April 2024 Eclipse

I’m sure my eclipse day story is not much different than untold thousands of others, but I only have mine to tell. 🙂

My long long time friend KD and I started loosely planning for an eclipse capture trip quite early, as one should. Actually, we started planning for the October 2023 annular eclipse. We both live in Texas, but a good four hours apart and neither of our homes were directly on the October 2023 path. Soon, however, I realized that I already had conflicting plans for that week, so I missed that one. That made April 2024 that much more important. I had vacation time to burn, so planned for Monday and Tuesday of that week so that I could do whatever travel I wanted to do.

As we got closer to the date, we tried to find a place that was a similar daytrip drive for both of us and it was looking likely for a lonely stretch of highway near Llano. Conditions changed, as they often do, and KD was going to be able to make it more than a day trip, so I started looking for places closer to me, intending to host him here. As it turns out, the path passed through a town near Sulphur Springs where I know someone who owns a bit of land. I contacted her and a couple of astrophotography nerds were just the thing she needed to complete her eclipse day plans. She asked for our T-shirt sizes, so I knew something was up. 🙂

The other part of planning that I was partly successful with was the two part task of getting things together for the shoot and practicing with them. I was better at gathering than having 😉 Of course, the gathering was done in time for the October eclipse.

The general plan for the day was to use my Redcat 51 telescope and venerable Canon Rebel T6 with a solar filter and an intervalometer to take about one picture per minute and use my tracker to make it easier. Happily, for that part of the plan, all I needed to purchase was a solar filter to fit the Redcat.

I also wanted to have an second camera for manual use. I found that I could get decent price on used Canon cameras on Adorama. They had a Rebel T5 for less than $100. The T6 has WiFi and NFC and a higher resolution screen, but otherwise the T5 is essentially identical to the T6, making them largely interchangeable for most of my uses.

Editors note… for reasons I can’t explain, I am picking up the editing of this post almost a full year after the event and everything above this paragraph was written a year ago. It just shows that if I don’t jump right on a blog post, it suffers.

Now it just came down to making sure that KD and I coordinated our travel plans and that we gathered pretty much everything vaguely photographically related that either of us own. He came to our house a day early and the morning of, we headed to North East Texas. After all the introductions were made, it came to light that the proprietor had indeed made a small event out of it and had lunch and T-shirts for a dozen or so guests.

We set up all of our gear. With all the boxes and bags we brough in, it looked like we were there for a movie shoot. Sadly, I did not get any good detail shots of the gear once it was set up, just this wide shot of the site.

In the foreground is KD’s setup, a Canon DSLR and filtered lens on a tracking mount, secured on a weighted tripod. Behind is my setup, similar in that it is a Canon DSLR and the Redcat51 with a filter on a tracking mount secured on a big tripod, but not weighted. In the rear is someone else’s camera on a tripod.

One of the things we were concerned with was polar alignment for the tracking mounts without being able to see Polaris. Using just compass directions fine tuned with smartphone apps, it turned out to not be a big deal. We sighted down the axis of the tracker along the compass line and tracked the sun pretty well, making a couple of small adjustments to tune it in beforehand.

The setup as we approached showtime felt pretty dialed in. Besides, what were we gonna do, start over?

I had my intervalometer set to one exposure per minute, and I was setting exposure manually in the camera. I had an external HDMI monitor connected so that I could preview images and do these exposure settings thanks to KD bringing one for me to use. This was SO handy that I immediately purchased one of my own after this event.

When the schedule app we were using gave us the warning for first contact, we got ready. I started my exposures *at* first contact, which technically was not yet visible to us, especially to the naked eye.

My setup tracked really well. I did have to reframe a few times to keep the image centered, so polar alignment was not perfect, but it was definitely good enough. I tweaked exposure a few times, especially when we had a few clouds pass through, which did happen several times, especially after totality.

So, yes, the clouds had us very nervous around totality, but if I recall correctly, we got all of totality cloud free. Or at least, if we had clouds, they passed quickly such that totality was not ruined by them. I would need to check all the images. As mentioned above, I am editing this post a full year after the event :/

There were quite a few clouds between the end of totality and last contact, enough so that I had to kinda cheat for my composite image of the event.

The top half images are first phase images. Because of how many second phase images were obscured by clouds, I could not really mirror shot for shot like I wanted to, so I cheated and just mirrored the first phase images completely for artistic reasons.

A good time was had by all. Yes, we are posing with Moon Pies.

It’s All Rigged!

As mentioned earlier, I have been setting up my work desk with some ham radio things, namely my Yaesu FTM-100DR for local repeater and WIRES-X access. I also wanted to redeploy my RemoteRig-equipped IC-7100 for HF access. That did not go quite as planned.

A bit of RemoteRig history as it pertains to my domicile. My wife indulges my numerous hobbies, but only to a point. A room packed full of radio equipment would be a step too far, so my HF rig and it’s attendant antennae are installed in my workshop and I invested in a set of RemoteRig RRC-1258MkIIs units paired with my Icom IC-706MkIIg. There are other ways to remotely operate a radio, but this solution uses SIP and VoIP technology to extend the control head separation cable over an IP network, whether locally or across the planet. It does a great job of it.

I originally purchased my set in 2015, along with the increasingly rare and expensive Icom OPC-581 separation cable (which I then, painfully, had to cut in order to use) but I was able to control my IC-706 in the workshop from anywhere on the property and with a little forethough, pretty much anywhere else either. In practice, I really only tested it from anywhere else, but I used it from the house frequently. Though I had not planned to do so, a situation kind of forced me to use it for Field Day 2015. Then I failed to submit the logs for my 57 QSOs. Sigh. I also used it for a Texas QSO party contest from our dining room. The thing just works.

I digress. When I got the itch up upgrade rigs around 2017, I kept in mind to find a compatible rig and landed on the Icom IC-7100. It was equally easy to reconfigure RemoteRig to the 7100.

Life and such ensued and some years passed with occasional use, but somewhere in there, the RemoteRig control unit was misplaced. I have searched quite extensively for it and while I am sure it will show up someday, I reached the conclusion that it was no longer practical to keep searching for it and elected to replace the missing unit.

In the years since my original purchase, RemoteRig had restructured somewhat and no longer does any direct sales. I think Ham Radio Outlet used to carry them, but they are no longer listed. I looked at all the vendors listed on RemoteRig’s webpages and found no US distributors. Furthermore, I found only one who sold single units, as opposed to a pair in a set, Limmerad in Sweden. The price looks scary at 3,600 kronor, but that is only about $365 US.

Only, he says.

So a week later, it’s in hand and set up. I updated firmware on both units, especially since I’m sure the last time the radio unit was updated was around 2017 or so. Everything seemed to come up working, but because I’m not really operating regularly, it would be quite a while before I would notice an issue. I had no transmit audio.

The troubleshooting saga deserves its own story. Over a period a a couple of months, I used Wireshark to snoop packets to verify that there was essentially no payload audio in the outgoing packets from the control.

For sanity check, I verified that audio packets coming from the radio definitely had data.

I used an oscilloscope to verify that the microphone was passing through the control head and into the jack on the RemoteRig device.

This signal was pretty low, 600ish mV peak to peak, so I also measured it directly at the microphone to ensure that it was not be adulterated by the control head, but it is the same 600ish mV for a similarly loud signal (of me emulating a tone generator; I can hold a frequency reasonably stable). I honestly expected some sort of amplification or buffering to happen in the control head, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Following the suggesting of a new friend from a RemoteRig forum, I was going to tap the option strap for the microphone inside the RemoteRig control device to verify that audio was making it *to* the device. In his experience, these strapping jumpers are unreliable. I removed the cover to gain access to the jumpers, then pulled up the documentation to see which pin I needed to connect to.

Hello!

I specifically remember putting in the jumpers that were not directly across from one another first then going back fro the ones that went straight across. I obviously skipped one and the one I skipped carries the microphone signal into the RemoteRig.

Doh!

I put the missing jumper on and they lived happily ever after.

Wired WIRES-X

Four years ago, I mentioned that I had purchased a discone antenna and some (unintended) coax to install in the attic, primarily intended for SDR use, but secondarily for having some sort of dual band radio in the house, probably my FTM-100DR.

I finally did that.

