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One thing I really like to have in a car is a warning buzzer than tells me when the headlights are on when I open the door, so that I don't leave the lights on and drain the battery.
My vintage Beetle never had such a circuit. It did have a buzzer that would buzz if you left the key in and opened the door. And it also turned on the dome light when either door was opened, independent of anything else. However, the switch to make both of those things work independently is a switch you can't get any more. It's a double-pole switch that switch the circuits independelty, and neither of them to ground. The only switches you can get for the doors are single-pole grounding switches. So the circuit to do all of this with a single switch per door gets a a bit more complicated.
I've designed a circuit to do the job. I want to have the buzzer go off if I open the door and any of the following is true:
Here's the circuit; two relays (they can be small ones) and four
diodes. Now I just need to get all the connectors organized and the
wires run, and the componnets wired up.
The only problem with this is I haven't been able to figure out to
wire the relays so that if either the door is opened or the key is in,
there isn't current being drained from the battery. Ideally it would
only draw when both were true. But for the moment, I'll have to put
up with a bit of current draw when the door is open, even if the dome
light is turned all the way off. That's probably not that big of a
deal.
Driving for Christmas, after the first stop, as we were about to get back on the interstate, we got a charging system warning. I was actually quite pleased with the Taurus; the status indicator said "check charging system" and the battery light came on, and it buzzed. (When I lost the alternator in our Escort, the first I knew of it was when the tachometer stopped functioning.)
We got a new alternator, which got us on our way within a few hours.
I'd like to put in a plug for the Richmond, Kentucky Ford dealer here. They got us in in the middle of a busy weekday and we were on our way in less than three hours from when we got dropped off. (It also confirmed my conviction to always have my AAA membership up to date.) They were fast, they had an alternator in stock, and they fixed a couple of other things with the car (headlight).
With the looking at the alternator, and the recent picture that
I blogged of the generator belt in the airplane. So here's a picture
of the serpentine belt in the Taurus that I took today:
This is looking down the right side of the engine bay (the engine is
transfersely mounted). The pulley in the upper right marked with a
yellow dot is the power steering pump. Below it, mounted with the
blue dot, is air-conditioning compressor pulley. In the upper left of
the photo, marked by the cyan (light blue) dot is the alternator;
that's kind of on top. I believe the lowest
pulley marked with the red dot is the drive pulley on the end of the
crankshaft, so by process of elimination the one on the left with the
purple dot is the pulley for the water pump.
So as far as I can tell, the two grey pulleys in the middle marked with grey dots are idlers. They're smaller than the others, the back side of the belt runs against them.
As in the previous post, I drove down to South Carolina to look at the plane and go flying with the seller on Sunday November 4th. I liked what I saw, so we arranged to have the plane inspected later the following week.
So on Tuesday evening November 6, I drove most of the way down to Rome, Georgia. I drove the rest of the way on Wednesday morning. The seller flew the plane there later that morning. I had my machanic do initial look-see during the middle of the day. He didn't spot anything immediate, so I gave seller a deposit, we signed the contract, and then I drove the seller to Augusta Geogia and met his wife to drop him off. I then drove most of the way back to Rome. I didn't make it all the way, but I pushed through (this is late Wednesday night now) so that I was north of Atlanta.
I was glad I had. Thursday morning, Driving north from Atlanta, the
traffic going into Atlana was pretty fierce; I was glad I was going
the other way:
Along that same strech of highway, here's a single shot I got of a
Smart Car entering onto the interstate in front of me. The way it
moved down the highway and outdistanced me made me much more confident
about the Smart's abilities as an interstate car. This was the
closest I ever got to it.
Thursday morning, I spent time in the shop taking inspectional panels
off of the plane. This is the first time I've helped with the prep
work for an annual--a first in my young life:
Inspection panels off on the left wing to expose the aileron controls:
I have lots of photos of the various bits of (now my) airplane. I'll
parcel them out among other posts. Here's one more, though. I find
it terribly amusing that the Lycoming engine/propeller combination
means that the drive pulley for the generator belt is behind the
propellor. That means that to put on a new belt, you have to take the
propellor off the crankshaft.
