Solar PV

It would appear that we are investigating Solar energy.  I believe that our quartely electricty bill has nudged over the $1k mark.  Mind you there seem to be some inconsistencies that are not understood yet and my never be  understood.  Anyway quotes have been solicited and soem have come in.

So now the challenge is to make a decision.  We need to choose between the following options:-
a) Solar electricity.  (PV solar)
b) Solar hot water.
c) Both
d) Neither (this option included for completeness).
e) Gas - This option added after fear of being acused of bias by today tonight.

This blog posting will concentrate on PV solar (PhotoVoltaic).

So how do we decide between options?

• Technology of the solar panels?
• Types of inverter?
• Brand names?
• Warranty?
• Cost?

To get an idea of the costs, I have done up the following table.  Will be updated as quotes come in.  I was also kind of interested to know what it might cost to DIY.  There are two DIY columns and the detail is in the next table.

The first observation is that that DIY Jarcar is not going to be cheaper.  The $14k does not include all the mounting hardware or cables.

.	Company	System Size	Panel Type	Inverter	Price we pay

.	Modern Solar	3kw	16x190W Monocrystaline	Xantrex GT2.8	$15950
.	Resource Energy	3kw	monocrystaline	Solar Lord or Power One	$7390
.	Solar Shop		18x205W Polycrystaline	2xSMA SB1700	11070
.	DIY (Jaycar)		16 x 170W Monocrystaline	Xantrex GT2.8	14704.05
.	DIY (Electus)		16 x 170W Monocrystaline	Xantrex GT2.8	TBD
.	????	Wait for update

This is the detail of how I costed the Jaycar DIY option.  Prices came from their web site.  I will try to look up the Electus web site.  Electus is the Jaycar wholesaler and we (Syndetic) have an account with them.

.				Total Jaycar	14704.05
.	Item	Note	Qty Required	$EA Jaycar
.	Solar panel 175W ZM9099	Actually will need more than 16.	16	695	11120
.	Z bracket HS8708	need 2 at each end	4	17.9375	71.75
.	T bracket HS8712	need 2 between each panel	28	8.975	251.3
.	Y lead negative PS5112		15	17.7	265.5
.	Y lead positive		15	17.7	265.5
.	Mounting hardware				0
.					0
.	Inverter Xantrex GT2.8	http://www.solaronline.com.au/xantrex-gt2-8.html	1	2730	2730
.					0
.

Mens Shed

Chris and I (Frank) did video production at the Men's Shed.

 www.shednight.com 

They had some interesting guest speakers including Duncan Armstrong, 








 Jason (on phone) in the background operated the sound desk.  He contracts to the school who are apparantly very supportive of the whole event.  Actually the whole school looks and feels very positive.  They have this huge basket ball hall and they keep 5 full size coaches in here at night.  GThe fact that they have these coaches.  Not just old BCC busses but what look to me like brand spanking new coaches just speaks volumes.

Lunch provided

Chris

Chris did a great job helping to setting up and pulling down.

 Chainsawart.  These guys sell these things.  GThe prices seemed quite reasonable to me.  Mostly between $120 and $200 apiece.

An interesting juxtaposition?

Analogue Video Passthrough Firewire Capture to USB hard disk

I am videoing a thing called a shed night.  They want a recording too.  The plan had been to record to USB hard disk in mini DV format to make it possible to easily edit later.  I planned to use my old Sony TRV6 because I knew it could injest analogue video and spit it out on the firewire (IEEE1394) port.  I double checked that during the week by sending video through it and then through our Pioneer hard disk recorder.  Picture on the screen.  All good so me thinks.

Last night tried to actually capture.  Premiere 6 showed one frame on the screen and indicated it was capturing a gazillion frames per second but at the same time the timecode counter did not move. 
Tried Premiere elements 4 which I also own.  It would not even initialise the capture driver instead it reported an error.

Went back to Tony's place and downloaded some freeware capure programs.
Lets see what happens.

Flashpoint Sunday 30-OCT-2011

FlashPoint is on again this Sunday

Readings:

• Joshua 3:7-17
• Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37 - Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.
• 1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
• Matthew 23:1-12 - A Warning Against Hypocrisy

We will use the psalm.
Science experiment ideas - Love endures forever.
Enduring forever.
Diamond. Strong.  Perfect form of carbon.  Tax it?
Set things on fire and see what endures.  Paper sizors rock :)
infinity symbol,
rubber band finger jump trick

Highland Ball 2011

Tis the luk of the Irish that the Scottish Ball would be hed in the Irish club.  All that drunkin Guiness and other cultural traditions putting money in those irish coffers.  We did though have a parading and addressing of a Haggas and bag pipes.