Sparing absolutely no expense by using four zipties to mount it to a handy rafter brace, the antenna works quite well up there. It is quite unweildy assembled, so I brought it up in the attic unassembled and put it together pretty much in place.

My desk is in a converted sunroom, so the simplest way to get the coax down was to drill in the plywood ceiling then conceal the wiring in plastic ducting.

I also added a CAT5/6 cable to provide wired LAN to my desk. I hope to redeploy my RemoteRig and operate HF from here soon!

With the antenna up, it was time to figure out the radio. This is a small desk that I tend to keep crowded, so I knew I needed to keep it space efficient. Because the LMR-400 is pretty stiff, it was going to be best parallel to the wall, so I would need to “remote” the control head. I originally had this radio installed in my car, with the remote cable fairly permanently installed. When I upgraded the car radio to the FTM-400, I left that cable in place and left the 400’s remote cable in it’s box. Hurray!

The 400’s accessories also include a mounting bracket. The instructions only show it deployed with adhesive tape, however it has a bend in it that would suggest attaching it to something like a car sun visor, if any of them were that thin anymore.

What can be that thin is plywood. I have placed the power supply on the desk, a rectangular piece of plywood under the radio (turned sideways) with the control head mounted on one end of it.

The other end of the plywood is against the wall, (mostly) steadying the control head for button pushing.

After verifying that I could hit several of the repeaters that were already in the radio’s memory, I set about getting in on WIRES-X.

There is a slightly sad tale here. The data cable for the FTM-100 obviously came with it. I’ve had it for years. It stayed in my car for a long time because that’s where the radio was. The FTM400 uses the same cable, so now I have two of them.

Somewhere.

Even currently unemployed, I reached the point where I’d rather buy the replacement cable than keep fruitlessly searching for either of the TWO cables that I KNOW I have. So, naturally, I would put the wrong one in my cart and order the cable for the FT3D handheld, for which I do already have the cable in hand. I would ironically discover this when I got home from a trip that involved a stop at Plano’s Ham Radio Outlet, where I could have picked up the correct cable, had only I have known two hours earlier.

Since I was experimenting with WIRES-X anyway, I looked at my now-four-years-old registration attempt and it was with the radio ID for the FTM100, which makes sense; that was the radio I had then. However, at the time that registration was submitted, I had never actually brought the radio up online, I had never activated that registration. I still had my credentials, logged on, updated the radio ID to my FT3D because I have a functioning data cable for it and tried to get it activated.

It was quite insistent on this error. I consulted a couple of people experienced in such matters and the consensus was that I should try to register it as a new device with new rooms, etc. I submitted all that and waited. Back in 2021, when I first registered the FTM100, I received a reply from the WIRES server team in about 24 hours. This time, it had been several days with no reply. I decided to submit a ticket on the bad registration, still planning to have two devices registered. Miraculously, I received both the new registration email and an update for the old registration at the same time, three hours later. 🙂

After that, it pretty much just about came up working. Since the program won’t let you in to mess up any settings until it connects successfully, I had no bad settings to go fix. 🙂

I spend most of the time parked on TEXAS NEXUS because some buddies and a couple of local repeaters are frequently there.

At this point, I have not yet connected the FT3D to WIRES-X because I have not figured out how to use it on the same laptop without trashing the FTM100 config. Research ensues.

The Jayco Marches On

As I write this, Christmas, New Years and Valentine’s Day have all come and gone since the last update on the Jayco.

Since the Jayco is expected to be at least semi-permanently parked at the campground in Dennison, we had eyes open looking for a deal on a small camper that could be easily towed behind Wifey’s Sorento and on or about December 8, we found and acquired same.

This little guy does need a little work, but it’s not it terrible shape, especially for the cost.

The timing was interesting. We were packed up and literally on the road to Dennison in mid December when the truck overheated. We were not really even out of the neighborhood, technically. Went back home and killed an hour troubleshooting to determine that the water pump was leaking. Our choices were to stay home or pivot and do the shakedown cruise with the pop-up camper. We went for it.

We (understandably) arrived in Dennison later than planned, but the little camper stepped up and did well. It needs curtains!

We did not fully trust the untested propane furnace, so we just bundled up for bedtime. Having cuddly doggies helps.

When we woke up in the morning, we found that not only was it just cold and damp, but the door was standing fully open, so it was even colder inside than it needed to be. Since we were now awake, we went ahead and fired up the furnace. It worked perfectly and provided a stupid amount of heat. It can run you outta there if you let it.

The Palomino Pony camper will probably get it’s own blog category when we tear into it. Stay tuned.

Also, replacing the water pump in the truck was itself not a terrible task. I replaced all of the consumable cooling system components, including the upper and lower radiator hoses. They were probably fine, but they were also 20 years old.

Meanwhile, the work on the Jayco resumed. When we last left our hero, the damaged fender had been refurbished and reinstalled. The fender needed some sealing.

I used a generic flexible sealing tape in some places where caulking didn’t seem appropriate, such around cracks that formed where the frame protrudes into the cab and where the rubbing tire had worn a hole in the fender.

Hopefully that whole fender project is done!

The Lug Bolt Excursion damaged the gray water plumbing. It took a little while to gather the necessary components for the repair. The existing pipe is ABS. I’m not sure why, unless ABS is just more resistant to freeze damage. Lowes is phasing out ABS pipe, which made it slightly difficult to locate in the store, but they still had it and for the best price. They get about $12 for one 5 foot long piece of ABS pipe, which is kind of ridiculous on it’s face. That is, until you get the price from anywhere that has “RV” or “camp” in its name. From Camping World, you have to buy two 6 foot pieces in a kit for $90. That is $7.50 per foot, compared to what I thought was expensive at $2.40 per foot at Lowes. I needed only about 2 feet of pipe and two 90’s to make my repair and had I been willing to skimp, I could have done it with about a foot of pipe and a coupler.

The sheet metal bracket was pretty much trashed so I made a plywood replacement. I somehow managed to not get a picture of the completely finished outlet. It’s nice.

A surprisingly tricky task was reinstalling the original trim around the bottom edge of the camper. This was tricky because almost none of the original wood that this trim attaches to was still there; it had almost all been replaced when the original walls were rebuilt and little of it was exactly where the original had been.

Around the wheel wells was mostly close. Even so, I needed to fill in a bit in areas, some more than others.

In some areas, I chose to cut custom pieces from 1×4 lumber to fill the gap by marking first the fit to the existing bottom edge of the camper, then tracing the matching bottom edge of the siding.

I had to do this in four areas, basically in front and behind both wheels. Then I could apply the trim to hold the siding to that bottom edge.

Wifey found a lady online who makes custom awnings for vintage campers. Her work is incredible. We elected to choose from a few she had in stock, as opposed to the daunting task of choosing custom fabrics for her to make a custom one just for us, but I think we did well.

If I were better at this blogging stuff, I’d have a picture of it to post here. At some point, this paragraph will disappear and a picture will replace it. 🙂

However, the awning connects to the camper by way of sliding into a special aluminum channel. The channel on the Jayco has endured a fair bit of abuse in its 50+ years and is at least partly pinched closed, preventing a new awning from being deployed. I designed and built a custom swage tool to address this issue.

I started with a Stanley punch that was the right diameter, 5/16″ if I recall correctly. I softened the edges of it somewhat, so that it would be smooth to drive through the aluminum channel. I heated it with a torch and bent an offset into it. I then ground away material to allow the offset to fit into the slot of the channel. The pictures will probably make more sense than the description.

To use the tool, you start at one end of the channel and run it through to the other end, driving it through to widen the channel where needed. I found that it was helpful to kind of wiggle the swage though the worst spots, sometimes using a sheet metal creasing hammer on the outside for more effect.

In all, however, it was about an hour long job, including making the tool. Sometimes, I impress myself.

I finally made a set of stairs. I’d like to say that the 2 inch addition on the back is because of a material limitation. Unfortunately, however, I had spent a few hours designing the steps, scrounging up the materials and building the the stairs. I proudly showed them to Wifey and the first thing she said was, to wit, “It would be nice if the top step was wider.”

One of those little things that needed to be done for a long time was to put a latch on the rear bed so that it will not slide out of place while towing. The original latch was lost so I finally procured another. It is interesting that this little latch on one end of the bed is enough to hold the whole thing in because of the way the bed slides in place.

