S-10 Electric Pickup

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Side view of the Electric S-10 Pickup
Our new commuter vehicle (and my new toy) is a second-hand electric conversion S-10 pickup. We purchased it from the original converter after he had upgraded to a Ford Ranger EV.

It is powered by 20 six-volt lead acid (PbA) golf cart batteries wired in series, giving a nominal 120 volt system. Sixteen of the batteries are stored in boxes under the tilt-up pickup bed. The remaining four batteries are under the hood, where the radiator would be on an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. It can be charged via either the QuickCharge 120V charger plugged into a standard 15Amp outlet (which takes 13 hours) or the Zivan NG3 high frequency 240V charger (which takes 7 hours and a 240 volt outlet).

16 six volt batteries under the tilt-bed of the pickup
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Motorola Backflip Android 2.1 upgrade

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I have been using my HTC Aria as my primary phone, and using CyanogenMod it runs android 2.2. Instead of leaving it sitting in a box, I decided I wanted to use my backup phone (a Motorola Backflip) as a wifi network camera. However, it runs Android 1.5, which isn’t supported by the Free IP Webcam software. Luckily, Motorola has released an upgrade for the Backflip, if you know where to look. Continue reading →

Best AT&T DSL modem for difficult conditons: 2Wire 2701

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We recently moved to a new house that is far from the central office, and apparently is served by some very old copper. AT&T’s computer system refused to sell us any DSL plans faster than 1.5 Mb/sec, as the lines wouldn’t support any faster speed.

I have tried using three different DSL modems at this house. In order of age and success:

  1. Westell WireSpeed (2200) B90 DSL modem – This modem works at the full 1.5 Mb/sec speed, for a few hours. Then it gets slower and slower, until it averages 7KB/sec for downloads. (Uploads remaind at full 0.3 MB/sec speed). Power cycling the DSL modem fixes the issue and restores full speed for 12 hours or so.
  2. Motorola Netopia DSL modem – This modem occasionally was able to get full download speeds, but typically would max out at 0.3 MB/sec (30 KB/sec) for the download speeds. (Uploads remained at a full 0.3 MB/sec.) Power cycling the modem did not improve things.
  3. 2Wire 2701hg-B DSL modem with integrated wifi. This modem was able to maintain the full 1.5 MB/sec download speeds. Perhaps because it is the newest of the three modems, and has a better DSL chipset.

It was worth purchasing a new DSL modem for this house. (Although the Netopia and WireSpeed modems have both worked fine in other locations.)

Building an OTA HDTV Antenna

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Screws and Washers holding coat hanger parts to the board
This week I built a TV antenna. Previously, we had been using a commercially purchased Radio Shack antenna with a built in pre-amplifier, but we left it mounted on the (tall, exterior) wall of our previous house. We had planned on purchasing a new antenna to place in our attic when I found plans on the Internet for how to make your own out of coat hangers and scrap wood. (Really, what CAN’T you find plans for on the Internet?) Continue reading →

Flashy Guy at Dragon*Con

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Update: His name is Marc DeVidts and more info about his costume can be found at his site.
The coolest technical “costume” I saw at Dragon*Con was a guy with a hundred or so individually addressable RGB LEDs under a white outfit. He had them under wifi control from his cell phone. He could select colors, speed, intensity and many different patterns of flashing. The video shows a “random” effect, but I also saw things such as a “line” moving up and down that made it obvious that each cluster was individually addressable. Unless he was supposed to be the guy from Quantum Leap, I think it was just a cool technical effect and not a specific costume. Download Video

DragonCon 2010 Mysterio Pictures

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In the Parade, I was wearing the plastic “safety” globe. Visibility out of it was about 2%. I basically followed a succession of brightly colored costumes (Storm’s white hair, wonder woman’s bright red cape, Zoo Hercules’ gold reflective bandoleer, etc).
Mysterio in DragonCon2010 parade

mysterio in DragonCon 2010 parade

Photo by Kirk Damato.

Mysterio in DragonCon 2010 parade - photo by Amber Croxall

Photo by Amber Croxall

The photos below show the glass sphere which I wore in more static settings indoors and for photo-shoots. Thanks to Chris, Becky and the photographers named in the captions for sending me photos from Saturday and Sunday! Continue reading →

Backflip wifi tether with Ubuntu Linux

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After gaining root access on my Motorola Backflip phone, I was (eventually) able to get wifi tethering working using the Barnacle application (version 0.5.1).

In Barnacle, I have “skip wpa_supplicant” checked, the channel set to six (6), and DHCP set up to use the OpenDNS DNS server (208.67.222.222) although the DNS server option may not be needed. (I had to also manually specify the DNS server IP on my client anyways.)

I had to pull some tricks on the client side (Ubuntu Linux) to make everything work. Specifically, setting MTU size to 1250 and setting up my own DNS name server IP.
The script I use to make this all work with ad-hoc networking on Ubuntu is as follows: Continue reading →