THe NAC Lots-O-BFG KO2 Thread

[vetteboy]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I would be willing to bet a case of beer that your problem with the digital potentiometers was relative voltage - your control circuit and the circuit it was controlling were not on the same reference, and the digital potentiometer chip ended up sucking up the difference and going up in smoke. The problem is that the scooter controller probably used the original throttle pot on the high side of some circuit (i.e. tied to VCC/VDD) while your control circuit was trying to use it ground referenced :explosion

That sounds vaguely familiar...I know what I did was nothing more elaborate than de-soldering the mechanical pot and connecting those 3 leads to the circuit board.

I was the only mechanical engineer on the team, with the other 6 people being electrical. Somehow I ended up doing the bulk of the soldering after finding way too many cold joints and people learning the hard way that just becauase you can design a circuit doesn't mean you can build one. There was a lot of dead weight on that team and it led to people getting pissed when I'd just do their part anyway so I could move along with mine. The guy who was my roommate at the time was also on the team, and he actually knew his shit and was brilliant at programming, so that worked out well - we did nearly all the design work in our apartment.

Frankly there was no mechanical "engineering" involved at all in building the car itself (just a box tube frame with simple steering and the Rascal motor)...kinda funny how that works out.

 

[kastein]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

Yep... I know the feeling.

We had me, a friend of mine who was like the pointy haired boss from Dilbert, but with a heavy dose of Alice added as well (i.e. he considered hitting me with a piece of steel tubing to be perfectly reasonable motivation. I didn't realize this when I signed onto the project) and a mutual friend who was good at talking the talk but had no idea what he was doing at all with anything on the project. So mostly I ended up as the engineer on a team of two, while pointy haired alice managed me.

Aside from him giving me crap, that was perfectly OK by me. I wanted to build the whole thing anyways, but we should have signed some power electronics / motor driver nerd on as the third guy instead of the clueless one.

Soldering is simple but almost no one knows how to do it... and it's only going to get worse when the US inevitably signs onto the RoHS boondoggle. Let's hear it for ultra toxic flux fumes, limited component and solder shelf life, and tin whisker problems with every electronic device we ever build.

 

[cmelo]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

My comanche goes nowhere, I guess I'll spend $20 and start on my fuel injection for my Honcho.

 

[vetteboy]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I think we probably would have been better off if it were just my roommate and I...that way we could have done the architecture for the entire car as a unit instead of trying to interface with 3 other people and try to tell them why their protocol/IO stuff wasn't gonna work with the main program.

We had a full-size electric golf cart to use as a test mule; the steering had a motor on it with proximity sensors on the tie rods to report position. We used that for writing and testing the GPS navigation stuff. In the interest of meeting deadlines, my roommate and I were riding on it trying to make it navigate to waypoints in a campus parking lot, at 2 in the morning during a snow storm. FML.

 

[XJLI]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

In the interest of meeting deadlines, my roommate and I were riding on it trying to make it navigate to waypoints in a campus parking lot, at 2 in the morning during a snow storm. FML.

i hope you had your good friend jack daniels with you to keep warm

 

[vetteboy]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

Actually, interesting little sidebar to that project. Any of you new england guys know Matt Gaskins? Haven't heard from him in a long time, but he used to wheel with UJ and others...

Anyway, he was driving home from a wedding someplace and crashed at our apartment for the night. We got to talking about the project and he mentioned that he knew a guy at Measurement Computing, a manufacturer of data acquisition stuff in Norton, MA. He made a phone call and that night we signed them on as a sponsor for our IO hardware, and got a free USB 24-channel digital I/O board to use on the project.

Cool how these things work out.

 

[JrTxJ]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

My comanche goes nowhere, I guess I'll spend $20 and start on my fuel injection for my Honcho.

what does it need? do mine next!

 

[themangeraaad]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

Today was pretty good, worked from home but didn't have power all day... so that just meant that I replied to emails from the blackberry and called into the conference calls that we had scheduled. Last con-call starts in a min then I'm done for the day. Glad I go to save myself a few hours of driving arty:

 

[XJLI]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

time to go home! hope theres still snow on the ground!