Fast forward about a month to January. Back when the whole lug bolt unpleasantness occurred, we had a Walmart tire mounted on that one wheel. We have not had a spare at all until now. We took the spare wheel to Discount Tire and had the same model tire mounted as the other tire on the ground. Right now, this is the tire that is the spare. At some point, I will swap it so that both tires on the ground are the same Discount Tire units and the spare is the Walmart tire. In any case, I have now mounted the spare tire carrier on the bumper, which turned out to be trickier than expected due to avoid blocking the tail lights and clearing the hitch on the bumper.

This same weekend, I did a LOT of finish trim work on the interior. I was particularly happy with the work around the ceiling vent and this celing seam.

Likewise, I think I did the best I could with what I had to work with here. That outside corner was not helping…

There were several kind of oddly shaped panels that came together on some of these walls, based somewhat on what material was on hand, as opposed to waiting and going to buy new material later. This left me with some seams to cover. These are mostly behind the refrigerator, so they are not particularly noticeable, especially now that they are covered with trim!

This one shows not only a bunch of trim, but also the switches by the front door.

Due to a slight lack of planning, this switch box is mounted a little too close to (read: under) the door frame, which made the switch plate a challenge. I managed, however, and one switch is wired to an interior light and one to an exterior light. The exterior light is kind of irritatingly bright 🙂

This gives us both 110V and 12V exterior lights.

This brings it pretty much up to date to early February. The February full moon event was Feb 8th.

We arrived early enough on Saturday to take an evening scooter ride before drum circle, though Sunday was uncomfortably damp for a daytime ride before packing up and heading home. :/

It’s An All Ubiquiti Shop Now

Thanks to a lucky sequence of events elsewhere, I inherited a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra router.

My Netgate 1100 running pfSense was not underperforming and didn’t need to be replaced, but I took the opportunity to replace the only major piece of network gear left in the house that wasn’t Ubiquiti.

I have a moderately sophisticated home LAN, beyond what most of the people I know need, but not as over the top as some others. I currently have one internet service provider, Starlink, though for a while I had an LTE provider as well. There is a fiber provider building out in our area and we have signed up. They have installed our ONT to a fiber stub that runs the the curb and all over our neighborhood, there are runs along the street between stubs. Still waiting for the rest of it to be completed somewhere. Whenever that does happen, we will have fiber and Starlink for long enough for me to trust the fiber.

I have the router, a switch and two WiFi access points in the house, a switch and a WiFi access point in the workshop and a wireless bridge connecting them. The main complications to this otherwise fairly straight forward deployment are: 1) My ISP is currently Starlink and to avoid all the trees around the house, the Starlink dish is physically installed at the workshop, requiring the use of an isolated VLAN to backhaul Starlink across a wireless bridge to the house where the router and all the other central gear is and 2) I have a moderate number of IoT devices, particularly inexpensive home automation devices, that should be somewhat isolated from the rest of the network.

I had set up a Unifi Network Controller running as a Docker container on my Synology NAS to administer the Ubiquiti switches and APs. No more CPU than this task takes, this has hardly been a load on the NAS at all. However, the Cloud Gateway Ultra can take over this task as well.

I read that there are ways to back up the running configurations for all of my devices and restore them to the new controller. It’s not particularly complicated, but I elected to take the opportunity to clean slate my configurations and reset each of these devices and configure them anew. This may have cost me more time than was necessary, but it definitely made me understand and address specific elements of the configurations.

I started by locating an ‘as built’ drawing that I made after adding the Ubiquiti switches and APs.

I used this drawing and consulted the existing configurations to verify the port numbers and VLANs, particularly dealing with the Starlink backhaul.

The flow of the VLANs are better illustrated here.

The thing to realize is that VLAN 50 allows data to and from Starlink to connect directly between port 7 of Flying Dog switch and port 15 of the Hippy Hollow switch without being available to any other ports on either switch. The router then processes it as a WAN source and distributes it out it’s LAN port, connected to port 16 of Hippy Hollow switch. All other ports on both switches have all VLANs except VLAN 50 available, so nothing can connect directly to Starlink, bypassing the router.

In any case, because I was going to deploy these devices with factory resets, establishing this VLAN backhaul added a twist. I had already brought the Gateway up in the house and changed it’s network IP from the default 192.168.1.0/24 to my existing 172.29.0.0/24. I then took the Gateway over to the workshop and connected it directly to Starlink and a random switchport and importantly, I plugged the workshop AP in to one of the Gateway’s switchports. This let it come up with the Gateway easily reachable from my phone. When things settled down, I reset the switch, adopted it, configured the VLAN on port 7 and the trunk on port 8 (which has the bridge between the workshop and house) then I moved the Gateway back into the house to reconfigure that switch.

In the house, I had the advantage of a laptop in the network cabinet, so I didn’t have to necessarily worry about the AP immediately.

I was able to quickly get the VLAN backhaul for Starlink up and going. Then came everything else.

I understand there is some method of resetting APs over the ethernet cable, but I needed a ladder to reach only two of the four and adoption to the new controller went smoothly.

There were two mildly troublesome parts to all the wireless stuff. First, it took so long for me to get all the APs reset that all the open DHCP scopes assigned IPs that were previously fixed and I couldn’t conveniently reassign them to the addresses they once had. There was kind of a plan there at one time. I just sighed and left the things that needed to be fixed where they landed, mostly cameras and printers. Second, the whole idea of having a separate IoT subnet is that devices on that network can reach the internet, but not your other local networks. A simple checkbox enables this isolation, but if something *does* need access, if for example if your Home Assistant server is on the main network and a bunch of your wireless home automation devices are on the IoT network, then this simple network isolation checkbox is not the solution; you need a couple of appropriate firewall rules instead. That is why all of my WiFi Home Assistant devices were grayed out. 🙂

To get all these devices up and running, I elected to remove the network isolation checkbox and work on setting proper firewall rules later.

As is often the case, a couple of months have passed between the previous paragraph and this one. In the interim, Ubiquiti has released Zone Firewall for my router, so I need to figure that out. It’s not expected to be difficult, but I haven’t even looked at it yet 🙂

I have four APs, three in the house and one in the workshop. Two U6 Lite APs were purchased together, one in the house and one in the workshop. I needed to add one in the house later and managed to secure a used AC Pro for free, which is a significantly older unit. By itself, that didn’t matter much, but it would probably be better if both of the units in the house were at least similar in features, such as WiFi 6, so I swapped the older one to the workshop. I also have an AC Mesh AP for some outdoor connectivity.

Also, that AC Pro had complained about the wiring ever since it was installed, claiming that it was Fast Ethernet instead of Gigabit. Not surprisingly, the U6 Lite didn’t like the wiring either. I shuffled the attic wiring around so that my USW Flex in the attic now powers one of the AC Mesh and one of the U6 Lites instead of the AC Mesh and a camera. The wiring that was on the troubled AP is now going to that camera, which is only Fast Ethernet anyway. I started by just running all three on the USW Flex, but it ran too close to the max PoE power budget for the switch and kept dropping the newly added AP.

There is one more VLAN thing I’d like to solve. I’d like for all the cameras to be in either the IoT VLAN or maybe their own VLAN. It is pretty trivial to move the WiFi cameras, but for some reason, I can’t seem to get the wired camera to be happy in anything except the default VLAN. I can definitely make the switch port appear to be in the expected VLAN, but then the camera just stops communicating. It seems to refuse to get a new IP from the DHCP in the new network. Maybe the zone firewall rules will make that easier to understand and manage. 🙂

The Lug Bolt Situation

The short version: I replaced the U-bolts and springs that were damaged when the wheel fell off since I didn’t check the f*%#ing lug bolts before we left on a trip. Then I started repairing the other damage done by that event.

I did indeed go install the new springs and U-bolts as planned.

Even though it had rained during the week, the ground was dry, so I elected to work on it in the campsite. Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous day, warm and sunny.

First thing was to get the camper elevated and supported by jackstands before rolling around under there.

With the wheel off, I was also able to better document some of the other damage done by the rogue wheel.

There is a lot in this one picture. You can see two side seams of the galvanized steel fender that are pulled apart, the crunched end that would normally be stapled to the bottom side of the floor, the wrecked piece of floor itself and underneath, the damaged gray water outlet.

One reason I wanted to replace the springs as well as the U-bolts was that this spring definitely lost some dimension to the roadway.

