Lister CS Spares in the States.

What is it you need? Leave a comment with a description.

A Rare Utterpower Built Machine

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Learning By Doing

Many of us believe we are living that Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”.

Hands-on learning is powerful, and I think I have a great example of a person who is learning at an accelerated rate due to her interest and her obvious intellect and curiosity. She is willing to play with the boys and get her hands dirty.

She drops several hints of her deep understanding of technology, and it started with an idea to deliver chicken sandwiches on campus.

A person in her position is often an information sponge, hungry for knowledge, and learns there’s never enough time to study all the topics and acquire the skills and knowledge that might make you successful.

Her toolkit includes Palantir tools, and she thinks it is of great value.  Palantir missed its earnings with a late-arriving analyst who tossed out an outlying higher expectation than the rest at the last minute.  Had he not done that, PLNTR stock might have doubled the price.

Here’s the link in case you choose to watch, part of my watching might involve buying a few shares of PLNTR.

All the best!

George B

 

Posted in Critical Thinking, In The News, Inspirational People | 1 Comment

A quick note! How Many Shots Have Been Fired Across Boeing’s BOW?

If you read about MCAS, if you read about making a carrier pay a lot of money for a second $28 attitude sensor.

Redundant systems are pretty much a standard in aircraft, and it would only be natural to compare two attitude sensors against each other and fail the preflight diagnostic when the deviation was greater than X.

Anything that flies higher than 10 feet off the ground should be built by companies in search of excellence.  I’m sure you can find it on the internet, but there is a video sent out by the CEO of Alaska Airlines. I attempt to read between the lines, he has lost faith in Boeing. Some suggest both the FAA and Boeing have dropped the ball, and a lot of people think they’re not picking it back up any time soon.  I think selling Boeing short is going to be a popular play, I wouldn’t pick this stock back up again, people on the shop floor say it’s all about DEI.

Here’s a link to comments from Alaska Air’s CEO.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPUGOFS0Dpg

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Subsidies are Bribes

How do you get people to do stuff they don’t want to do?

Offer them enough money to do it.  Do I wish I would have bought a lot of Tesla Stock? No doubt. Do I think subsidies are a good idea? No.

I’m sure people are aware that GM is currently pushing Buick dealers to either invest about ~$300K to service their new electric vehicles or lose their franchise. No one knows the local market better than the Dealers, and many are folding their tents instead of going along with GM’s plan. I think the Dealers would love to sell Buick EVs, but they know their customers and the sales are not there.

I’m not sure anyone is worried about who will pick up the pieces, those in government who are convinced they need to push EVs on the public won’t pay. And as we know GM is too big to fail, so they won’t pay.

The public may not understand that it will be them who pays, just add it to the tab.

George B.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

A note on developing products, even simple ones.

Lesson Learned

As I write, I recall making a tool to pull tappet guides in Lister Clones, some of the Erectors would hammer them in with very tight clearances, so I designed a “Tappet Jack” to help pull them.  After I had sold a decent number of them, I received some complaints which led to some emails inquiring about the diameter of the tappet shoulder that the tool grabbed onto.  What were the tolerances of tappet shoulder diameter? 

The reply was a little difficult for the Western mind to gasp, there was no spec, and every Erector (Builder) decided what was best for him.  My tool was made after measuring about 50 tappet guides, but they were all made by one manufacturer. 

Today’s Lesson

I bought some LilyGo T beam Lora radios to play with and quickly decided I needed some cases for the field.  I ordered a few off Etsy and was somewhat surprised as to how nice they looked. I knew there was no way I’d make anything close.

While stuffing the radio into the case I noted I needed to trim a few pins on the bottom side of the circuit board to get the board in the case and the lid on. The buttons didn’t always work, I needed the radio in the field the next day, so I’d live with it and use the app on the phone to make adjustments.  The next day, the radio made a 3-foot drop to the ground and the display broke.  It didn’t help my testing, but other gear wasn’t working, so I was out of business for the entire Cowiche trip.

Some spare parts arrived, it’s time to look at the T-Beams again.

Tonight I opened the case and removed the broken display, I soldered in a new display and all is good. I noted the case cover was hard on the delicate display, with no gap to protect it from a drop.  I looked at the design and noted that in order for the buttons and clearances to be right, the circuit board had to sit dead flat on the upper surface of the case. In no way was this was going to happen without some adjustments.

The first one was the need to make an indent so the pins protruding below the circuit board for the SMA antenna mount would have a place to nest.  I got out the dremel and easily made a pocket, and reassembled it. The board still rocked back and forth and resisted my efforts to seat it.