The engine is to the left here, the propellor and spinner to the
right. As in all Lycoming engines, the starter ring gear is here at
the front of the engine. The generator pulley is near the bottom of
the photo.
On the whole, the vintage Beetle is doing pretty well. I've taken it on my periodic long commute twice this calendar year, and it did pretty well. I'm sorting out how to drive it and keep the engine cool enough, which is partly bracing the deck lid (engine cover) open a bit while driving and changing the main jet in the carburetor. But it is a good (although loud) highway car.
There are two problems with it at the moment, so it's decomissioned for the winter. One its had as long as I've had it; there's a characteristic vibration that most Super Beetles get at some point; it's euphemistically called the "Super Shimmy". One of the things that makes the "Super Beetle" different is that it has a totally different front suspension setup than the earlier cars. The tie rods are very long, and so it doesn't take a lot of deterioration in the suspension components before the leverage provided by the leverage of the tie rods to allow wheel vibration to shake the car.
My car has it; unfortunately it's sort of difficult to quantify since it sometimes happens more than other times. Sometimes, it vibrates between 43 and 45 mph and that's it. Somtimes it vibrates any speed from 35 to 50. Well, it's been getting a bit worse this year, so I think it's time to at least look carefully at the suspension and try to remedy it. My vague plan is to take my time and take the front suspension apart slowly this winter, and see how things look once everything's apart. I'll probably buy a bushing it and then put things back together and see how that goes.
The other thing is brand new. My fuel pump seems to have ruptured, putting gasoline into the crank case. So I need to fix the pump, and change the oil a couple of times in a row to get all that flushed out. Not a huge deal, but a pain none the less.
And of course, I'll be instrument it with logging electronics soon. More on that later.
Boy, it's been a busy month at work. We have a big review tomorrow and Friday. A lot of the last month has been preparing for it. And in there was Thanksgiving. And in there I decided to buy an airplane (but that's another post).
One project that I'd had in the pipeline for a while but I just had't gotten all the pieces together was to create a temperature logging gadget for my vintage Beetle. I'm very curious as to how things warm up and cool down when it's first started, during driving and afterwards. So I'm going to install an Arduino data logger in the car, and instrument it with lots of temperature sensors so that I can download and graph data from it. There may be interesting things to learn there.
I've had an Arduino Mega for a couple of years but I've never really done anything with it (yet). I did buy a protoshield which is somethin that plugs into the Arduino board's sockets but allows you to solder things to connecto the Arduino withould making the connections permanent.
The Arduino Mega is on top, the protoshield is on the bottom.
You can
sort of see the power rectified that's sticking up from the
protoshield. It will drop the voltage from the car down to 8V. The
Aduino likes to get somewhere in the range of 7 to 9 volts as input
and then regulates it down to 5V internally. The documentation says
that higher voltages aren't really recommended, which is wny I'm not
driving the board directly with the 12V from the car (which can get as
high as 14.5V or a bit higher when the engine is running fast.)
The Arduino itself is a microcontroller; it's a processor with inputs
and outputs. Not very interesteing just that; it can blink lights,
that's about it. Along with the protoshield, I bought two add-ons
that will make it into a good data logging device. Once is a
real-time clock:
That's a battery-run clock, like the type that's on a computer's
motherboard, that tells the computer what date and time it is when
it's powered on. The real-time clock allows the Arduino to put a time
and date with each measurement it records, so that the sequence and
spacing of the data is understood.
The other component I got is a micro-SD card reader:
I can put a micro-SD card in the jack and once that's wired to the
Arduino, the Arduino can open files on the micro-SD and write data to
them.
The first thing I'll measure is temperature. I bought a bunch of temperature sensors, but they're boring so I didn't take a photo.
The goal here is to be able to print out all kinds of information to see how my car is doing more precisely.