Add another half day on the sidecar, testing every last thing. It starts and runs, which is what is to be expected for what little I paid for it, but that low price was a tradeoff. It means I did not take time to check everything. And that is what I’m doing now. I’m no mechanic, but I’ve only bought one new vehicle in my life (and was lucky it lasted). Today, I had the sidecar over to Blais, the Honda specialists with the three week waiting list.The English guy mechanic says there is nothing wrong with it that I could not fix myself. Wishful thinking. Some of the wiring is crisp (meaning brittle, not a good thing), the manifold seals need to be replaced with “anaerobic seals”, the clips on the battery compartment are broken. For the money I saved off the purchase price, it’s good news to hear only minor fix-ups are needed. But you know me, I’ll upgrade every last thing before getting out on the open highway.
What I didn’t like to hear was the gas needles may not be sitting right. These carburetors were dicey when new, they have to be “synced” and this is not cheap. Like other Hondas, you can leave it, but the engine eats gasoline. I’m not worried since the gas mileage still beats any car and I’d be in Colorado with ten tank-fulls (around $150). I’ll leave the gas efficiency alone for now and tend to things that are worn out or old.
A surprise was the empty brake fluid from the rear disk, originally mistaken for an oil leak. Can’t do without brakes and I don’t know how to “bleed” the system. Where is Elliott, the Speedi-Bleed inventor, when I need him? Shown here is the system he invented and he still owes me $105 for helping drill the mounting holes in the plastic tool kit cases, like you see in the background. Plus another $55 for assembly, before I forget. Since 1994-ish.
The system works with air pressure off one of your tires, that’s the black coiled hose. The pile of metal at lower right is plate that fits over most brake reservoirs and clamps in place. That white plastic bottle is triple-molded, we could not break one with a hammer. My new six-fan blower system makes my Florida room inhabitable, meaning I got the afternoon off to relax and study. The object at this time is the miniaturization of the Arduino controller software in case we are unable to etch printed circuit boards as planned. Called shrinkify, it promises a way to get the prices down by 92%, but at the expense of greater planning and some loss of functionality. In case you’ve forgotten, the cost of the Arduino, around $30, means every project has to be dismantled so we can reuse the controller.
So, if you got this far, you like new ideas. Here’s a guy making a PCB (printed circuit board) on a glass microscope slide. A lot of this material is common place around here, and I chose this video link because the author doesn’t gloss over important steps and he explains every move. I know it has been a year and we still have no laser printer. Or a laminator. But we thoroughly understand the process!
Noteworthy is the way the components are soldered to the glass, which obviously must use surface mount technology. With all the intense work we did to learn soldering, this is the first time we’ve seen or heard of solder paste used in this way. Also, if you notice the Cubloc (say “cube-lock”) controller, we are looking into this expensive item because it uses BASIC code instead of the mind-numbing C+.
(I don’t like the way C+ is designed to have no structure. Writing code should challenge your brain, not your typing skills. It is my opinion they should have modified BASIC to handle the environment where C+ claims to be better.)
It’s harder than you think to find these informative videos. The Internet is full of dipschits, not a typo. They think they’re impressing us by showing off only the finished project, usually a store-bought (a kit), and blasting techo-musak through your speakers. This blog does not link to dork files.
And I have not wasted a single minute on the Olympics. I’d rather watch plumbers giving each other plunger awards. In what I think is a far more important “event”, Forbes reports that an anonymous user (“HaveBlue”) successfully used a 3D printer to “print” the working part of an military M16 and successfully fired 200 rounds. These printers were reported here around a year ago. Normally, the cheaper models construct a plastic model of whatever you scan, and you take the model to a machinist. But the newer types can “print” in ceramic or metal. Jay Leno uses this technology to make parts for older cars.
In fact, maybe you should watch this video of a product from Objet. It can use 107 different materials. (Objet is tight-lipped about the price until they psycho-analyze your credit report, but trade show attendees have been quoted $250k.) My dentist wants $6,400 for a perfect set of teeth and a "3D Touch" model is only $3,895. Think about it.
ADDENDUM
Although remote control has been downplayed in the club’s robotic study, many of the components of automatic and remote control are shared. These include actuator and stepper motors. This led to a fascinating side study of WWII German rocket weapons. Talk about your original self-guiding mechanisms, these were the fastest machines ever man-made at the time. One particularly advanced item was a flying bomb (not a rocket) called the HS293.
The general study of guide mechanisms has caused me to unintentionally duplicate the entire development period of the HS293 steering controls and let me tell you, what those Germans did was incredible. Mind you, they did have government money to speed things along. They used radio signals which are, in my opinion, are too unreliable to risk on expensive equipment. The microcontrollers available today are a reasonable substitute for radio control, but this does not solve the problem of letting the crew back at the base know what’s going on.
One ingenious solution, but one we can’t use, is trailing wires. When the HS293 was loosed, bobbins fed out thin wires back to an operator in the launch aircraft. Nineteen miles of wire. This would be impractical for anything but a flying object. A sturdier tether is needed for ground or water operations and becomes a liability. A tangled cable will squander your robot just as badly as a jumbled beam. If the thought crossed your mind, the answer is yes. Yes, in the process here we’ve learned perfectly well how to jam radio traffic. It was a natural spin-off topic.
This is also how we learned that the Germans had in use eight rocket engines, “rugged, dependable, and simple to manufacture and operate”. Did you get that, NASA? Eight, and that was 1942. Also, these rockets could use a wide variety of different fuels. Equally impressive were the German (not Nazi) jet engines. Shown here, if you know what to look for, is a V1 pulsejet, looks like a stovepipe, mounted under a light propeller aircraft for testing.
So, once again we get returned to the Mars lander trade-off, which makes about three times now we’ve reached the same mental barrier. The landers use a hybrid control system, with on-board micro-controllers linked by radio command. On second thought, let me re-word that. In my poor thinking, the landers must work on this family of principles. For all I know, the knowledge could be classified. But that would be a dumb state secret, however, since we figured it out over here, didn’t we?Don’t conclude we are so advanced. Nothing we have is even off the drawing board. Our approach is non-standard, in that the radio link of our thinking is mainly for feedback; the local control decisions are still intended to be made by the robot. To give you an idea, the most complex circuit I’ve built has six transistors (the half adder circuit), while I estimate the most basic ones for the robot will use 58 transistors each. It will be months before the tools and money are gathered for that effort.
Knowledge feeds itself after you reach the critical mass. We are a club and at this point largely a social club. We are more profit-driven than we will ever be politically motivated. But the military applications of all this capability are beyond temptation. The definition of plain stupid would be anyone who goes to war against even amateurs who possess this technology.