To get on with it, I put a jackstand under the axle so that I could remove the spring.

Using an electric 1/2″ impact wrench made short work of removing the old shank bolts. The splined design of the new bolts prevented me from using my torque wrench on the front mount. The splines bite into the mount and the bolt can only go in one way. There is not room to get a socket on the nut. They are plenty tight, though.

A little natural tension in the system fought with me, but with a little convincing leverage, I was able to get the axle to pop onto the alignment pin. Then it was trivial to put on the tie plate and U-bolts and torque to specification.

The wobbling wheel quickly chewed off the dust cap, so after readjusting the castle nut and installing another new cotter pin, I gave it a new dust cap, too.

I have found that removing and installing the wheel on this side of the camper is easier if you deflate the tire first. It is a very tight fit between the hub and the inside of the wheel well. So, here is the wheel reinstalled, with new lug bolts, being reinflated.

I didn’t take pictures of the process on the other side, as it was almost identical, with the exception that I had to remove the U-bolts on that side and to get the impact wrench over the ends of those bolts, I had to dig a shallow pit under the assembly. Also, since everything was still assembled, the components were under some tension, which complicated things at first.

We are not skipping this step. 85-95 ft/lbs.

It now sits as level as the ground it’s on!

We had decided before I even left the house that if it was 3:30 or later when I finished that I would just spend the night in the camper and tow it home in the morning. Not only did I just not want to tow it at night with all the new suspension under it and no spotter, it was discovered on the way into camp last time that we had brake and turn lights, but no tail lights. It is presumed since the wiring traverses the damaged region that something may have happened to the wiring.

In any case, it was a few minutes after 4:00PM by the time I got everything wrapped up and it would have been later than that by the time I got it hitched and ready to go. Besides, I had already been invited to join the proprietor’s family for dinner, which turned out to be an early Thanksgiving dinner with wonderful smoked turkey. We caravanned a trail ride through the woods and enjoyed a short campfire.

I enjoyed my pipe and a couple of beers as well. In all, it was a relaxing evening after a successful day’s work.

The tow home the next day was uneventful, for once!

It would be the Friday after Thanksgiving before I would start on the fender repair.

From the inside, the damage is no better or worse. This is the rear of the fender from the inside. The floor covering makes the floor look better but somehow, the fender looks worse. 🙂

I jacked the camper up in similar fashion as for the spring repair, removed the wheel and crawled under there to remove the 658 staples holding the fender in place. I didn’t actually count them, but it would not surprise me if there were at least 100.

Well, almost all of them. Apparently when this thing was built, the floor, complete with fenders, was completed and then attached to the frame. There was at least one staple hidden behind each spring mount, unreachable to remove. I was already going to cut the worst part of the splintered floor away for replacement, so I just cut a little more away and addressed these hidden staples.

I removed part of the floor tile and cut away the really shredded part of the plywood floor. I applied glue liberally and clamped it overnight to refurbish it.

The fender itself surprised me. I really expected to have to get it kinda close, then grind/sand the paint off and solder/braze/weld the seams back together, but using a set of basic auto body sheet metal repair tools that I picked up years ago for an unrelated project, I was able to carress the fender back into fender shape and reuse the existing seams. It is not in original condition, but it is in it’s original shape.

I was sure this seam was a gonner.

But this is how it turned out.

I didn’t know until I sat down to write this blog entry that this particular seam is called a Pittsburgh Lock or sometimes just Pittsburgh seam.

In this case, the curved top portion carries the lock folds, shown here in blue, and the flat sides have the simple edge fold. I used the sheet metal tools to reform the curved or flat piece. I folded the edge of the blue open, reintroduced the red fold into the lock and hammered the fold back down.

The crunched up section responded well to the sheet metal tools as well.

I didn’t really notice until I was working on the sheet metal that the fender rubbed enough on the tire to heat it up and heat it up enough to discolor the paint. I suspect this was after we had a new tire on and had continued down the road, with the trailer leaning heavily with no springs on this side.

Much later during reinstallation of the fender, I would also notice that there are some spots where this area has a couple of spots where light shines through.

For the floor repair, I cut a shape to fit the void I had cut out earlier. This required a little hand fitting since the cutout was done freehand with the oscillating tool.

I could not think of any better way to securely attach it other than glue and screws. It’s plywood, so of course it wanted to split out with such a narrow piece.

I didn’t get pix of the repair of the repair 🙂 but I did get one of the fix of the smaller piece at the front of the fender cutout.

I find it amazing how many voids are just naturally in this plywood anyway. The gap in teh middle is not a split, but a void in the plywood.

Here we are getting ready for the first staples reinstalling the fender. The repair is solid, but it could have been maybe 1/4″ wider. Still, it will hold just fine.

That turns out to be the last picture I took of the fender reinstallation process. I put the requisite 100ish staples back in, especially around the wheel well opening. There will be some sealing to do from the top and I need to put the floor tile back in, but the fender job is basically done.

There is a trim piece that runs along the bottom edge of the each side of the camper. This is a good opportunity to reinstall that.

I’d Like An October/November Do-Over, Please

In the wake of a successful debut of the Jayco, we had a new hitlist of perhaps less urgent things to get done for the following month’s trip.

Our 2004 RAM 2500 truck has been a workhorse. Wifey commuted to work with it until we moved out in the country. It has hauled horse trailers, several RVs, utility trailers, etc. I love that it runs essentially the same 0-60 time with or without a load attached.

However, in the last few years, it has developed some troubling transmission symptoms. If it sits unused for a long time, couple of weeks at least, it wont immediately move when put into gear. One has to shuttle back and forth between Reverse and Drive a few times to get it to roll. More recently, it developed a more worrisome issue wherein it would seem to be stuck in 2nd gear, especially if you were engaged in even modestly aggressive acceleration. You could often kind of force it to shift by manipulating the throttle, but it was not reliable. This made towing the Jayco trickier than it had to be and, surely, the extra weight of towing something can’t be helping whatever is wrong with the transmission. Store this note away for a few minutes.

We returned with the Jayco on Sunday, October 20. On Wednesday, October 23, me and about 25 of my IT Infrastructure Team coworkers were all laid off work. In a Teams call.

I spent most of the week reeling from that and starting the job hunting process, something that I am WOEFULLY out of practice with. I’d been with this company for 21 years, with the previous company 18 years and literally had a weekend off between those two jobs. I haven’t had to actually hunt for a job for nearly 40 years.

By the weekend, it was time to get on with the camper.

I replaced all the rear marker lights. The new wiring does not presume that the metal skin is grounded, so I wired the ground to each light.

I upgraded the light over the rear bed to an LED light/fan combo. It has a remote, which is obviously intended to be used from below. It throws a LOT of light and the light’s color temperature is adjustable. The fan is nice, though on high, it vibrates a little.

Speaking of fans, I manually wired 12V to the roof vent fan and verified my fears, that as mounted, it was going to pull the screen into the blades and sound like a chainsaw. I fabricated a simple bracket and flipped the fan over. I also flipped the fan blade on the motor so that it could run in the proper direction. The red sharpie arrow no longer applies. 🙂

Since I was playing with 12VDC stuff, I mounted the DC room light.

And the outdoor light, which doesn’t look very bright in full sun, but it is on.

With all these 12 volt devices installed, it was past time to install the massively oversized 12 volt converter, starting with adding a 110V outlet in The Hole.

It will one day be slightly taxed by charging a battery, but for today, 45 amps is about 42 amps more than necessary.

November 1 & 2 was a major IDPA match. It was fun, though I didn’t place or win anything. Coolest logo and match shirt ever, though.

Wifey went to visit friends in Oklahoma on that Saturday and I had plans to continue working on the Jayco and perhaps do some work in the workshop to get ready for some winter blacksmithing.

Trouble arose on the trip home from the match on Saturday. I was only 30 minutes from the range and still an hour from home when my car developed a leak. It leaked oil and connecting rods out of a hole in the side of the engine block.

Luckily for me, this spot on the road was only 20 minutes from where we camp with the Jayco and the incredible people there came to my rescue without hesitation. They loaned me one of their cars to get the rest of the way home. The next morning, I rented a U-Haul tow dolly, returned their car to them then picked up mine and towed it home. At this point, I am still not sure exactly what I am going to do about it, junk it or attempt to repair it.