Bag pipes.  You can understand why this instrument was developed with a grant from the military.  It would have scared the #^I^%$ out of the opposition.  Especially in the confines of this room it is loud and powerful.  If ever you were to think of men in skirts as somewhat wussy then check these guys out for an unabashed demonstration of testosterone and strength.








Pre dinner drinks at the Hilton.  Quiet, gentile and very expensive.  I fortified myself for the night ahead with a coffee.

Here we are in our formal splendour.











We were seated with the band at stage left (That would be to the right on this picture).  One can philosophise on whether we were at the top table or out with the hired help.  But for musical Megan it was certainly a highlight and she got a personal lesson in a 'Bodrahn'  This is a sort of drum.  Actually for the non musical among us it is best described as a large tamborine with out the jangly bits or the salvation army chick.

There was community Dancing.  Starting with the Cumberland Reel.  A bit like bush dancing but Scottish.  I established that it is more important to keep the than to be in synch with the other people.  At one stage our set added in a bit that was not quite right and got behind.  I was all for just speeding up just a little until we were back in time with the rest of them.  However doing 5 steps in response to 4 beats was not considered right.

 Frank is a winner.  A winner!.  He won 206780th prize in the raffle and was having trouble deciding what to pick.  The genuine old band drum was gone.  So was the Bunnings voucher.  We were left with two bottles of white wine or a couple of wisky glasses.

Chris's boat - Inagural trial ... in the bath

Congratulations to Chris.
He has done the lions share of the work and kept the project going.

Tomorrow we hope to try it in the pool.

P1 Indoor Rock Climbing

Frank and Jemma at Rick Sports in the Valley on the P1 (grade 7 youth group) rock climbing night.

Helicopter Home Made Simulator

The collective is the control on the helicopter that makes it go up and down.
The pedals control the pitch of the tail rotor
The Cyclic is the main control and it controls the direction and speed. - We will use a joystick.

7-DEC-2011 UPDATE
The analog board from desktopaviator.com has arrived and works well.  FSX sees it as a games controller and my pedals can control Microsoft Flight Simulator.
BUT
I can not work out how (maybe there is no way) to get the pedals to control the helicoper YAW properly.  MS flight simulator FSX seems to have an analog input for rudder but when a helicopter model is selected then using the pedals causes the whole helicopter to move sideways in a big arc rather than rotating around the axis of the rotor.

5-NOV-2011 UPDATE - PEDALS 

 This picture shows the M10 threaded rod foot rests.

This picture shows the mounting of the slider pot using two pieces of 20x20mm RHS aluminum.  The connection to the 'crank' was made with a piece of 10x10 angle and M3 screws and nyloc nuts.











4-NOV-2011 ORDERED ANALOGUE - USB BOARD

http://www.desktopaviator.com/Products/Model_2310-2312/index.htm $43USD + Shipping  12 bit analog
 Instruction data



1-NOV-2011 PEDAL PROTOTYPE

This mechanism implements the push pull nature of the pedals.

Still to do:-
actual footrests have not been fitted
and adding the pot to transmit the pedal position to the analog board and hence into the computer via USB.

The wood is 70x35 pine framing.
The aluminum is 20x20RHS.  So there is a slight misalignment because 3x20=60 and the timber is 70 but for now it is OK. 



22-OCT-2011 USB ANALOGUE INTERFACE BOARDS
Gave up on using the canibalised had controller.  Looking for a real interface board.

The Pedals are half finished and the collective likewise is pretty much done.  Will have to post some photos.

Found two potential sources of analogue input boards.
Leobodnar.com
and
Apogee kits.

Leobodnar seems to have gone AWOL and is not answering emails although his boards claim to show up as games controllers.

Apogee kits are answering emails and so I will ask them what they know about games controllers.

http://www.leobodnar.com/products/BU0836/    $   
8 analog inputs with 10-bit (1024 steps) resolution each
12 switches or 32 buttons in a matrix.
Shows up as a game controller I believe


http://www.leobodnar.com/products/BU0836A/   $
8 analog inputs with 12-bit (4096 steps) resolution each+ 12 switches.

http://www.apogeekits.com/usb_interface_board_vm167.htm   $US57.95 + PP

• 5 x analog 10 bit resolution inputs: 0…5V / (30K)
• 8 x digital 5V inputs/outputs with on-board LED indication: Input/output mode is selectable in groups of 4 terminals
• 1 x 32 bit pulse counter up to 1MHz input frequency
• 2 x 8 bit 5V PWM outputs: 0 to 100%
• on-board LED indication for I/O and PWM outputs
• output current, PWM: 10mA / Digital outputs: 6mA

