Stolen designs

I've got the nice torquey 2-liter 4-cyl, which isn't feeling a bit strained at 80 MPH, about the fastest I've tried it. Wide-open spaces this ain't. It does blast up hills pretty well, which I do about 40 times a day. It helps that my skinny wife doesn't bog it down much, too.

My project for the day (or more like for the summer, maybe) is repairing our antique freight elevator. It's late 1940's vintage, mostly wood construction, 3-floor hydraulic (using water!) This place was a fortune-cookie factory for 50+ years, so the dirt+grease multilayers are awesome. I'm also designing a fast-ish 1310 nm singlemode laser driver, which is pretty simple except that the laser needs severe drive-current temperature compensation, very nonlinear on temp, which makes it a little interesting given the < 4 sq inch size of the pcb.

John

We just branded 1's and 0's directly on the mules.

John

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:34:58 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) Gave us:

That explains everything. It was a Ford.

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:38:27 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) Gave us:

Sure.

We used smoke signals, which were the first truly digital form of communication, unless you want to count witnessed supernova events.

uphill in the snow barefoot both ways.

Will you take some pictures of the elevator before, during and after you get it running and post them on ABSE? That sounds like an interesting project!

maybe you need this

That sounds like fun

martin

My last trip to Frankfurt I paid the overage and rented an Opel Vectra so I could see how fast the big 600D's were doing... 130MPH ;-)

...Jim Thompson

With patches of black ice.

You jest, but I knew a flautist who could blow the upper-case ASCII alphabet at 110 baud. Really!

See pics in a.b.s.e.

This weekend I sorta repaired a couple of the gate switches. The wood is all worn from 50 years of use, so I had to add some metal splints. The proper fix will be to replace all the old/ugly wood with nice stuff. The wiring is a mess, too.

But it does work!

John

Looks good. Are you going to build a "one off" computerized elecvator control system? Maybe add a wireless remote control so you can stop it and make it wait for you, while you're at it? ;-)

On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:30:33 +1000, Clifford Heath Gave us:

Problem is... You can't s*it a shitter...

Or, John could have a design competition - whoever designs the best, cheapest, and most reliable controller system gets the contract. ;-) (Which probably wouldn't amount to much, since the design will have already been done. ;-P )

Cheers! Rich

I was thinking of redesigning the controls with some nice modern octal-socket plugin relays. The stuff there now has worked for 40 years or so; do you think any computer-based system could do that?

John

Yes, if its designed and built properly. Soldered in parts, and protected in a nice all steel NEMA box would add to the reliability, too. Overkill, all the way! ;-)

-snip-

You live in a foshun cookee factowy?

neat! Got pics?

-phaeton

It was a working cookie factory when we bought it. But all the cookies come from China now, at a fourth the price that USians can make them, so the Louies got out of the biz and sold the building to us. We gutted it, did all the seismic upgrades and stuff, and turned it into an electronics thing.

I do have some pics of the cookie machines; see a.b.s.e.

Their cookies were sure good, much better than the cheap imports.

John

I see from the NYT article he sold "risque" fortune cookie messages. Reminds me of a time a friend went to a very dull birthday party at a restaurant, being held by some very dull and conservative folks. The chinese restaurant supplied a bowl of fortune cookies. Unbeknownst to all, the previous users of that bowl was a bachelot party, and someone had added some very risque fortune cookies to the bowl. The bachelors didnt empty out the bowl, and the restauranteurs just added some more to the refill the bowl, so the last few straigh-laced folks showed rather flushed faces and woudlnt read out loud their fortunes. Guess you had to be there.