With the next Love’s Way outing rapidly approaching, we are suddenly in a rush to get a bunch of stuff done in time for the weekend.

I replaced the kitchen faucet and the shower wand and finalized the installation of the water heater, bringing the last of the plumbing to a close.

The kitchen sink was a handy place to record the video of the shower wand in operation.

I added a terminal block specifically to distribute DC power, complete with its own fuse.

I added a light in the ceiling of The Hole.

I added the switch for the roof vent fan to the 12V ceiling light.

Importantly, I installed USB charging outlets by each of the beds!

You recall we had concerns about the transmission on the truck. I had been doing research into the issue and found two solutions, either or both of which could be our problem.

One is a hydraulic pressure regulator solenoid and/or pressure transducer. These are internal parts, but they can be reached by removing the pan on the bottom of the transmission and they are generally not very difficult to replace. There are commonly available parts kits that include the pan gasket and a replacement transmission oil filter, which you have to remove to get to the solenoid anyway, so you may as well replace it. In all, a couple of hours work and 7-8 quarts of fairly expensive automatic transmission fluid. It is unclear if this will directly address the 2nd gear slippage, but it definitely addresses the lack of motion after the truck sits unused for a while.

The other is a far simpler procedure. There is an externally adjustable tension setting for one of the tension bands. It is common for transmissions with 100K or more miles to need this band adjusted. The various YouTube videos describing it’s adjustment call it a 15 minute job, but most of them have the transmission out on a bench or the vehicle up on a lift. They are not being adjusted on the ground by an old fat guy crawling around under the truck. Still, it was not a bad experience overall and the difference is like night and day. The truck shifts like it is supposed to. We can defer the solenoid replacement for now, which is good since for the foreseeable future, the truck is going to be my daily driver.

With that particular thorn out of our toe, we continue working towards the next campout.

I cut and attached a top for the cabinet. It will eventually be painted, but I kind of like the woodgrain. Its just plain old plywood.

We applied this really inexpensive backsplash stuff from the dollar store to the walls around the kitchen. It took some extra effort to stabilize the actual material and to use better glue than it’s self adhesive stuff, but it turned out nice.

We got a nice big holding tank for sewage and I plumbed it for both black and grey water, but long term, we probably wont leave it this way. Our gray water output will be a lot higher than black water and we may be able to plumb a smaller black water tank directly into that outlet.

We got everything packed up and, while we didn’t leave as early as we had planned, we still got away reasonably early.

Then a new disaster struck.

You know how they tell you to always check your lug nuts before you go on a long trip. Yeah. Do that.

On the same highway where my car threw a rod, just two weeks and eight miles west of where that happened, the last lug bolt came out of one of the Jayco’s wheels.

I failed to get a picture of it before I pulled the wheel out, but it was laying at a weird forward angle, but it had been dragged on the pavement far enough to have a thumb sized hole in the sidewall. It didn’t look like the lug threads in the hub were damaged, so there was hope. I used one of the leveling jacks to jack it up enough to extract the wheel. The spring had obviously dragged as well and we found the gray water adapter half ground, but broken off a few feet behind where we had stopped.

Shortening the story from here greatly, we were able to replace the damaged tire at Walmart and use some standard bolts in order to get the trailer back on the road well enough to make it the rest of the way to Love’s Way, arriving five hours later than planned.

We used two lug bolts and two regular bolts in each wheel. As expected, we had to deflate the tire in order to convince it to fit into the wheelwell, so I am very happy that I threw my inflator in the truck before we left.

We stopped a couple of times on rest of the trip to recheck the lug bolts, especially since they were in an extra compromised configuration. At one stop, it was easy and comfortable to look around under there and investigate the totally not unexpected lean that the trailer was displaying.

The most obvious thing is that the spring is not connected to the axle, thus the lean. The axle is resting against the frame and the dangling Ubolt will later be found to literally just be hanging there. I am surprised that it stayed there for the whole bumpy trip.

Oh, and the tail lights stopped working. Brake and turn lights work, but no tail lights. The wiring for the lights passes right along the edge of that wall and over that fender, so it may have been damaged.

I did a lot of shopping online for replacement Ubolts and tie plates and later springs. It occurred to me that not only would it be wise to replace the spring because it would be prone to break where it got ground to smithereens, but the camper has always ridden really low and some new springs might lift it up a bit and help with the sewer connections and towing into driveways and all those kinds of things. Once I had some pretty good ideas on what to get, we also checked some local(ish) places and found what turned out to be arguably the best deal. I got two new springs that are a little heavier, new Ubolts and tie plates, all for $133, no waiting, no shipping. I did have to drive into Fort Worth to pick them up, but no biggie. I also procured 10 lug bolts, so it will get all new bolts and we will have 6 spares 🙂

We are planning to go install all this on Saturday and probably haul the camper back home for the rest of the work, like replacing the broken gray water fitting and other damage done in this excursion, besides the other pending work, such as installing a battery, replacing the seals in the toilet, finishing the interior trim.

So in just about exactly 30 days, I was laid off work, had my car blow up and nearly destroyed the camper. The one shining star is that just today, I got a really good bite on a job application, something similar to what I was doing and for similar pay. With a little luck, I will ace the interview and put a lot of this negative stuff behind us!

Refresh and Renew

As I often do, this first post is a massive catch-up post, covering months of work and events, intended to bring the reader up to the present day. I apologize, but such is the nature of the blogging beast, at least when I do it.

Way back in 2004 or so, we picked up a very cute 1972 Jayco Jaywren camper.

The guy we bought it from was a crop duster and among other customizations, he had painted a Texas flag on the roof so that he could find it easily from the air.

It had some minor water damage from leaks around the marker lights. After using the camper a couple of times, we tackled repairing the worst of it, where the front marker lights had leaked and damaged the front wall, mostly above the window.

There was also quite a bit of damage at the front corners, also largely from the the corner marker lights leaking.

The repair came out pretty ok, other than some difficulty matching the color. The luan plywood we used and the pecan stain looks redder in these nighttime flash pictures than it did in person, though it was obviously not the factory paneling.

We continued using that camper for a number of years, though it did go through some fairly long periods of storage.

Among other hobbies, I am a ham radio operator. There is an big annual contest in the USA called ARRL Field Day, wherein you try to contact as many unique operators as possible during a 24 hour period, preferably under simulated emergency conditions. There are points mulitpliers for teams, using emergency power, remote operations, etc. In 2014, a friend of ours had her large RV stored on our property, so I used it as a base for operating at home under generator power. It got me out of the unairconditioned workshop for the contest, which turned out extra helpful since I threw my back out during preparations.

When 2015 Field Day came around, the big RV had returned to it’s home, so I thought I can just duplicate the conditions using our little Jayco. I towed it over from the other side of the property where we store it to a spot outside the workshop. I got it roughly leveled and stabilized and I opened the door to get started setting up. This is what I saw:

That is hundreds of dead bees. They were everywhere. Long story short, turns out there was a large hive in one of the storage hutches. The beekeeper we had come to remove the hive said that these bees managed to slip out into the camper proper and were unable to find their way back home and probably perished in the heat.

In any case, I made other plans for 2015 Field Day.

It continued to be used occasionally but rarely until summer of 2019. We have a friend who is may be best described as a vagabond. He visits various friends all over the country for a while every few years and while visiting each place, he generally tackles some projects, presumably to help offset the costs of hosting him. He is a talented carpenter and really quite the pantologist. There is a catch. Ya gotta let him do it his way. This has lead to more than one clash, generally over materials and scheduling. For example, we might want to get as much material as possible to leverage a credit card discount for a large purchase, but he’s not ready for that material and doesn’t want to even think about the project that far ahead yet.

Knowing all this, we still asked him to address some water damage on the Jayco, similar to the damage I had fixed some years ago, but in the back and the ceiling. We didn’t expect it to be simple, but we didn’t expect so much of the RV’s complete intrinsic value to be destroyed in the process.

He had gutted it, far more than necessary for the areas we wanted to address. His plans for the remodel apparently involved permanently removing the shower and kitchen as well.

So, being the optimist I am, a few good things came out of this process. About half of the aluminum skin got an above average paint job. A lot (though importantly, not all) of the original water damage was addressed. Some arguably weak parts of the structure were redesigned stronger.

