I’d wrapped up the 7th article in this serious on an optimistic note. I had just patted myself on the back for having drawn up a circuit board diagram like a real electrical engineering studies intern, wasn’t I so smert?
The boards arrived, and I began spotting mistakes I made. The mistakes continued to pile up, some of them old, some of them made while trying to troubleshoot the existing issues. So, instead of the triumphant victory lap I’d hoped for, I’m going to delve into what I did wrong. But learning means making mistakes and figuring out how to avoid them later. So I’ve identified ten specific errors to address. Six were in the design of the board, and four were made while looking at those six.
Now, there may be more identified going forward, but I’ve not solved those yet, so I can’t rightly write about what went wrong.
As a quick overview, the six errors in the board design are in these spots:
Maybe I should just have circled the whole thing?
I’m going to address them in the order I discovered them, as a chronological narrative will explain the two additional errors in troubleshooting.
Errors one and two were made at the same time, and discovered fairly quickly as soon as the board arrived, though I’d figured them out before them.
My first mistake.
Both come from the same mistake. The four digit seven segment display I used did not have a premade footprint for KiCAD, so I figured I’d create the connections for it by placing Vias for the posts to get soldered into. This plan wasn’t bad on its own, but I missed some details when setting it up. The first was easy to make. By default, KiCAD has solder masks over the vias as they are intended to connect traces on different layers of the board. Since I didn’t remove that from the design, the board arrived with solder mask over the copper where I’d intended to solder. The fix was straightforward, I ended up scraping the mask of with an X-acto knife.
Mistake number 2 was one of spacing. Inside the two rows, the vias were properly spaced, but the spacing between the two rows was between 0.1-0.2″ wider than it should be. I don’t know if I messed up when moving them around, or when I originally measured out the spacing. Thankfully, the leads on the display are fairly long, so I was able to bend them into a wider spacing and fit the display into the board. I figured I’d made my mistake for the stage, but oh, how wrong I was.
I got everything soldered onto the board, plugged it in, and nothing happened. “Nothing” is one of the more difficult issues to track down. The power supply portion of the circuit is brand new to the printed board version, since the breadboard was powered wither off the launchpad or an Arduino, and here I had to regulate my own voltages. So I had the least experience in working with these components. Since it wasn’t in the earlier discussions, I’ll have to go over the voltage regulator circuit to pad out the article provide proper background.
In short, I needed to bring a 4.7v input power from the battery pack down to the 3.3v I’d designed the rest around. They do make voltage regulators that do exactly that. I built the circuit around an example in the datasheet for the component I bought. Here’s the datasheet example in question:
This is actually two different diagrams bodged together since the other stuff isn’t needed for the article.
Vin is the 4.7v from the battery, it goes into Pin 3, but has a ten microFarad capacitor connecting it to ground. The Vout is the 3.3v going to the rest of the decide and comes from Pin 2. It also has a 10 microFarad capacitor connecting it to ground. Ground gets connected to Pin 1.
Now, why in the world do we have capacitors shorting both of these lines to ground? In short – we don’t. According to what I’ve read, once the capacitors are energized, they become highly resistant to DC current, but offering low resistance to AC current. What this means is that once it fills up on that ten microFarads, it doesn’t short out the line, but it does divert any current going the “wrong” way to ground. This leads to their name as ‘filter caps’, as they filter out some of the potential power problems. I included them as a best practice, since I’m not so smart as to argue with the people who’d come before.
So lets take a look at where I made mistakes in the power circuit.
Power Underwhelming
Problem 4 is simpler, but helped me second guess the fix to problem 3. In short, what I did was connect the switch at the top to the wrong pin. I meant to connect to Vout (Center Pin), but connected to Ground (Pin 1). Connected to ground, the switch would do nothing, as it was supposed to provide a positive voltage to downstream components. What this led to was me thinking I’d installed the voltage regulator in upside down. Thus I made my first mistake in troubleshooting. I desoldered the component and flipped it to the other side of the board, swapping Pins 1 and 3. Now, voltage regulators have rather beefy pins to handle the load that gets put through them. This has made them the bane of the amateur soldering efforts. The solderpullt and solderwick were unable to extract enough of the solder from the holes, so I resorted to hot air to melt the solder on all three leads at the same time. This did get the voltage regulator out, but I touched the edge of the display with the hot metal on the air gun, melting some of the plastic.