Another potential board$48USD + Shipping  12 bit analog
http://desktopaviator3.tripod.com/Instructions/Model_2180/index.htm

 22-OCT-2011 UPDATE

The picture below shows two boards.  A green board with a chip on it and a brown coloured board that I assumed only had the switches on it.  So I cut it off.  Bad move.  Hidden on the other side under a blob of plastic is another chip.  The two work together somehow and with the boards separated, it does not work.
Not worth the trouble.  So I am investigating proper USB anaogue interface boards.  They seem to be reasonably cheap at around $60.

On a more interesting note, The prototype pot for the trottle has been made.  The yellow stuff is epoxy.  It was moulded inside a piece of the pipe that will form the collective.  It could have been made of aluminum but I do not have a lathe so I thought I would try to mould it and it worked.

The collective pot is just an aluminum bracket.

It appears that microsoft flight simulator does not have an input for throttle so the first version of the collective will be just this pot connected to a piece of broom handle.  Would a witch would think of that as ironic?











 16-OCT-2011

Plan for a home made "collective"

The hand controller that will be sacrificed to provide an analogue in to USB function.

Inside.
One can see the interface chip and two joystick assemblies.  The yellow squares are the pots and they measure as 2k2 ohms.

Chris's Boat

Chris is making a balsa wood boat.  The project was initiated at Boys Brigade but he has done the lions share of the work at home.  Although he has received some advise from Grandpa and myself, he has done the vast majority of the work.

The engine and radio control system was harvested from the old yellow plane.  The hardest bit (from my perspective) was making the mounting for the motor.  The motor needs to be on an angle and lined up with the propeller shaft.  Chris ended up carving the mount out of balsa.  The angle was guessed.  A flexible coupling made of glue lined heatshrink tubing connects the motor to the prop shaft.  Hopefully the flex in the heatshrink will take care of any misalignment.
 

Dismantle Asus M9V

Chris's Asus M9V laptop has stopped working.  A visual inspection showed the centre pin of the DC input connector had been pushed to the side.  Possibly as a result of rough handling,or perhaps pushing the laptop back on the desk and having the DC cable push up against the back of the desk.
1

2  Took out about 40 screws. Stuck two pieces of paper to the bench top and sketched the top and bottom of the laptop.  Put each screw on the paper in its location.  Helps when reassembling.

The silver thing on the right is the keyboard (upside down).  To remove it, look for the three little plastic tabs at the top of the keyboard.  Use a flat blade screw driver to push the case back.

3 There is a screw under the gold heat pipe where the hole is drilled in the heat pipe.  I was not game to remove the heat pipe assy.  So I could not get the case completely apart

4
Case pried partially open.  Broken DC connector being held in long nose pliers.

5 In this picture you can see right through the broken connector.  (Round Hole)









6
I cut the old connector off the board.  I would have needed 4 soldering irons to desolder it.

7
Soldered three wires on.  These go to an external DC connector. It had a way different footprint and so trying to shoe horn it in would have been timeconsuming and probably would never have lined up with the hole.

8
Two cable ties will stop the wires being pulled out of the hole.  May even plug with epoxy but nothing ever sticks to the plastic that toys these days are made of so I am not sure how useful the glue would be.

9
New DC connector soldered to the wires.  Black glue lined heat shrink will be shrunk over it.

10
It lives again!

marcus leaves his hat on the train

I picked up Marcus from Oxley station.  As he gets into the car he announces that he has left his hat on the train.

He suggests that he can recover it from lost property and I remind him that he does not have a good record of success in that area having left some luggage on a train in Munich that was never recovered.

This is a hundred dollar hat.  Do these kids have absolutely no idea of the value of money.  I decide we should give chase.  Push the pedal to the metal and with wheels spinning, gravel and old ladies with prams flying we exit the station.  Luckily the the oxley round about is clear as we skid round it and up the hill.  Then disaster.  A 50kmh driver in a black audi in front as we proceed up Seventeen mile rocks road.  Again some luck at the Canossa roundabout they go straight ahead and accelerate left and drift into turn and head for Darra.