On the other hand…

I don’t recall the exact sequence of events, nor do I want to relive them, but long story short, the RV project was buttoned up unfinished and our friend left on somewhat tense terms, not entirely due to the RV project alone. He has not been back, but we keep in touch. His somewhat hard life may be catching up with him, as his health is not fantastic. When he one day reads this, I hope it finds him well and, even though we may have cursed his name a few times during the project that follows, he still got it started.

The main thing is that some decisions he made have had long lasting consequences, not all of them great. Sometimes, I can see where he was going with something or why he may have done this or that. Other times, I can’t help but think, what the hell was he thinking? I’ll try to not dwell on them too much, but I can’t promise to never let any irritation come through. I’ll call him Bob.

The general disgust with the whole situation caused us to let the poor thing sit untouched for about 5 years. Sure, checked inside every once in a while. It was apparently sealed up well enough to keep the wasps out, but it did accrue more unseen water damage during that time. I mowed and weeded around it since Bob took the f*%kin’ wheels off it and I couldn’t move it.

Without going too far off on a tangent, we have a place where we like to camp at least once a month. We took our little motorcycle camper up there once and due to it blowing up tires just before we arrived, we ended up leaving it there and building a permanent campsite on that property.

The little camper is a clever design, especially for setting up a place for two (plus pups) to sleep, with attached storage/closet space in a package that was small enough to tow behind a large motorcycle.

What it is not is handy. It takes at minimum an hour to get the whole thing set up with the front porch tent and the beds made up, etc. Also, it is so compact that we have to pack in just about everything. There is essentially zero storage within that camper.

So, we were inspired to assess and possibly refurbish the Jayco into appropriate condition to haul to this property to replace the clever but pain in the butt camper.

May 10, 2024

It had been a while since the last weeding around it, so that had to be task one.

Some of the worst deterioration over the last 5 years is clearly visible here, the lower panel of the skin had come loose, leaving the plywood completely exposed.

I didn’t want to work on it way out there where it was parked, but rather much closer to either the house of the workshop, where power and tool storage would be much more convenient. We decided to park it in the driveway for easy access to the garage and power. However, to move it, we were going to need to put the wheels back on first.

I will never, under any circumstances, understand why Bob felt the need to remove the wheels in order to work on water damage on the roof. Now, I know that part of what he was doing was refurbishing the rims, which is somewhat better done with the tires removed. On the other hand, it’s been 5 years now, so they need to be painted again. Sigh.

On the other hand, Bob is no idiot. As you can see, the wheel hub is covered with a plastic bucket and beneath said bucket, the axle is wrapped in a grease soaked rag. New bearings and seals were filed away in a coffee can inside the trailer. The only thing I could not find was replacement cotter pins.

The tires turned out to be a mildly nasty surprise. The date code on the existing low mileage tires made them old enough that Discount Tire would not even mount them, even though they were probably fine. We ended up buying a new pair of tires, but since we knew we were planning to tow it nearly 100 miles as soon as it was ready, we considered that the safer option anyway.

Remounting the wheels was a challenge. I recall changing a tire for some reason years ago on this RV. The driver side tire just will not fit up in there without heavy duty mechanical assistance. I ended up having to deflate it almost entirely so that I could squeeze it between the axle and the body of the trailer.

Upon close observation, I think the axle is very slightly off center towards that side, making the gap too small for the full width radial tire to fit betwen the axle and the fender.

But, perseverance won out.

I set it up in the driveway, reasonably close to the edge.

Next, I had to transform it from a box stuffed with parts and trash…..

… into a blank canvas!

The first major challenge was the floor. The plan to to put down vinyl tile. The original flooring had been linoleum. My favorite solution would have been some form of laminate flooring, but there is a 10-15 degree upsweep at the back which would have been a significant challenge with any rigid flooring.

Multiplying the challenge was that Bob had applied Thompson’s water seal to the floor. This is one of those things where I can kinda see where he was going; it’s an RV, it’s likely to get water in it sometime, so let’s help keep the floor from rotting. On the other hand, Thompson’s is an oil based product. It is not adhesive friendly. Furthermore, there were some thin remnants of linoleum still left on the floor, sealed down with Thompson’s. We killed an entire weekend doing nothing but scraping and power sanding the floor in an attempt to get through enough of the seal to give the primer and floor adhesive a chance to stick.

May 21, 2024:

The floor turned out pretty nice, though.

Later, about 10% of these tiles would need to be pulled up and reglued with Liquid Nails, but that was just mildly irritating.

The next major step was to repanel the ceiling. Although *technically*, the entire ceiling wasn’t trashed, enough of it was for it to make sense to replace it all.

Insulation was a significant challenge. The “joists” in the ceiling are essentially flat 1×2 lumber, so there is about 3/4″ of space for insulation. What turned out to work the best was taking standard insulation batting, splitting it down really thin, about 1″ to 1-1/2″ then stapling that to the wood as one normally would. The split off pieces were saved for use in the walls, where it was easier to get by without the kraft paper.

We used a lot of 5mm plywood, from either of two sources. Lowes has a very light colored poplar plywood that runs about $26 per sheet as of this writing. Lowes has the advantage of being about 20 minutes away and since we didn’t want to store a gob of material ahead of time, it was a reasonable compromise. This stuff takes paint pretty well.

June 8, 2024:

The first sheet was essentially 7 x 4 feet with no weird cuts. We had decided on a light green color for the ceiling and eventually the cabinet doors and drawer fronts, partly because it was inexpensive and readily available from Walmart.

The next ceiling panel was decidely NOT simple to cut. I do wish that I had cut it a little closer around the roof vent, though. It would, however, be nearly four months later before I would realize that.

It is amazing that this panel fits at all, let alone on the first attempt:

One more small piece at the front of the trailer and the ceiling is nearly complete. A few months later and I would end up replacing that last piece with a wider one, having changed my mind about how I was going to finish out the corners of the ceiling at the front and back.

The next major task was to repair all the walls. Bob had done the street side wall, or at least most of it. I would need to fix either some old damage that had never been addressed or new damage that had appeared in the 5 years that the Jayco sat partially done. Considering the advanced rust in the staples and screws, I’m pretty sure most of it was really old water damage.

I digress.

I have fewer in-progress pictures of this process than I would prefer. Some of this work was fun-challenging and some of it was exasperating-challenging.

The framing in any RV is, shall we say, least effort. In the factory, they butt 1×2 lumber together and drive heavy duty staples across the joint, usually on both sides.

Then paneling is attached on the inside and the aluminum skin to the outside and the assembly is reasonably rigid.

We don’t have these monster staples available to us, short of literally hammering used staples back in. The material is too thin for most other decent joinery, so we have to innovate. I’ll give Bob full credit for starting this trend, though I’ve done enough of them to feel I’m better at them by now. 🙂 I’m not sure what this joinery is called, officially. It’s not entirely unlike dovetails, except there is no actual dovetail. We basically cut a notch in one board, closely fitted to the end of another board, then use glue and sometimes screws or crown staples to secure it. It’s dovetail adjacent.

In short, I used the CRAP outta this joint to reinforce, repair and replace lumber all over the Jayco, but especially in the walls, because they are all built like this, flat 1×2 lumber in essentially a 2D assembly.

Sometimes, I felt an existing structure needed more material. I added the center vertical bracing here to help make this particular panel more rigid. This area had the original gas powered refrigerator and gas furnace that came with the RV from the factory, but both were gone long before we got it. I have plugged those holes with 16ga sheet metal and I think the extra framework will help keep all all that together.

June 15, 2024:

I have used a 2×4 sheet of 3/4″ plywood on the bed of the Mule as a workbench for years. It is a good working height and easily adjusted. It works really well.

That makes removing an entire wall and repairing and replacing pieces from there generally the easiest.

This is the top half of the rear wall. The opening to the left of the clamp is where the window goes.

The finished wall, back in place on the camper, with poplar plywood on the inside:

The framing above the shower was a difficult repair. The parts of the curbside wall that are missing were so rotted that they crumbled, so there was nothing to get any good measurements off of. The frame pieces attached to the roof were in pretty poor shape as well. As of this writing, this area is put together, but it still needs some rework and adjustments because my best guesses as to where to cut and add framing were not great. Plus, Bob’s wall on the other side is about 3/4″ too wide.

