Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category
Cell Ringer is GO
Several months ago when it became annoyingly clear that my 2 year old “Razr” phone was slowly dying I picked up a cheap out of contract Motorola E815 on eBay to replace it- I’ve been impressed with the phone, it gets excellent reception and battery life and I really enjoyed putting goofy MP3 ringtones on […]
Looking a Lot Like an Electric Car
Solar Power is GO
It was dissappointing to confirm that my Prosine inverter was toasted– so I hadn’t gotten around to working on the system for a while. Today I remembered that I have an old modified sine wave inverter in storage from the first and never functional version of the solar power system- I dug it out and […]
Wiring Up
I spent a good many hours today working on the car- got a lot done, and boy is it plenty hard work. I basically just ran the necesesary power cables front/back under the car. You can kind of see there, the welding cable is run in orange “Smurf Tube” from the home depot. It is […]
LeMons Arse-Freeze: Year Two
This year’s Arse Freeze-A-Palooza is still many months off, it’s true. But in the members of Project Fate’s collective busyness and brokeness, we decided it would be wise to shoot for one LeMons race a year for now- so Arse-Freeze ’09 is the goal. Last year we scrambled to get our racecar ready for Arse-Freeze […]
I wanna ShopBot
The ShopBot CNC router hasn’t always been an object of desire for me- It’s easy to judge it as inferior because it doesn’t use linear rail bearings, ballscrews or servo motors in favor of ball bearings on rails, rack and pinion gears and gearhead steppers. I have learned more of the capabilities and strengths of […]
A Million Loose Ends
Along with continuing to work on assembling the battery monitor modules (Update soon—) I spent some time today taking care of a few issues that needed to be addressed on the Miata. First I replaced the tangle of inline ATC fuse holders as seen above with a much tidier marine/RV ATC fuse block I purchased […]
1/2 Ton of Batteries
… very nearly, that is. First, I picked up a pair of L16s to wire into the little photovoltaic system I set up years ago- and never bought proper batteries for. I had an inverter on the system (prosine 1000), but it seems to have broken at some point- I don’t know when or how, […]
In: EV Miata, Renewable Energy System
Battery Regulator- the OTHER part of the project
I devised a workable fix for the circuit FAIL previously described and finished assembling a set of four battery regulator boards- their relatively small size belies that they have a LOT of parts on them! They are a pretty involved assembly project! I haven’t tested everything about every board, but as far as I can […]
Racing is Expensive
I read Jalopnik regularly, so I became aware this morning of the link they posted to Speed:Sport:Life about the expense of racing. I’m still not totally sure what the purpose of the article is, I guess it’s just to educate people who weren’t aware- and I guess that’s reasonable enough. I have always assumed that […]
In: LeMons, Life and Times, Racing