I purchased a surplus Currie Technologies “Diagnostic” throttle. (Which includes 3 LED’s labeled as 1/3, 2/3 and full charge indicators) It has a six pin (7 cable) connector with no pin-out diagram.
Currie Technologies diagnostic throttle
After opening it up, it appears that the blue, black, and red wires are connected to the throttle sensor itself, while the other four wires (White, Gray, Yellow, Green) connect to the LED circuit board.
The pin-out ordering is as follows, from the bottom of my picture up:
- Red/White (Throttle/LED, sharing a pin, + voltage)
- Black (to throttle, I assume Ground)
- Blue (from throttle, I assume signal)
- Green (Full LED)
- Yellow (2/3 full LED)
- Gray (1/3 full LED)
I connected the Red/Black/Blue wires to a motor speed controller that had a 3 wire throttle connection (matching them up to the Red/Black/Green wires from the controller) and it worked great!
The LED pin-out is as follows:
White (positive / Vcc)
Gray – 1/3 empty LED
Yellow – 2/3 full LED
Green – Full LED
Note that I was able to get the LED’s to light up with a 3V source, but I believe their forward voltage is less than 3V and you should use a current limited supply so that you do not burn the LED’s out.
I purchased a used Navajo Turbo Z 24volt electric scooter. The person I bought it from had installed two brand new 12V 7.0Ah batteries, similar to the battery in this data sheet. Note that because the scooter will discharge the batteries in less than an hour, the pack’s usable capacity is closer to 4Ah. Because the batteries are sealed lead-acid, they are heavy, approximately 6lbs each, and the pair make up approximately 35% of the scooter’s 34lb total weight. (Most of the rest of the weight comes from the hefty all-steel frame, and the 5lb 200-watt motor.)
(Continued)
AT&T and T-Mobile are the two main providers (in the USA) who provide GSM service. Below are the main cellular bands they use.
AT&T:
GSM: 850 and 1900
3G / UMTS / HSDPA: 850 and 1900
T-Mobile:
GSM 1900
3G/ UMTS / HSDPA: 1700 (Unique to T-Mobile) and 2100MHz
GSM bands not supported in the US: 900 and 1800
Internationally, you may need the 900 and 1800 bands, especially in Europe and Asia (many south American countries work on the 1900 GSM band). If you have a “quad-band” phone it will work everywhere.
My SiliconDust HD HomeRun has a relatively good HD tuner, but it’s not quite as good as the built in tuner on my TV at picking up stations that are extremely strong and have multi-path reception problems. Although the signal My MythTV box reception of Fox TV would intermittently cut out as the SNR would drop too low to enable reception (even though, or, because the power level was pegged at 100%).
I purchased a Skywalker 16db attenuator, and it successfully lowered the signal strength of the (overpowered) Fox channel so that my HD HomeRun’s tuner chip could receive it with an acceptable SNR and no dropouts.
The only problem with attenuating my signal was that one of the two PBS channels (8, GPB-HD) was too weak to be picked up through the attenuator.
(Continued)
When I set up my MythTV box to suspend itself (and wake up whenever a show needed to be recorded) I followed the directions on the MythWiki ACPI Wakeup page, which suggested that I disable writes to the hardware clock as follows:
“Disable hwclock updates
On most machines it’s required to make a small change to the Linux shutdown procedure. When your machine goes down, most linux distributions write the system time/data back to the bios. On MANY machines, the machine never wakes-up after a time/data update. It’s recommended to make this change before you start. See below for more details (distro specific),
The reason for the recommendation above is that most linux distributions write the current system time back to the bios when shutting down the machine, and with some BIOSes, the machine will not wake up if the hardware clock is modified after the alarm timer has been set. To avoid that, it is necessary to disable the writing of the current system time to the hardware clock in the system shutdown scripts.”
This had no negative effects until daylight savings time kicked in. My MythTV box syncs itself over the internet, so it updated itself to daylight savings time with no problems. However, the system BIOS clock (hwclock) was not updated because I had disabled hardware clock updates! After a week of recording the very ends of shows instead of the full shows, I figured out what was happening and issued a “hwclock –systohc” command to re-set the BIOS (hardware) clock from the (correct) system time.
However, this will only work until daylight savings time ends, so I am investigating if I really need to disable the write to my hardware clock after the system sets the wakeup time. It may be that my BIOS handles that correctly, in which case I can take out the “HWCLOCKACCESS=no” line I added to my “/etc/default/rcS” file.
Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Annoyances
I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 over the weekend.
The good:
Faster boot up. (worth the upgrade all by itself)
New notification “bubbles” that appear and then disappear again without any fuss.
OpenOffice 3.0 and other software upgrades.
The Bad:
Required tweaks to my pam_mount.conf.xml file to get my encrypted home directory to work. (Not an issue for most users.)
Bluetooth communication ports (serial over bluetooth) started giving errors because standard users no longer had permissions to use them. Adding the following code to an /etc/udev/rules.d/rfcomm.rules file allowed all users in the “dialout” group to access the /dev/rfcommXXX serial over bluetooth ports. (Ubuntu developers know about this problem and it will be fixed eventually.)
KERNEL=="rfcomm*", GROUP="dialout"Java support for MIDI music failed until I installed timidity again with the following command:
sudo apt-get install timidity pmidiThe Annoying:
The hardware buttons on my thinkpad (brightness, volume, etc) still work, but no longer have an on screen display. I could fix this by installing the tpb (thinkPadButtons) package, but it takes up extra CPU cycles and power. I found that the packagers are actively discussing this issue and have decided to wait until they fix the issue within the default packages.
When running Pidgin (IM client), an “envelope” icon appears inside a “indicator-applet 0.1″ to show that it’s running. Of course, Pidgin itself pops up another icon to show that it’s running on my gnome panel at the same time. I’ve thought about removing the indicator-applet from my panel to remove the duplicate items, but worried about what else I may miss if it’s not there to “hold all of the system indicators”. I eventually decided to go into the Pidgin preferences and select “Show System Tray Icon” only “on unread messages” which mostly fixed this annoyance, although now I need two button clicks to bring the IM window to the top instead of just one.
The ATI M6 graphics processor on my IBM X31 laptop was not automatically configured to use hardware acceleration. To use ppracer and other applications that require hardware acelleration to work well (such as the new version of lyx!) I had to edit my xorg.conf file following directions I found here.