Never been one to let the carrier drop

Things needed to make the EV mobile again:

1) Complete the positive-side high voltage wiring under the shifter.

(need to get 1″ conduit nipple)

2) Rewire the inverter interface

(first phase: just connect the activation line to FWD instead of REV – need to look up which color FWD is)

(second phase: build interface board for mk3 controller with sensor inputs for all inverter outputs and relays for all inverter inputs.)

3) Fix the power line leading to the water pump and vacuum pump

(Probably temporarily with crimps, because it will need redone as part of the second phase of the inverter interface rewiring)

4) Install HV shield on inverter

5) Reinstall inverter and reconnect cooling system and refill

(Should be no big deal)

6) Reconnect front battery pack

(maybe should order some new washers)

7) Replace access cover on motor

While in the past this has looked completely overwhelming, today I’m not feeling like it’s that much work. I already swapped the L1 and L2 input wires on the motor to deal with the whole forward-reverse thing today. While not as ideal as being on a lift, the jackstands approach I’ve taken seems to be totally viable – I was able to work under the car fairly easily. I’m hoping to have it back on the road by the end of the month. Of course it helps that my #1 job is paying me in stock again, which gives me incentive to work on my own projects instead.

Well, tomorrow is election day, and I still don’t know who I’m supporting in the Democratic primary.

Kucinich is the closest to my ideals, but he’ll never win. (Face it, Sheer is not in the majority)

Clinton is a end to the stupid-rich-white-male-with-misplaced-priorities game, and also is very interested in improving our health care situation, which I’m also very interested in.  So she’s tempting.

Obama appears to be a honest politician, which might make for a refreshing change, but is a little too religious for my tastes.

I think the winner will be Clinton – but I may not know myself until I push the button.

If anyone is looking for something silly and small to buy me as a gift – http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB-THINK-LIGHT&cat=CON 😉

All the tracks that are getting all the downloads were not major production numbers.. the best of them were recorded in a few hours, the worst of them were just captures of jam sessions. The Mischief Committee album, which had hundreds of hours of work put into it.. the most downloaded track on it got 30 downloads last month.

Please, if you haven’t listened to it yet, download the Mischief Committee album.

As I recall, at some point about this time a few years ago I was convinced that earth was a radio star – after all, we do emit a buncha electromagnetic radiation.

Come to think of it, I may still think that 😉 But, anyway, I also had some explanation for why all humans were rock stars, which I don’t remember at all. That’s *not* what I mean here.

Also, in all fairness, if one had a sense of proportion about the numbers I’m about to recite, one would admit that they don’t even stand up to the coffeehouse circuit, much less make me Bono.

However, a track I did with the lovely and talanted Esen had 811 downloads last month. I have more than ten tracks on my web site that received more than 100 downloads each in December, and more than five that received more than 200 downloads. Mischief Committee has several jam sessions which received more than 100 downloads. And, the trend in my web traffic has consistantly been upwards the entire time I’ve been maintaining sheer.us.

To me, these are rock star numbers. This is a larger audience than I ever dreamed of reaching.. it inspires me to want to write and release more tracks, to say the very least.

Speaking of books, my friend How Kuff wrote one that I’ve been slowly working my way through – it’s not a traditional novel, but it has a lot of good ideas. A lot of the same things that bother me bother How, and he has a little more distance from them so he expresses them more artfully. His characters are fighting with problems like what to do about the moral repercussions of your day job (if you make bombs, are you responsible for those they kill?), what the costs of endless commercialization might be, and what it might cost you to try and fight the Powers that Be – and what it might gain you.

You can buy a copy of his book at www.changing-history.com. I suspect that it’s one of those works that will take me many passes to fully appreciate, but there’s definitely some good content there.

I should really post about this on the EVDL or evtech, but I lack the energy at the moment and besides, I’d like to get the idea kicked apart on my journal first.

It seems to me that you could build a very cheap, very powerful drive for a EV that had a lot of the advantages of a DC drive combined with a lot of the advantages of a AC drive by having a standard DC series motor which did not have the commutator mechanically connected to the shaft – instead, the comm would be driven by a stepper motor controlled by a microcontroller which would have a rotary encoder to tell it the current position of the main drive shaft (the output from the ‘power stage’ of the motor), the current position of the commutator, whether any arcing was occuring, etc.

Maybe I misunderstand some of the theory, but I think that such a motor would be able to do regen braking fairly easily, would not fail in a full-throttle on mode (because the only way it produces motive power is if the comm is staying synchronous with the main output shaft, which requires that the microprocesser be doing its job), and that you would be able to get considerably higher power drives in considerably smaller spaces because you would only need a single H-bridge of power silicon to control power to the motor instead of the three H-bridges that a AC drive requires. However, you would still be able to get AC’s flat torque curve because you would in essence have the same amount of control over the magnetic state of the motor that a AC drive has.

Anyone want to kick a hole in it? Yes, it has brushes, which are mechanical and therefore frowned upon. However, I think it could be made simpler and cheaper than a ‘real’ AC drive, and aside from needing to swap the brushes every few hundred thousand miles – which a sensor could tell the micro about – it would have all the advantages of ‘real’ AC.

My next challenge on this vein of thinking is to mentally walk through all the failure modes – i.e. what happens when the comm gets energized in the wrong position -out of sync – with the current shaft position of the rotor..

You all are wonderful 😉 I appear to have more than enough work for the next few months.. thank you to one and all, and sorry it didn’t work out to the people who I had to turn down.

(I hate turning people down, because I feel like I’ve lost the opportunity to work for them forever… and I really do want to help people do things, beyond the money aspect)

I think I’m maybe a bit overly afraid that I’ll be unable to find work. Thus far I’ve never had to look very hard to find someone who wanted me to do something for them – I just feel like surely there are a million people who are better, faster, smarter, and more creative than I am – but what I forget is that there are probably billions of things that want to be built – far more things that need fixed or created than people to fix or create them – and that I do genuinely produce – eventually – good products. I’m sure that there’s still much to be learned, but I’m also sure, at least on some level, that I’m not completely worthless.

as usual, sysinternals.net had a tool. 😉

What’s really terrifying is what I found out *using* that tool. I was having trouble starting IIS on my win2k machine, because something else was already bound to port 80. Guess what it was…

…. skype.exe

Yes, boys and girls, *skype* is a web server. I guess that’s one way to get around those pesky firewalls – almost *everyone* lets people open a connection to port 80…

this microsoft support article in essence says M$ is holding hostage a hotfix that will let you see what processes on a windows 2000 computer are opening what network ports. They could have easily just included a link to the hotfix, but this article seems to me to be saying, ‘we are going to make you pay $200 for a support incident to get a copy of this tool’.