I turned the board over and noticed two solder connections that needed similar indents.  A little more dremel work took care of that, but still, the board rocked and would not snug up to the indented surface it was designed to index on.

At this point, even that solder battery connection had a dremel-made pocket to drop into.

Another test fit  

I was running out of ideas, but there it was, the circuit board rocking, rocking, rocking. I painted the bottom of the 18650 battery with some fingernail polish and quickly dropped it back in the case, and when I pulled it back out, there was polish in the bottom of the case, no clearance for a circuit board with the battery on the bottom, which is the standard. 

I got the Dremel out again and carved a groove in the bottom center of the case to make room for the battery, it was all making perfect sense now, the creator used a CAD drawing of the Tbeam to design the case. It’s possible he never put a working T beam in the case. 

A total of four areas prevented the board from indexing in its proper place.  Beware, with this condition, it’s very easy to destroy the buttons when trying to install the board, and as I mentioned, it’s pretty easy to mess up the display, you need proper clearance for it. 

But there’s one more thing you need to fix.

there’s nothing in the design to hold the board in its proper place, if you were to drop it and it landed with the display down, the circuit board would hammer into the cover and most likely break the display. For this, I added some double back take to build a wedge cushion between the cover and the board.

With all the adjustments made, the buttons work and nothing binds.  Still, the case is far nicer than anything I could build, this creator is a whiz with the 3D printer, and the plastic he used is high-quality stuff, he just needs to work with his hands on the real thing.

The Lilygo T-Beam Radio

It’s an amazing product, but why would you ever put an antenna in the middle, and why allow a drop to stress the circuit board in the area of the SMA antenna connector?  Lilygo has smarter designs now, and so do others, but these radios are cheap and full of fun and learning.

George B.

 

 

Posted in Buyer Beware, Critical Thinking | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Why Meshtastic? It can tie everything together.

Some projects force you to learn, and Meshtastic is one of them.

Test router mounted to the top of the mast, and ready to tip up to service.

Whether you live further out or in the city, you can be left without communication when things go wrong. Meshtastic is a mesh network that can be used by two people to share their locations and text messages all with no fees. Although it is not necessary, you can use an older cell phone and an app to send messages and view maps and the locations of other members of your mesh network. If you have one node tied to an internet portal (MQTT), you can communicate with the world.

Meshtastic.org is the place to start, and Discord is a place to learn more.

Placing a mountaintop repeater or router can expand your coverage, and as you will learn, some of the fun is sizing solar panels and figuring out what you will need to keep them alive and operating. Learning more about 18650 batteries, lithium-ion, VS other chemistries can also be fun, but I’m not here to teach that because there are a lot of better teachers available for free on Youtube and several other places.

What I can share is a little about the two places I plan to deploy a meshtastic network and why.  I can also share some of the learning underway. One of my current concerns is that Lithium-ion chemistry can’t be charged below freezing, and I don’t see that anyone has provided an ‘on the shelf’ solution to this problem, so I will share my progress.

Once you get a stationary device up in the air, you can read the battery voltage and have some idea as to the solar gain of the day, you can also attach sensors and know the temperature and humidity for very little money.

A properly placed mountain repeater could give you hundreds of square miles of coverage, and the GPS location can be broadcasted to others publically, or you can keep all your messages encrypted and private among the group members you authorize.

My challenges, My learning.

When it is hard to keep a solar-powered repeater alive? I’d say during winter because the winter day is short and the sun angle is low. It’s rather amazing that the experts don’t agree on how you calculate the best angle for your PV panel in winter, but I’m learning it’s far steeper than I had thought. One calculation I came across is Latitude in degrees x .9 + 29. For the Area of Easton Washington, this equates to a steep 72 degrees, and as I look at the arch of the Sun’s travel, that looks about right for the season.

How does one get through 4 or 5 days of no sun? A lot of people are running one 18650 lithium-ion battery, which is about 3500 milli amp hours of capacity at the maximum.  I found it easy to stuff three 27100 cells in my repeater case, this gives me about 15,000 mill amp hours. On a no-sun day, I see it takes about one percent of the battery’s rated storage capacity to keep it running. I haven’t had it up very long, but one day I had good sun for four hours and noted one hour of good sun would raise the state of charge to => than one percent.

My test device is currently programmed to be a router/client, it has been up for 8 full days, most of the time in a very poor position, but I moved it to a location where it can get good sun between 10 am and 1 pm, still not a good location, but the battery is at 70% charge which is the same as when I put it up. There’s been cloudy skies most of the time.

The PV Panel, and other potential problems?