Moving the component to swap Pins 1 and 3 was completely the wrong move. The blue trace off Pin 1 in the diagram is the ground plane for everything. Connecting Vin to the ground plane does not do anything useful.
Ultimately, I concluded that my mistake was in wiring up the battery connector backwards. These connectors are what I circled for Mistake 3. Pin 2 on the battery connector is ground. The correct fix was to break the traces and run bodge wires to the correct pins on the voltage regulator. But first, I had to put it back on the correct side. This, again led to be resorting to hot air to finish removing the component. Again, I touched the edge of the display and melted more plastic.
I did check for solder bridges, it’s not neat, but there are no shorts.
When I was done, all three voltage regulator pins had their own bodge wire, two for the battery connector, and the center pin to connect the switch properly. I powered it back up… and only the top half of the display lit up.
At this point, I made my second troubleshooting mistake.
I assumed that I had damaged the display when I melted bits of plastic on it. To be fair, it wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion, since the half that was failing was closer to the damage. Since I thought it was broken, I didn’t make a concerted effort to save the display, and ended up clipping the leads after desoldering left them still stuck. I bent the leads on a new display and attached it. Half of it didn’t light up. The same half as before. The display with the melted plastic and now stuffy leads was working just fine. So, I went hunting for mistake 5.
I found it here:
It’s obvious, really
A sharp eye might see what is wrong with pins 1, 2 and 3 on the Shift register here.
I did not intend to attach them to that trace, but it got too close, and all three shorted to it. What is that trace? The ground plane. Pins 1, 2, and 3 are data lines controlling the bottom three segments of the seven segment display, so if they’re all shorted to ground, half of the display will never light up. Now this diagram is zoomed way in. Bear in mind that the space between pins on this board in 0.1″ (2.54mm), so that second trace below the ground plane was awfully close. What is that trace? It’s the serial line providing data to the second shift register, controlling which digit of the display is being controlled. If I broke that, the entire display would go dark. I had no choice but to break up the ground plane trace, and avoid damaging the serial data line adjacent. This led to a lot of careful picking away with the tip of an X-acto knife, and running another bodge wire between Pin 10 on one shift register to Pin 13 on the other to repair the ground plane. Ultimately, the changes looked like this:
X never, ever marks the spot.
Surely This had to be everything?
Of course not. There is another. One I made way back before I ever designed a circuit board. It lives here:
Le Sigh.
When I drew up the schematic for Article 4, I made a mistake in recording which wires on the shift registers were connected to which pins on the display. This manifested in the digits showing garbled output. I still had my breadboard wired up and verified that it did not match what appeared in the schematic. I’d used the schematic as my reference for the circuit board, so that transcription error was carried forward.
I could have fixed the wiring, but this problem was fixable in code. Updating the code requires moving the MSP430 back to the launchpad to re-flash the storage. I had anticipated the need to change code, so I put the three Integrated Circuits in sockets that let me pull them without having to desolder anything. What happened next was yet another mistake – I severely bent the pins on the microcontroller when I pulled it from the socket. One was particularly warped in a manner where I knew I’d need to spend a lot of time coaxing it into a workable position. Rather than do that I grabbed a spare MSP430F2003 from my collection and plugged that into the launchpad. I was about to overwrite all the code anyway.
To make sure I was able to make multiple updates without risking another mishap, I connected jumper wires from the launchpad to the socket. I dubbed this the debugging harness, as it let me run and update code to run against the hardware without risking damage by constantly swapping the microcontroller back and forth.
Typically this would be by my computer, but it’s more photogenic over on the workbench.
Luckily, I knew exactly what line of code needed updating. It was
unsigned int digMask[10] = { 0x77, 0x11, 0x6b, 0x3b, 0x1d, 0x3e, 0x7e, 0x13, 0x7f, 0x3f};
Those magic numbers were simply the translation from a binary record of which pins needed to be turned on for the right segments to light up. I just had to map out what pins led to which segments and update the numbers.
Aaand then I made mistake 10. Being a native English speaker, I read numbers with the most significant digit on the left, and think about them that way. So Pin 7 got mapped to the leftmost digit while Pin 1 got the rightmost. Unfortunately, to fill the shift registers with data, I had to send Pin 7 first, so it was supposed to have the Least significant digit. It only took me two rounds of “what is going on here?” to realize my mistake.