As we traverse the Harcourt Rd overpass we can see the Darra station is empty and so plot a course for Ipswich.  There are about 6 cars queued at the lights at the end of Harcourt Rd but we make it through on the first change of lights.  We are stuck at 40km/h, trapped behind a queue of cars lead by a Nissan Urvan, we are like Craig Lowndes trying to take Nick Percat but no opportunity to overtake.  Again luckily half the cars including the offending Nissan Urvan take a left to Inala and the rest of us are round the roundabout and onto Ipswich Rd.

On the Ipswich Rd straight and I am weighing up value of hat vs more points and more dollars and kind of wishing we could enter warp speed.  To the right and I see the jail and that tempers the thoughts but reminds me that my previously jailbroken iphone is now rehabilitated and so I get Marcus to check the maps.

I feel the need for speed.  In the movie they seemed to get it by having a laptop connected to the car's computer.  Convieniently grammar has supplied Marcus with said laptop for just such occasions as this so I tell him to get it out and hack into the cars computer.  Suddenly the windows open.  The ECU I shout, you've got the BCM.  The windows close again and we feel a surge of speed.  One of those big air intake things with a huge fan belt sticking out of the bonnet would be handy about now.  More power.  More speed we need.  Stealth technology and a blue flashing light would be handy too.  We don't even have the top gun CD.

We see the train on the right and have a new found appreciation of the speed of public transport.  Racing the train on Ipswich Rd, we pull ahead with every station it stops at.  We pass that iconic cultural heart of Wacol (Maccas).  Consulting Google maps we decide to take the Redbank exit from the right lane. We cross several lanes of traffic and swing down the exit.  Oh no.  Yellow flashing lights.  Roadworks.  No chance.  Luckily they have not started yet.  At the bottom.  Red light. We wait and wait and wait..

Finally its green and the car in front eventually decides that they might consider moving this week.  As we take the wide track we pass the guy on the left gathering acceleration.  The light in front is turning a shade less green.  A call the the engine room.  "More Power Scottie"  "I'm given it all she's got" comes back the answer in what sounds like Billy Connoly's voice.  As we become slightly airborne and we could debate the colour of the lights we see more men in the shadows.  Police.  Relax only men propping up stop/go signs.

Round to the right and we see the train pulling into the station.  Into pit straight and pull up beside the ramp. Marcus has the door open as we pull to a stop.  Zig zag up the ramp and onto the platform.  I think he forgot to touch on.  I see a hitch.  This is two trains joined together.  He has this in hand as he sprints down the platform and enters the last door of the front train.  Then I see him running like Jason Bourne through the middle of the train.  All the doors are open and people are ejected as he sprints down the train.  He stops.  Bends down.  Picks up the hat.  Dusts it off.  Some kid is holding the door open.  To be totally cool sunglasses are required.  The train pulls out.  Marcus walks coolly down the platform and a man in uniform yells obscenities from the next platform stymied by the $300 fine he is unable to attend to his duties on the platform where all the people are.

Then we drive calmly home listening to 4BH and have Corn Beef and 3 vegies for tea.

Asus 1005P XP from USB Flash Drive and dual boot win 7 & XP

THE PLAN
1.  Use nLite to create an XP image on the hard disk and then add SP3 and the 1005P drivers to that image.
then
2.  Use WinToFlash. to transfer the Windows XP installation files to a USB flash drive.

PREPARATION
Down load nlite from www.nlite.com
Down load WinToFlash.
Download XP Serice pack 3 from microsoft.  Got the stand alone version of SP3
Download all the 1005P drivers from the asus web site.
Download  EasyBCD   http://neosmart.net/

ASUS DRIVER PREPARATION
The Asus drivers downloaded as 1 zip file per driver.  I put all the zip files in one directory and then unzipped each one into its own directory with the same name as the zip file.  Then I went through the directories and deleted any sub directories that said things line Vista or W7.

1.  CREATE XP IMAGE ON HARD DISK
Read references 1 and 2 below.
1.1 Download nlite from www.nliteos.com
1.2 Installed it
1.3 Attached USB DVD drive.  Put my genuine Microsoft XP disk in the drive.
1.4 Ran nlite.
1.5 Pointed nlite to the DVD drive and to a new directory on my C drive
1.6 nlite just did its thing.  Took a couple of minutes.
nlite is still running
1.7  ADD SP3
 SP3 is added with nlite.  I just navigated to the downloads directory and pointed it at the microsoft file
WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU
and nlite just injested it and all seemed right with the world.
1.8. ADD 1005P DRIVERS
Pointed nlite at the driver directory and chose the add directory with multiple drivers.  It brought up a screen where I chose all the XP versions.
Clicked OK and let it go.