A good portion of my experience with electronics and electrical has been power supplies or circuits to condition power for what you need to run are a big part of the project. The small Chinese solar panels you buy off eBay and Amazon often have quite a bit less watt capacity than advertised.  I bought an Acopower 5W 12V panel that looks well made off Amazon, they claim to be a USA seller. 12 volts is a problem, the circuit I want to drive this time is the onboard charger of the RAK Wisblock, and it is about 5.5Volts max, or damage likely occurs. I best keep it at 5.1V for longevity’s sake.

Now we have some efficiency concerns, but I had to get this test router up in the air so I could start learning the basics of the configuration, I have the majority of this to learn.

To power the solar charger port, I ran the PV output to an LM2596s Buck converter, they are inexpensive, and the 5.1 volts I dialed in seems very stable. The converter has plus and minus leads in, and plus and minus leads out, I found the tiny connector I needed on Amazon.

Instead of a buck converter, there are tiny MPPT boards that promise more efficiency, and maybe my next unit will use one.  I think I found a very nice box to build this repeater in, that too was found on Amazon. Since I’m especially happy with the box, I’ll share the link here. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P54XQK7?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

RAK Lora Radio and a buck converter, to the right, is cable to PV, and to the left is a 6dbi antenna. Batteries are in the box under the radio.

The router sits on top of a 1 and 3/4 inch 20-foot long steel pole, I’ve had it for years, and I wish I knew where I could buy the next one.

The flaw in version one may be fatal, how will I correct the problem?

At first, I wondered if I was one of the few who worried about below-freezing and the destructive effect that charging could have on the lithium batteries in this device. I signed up for Discord, and eventually found the group discussing meshtastic. It didn’t take me long to find a group discussing exactly what I was worried about. I also noted they had already looked at sodium batteries and noted the need for a 2s  battery management system (BMS) which isn’t on the shelf for sale yet. I read about Lithium titanate which can operate at far lower temperatures, but its chemistry produces a lower voltage similar to sodium, and you’d need two cells in series to work with the LORA radios that meshtastic uses. Two cells wired in series need to be balanced, and that is the primary job of a BMS.

So what to do? I think the parts will be on the shelf at some point, but we need some type of solution now, we just can’t let the batteries charge below freezing.  Part of my approach is a lot of battery capacity, and then cranking down some of the unnecessary broadcasts. I don’t need the device reporting its location, nor do I need it telling me it’s alive every 15 minutes, cutting back on these broadcasts conserves battery.

I have not read of the approach I am taking, but I doubt I’m alone. As you read my plan, you might ask why is this guy using inefficient heat-producing parts. There’s a reason.

I plan to use the temperature and humidity sensor from Rokland.com, I’ll add it to the WisBlock, and our unit will know when it’s about to freeze. Rockland supplies the library you need to drive the sensors they have available, it should be easy to add a line or two of code to toggle a pin to a low state so we can use it to shunt the output of the buck inverter WHEN the temperature is 33F or below. I plan to cut copper foil so I can wrap it around the three Lithium cells and then use thermal conductive tape to attach both a TIP120 or its complement, and a 5-watt resistor to the copper foil.

When the temperature is below freezing, the I/O pin will saturate the base of the transistor and any energy the PV panel makes will generate heat inside the case, the transistor might add a little heat as the foil around the cells is its heat sink,  the 5-watt resistor is the load and the main heat source which is also heating the cells directly. The resistor is sized to allow the PV panel to operate at about .28 amps and that’s what the manufacturer claims is the sweet spot. The buck converter is also inside the case, and its tiny losses are also helping to warm the inside of the box. The box is painted a flat black, and it faces south.  There’s a thermal break between the box and the steel pipe.

When the sun hits the panel, all the PV energy is shunted away from the solar charger until the temperature rises to the setpoint. When this happens, the program changes the state of the I/O pin, the shunt is removed, and charging hopefully begins. During both charging and discharge, the battery produces some heat internally, and this all helps to keep the battery above freezing.

The test unit has been up for 8 full days now and there’s been only a few hours of good sun. This particular radio is very efficient, it lacks a GPS receiver, but it is built for a fixed position and doesn’t need it, another load we don’t need to drive. Right now it’s 9:20 PM, and the unit is at 69% charge, we’re down one percent, and one hour of the sun can put us back to even.  Both sites where I plan to put repeaters/routers have way better views of the sky and significantly more sunny days, Cowiche borders Yakima which has an average of 300 days of sun. this is twice what Kent Washington gets where this test unit is set up.

what will I do with this mesh network? One of the first applications will be to monitor my solar plant, and to run the solar power irrigation system, I have trees planted, and they need to get through a potentially dry and hot spring and summer. if you can send a message and toggle an I/O pin, you can do most of what needs to be done.