Stupid Endianness.
Now, the numbers were finally displaying as they should.
Problems solved, right?
Ha Ha, of course not.
I’ve got two more unsolved problems, which might be from additional undetected mistakes, or from factors unaccounted for. But I haven’t solved them as of time of writing.
First problem is that button presses for setting the time simply send the values going wild, clearly that signal is insane and I’ve got to figure out a better debouncing method.
Second is that whenever the Colon in the middle of the display is Not lit up, some of the other segments which are supposed to be dark will flicker on slightly. For the time being I’ve hacked a fix by keeping the colon lit, but I want that to blink with the seconds.
But these are for future me to solve. Right now, I’m going to take a break and ruminate.
Maybe Part 9 will be a redemption arc where I’ve fixed my mistakes and present a working clock. Maybe.
Nobody got any bonus points, since I didn’t see any guesses.
I have no guesses, because I don’t know very much about circuit boards. Appreciate the articles though, as I am slightly less ignorant than previously.
I love the work bench, reminds of the good old days.
I always expect a mistake or 2 when design/building, it happens
Oh, I expect maybe one or two mistakes. Ultimately this iteration had twelve. The last two are addressed in part 9.
And yes, the workbench is cluttered. Almost all of that is electronics stuff… until you reach the layer of plastic crack hiding behind the oscilliscope.
I went to college for this, and my work area looked exactly like that. So you’re on the right track.
Taig Mill and everything?
😜
Learning by fucking up: the best teacher.
And KN looks like a Nine inch Nails album logo
It throws me whenever I see it., I go “Knight?”
I admire you for sticking with this. There’s a lot going on here, and you’re doing this without an instructor’s help.
Thank you.
My ultimate goal isn’t the clock project, but I want to get this working before I move on to the next step.
It’s logic, he knows how to learn things.
/autodidact
You sir are so much braver than I.
I would never have even tried.
Bravo
The key thing is willingness to fail and learn from that failure.
Well somehow sir you have managed to snap a photo of our bench here at work. Good job working through your issues.
I know where to look for anything I need in that mess.
For some reason that organizational style is common.
Anybody that actually uses a workbench has a bench like that.
The only part kept clear is that part where you do the work.
OT – I picked this up because the signal generator in my cheap as can be single channels scope is awful,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B49S1S6D
It’s surprisingly good. I needed for sine waves, but as a reviewer noted the only downside I’ve found is you can’t change the duty cycle on the square wave.
Square waves are where all my current work is…
I needed higher voltage sine waves that didn’t distort.
OTH, my scope does fine with p-p 3.3V square waves and can also vary the duty cycle.
I have one (picked up on the cheap), but have never found a need for it.
My Fluke 179, on the other hand… True RMS is the awesome.
The Bee of course nails it.
Nice for our low expectations to be exceeded.
Perfect!
I like looking at people’s work spaces.
It is facinating.
Now I do wonder – does yours tend to the orderly or the cluttered?
https://ibb.co/ZXwqtFM
Woodworking? Or Small Metal?
Yes.
I misread your question. Small metal lathe, 9″x48″.
I do both in the shop.
I guess I guessed correctly, since I couldn’t decide between the two.
Depends on the day. Today is not a good one.
https://ibb.co/vLmFfvX
https://ibb.co/gjFRGxN
That is still far neater than any workspace I’ve been near.
Of course Mojeaux is fixated on my beautiful comments.
Pony up the pix, Bro.
Zwak’s are fun. Lots of hidey-holes.
Not like THAT, you perverted motherfuckers.
For Mojo:
https://ibb.co/DQSCx5x
https://ibb.co/k84Mytn
You should see where I First. It’s mission control, the command center for upending the apple cart of seconding society.
For you Zoomies busting me for my relatively clean garage. It get’s quite messy when i’m working, but I clean it up afterwards as much as possible. If the project is going to take a few weeks or months, I keep it cluttered but ordered. I hate loosing parts, trying to find tools, re-buying fasteners, or tripping over stuff.
I spend 30 minutes at the end of my night/day session cleaning tools, putting them away, sweeping or vacuuming.
