the only one I had. The light housing is basically a cylinder with the light at one end and connectors at the other, but here's what the innards look like:


Starting shortly before my car was manufactured, VWs had "transistorized" brake warning lights. The transistor is circled in purple here. I guess the improvement was that you didn't need to press on the light to test the bulb, instead the light comes on when you turn the key to "on", like the other warning lights. Unfortunately, it turned out that the components that formed the two circuits in the light (one for warning indication and one for power-on-test) were far less reliable than the bulb itself.

To fix it, I needed to figure out how it was supposed to work. With a magnifying glass and an ohm-meter, I figured out how the wiring was supposed to work. Here's a diagram for those of you into that sort of thing:


The labels in circles (15,K,31,V, and 61) are the labels on the connectors at the back of the warning light housing. Where I've labelled "tap" is a metal stud on the back that isn't meant to be hooked up in the car but is useful as a diagnostic tool when you have the light out of the car. (To keep this post blogg-ish, I will relagate the explanation of this circuit to my full write-up).

This was my reverse-enginneering of the bulb, but before I went soldering on stuff, I wanted to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. So I wandered down to Radio Shack and got a pack of NPN transistors and resistors suitable for duplicating this circuit. After reading on-line and resurrecting my dim memories of electronics class (1994-ish), I go this circuit to work properly.


Again, the transistor is circled in purple.

So I removed the old transistor, soldered in the new one, and hooked it up to the car, and it works. I'm currently in the process of getting the red lens for the light into a shape that will stay in the light, and then it will be done.

two thirds of what?

I ran across this battery in my basement the other day:


Anyone know what this is a battery for? (I know, I'm asking it as a rhetorical question.) Consider it foreshadowing for a blog feature that will be coming soon. Here's a hint: It has noting to do with my car and it has nothing to do with flying or airplanes.

Since this battery and its siblings are over 15 years old now, I've been looking for replacements. There's a Panasonic Lithium camera battery that's pretty close, which will work, but it's a tight fit in the socket that the battery goes in. Just now, it occured to me that the important marking is the one in the middle, "BR=2/3A". I had alwasy thought that "A" stood for "amperes", so the two bottom markings above "matsushita electric" were statements of the battery's voltage and current capacity, but it turns out that BR-2/3A is the battery type. That is, it's two-thirds the length of an A-type battery (used to be available along with AA and AAA).

So by searing Google for "2/3A" and "battery", I think I finally found a source of exact replacement batteries. This web site gets kudos for being cheaper than the other places that came up on google and they have exact battery measurements in mm, which allowed me to match the size. Woot!

More to come.

damn stores these days

I had a major grumpy old man moment yesterday. Since electrical stuff is something I'm interested in, I feel that it's incumbent upon me to install after-market devices in my beetle as a way of customizing it. I'd like to have a mount for a GPS that's powered from the car, and since it currently doesn't have a working radio at all, before I take it on any major trips, I'd like to install a Sirius radio in it.

By the way, reason I went with Sirius over XM is that Sirius carries NFL football games, so that means that I can't listen to Indy Car racing...oh well. The radio display that they have for games is neat:


Instead of title and artist, the lower two lines of the display list the teams playing and the current score. That way you can flip to another channel and get the score of another game quickly. A clever way to make the experience more efficient.

Before I start hanging extra devices on the electrical bus of the beetle, which isn't that robust anyway, I want to have instrumentation on the electrical system. I want to have meters to measure the voltage of the system and the current flowing to (or from) the battery and the total electrical draw. I went to Radio Shack thinking that they would have something. Well, it turns out they don't. Not a single blessed panel current meter in the store, and the clerk's method for searching for it was to log onto the Radio Shack web site and search for it there. I could have done that from home, thanks.

And that was my Grumpy Old Man moment. As recently as 1995, Radio Shack was an electronics gadget store; that is, if you wanted to build something out of wires and components, that was where you went to get the parts. I guess that they as a franchise are following the path that they need to to survive, but it saddens me that what was once a paragon of useful stuff is now primarily a reseller of digital TV items, cell phones, and crappy remote control toys and stereo equipment. Granted, they do have some amounts of component-level merchandise, but that's like 20% of the store or less.

of COURSE it's an AND-gate

I thought about a game I've not thought about in ages yesterday, called Robot Odyssey. It was a game I had for my Tandy 1000 EX made by the Learning Company. It was a very involved puzzle game where the central theme was circuit logic. You had three (later four) robots (moving boxes) that you wired to do certain things in the game, like retrive objects or push buttons to open doors. I played the game through a couple of times in junior high and high school, and so learning a bunch of basic circuit logic stuff. To the point that when I got to electronics class my junior year at Gustavus, I already knew the basic symbols of circuit logic and the basics of how to use them.

Some links for Robot Odyssey, past and present:

• Wikipedia article
• a page on AOL that includes solutions and web maps
• Thomas Foote's page about creating a Java port of the game

I played this game...well, an apallingly long time ago, during my formative years. It was a lot of fun, and I learned stuff, but I don't think I can underestimate its effect on my personality. It, along with Starflight, were very important in training me to be able to take on long tasks and persevere to the end.

I recently started to get enough furniture in the basement that I can start to set up some of my vintage computers. When I've set up the Tandy, I will see about getting some screen shots of Robot Odyssey.

Eighty Eight miles per hour!!!

I was up in Wisconsin visiting my sister this weekend. Drove 500 miles up yesterday, and 500 back today. On the way back, my total average speed for the trip was about 66 mph. That's pretty good; 50 is respectable, 55 is pretty good, and I generally shoot for 60.

I did listen to music some both legs of the trip. I'm dorkily proud that my music has never touched a Windows system. I'm sure there are much better ways of doing this, but I tried this out , and it seems to work.




Bottom Right: My PDA, a PalmOne Zire 31. I have the RealOne mp3 player installed on it. It has a SD slot.

Bottom Center: 128 MB "Secure Digital" media card. The music has to reside on an expansion card for RealOne, not the internal memory. Go figure.

Bottom Left: USB reader for Memory Sticks and SD Media.

Top Right: plugs into the headset jack in the PDA and puts the sound on the casette player in the car.

Top Center: USB power supply that plugs into the lighter jack.

Top Left: plugs the PDA into the above power supply.

I pulled the music off the CDs on my laptop, encoded the .mp3s there, and then put the music on the SD card using the USB reader. I only have 2 CD's worth; with some songs not used, that fills up about half the card. That's little enough that I don't want to listen to it continuously.