Here’s one of the inexpensive pocket radios sitting on my desktop.

This orange-cased pocket radio is based on the Lilygo T beam, it has GPS, WIFI, BLE, and a LORA transceiver, all running on an 18650 lithium cell.

 

Here’s my parts list minus the mods to shunt charging at freezing, which is in the works. 

Parts List:
High-Performance Meshtastic Router

Following parts from Rokland.com

RAK Wireless WisBlock Meshtastic Starter Kit US915

5.8 dBi N-Male Omni Outdoor Helium 915 MHz Antenna (Large Profile 32″) for RAK Miner 2 Nebra SenseCap M1 & Bobcat Hotspots

RAK Wireless RAK1901 Temperature and Humidity Sensor Sensirion SHTC3 PID: 100001 2-PACK

 

Following from Amazon

Otdorpatio Junction Box IP65 Waterproof ABS Plastic Electrical Project Case Power Junction Boxes, Project Box with Fixed Ear Black 4.53×3.54 x2.17 inch (115 x 90 x55 mm)

ACOPOWER Solar Panel 5 Watt 12V Black Monocrystalline High-Efficiency Module Off Gird PV Power with Solar Connectors for Battery Charging Path Light

wlaniot IPX/u.fl to N Type Female Pigtail Cable (6″ RG178 for PCI WiFi Card Wireless Router Gateway External Antenna etc.
Visit the Superbat Store

AZDelivery 5 x Compatible with LM2596S DC-DC Power Supply Adapter Step Down Module Compatible with Arduino Including eBook

Babaobox 10pairs 24AWG JST ZH1.5mm 2PIN Micro Electrical Male and Female Connector Plug with 150mm Wire Cables

smseace 30PCS JST ph2.0 Connector Female and Male jst ph2.0 Wire Cables 100mm jst ph 2.0 Connector kit

RioRand XT60 Drone Connectors (5 Pair)

Bistook 21700 Battery Holder Box Case for PCB Projects, 4-Pack, 4-Slot Each

Other parts you need:

heat shrink

1 3/4 inch steel tubing for a mast, mine is 20 feet long.

All the best,

George B.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in In The News, Projects, Survival Skills | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

How to wire up the standard stator in a generator

I’ve received a lot of emails from people who have four leads out of their stators, but no clue as to what they are or how to wire them.

The typical stator has two windings, you can ohm them out to find the pairs, then just think about them like two flashlight batteries, when they are in series, they make 240 out, when they are in parallel, they make 120 only.

If it’s not producing the expected output, turn one of the windings around just like you would a flashlight battery.  When wired in series, the neutral is in the middle.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

2021

When there is no rule of law, all remedies lay outside the law?

Is QAnon covering for the Left? Can you imagine a better way to placate your political enemies than telling them every week for four long years that those who broke the law will be held accountable shortly?  I see I used the wrong word, they have given up nothing! Maybe Placate is the better word?

Back to Basics

Back to Basics

Posted in Critical Thinking | Leave a comment

Chinese Horizontal Parts Page

China TruckI’m putting this page up as a service to our community of DIYers who have them.   There was a very reliable person in California who was making monthly orders for parts, and he was easy to do business with, I don’t know where he is now if you do, or know other sources of parts, please consider making a comment on this page, so others will know.

Ebay has moved on to the Yamar clones, and little else in the way of parts.

These folks mention small orders are possible, but I have not yet confirmed that.

https://agriculturalmachinery-parts.sell.everychina.com/p-108469922-cylinder-liner-piston-ring-kit-for-single-diesel-engine-s195-s1100-s1105-s1110.html

Typical Bore sizes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you have any supplier contacts to share??

 

George B.

 

Posted in Alternative Energy Sources, Engines, Slow Speed Engines | Leave a comment

The Critical Importance of Quality.

Tony_Dovey

Tony Dovey with the ‘Mother of all big Singles’? My thanks to Tony who shared his knowledge and helped paint a clearer picture of realities of slow speed.

And who may never understand the requirement? India?

If you have been watching Boeing, there’s plenty of food for thought, and it does cause me to reflect on a few things I’ve studied for years, things the typical western mind generally fails to grasp.

Back to Boeing for a minute, it really is sad, but I think Boeing has had an incestuous relationship for a long long time, and perhaps the FFA should be seen as carrying the larger share of the blame, but we know how government works, it’s generally a place you can work with little chance of paying much of a consequence for your wrongdoing WHEN we compare it to a job in private enterprise.