 

[RCman]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I didn't get it either :rattle:

Oh geez. I didn't want to spam everyone's cell phone inbox. I only sent it to Chris as we had a previous converation about it. Colin got it simply because he is right below Chris in my phone.

Bill will be confused by this post :roll:

:gag: I'm not that out of the loop.

$1350 for all the full hydro stuff and a derale tube/fin cooler shipped to my door.

If that is the shipped price that's not bad.

Thankfully that's literally everything I need to get the steering done minus a reservoir bracket and some fluid.

Mine came with a res bracket, I modified it to work. IIRC, it was cheap. Make sure you get the correct spline column. Mine is the 4.75" long, 3/4-30 spline.

Tech geeks, this is pretty cool:

http://www.dump.com/2010/11/25/double-inverted-pendulum-video/

We had a single-inverted pendulum that we played with in my control systems classes, but that one's just badass.

Thats pretty neat.

http://www.fastenal.com/web/products/detail.ex?sku=0854060&ucst=t

I can get this at a pretty sweet discount. I don't know what to look for in a torch setup, can anyone offer some advice?

When I was looking at torches that was the one I was going to get.
Then I realized I could spend the money better elsewhere and never got one.

time to go home! hope theres still snow on the ground!

My Jeep activities are over, the salt truck just drove buy.
Sand and snow I have no problem with, but I'm not caking salt up in there.

 

[kastein]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

Oh geez. I didn't want to spam everyone's cell phone inbox. I only sent it to Chris as we had a previous converation about it. Colin got it simply because he is right below Chris in my phone.

hahaha no worries, I was just giving you crap about it.

 

[XJLI]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

My Jeep activities are over, the salt truck just drove buy.
Sand and snow I have no problem with, but I'm not caking salt up in there.

i rarely see a salter go by anymore, mostly sand. everything was clean as a whistle on my drive home

 

[Begster]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I got a text at 4 in the morning from my school saying everything was canceled. Now if only tomorrow is canceled, I'll have 8 straight days free of school.

 

[RCman]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

i rarely see a salter go by anymore, mostly sand. everything was clean as a whistle on my drive home

Mass LOVES to put salt down.
Typically my road doesn't get touched by twice during a storm like this. Once half way through and a cleanup/pushback at the end. The end pass will have sand and salt.

I got a text at 4 in the morning from my school saying everything was canceled. Now if only tomorrow is canceled, I'll have 8 straight days free of school.

That would have neat.

 

[Hackmeister]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

yay it's out!

 

[kastein]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I hope you are finding a way to make that AW-4 stay out.

Speaking of which, I have some ideas... I need to dig the 98+ TCU guts out again soon.

 

[foxwar71]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

Speaking of which, I have some ideas... I need to dig the 98+ TCU guts out again soon.

Speaking of which, I need someone to make me a new TCU for my arcade shifter.

 

[XJLI]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

and i need to mod my tcu for 1-2 and torque convertor manipulation

 

[kastein]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I need to figure things out the rest of the way and sign up as a vendor before I can really help with that. The last post was more of the "figure things out" idea type, as usual I don't know if my idea will work till I try it out.

It will happen... I just have half a million projects going on right now. At least the roof is coming together finally.

 

[Hackmeister]

Re: THe NAC Lots-O-Post Thread

I hope you are finding a way to make that AW-4 stay out.

I have no intentions of staying with an AW-4. Goal is most likely to sell the transmission and tcase. I'll probably keep the engine to rape for parts (oil pan, extra starter, etc etc etc). Once I decide I'm done with the 96 after one more decent wheeling day, I'll pull out the engine from that one, put the extra transmission in my basement to that, and the tcase with SYE in. In the mean time find me an ECU and pedals, and be ready to wheel by spring thaw. It only took about 3, 2-3 hour sessions in the shop to yank it out gracefully