2 WINTOFLASH
Ran it.  Bit worried about a russian program that even tells me it wants to report back to base.  Esp as it wants my XP key.
Anyway, let it go and it created a USB with files on it.


3  DUAL BOOT
3.1 Use the in built Win 7 partition manager to create a new partition on the C: drive.  Because the Win7 control panel is unlear to me, use the start>search function to seeach for "partition"
Ran the partition tool.  It took a while to determine available space.  Told it to shrink by 100GB.  This only took half a minute at most.
3.2 Format as "New Simple Volume", Quick Format and named it XP

Now we are about to try to install XP onto our new partition from the USB drive.
Hopefully see you on the other side.

........> FAIL
On boot, I press ESC to bring up a boot selection menu and choose to boot from the USB drive.
Selection 1 is a text mode boot
Selection 2 is a GUI boot.
Section 2 is the default.  Choosing this option results in a plain black screen.
When I choose option 1, the boot process starts and eventually gets to a screen where it incorrectly identified the D drive as formatted as FAT32 when it is definatly NTFS.  It offers to reformat it as NTFS.  If I take that offer then it tells me the volume is corrupt and can not be repaired.

11-OCT-2011
Go back and recreate the image on the Hard Disk and only add SP3 and the SATA driver.
This gets further into the process but it is time consuming so I go to bed.
In the morning there is a boot error showing on the screen.
Now the dam thing won't boot to either win7 or xp.  Always this boot error.
I suspect it is a combination of SATA/IDE & boot sector issues.


On boot, press ESC to bring up the boot selection menu.  Choose the USB drive.
Select item 3.  This is repair disk 1 partition 2
XP boots.
So I assume the boot record is corrupt
In XP I can get everything to work except the wireless.  So no internet yet.

12-OCT-2011
Ran EasyBCD   http://neosmart.net/
but it got stuck wanting the internet that XP does not see.
Downloaded vista boot pro 3.  Not sure if that will work as we have Win 7 but anyway.

-----------------------------------
13-OCT-2011
Reinstalled WIN7 from the Asus recovery CD.  This completely wipes the entire disk.
Used the WIN7 disk manager to create a 100MB partition D

Created directory C:/XPCD
Copied the XP disk from the USB DVD drive onto the local C drive intoXPCD
Copied XPCD to XPCDcopy (so I do not have to do it again)

Ran nLite
Chose "Integrate Service Packs" Addons and Update packsand "Drivers"
Navigated to the XP SP3 download.  NLite slipstreamed that in.
Addons and Updates - Navigated to the directory where I had downloaded dot net and its updates
.
Inserted these in this order  (See http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?amp;displaylang=en&id=10006)
dotnetfx35.exe
NDP20SP2-KB958481-x86.exe
NDP30SP2-KB958483-x86.exe
NDP35SP1-KB958484-x86.exe
dotNetFx40_Client_x86_x64.exe


Drivers -> Chose "Multiple driver folder"
Chose from the large number only to install :-
SATA
WLAN
(Text mode) whatever that is

nLite then does a whole lot of processing.

 








REFERENCES
1.   http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:nlitexp
2.   http://en.kioskea.net/faq/6304-how-to-slipstream-windows-xp-sp3-and-vista-sp1
3.  http://liliputing.com/2009/08/easiest-way-to-install-windows-on-a-netbook-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html
4.  http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8790/dual-boot-your-pre-installed-windows-7-computer-with-xp/

Choir Sings at St John's Fete

 8-AUG-2011 dawned with a storm.  The drum of rain on the tin roof just makes you want to snuggle under the covers. 

The wind and rain were lashing the house and coming in on the stuff on the back verandah.  Still there from where it was moved during Januarys flood.

When we arrived at St Johns, we were greeted with the skeletons of two wrecked "easy ups".  The people though put on a very happy and welcoming faces. 

The choir sang up stairs in their hall. 

You would never have known the morning opened with such a storm.

P1 Games

Friday night Megan was away helping at the Synod Cellebration Church Service at Alex Park (I think).  I was roped into run some games at P1.

David Semple did devotions on "changes".

In this game of musical chairs, you can share a chair.  You are only out if any part of your body is touching the ground.  

It gets a bit compeditive naturally and only the strong survive.

 In the end there are winners and watchers.

 Helicopter is Skipping with attitude.  Tie a bag of rags to the end of a rope and spin and jump.  When the bag of rags hits your ankles it bowles you over and the spinner in the middle walks around dazed.

Listen girl, no matter how hard you try to shove that in have me take your photo, you just are never gonna look gross