I was recently honored to have a guided tour of Blue Origin in my home town of Kent, Washington.  Some of the things they are doing there are truly bleeding edge, and some of the machines I saw there are first-generation, and were just being bolted to the floor.  My host has been a friend for many years, he’s an engineer in QC, and he pointed out a lot of lasers and other toolings that allow measurements of very large pieces with incredible precision.  As you might expect, he knows the tolerances for many of the parts we saw in the production area, and one of the things he said that has stuck in my head was “WE are no one’s friend here”.  What he meant by that is his group of people ‘Quality Control’ are a totally autonomous group, and they’re even inclined to eat lunch together.  They do not overlook misses in QC because their Boss who also has reports in Production suggests that it is the right thing to do. In young Blue Origin, they don’t have that problem!

I ask, how did such a young entity like Blue Origin get it so right? I think the answer might be that most companies get it right in the beginning, and then what seems like a good cost-cutting idea takes root.  The removal of middle management to help with the bottom line, moves to impress wall street with better numbers, and so much more.

When the 737 Max plowed in, it wasn’t long before a lot of people questioned the design of MCAS, but there were pilots that stepped forward to say that regardless of MCAS, you just needed to know how to shut it off and fly the plane!  This didn’t stop the further scrutiny of MCAS, and I choose to think that there is no one who has been brought up in the world of redundant systems who would agree to sign his name to the approval of such a design.

There’s a lot of books written on the topic, but my first opportunity to study these designs was in the Navy.  The ‘Man of War’ is a very different ship from an Auxuallary ship like an oiler or a supplies ship. On the man of war, even electric motors are built to a higher spec and power to critical equipment is sometimes fed by different cable routes and different sources of power with automatic bus transfers.  A lot of these design principles were adopted for aircraft, and at the heart of it is high quality, redundant systems and in some cases diverse routing of power and communication/control cables.

As we look at Boeing today, they have been brutally punished, their stock price arrived in the toilet just in time to be murdered by the irrational fear of the virus! I think Boeing has to get rid of the incest to survive, and they will be a better company for it. I figure it might take 15 years for them to forget this lesson, so I think Boeing stock will be a solid buy soon. Anyone who is caught fudging on QC needs to be fired or transferred to the mailroom or janitorial services, if the Union can’t agree to that, maybe it’s time to have a going out of business sale?

A friend of mine who spent his working years in drug research was comparing China and India as suppliers of raw materials, he made this comparison that I thought was  interesting:  I steal a snippet from his post:

  When I left XYZ, I was horrified to learn that virtually all of the raw materials that were being used to make batches of any of our drugs were sourced entirely from China.  The company HAD sourced many of them from India, but getting the Indians to produce to our quality requirements, and not falsify documents, and not insist on taking bribes as a part of every transaction, took constant vigilance.  Who’d have thought that?   The ChiComs, on the other hand, knew the value of quality because they likely stole that ethic from Japan next door.  However, as we have just learned, relying on a single source of materials to manufacture your product places you at great risk when the unexpected happens.  The Just In Time manufacturing process failed to take that into account. 

I gave up on getting any kind of reliable quality out of India,  it was simply a crapshoot every time. I quickly learned that what you bought could be anything from quite good to no more useful than a doorstop.  The better stuff came out of periods of steady production where a crew of workers learned what was good and what was bad. When there are no orders, workers must leave to find other work and the more skilled worker is often not available when new orders for engines come in.  One thing you can count on, if there are orders for engines, they will be built, and this happens even if the ‘erector’ can only find farmers to do it.

I put a lot of effort into understanding why it was that no one producing slow-speed engines was interested in building a longterm relationship based on better quality, I think their inability to keep craftsmen employed ongoing, and the typical attitude that ‘we always find someone to buy what we make’ pretty much dictated how things were to be done.  I do remember others thinking they had connections so strong that quality was guaranteed, in one case, I remember a person touting one brand he bought as the best thing anyone had ever seen! He ordered a 40-foot container and then announced to the world that his order had been sabotaged, as it was the only thing his western shaped mind could think of.

I recently talked to a valued friend in Mumbai, he reminded me that much has changed since Modi has been elected, and a lot of crooks have been jailed or left the country. JB reminded me that India is now 3rd in the space race, and here we know you can’t even get into orbit without a consistent level of QC. I think India has made it ‘over the bar’, and a lot of gains may be the result of installing a government committed to getting rid of corruption?

I hope America can stay the course, God knows we have our share of corruption, and many who are corrupt are fighting to regain their power? America wake up, there’s every reason to bring work back home, and to get very good at what we do.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Critical Thinking | Tagged , | 1 Comment