I’m not a neat freak or anal about organization, but I do what I have to to make my life easier. Otherwise there will be piles and stacks.
Needz moar gray epoxy with sprinkles.
It will eventually have enough paint, epoxy splatters, and grease/oil stains to be considered sprinkles. One day it will look like a Pollock painting made by a drunk chimp with grease gun and a bandoleer of rattle cans.
I think the mess is from the apostrophes.
Cool clock, Moj!
What’s the thing with one yellow foot?
https://www.amazon.com/Squishy-Novelty-Birthday-Nightlight-Rechargeable/dp/B0CPYPMMXB
Secret recordings of 2 Supreme Court justices released
love it.
“Newish has not authenticated the audio…”
JHTFC
What the hell is the scandal here, outside some whack job recorded them after asking some leading questions?
Her big gotcha’s are nothing, even assuming they haven’t been heavily edited.
We have exposed them because they politely agreed with the radical agenda we falsely suggested to them! If they were decent humans – progressives – they would’ve screamed in my face how evil I was for speaking to them as I did!!!
When James O’Keefe does something like that it’s to be ignored in the media.
How DARE this woman talk like that! Justice Alito really needs to curb his wife. /progressive demands
If Alito can’t even control his bitch, how can he be in a position that impacts millions of people?
Rocket porn from Tory Bruno
https://x.com/torybruno/status/1800529029201875307?s=19
Have I told you all recently how much I fucking hate Mike Tomlin? Dude belongs in Cleveland at this point.
He just got his extension… after the Browns extended Stefanski and Berry. At least one NFL analyst had a stroke, and thinks the Stillers are the front runner to win the division.
Yea, I don’t understand the extension of the GM and head coach who hitched their wagon to Deshaun Watson, either. But at least they’ve won a playoff game more recently than Mediocre Mike…against Mediocre Mike in an embarrassing fashion, no less.
I do get Cleveland wanting stability and winning there hasn’t been easy.
I see it as a way to move past the Watson trade (which I think was foisted upon Stefanski, and was a panic move by Berry), while trying to give some stability to a team that’s needed it. With Stefanski pulling off a playoff run while starting 5 different QB’s, I think he really earned that extension. Keep in mind that Stefanski has won more games with the Browns than all but FIVE head coaches (Brown, Collier, [both before my time] Rutigliano, Schottenheimer, Belichick).
Stefanski has the Vikings Curse on him.
You are doomed.
What you needed to ask was does anyone care?
Summarizes my thoughts on you, juris.
You sweet-talker.
You wouldn’t be the first person to dislike Mike Tomlin.
Jacoby Jones would agree.
Persecution of the innocent
Trump has a yearslong history of singling out members of the DOJ — dating back to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI employees who recently settled a federal lawsuit stemming from the leak of their anti-Trump texts to the news media.
Completely out of the blue. Just a pair of honest, hard working apolitical investigators defending truth and freedom.
Savor the irony of them essentially saying “if he can do that to us, he’ll do it to you”.
I thought it was more “if we can do this to him, he can do it to you.”
I did not know those clowns actually got a paycheck out of all that. I don’t care how much it was – it’s an embarrassment. Some clowns they were probably buddies with cut a wink nod deal or settlement for them.
Wasn’t that shit put in a lengthy inspector general report in the first place? And weren’t they texting from government issued devices? But they want to pretend it was their private pillow talk,
So, leak non-public information and you may get punished? Where is my fainting couch?
/has large amounts of non-public information that I cannot share with the public
If I was one of the few honest G-men out there, I sure wouldn’t meet up with any of the other honest ones.
Seems like there have been a lot of people out there bemoaning the attacks on “our sacred institutions”. When I take off my tinfoil hat to shower, I start hearing voices telling me that it sure seems like they are preparing the public for something.
Which goes back to my honest G-men argument. You don’t want to blow up a bunch of good foot soldiers, but a few malcontents who are always bringing everyone down with their fancy rule of law bullshit? Yeah, they’d be a good bunch of martyrs.
Also. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, what sort of lowlife uses “but muh institutions!” as their last refuge?
Someone should get Obama on record now about how he feels about Garland. I have a feeling that like Fauci more and more bad shit will start to come out about Garland’s tenure at the DOJ.