The actual work came together pretty well, though. It’s like Hubble, nicely built to the wrong dimensions 🙂

It was about this time that I began to realize that this work is not so much carpentry as sculpture. No two dimensions are the same, every cut is custom, whether a custom length or custom angle. This is what sculpters do.

We decided to use OSB for this particular piece of wall. Unlike all the other pieces of wall, it will never be seen, so the rationale is why spend $30 on a sheet of nice plywood for that? If I had it to over, I would go for the regular plywood. The OSB is thicker, heavier and generally just harder to work with than the plywood, for not that much savings. It worked out fine, it was just more of a pain than it probably needed to be.

One reason this piece was difficult to work with was because I could not really remove this wall frame. The shower, the kitchen cabinets and the door are all attached to this frame. Furthermore, I was going to have to depend on Liquid Nail for most of the attachment because I could not get behind the sheet to drive screws or staples through the OSB into the frame. Thus fitting it was a process that involved a LOT of putting the sheet up there, supported by the jacks, mark a couple of things, pull the sheet out, make some trim cuts, repeat, until it fit reasonably well.

Though I don’t appear to have any in progress pictures, the entire bottom half of the rear wall was essentially built from scratch. Where the old window air conditioner had been cut in allowed a lot of water in and the street side rear corner had its own leaks, so the original wall was pretty much kindling. The completed new wall is in place here, though we will be back for an issue.

It is now a little after 7PM, June 17, a Monday.

I have just finished the OSB wall. My wife has gone out of town for a few days and we realize that storms are expected on Tuesday. I need to button up this whole thing that I have been able to leave open for a few weeks. I need it to be reasonably rain tight.

I have had the skin on and off the camper enough times to be good at it, but this is the first time the rear skin has gone back on with all these new walls back here. By 9PM, I have the skins back on, but if you look closely, you can see that I needed to use foil tape to fill in an area at the top corner. That is where the shower framing I mentioned earlier is no longer the same shape as the outer skin.

By 12:30 Tuesday morning, I have installed the windows that I can; the shower window is not ready to go in yet. I have the old air conditioner hole covered and taped and I have door installed.

The door was a significant challenge. At the time I was ready to put the door on, which is not really a task for one person, the wind had moved in. The wind had already made dealing with the large flat lightweight pieces of aluminum skin a massive pain. The door was just that much more of a problem child.

When putting the door in by oneself, you need to be able to grip it well enough to lift the entire assembly, often by only a fraction of an inch, but it must be done. To get a reasonable grip on the frame, I had to have the door ajar. A gust of wind ripped the open door from my grip. Though I did not drop the door, the force slammed it hard enough to spring the bottom of the door itself open and wrench the frame out of square. I suspected there was damage there anyway, this just proved that there was little holding the door together down there, and even less now.

The wind subsided enough for me to gather the door up onto the Mule worksurface and get it beaten into shape enough to close again and I managed to get it mounted.

My door breaking gust turns out to have been the peak wind of the evening, 36mph, shortly before midnight.

The sad irony is that, by the time I buttoned up the whole camper and put away all the tools, it was well after 2AM. I was exhausted for work the next day.

It never rained.

June 24, 2024:

I have a TIG welder. I am reasonably good at welding steel with it. I chose the Primeweld 225X based largely on this pretty old review. It was not old when I first saw it and a few years later when I was ready to buy my welder, the 225X is still well reviewed, so I’m pretty happy I got it. I quickly learned to weld steel with it and, especially compared to my 15 year old Harbor Freight MIG welder, it is SO clean.

One of my TIG welder’s many talents is AC TIG, which is what you need for welding aluminum. I say the welder’s talent because, at this point anyway, it is not on my list of talents. I found I can put down reasonably OK practice beads on a aluminum coupons.

That does not translate directly be being able to repair the camper door frame. Oh, I guess I can say that it’s more assembled than it used to be. This is the best one:

It was really easy to blow through.

I know now that I probably had the AC balance too far into “cleaning”, which made me crank up the amps trying to get a pool, then it was really easy to get too many amps and smoke it.

Practice.

In any case, the frame is arguably better than it was. Bad welds are at least slightly better than open cracks.

june 30, 2024:

I’m back to the kitchen wall.

Regardless of the poor condition of the plywood, the framing in this area has survived pretty well.

I didn’t realize at the time I was doing this work that the two copper lines on the left were deprecated water lines or I would have removed them. The one copper line on the right is the propane line to the range/oven.

Though I had high hopes of replacing this plywood in one piece, it was not to be. There is an upper and a lower piece, but they turned out great!

Next was to replace the 3/4″ plywood at the bottom of the wall. This is somewhat structural. In the factory, I suspect this piece was first and everything was built toward the inside from it. That is not really an option here.

Once cut to size and the wheel well is cut out….

Next comes more ersatz joinery.

Then even more joinery as I cut in and frame around the shower window. Still no way to use any fasteners, so relying heavily on Liquid Nails and clamps.

By this time, I have partially addressed the mismatch in the corner, but it still requires some special procedures to keep it rain tight.

The plan is to replace that top section of skin with material salvaged from another camper we have. It won’t match exactly, but it will look better than this bandage.

July 4, 2024:

I finally get to start playing with some of the wiring. I have run some marker lights at this point, but this is the first real work on the 110V systems.

I have neglected to mention… I picked up an oscillating multitool and it has been invaluable for the cut-in joinery and things like cutting a shallow slot for the wire to route through. It has metal cutting blades available and they make pretty short work of nails, but I have discovered that screws are significantly tougher stuff.

This particular wire goes up through the ceiling and drops out over the bed at the front of the camper. The orange wire goes to the utility box where the breaker panel will eventually be. Originally, the wiring went the other way, from the breaker, up the front wall to that light, then to here to power the refrigerator.

The utility box or closet, we usually just called The Hole, needed to built back from scratch. I don’t have any interior view pictures of what it used to look like, but I recall that it had a few cubbyhole shelves where the jacks could fit. I’m not sure if I will replicate those or not, but I definitely gotta start somewhere.

The original framing was gone, but Bob had a start on the replacement, so I was able to cut in the rest of it fairly easily. The rest would need to wait.

In the condition shown here, the key would not hold the door shut, so I felt obligated to tape it shut to keep out water.

In finishing out the back wall, I discovered a measurement error I had made on one of the braces. That brace was one 1×2 width off, making it difficult to secure that wall because that brace was floating where there was nothing to screw it to.

I pulled that piece of the wall out and joined in a sister to that brace.

Except that I missed and joined a sister to the wrong board (red arrow) and had to do it a second time (green arrow)!

July 12, 2024:

Bob had replaced some fairly complex pieces on the front of the trailer with 3/4″ plywood, but it wasn’t really well protected against the weather, so in 5 years, these plywood pieces already needed replacing.

I used similar joinery to keep it strong.

For what I am sure are reasons, the two sides are not the same.

With those plywood pieces in place, I was finally at a point where I could start installing interior paneling. The first panel would be a fitting challenge.

I didnt have a panel square, but it was pretty easy to knock out a reasonable homebrew version. I still use this on occasion, but I have had to shorten it for a task.

July 20, 2024:

There are so many angles and intersections that it takes a lot test fitting and trimming to get the piece up there, plus even though I drew it as a line on the measurement sheet, that top edge is actually a curve. In any case, success!

Next came a ton of small but important jobs replacing damaged paneling, like the bottom fo the kitchen cabinet…

…and below the shower door.

August 9, 2024:

I’m about to leave for a week for the IDPA National Championship match in Alabama, so there is a push to get some stuff done and to seal up in case it rains while I’m gone.

It is difficult to show exactly what is going on here, but I am replicating the narrow shelf that was at the front of the trailer under the window. This shelf is only about 5-6 inches wide and serves as the transition between the angle between the upper wall and the lower wall. As such, it was the first time in this project I needed to deal with a specific angle other than matching a panel.

As it turns out, the top edge of that front 1×2 is cut to 15 degrees and I will find that 15 degree angle is repeated often in the camper, so yay!

It is a long span, so it needs some braces.

In building the utility box, the 15 degree angle persists, though here it is more obvious as 15 degrees off of 90, or 75 degrees included.

