Alright, so I get it. Yes, it’s been a whole month since I’ve posted anything here. I’m sorry. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing things. Thus, despite the lack of posts, I do have a good chunk of content for this one.
First, new boots. I live in my boots. Wear them year round. Rain, sleet, sun, sand, etc. Boots. This kind of lifestyle however has an impact on the boots physically, and they tend to get a little worn out. So, a couple weeks ago I went to REI and got some new ones. Here’s the old VS. the new.
So them’s the boots. Next topic. Remember a while ago when I was showing you that big ass bitchin’ power supply? Well, it blew up and took my motherboard with it. How you might ask? Well, I was testing it, and a bit of plastic melted and let +12V touch the ground line. This traveled through the USB cable I was using to monitor the system into my motherboard, which doesn’t like to have car batteries connected to the ground lines. Therefore it went *poof* and was dead. Since then, I’ve replaced the motherboard and took the display out of the power supply to make a clock. Here’s some pictures…
You may notice in the last image that there’s a little coin cell backup battery on the board. This is used in combination with an RTC (Real-Time Clock) chip that I got as a sample. This means that if the power is disconnected, the main processor doesn’t need to run, and the RTC chip will keep time. It’s pretty handy.
The last major thing going on is that I’ve pretty much sold my truck. She’s served me well, but the transmission is going out (I think I’ve already said that on here before) and I can’t really afford to replace the transmission on her. Also, If I were to dump that kind of money into it, I’d like to get a manual transmission. I prefer them, and they tend to last a while longer. She was a good truck, but at this point I have to let her go.
So, I’ve cleaned up my old Subaru Brat, filled up all the fluids, drove her over the pass, and had her emissions tested so I could renew the registration. In addition to fawning over my totally awesome brat, the guy at the emissions test place said that she “passed with flying colors” and so now I’ve got her registered, new license plates, and she’s running good. It makes me happy to have her going again. One of the things I’ve always liked about the brat is that I could work on her if something went wrong, and you really couldn’t kill her. I could trust her to get me where I needed to go. Else, I knew I could fix her enough that if she broke on the way there, I could get the rest of the way. I never had that confidence in the truck. She was reliable, but I never had the feeling that I could patch it up with duct tape and be able to roll her home. Anyway, the brat’s living over here now, and things are going pretty well.
In a day or two I should have something about that new telemetry system I’m making for that ESS205 class I did last year where I sent a camera up on a weather balloon. Anyway, I’m designing a high speed digital data link for the balloons so we can get everyone’s data down much faster than we’ve been able to in the past, and if we can get more data down, that can lead to better conclusions from it, and thus (hopefully) BETTER SCIENCE!