If no one pins Obama down, I’m sure he will say “hey back when I appointed him, he was a totes different guy! He got all twisted up after he started working with that Biden guy (who I hardly knew either)”
Inexorable march of justice
New Jersey’s attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s recent felony convictions in New York make him ineligible to hold liquor licenses at his three New Jersey golf courses.
A spokeswoman for the office said Monday that it is reviewing whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts involving payment of hush money to a porn star and falsifying business records in an attempt to hide it should impact the former president’s continued ability to hold liquor licenses.
State law prohibits anyone from holding a liquor licenses who has been convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude.”
Doin’ right ain’t got no end.
I dont think that is how that works. Trump does not hold a liquor license. The business entity holds the license.
I guess these days none of that matters. He is bad therefore he is guilty.
They’ll find a way, maybe cite the Trump Exemption.
I doubt that, in a sane society, being convicted of some kind of recordkeeping fuckup would count as “moral turpitude”.
What is this sane society you speak of?
Hunter Biden convicted.
See – complete equality under the law.
The headline should be ‘Creepy Joe dodges another bullet’.
That’s how it’ll be spun. As it stands now our side’s happy over the conviction of a gun buying crackhead while their side gets the conviction of the leading rival presidential candidate. Not exactly a fair trade.
It will be interesting to see the tax trial out in California – that’s the one with real implications to Joe. I could definitely see a “deal” cut there since Hunter has already been convicted on the gun charges. If not, and he’s getting the full monty, then someone behind the scenes may actually be putting the squeeze on Joe.
Not even close. One actual criminal, and one imaginary.
No, no, no, you don’t understand. Hunter’s clear violation of the letter of the law is a political prosecution. The novel legal theory used to convict Trump of 34 felonies is justice.
34 misdemeanors, since they never charged him with the felony that could’ve escalated those misdemeanors into felonies.
Details, details. He’s guilty of something.
No, they’re felonies because they tied them to a crime for which some other person was convicted (the payment to Stormy by Cohen, who accepted a plea deal to avoid a worse fate.)
I still don’t know how making hush money payments is considered a felony? Was it due to it being accounted for as a campaign expense by Cohen?
That’s not what the news is telling me about Convicted Felon Donald Trump
Yes, Trump was guilty of mislabelling the invoices to hide the existence of an illegal campaign contribution that everyone knew about because it was the result of a plea bargain in open court.
Never mind that the payments came AFTER the election he was illegally
influencingwinning.Part of what goes into that calculation is a requirement that “a person must have a reputable character and would be expected to operate the licensed business in a reputable manner,’’ according to the division.
That should be enough to exclude any politician or public official.
Sure, we hand out the licenses – we couldn’t ever qualify for one!
Peter Strozk and Lisa Page are consummate professionals with the ability to completely compartmentalize any personal private political opinions, unlike that Scalia guy.
Well of course they are professionals without any agenda.
The FBI has always been a ompletely apolitical entity. Never have they ever done things like say infiltrate “dissident” Facebook groups and frame autistic kids for crimes they themselves planned.
Look it is like gain of function research!
If you wait around for a bunch of white supremacists to kidnap the governor of a state it is going to be a disaster. But if you go out there and get involved with the kidnapping plot from the very beginning you will be totes prepared to foil the plot. Or at the very least get the governor back after a ransom drop.
Same with bombings. It is next to impossible to catch some random bomber. The Unabomber would have still been at large if his brother hadn’t ratted him out. But with the FBI’s proactive approach to handing out bomb materials to wackos it is much easier to “solve” any bombings that happen.
The FBI has always been a ompletely apolitical entity…
Or attempt to crush dissenting voices.
Hunter’s clear violation of the letter of the law is a political prosecution. The novel legal theory used to convict Trump of 34 felonies is justice.
They used a minor procedural misstep, a mere formality, on Hunter’s part to unfairly drag his name through the mud.
It was a stroke of legal genius to use Trump’s underhanded tricks to prevent Stormy Daniels from telling her innocent woman’s truth as a lever to finally bring him to justice. He’s the Al Capone of American Presidents.
Is it really vandalism if it improves the artistic value?
King Charles portrait gets makeover from animal rights protesters
That’s fantastic. Reap what you sow, Charles!
I’ve told you all about my Mom and Dad the diehard Dems. Today I’m on a group text with my siblings and one of them said that Mom thinks Hunter was innocent. * head desk *
He is definitely guilty of that law.
Now I have issue with 1) the legality of that law, given the Second Amendment and
2) The ridiculous possible penalties.
Most likely he will appeal, I would think. Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court? That would the the only good thing the Bidens ever did.
It’ll be interesting if it gets up the the Supreme Court. For once, I would have no idea how the progressive justices would rule? Would they defend the Second, or would they throw Hunter under the bus to keep their gun laws, or come up with a third option that finds Hunter innocent and keeps the law on the books?
I’m not a legal scholar, but haven’t courts already ruled on the legality of background checks for gun purchases? Being a crackhead isn’t a reasonable disqualifier that they haven’t already ruled on?
Not to mention, losing track of the weapon by not securing it.
Option 4: He’s pardoned by Joe win or lose as soon as the election results are in.
My prediction – sentencing is dragged out so he doesn’t actually have to show up at jail until after the election.
At which point, Joe pardons him.
It would be nice if the courts just came out and clearly said that these laws don’t apply to important people. Only the serfs need to follow them.
Just get it over with. We can’t be having our betters worrying about being dragged into some court by mistake.
My response was that he took pictures of himself doing crack, and at that time he purchased a gun, and he lied on the form about his drug use which was a felony. We may dispute that it SHOULD be a crime, but there is no doubt he broke a law.
It sounds like there are minimum sentencing requirements. Which will be rich because Joe was a big proponent of mandatory minimums for crack possession.
TOK: I’m hoping that Joe blurts out some of that racist bullshit he always is saying. “Black kids are just as smart as white kids”, etc.
“Minimum sentencing guidelines aren’t for white people!”
Some additional news floating around:
Joe has said “no pardon” for his son already. Now take that with a grain of salt, he lies a hundred times before he gets out of bed in the morning.
This will be interesting to watch. I do not think there is a minimum penalty for this – so he may end up with probation.
TOK:
I feel that right there makes the whole Hunter thing a worthy Twilight Zone-esque twist.
And there was at least one fake press release from Trump promising to pardon Hunter as everyone should be able to get a gun.
he lies a hundred times before he gets out of bed in the morning.
Joe: c’mon Jill, you know I’m as studly as I ever was!
Narrator: This may not actually be a lie.
Pope: I think Charlie Rangel already covered that.
What does sibling(s) think?
All three are pro-Trump Republicans. I’m Republican-adjacent. Much to the chagrin of Mom and Dad.
3.5 Alex P. Keatons!
A good friend of mine passed last October, he was my go to for electronic fixes. Since he has passed, I have had to teach myself some of this stuff, oftentimes on the fly. No guesses from me on your errors because they’d be idiotic guesses, but I am studying the circuits because this is interesting to me. I wish I took it more seriously when I was younger and when my brain was more of a sponge.
I was told today, by a proggie accountant friend, that if Trump had memoed his check as “reimburse lawyer for non-disclosure agreement with Ms. Daniels” , there would have been no crime. I asked her “what was the crime?”. “unlawfully interfering with the election by fraudulently altering business records of course.”. “So explain to me why altering a record in 2017 had an effect on the 2016 election?”. Answer: “He’s an asshole who deserved to be convicted for something.”
“So you support punishing people for crimes they haven’t been convicted of? Do I have that right.”
“Only people I really, really hate.”
Yes; this particular prog is convinced Dems will control everything forever and never have to face what would be “childish and unfair”revenge from Republicans.
if Trump had memoed his check as “reimburse lawyer for non-disclosure agreement with Ms. Daniels” , there would have been no crime.
I hope there is electron microscope level scrutiny for this kind of bullshit given to every Democrat in or candidate for high national office, as well as every major Democrat donor.
If this is the law they want, they should get it good and hard.
Pop up headlights, 5 speed and a “turbo”. What’s not to love?
https://phoenix.craigslist.org/nph/cto/d/glendale-1987-mitsubishi-starion-esi-obo/7747337321.html
Still a nice looking car, the middle class guy’s 944.
My good friend was able to get his uncle’s mint 89 Conquest TSI Red with black interior. Looked like this one.
https://silodrome.com/dodge-conquest-tsi/
That thing was a blast to drive and be a passenger in. RWD, no traction control, and turbo fun. I don’t know what he did with it. I imagine it was sold when he moved to Missoula. Not great in the snow.
3rd Gen Camaros were amongst the most hard done by the gas crisis years.
I didn’t realize until fairly recently that some (most?) older pop-up headlights operated using the vacuum system I always assumed they were moved via electric motors.
Including the C3 Corvette.
Flash backs of my Firebird Formula headlight motors failing to shut off when retracting. I can still hear the noise, dammed salty air corroding all of the electrical contacts.
I will die on the hill that C3 is sexiest C.
C3 pre plastic bumpers and non-hatch back.
OTH, how about a 1982 smog equipped 305 small block automatic?
That 305 is probably the grossest thing that GM ever did.
I had a ’92 Camaro with that insult to American Muscle stuffed in it. *spits*
@OBJ, I had a ’85 Z28 with the 305. MEH. At least it was a manual.
Clean car and I appreciate the period styling.
*points to avatar*
What this means is that once it fills up on that ten microFarads, it doesn’t short out the line, but it does divert any current going the “wrong” way to ground.
I know you’re simplifying for a non-technical crowd, but I want to add just a touch of nuance here.
A device that stops* current from going the wrong way is a diode. It’s the check valve of the electrical world.
*in a world with spherical cows
Here, the capacitor is for filtering wrong _frequencies_. The voltage is varying off of exactly 3.3V by some small amount due to a number of reasons. That noise on the power line can cause issues if it is a big enough change. The noise, however has some relatively high frequency associated with it.
The capacitor acts more and more like a short circuit to ground the higher the frequency of a signal, so the 3.3V part of the signal (with frequency of 0) continues unchanged, but the noise part of the signal is reduced because it’s partially redirected to ground. The current is never actually going the wrong way unless the noise is extreme.
BTW, I’m really enjoying this series. I’m remembering a lot of the stuff I had forgotten from engineering school.
Some portion of it is simplification, some portion of it is my ongoing levels of ignorance.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the articles. Because I’m at part 12 and still haven’t gotten the clock “done”
So you’re saying “it’s not time”?
It’s right twice a day currently. At some point it may be right more frequently.
That should be really useful.
Biden nixes plans, heads to Delaware estate after son Hunter’s federal conviction
https://nypost.com/2024/06/11/us-news/joe-biden-makes-first-comments-after-hunter-found-guilty-on-felony-gun-charges/
Pop up headlights, 5 speed and a “turbo”. What’s not to love?
Japanese Mustang.
My conspiracy theory:
FJB gives speech about being in an impossible situation, pardons Hunter since he must do everything he can for his son and then resigns since it wouldn’t be right to continue to be President after that.
Hagiographies and accolades fly in from all media, President Harris gets boost in polls due to D’s super-duper ethical display.
Why are the instructions entirely in Japanese!?!
Curse you Diversified Plastic Crack!
問題ない！
Shockingly, I can’t read Japanese.
https://translate.google.com/
I spent $200 on a represnetative sample of kits from this company to see if they were any fun to assembly. At least the parts labels do use Latin letters and arabic numerals, so I can work off the pretty pictures, which do appear to be fairly well done in terms of clarity of instruction
UCS – as Ted mentioned you can use Google Translate.
At least on Android (and I believe iOS) you can photograph the text and it will OCR it and translate. It works much better than in the past for Japanese, but still not anywhere close to Romance languages.
Sorry Ted, but A: Google is a bad company, and B: I’m not scanning in the instructions to feed to an internet site from their current paper form.
For not being able to read any of the text, these are actually very good instructions. I think I’ll be okay
To be honest, I was only suggesting Google Translate for Sensei’s previous comment. 🙂
😆
after he delivers remarks about gun safety in the afternoon at Everytown’s Gun Sense University at the Washington Hilton, according to the White House.
Don’t toss your gun in the trash where any old hobo can find it and turn it in to the screws.
I will die on the hill that C3 is sexiest C.
*shovels dirt on OBJ*
Actually, the C3 convertible is not horrible.
C3 was the last generation that didn’t require that you have to look like Kenny Rodgers in New Balance sneakers to own.