One really irritating part about this entire project is how sometimes a dimension will sneak up and bite you on the ass. Throughout the construction of the rear walls, I carefully maintained the relationship between the old wall and side wall that Bob built. His was was maybe overbuilt, the lower half being made of 3/4″ pine lumber rather than the 1×2 framing that the rest of the wall was made from. Generally, I’m good with that. I am not sure exactly how it happened but somewhere in that process, the rear wall assembly ended up about 3/4″ wider than the aluminum skin, but only at the bottom. I presume that is on me. Maybe the wall I built is square and shouldn’t be. In any case, it had lead me to a janky solution wherein I have to fill a gap in the skin.

By the time the trim is in place, it’s kinda hidden.

August 24, 2024:

I’m back from Alabama and dealing with COVID 19 that I presume I picked up there. I’ve managed to avoid it for five years, but finally did not dodge it this time. Here’s a tip. Paxlovid gives you diarrhea. Don’t forget to replace your electrolytes while you rehydrate. I very nearly collapsed before it occurred to me that I simply needed Gatorade. Half an hour later, I was golden.

In the front end of the camper, the original configuration had a dinette that would convert to a bed.

We were planning for just a bed in place of the dinette. We experimented with some rollaway beds we used to use for some specialized camping we did a million years ago and one of those fits here.

They have always been pretty compromised sleeping options, however. This matress has inner springs, but it is terrible. The combination that worked best when we used them often was a piece of plywood sized to fit inside the frame’s springs, this mattress, then a four inch foam topper. Even so, we can do better and found this piece of actual furniture that is slightly bigger but still fits in the space.

It needed a little TLC, tightening joints, etc, but it is going to work great.

I continued with insulation and paneling.

We got new paneling from Plywood of Fort Worth. Had we gotten this plywood from the beginning, we would probably have gone for a stained wood finish instead of paint. It’s a pity to cover up this pretty wood with paint.

On or about July 8, there was the first mishap with the EasyUp shade. We rushed home trying to beat a storm to take down the shade and perform other storm preparations. We arrived just as a burst of wind also arrived, which pulled the shade out of our hands, flipping it up and over the camper. The roof vent was open, so the frame of the shade caught on it and bent the vent lid pretty badly. I was able to close it from the inside, but only just.

August 31, 2024:

I got a replacement vent lid and since I was in there anyway, I decided to add a fan to the vent. A 40 thousandths welding filler rod makes a decent wire fish.

Meanwhile, the paneling continues whenever possible. I REALLY wish we were staining this.

There is one occasion when the decision to paint helped hide an otherwise egregious error. This panel was almost but not quite square. After fitting, I pulled it down to cut in the hole for the outlet and managed to get it turned 90 degrees one direction or the other. Luckily, between paint covering the grain and trim covering the gap up top, I got away without having to trash the piece.

September 6, 2024:

The parts for the orginal rear bed are still around.

Under this bed is where the water heater lives. I am not sure if Bob had more in mind for this area or not, but the ledge he built on the wall that appears to be for the bed was not high enough to clear the water heater fittings, especially with the lines attached. I added a fussy cut 1×4 to add both vertical height and strength. Later, I would have to add even a little more.

The front frame for this cabinet/bed was in sad shape, but after I got started on it, I realized that I could salvage most of the actual framework and that the paneling was the worst part. There were about 1.6 million tiny staples holding the paneling on the frame.

Here is the assembly in at least good enough condition to sit on.

While I continue with more construction oriented tasks, Wifey has gotten a great start on painting. In this particular panel, note that a decision was made to use the material I had rather than wait and buy a new piece of plywood. This strip at the bottom will be obscured by the cabinet *and* by paint. Compromise is ok sometimes.

If I recall correctly, these were the last full panels to go in. Yes, those gaps are bigger than I wanted.

September 21, 2024:

By the time the back bed, the front bed and the cabinet were all in place, there was a very tight fit and I had a weird little gap to fill. To accomplish that, I needed to remove a panel’s thickness of frame from the rear bed.

Once that was completed and the top finished out, the bed platform works out pretty well.

The entire bed is in good shape, other than needing a coat of paint.

The portably air conditioner we got works well, other than drawing more power than the outlet in the garage can adequately provide. I’ve been running it on my generator when needed. The long term plan is to build a platform for it to sit on at the back and vent it out the back wall.

September 28, 2024:

I skipped a lot of photo opportunities with the electrical panel, but it is done. This is the original two circuit panel, but I have equiped it with two dual circuit breakers to let me break up the loads into four circuits.

I need to add an outlet in the utility box for the 12V converter. I will probably put it on the refrigerator circuit, which is arguably the lightest single load.

The other side of the utility box has the DC wiring, which is mostly tail lights and marker lights, but importantly, a circuit for the 12V lighting and that one fan I added for the roof vent.

October 6, 2024:

The original camper had cabinets everywhere, but as most of those are either damaged beyond reasonable use or were designed to be used with other cabinets or elements which are no longer there, we have elected to use shelves as storage. The cabinets also likely added to the rigidity of the structure, so the shelves have that in mind as well.

The front shelf went through a couple of design and build iterations until we arrived at a suitable size.

The shelves needed to integrate fairly well with the trim, so they went in and out during the process. In the end, I am pretty happy withe shelves and semi-happy with the trim

October 10, 2024:

While I was working on the shelves, we had a combination of events. I typically tie a couple of the legs of the EasyUp shade to something, but we had been moving stuff around and using those things and the shade ended up not particularly well secured when we had some gusty winds come around.

The thing landed upright with one slightly bent leg. I was able to straighten the leg and we were able to set it back up and use it. For 6 more days.

Finally having all of these pieces in at the same time revealed how little room there was for this bathroom vanity turned utility cabinet in this space.

October 13, 2024:

We knew from the time of purchase that the left drawer of the bed pedestal would be inaccessible, but now that everything is tucked in here, the cabinet is truly an interference fit in that space. You have to lift the cabinet to put the bed in.

We had contemplated it before, but now it was time to either abandon the cabinet or chop it in half. The way it is made, it was not bad to cut it in half, keeping the left side. It was easier than expected, really. The operation took about an hour.

An oddball piece of the aluminum skin that fits in front of the curbside wheelwell and under the door was misplaced for a while. Interestingly enough, the full size cabinet does not fit through the door frame, so to remove it to split it in half, I needed to remove the door frame. While the door was off, I installed the long lost piece of skin and a missing piece of wood needed for it.

There was also the end cap panel of the kitchen cabinet that I could replace while the door frame was out. It had been painted, but the paint was not adhering well. This panel also has an aftermarket switch installed for a 110V porch light. I have never liked that this switch is mounted sideways and crooked at that, so I also replaced that panel and moved the switch box at the same time. I also upgraded it to a dual switch, the ideal being that we could turn on an inside light on the way in the door as well.

However, I did not account for how far into the opening the door frame protrudes. Now I need to remove the door again in order to wire up the switches.

The platfrom/riser for the airconditioner is completed. It’s base is at, say it with me, a 15 degree angle. It also hides and protects some the plumbing.

I added rails to help keep things from rolling off of it and of course, a coat of paint. With colder weather coming soon, we have put a heater in its place for now.

With less pantry space now, every extra bit of storage is helpful. Ikea to the rescue!

Now that we are getting really close to completing the project, Wifey can really crank up the decorating skills This is the front bed; very cozy.

October 16, 2024:

As promised, 6 days later, the wind strikes again. Fate is watching and knows when you have left something unsecured.

This time, the same leg that previously was just bent is now almost completely severed. It is essentially trash now. I am just very happy (and lucky) that it did not damage the CanAm.

October 17, 2024:

We are now just a couple of days from what we hope will be the debut, towing the camper to Love’s Way for a shakedown cruise and overnight camp, then bring it back home to continue working on it. To that end, we have begun working on stuff required for that trip, like tail lights.

These are actually intended for a boat trailer, which means they are intended to bolt to an open frame. Maybe not the best design for me to use here, but I made it work.

Also, I replaced the plastic cover over the old air conditioner cutout with a sheet of aluminum that we had purchased for the purpose a couple of months ago. Weather sealing is via butyl tape.

October 18, 2024:

The tail lights need a connection to the tow vehicle. The wire I picked up at Tractor Supply or Bomgaar’s, I forget which, was cleaverly arranged for wiring a flatbed trailer, with a short white ground wire, then a yellow/brown pair for the left tail/marker lights and a green/brown pair for the right. For my wiring, I extended the white ground to my terminal strip and bonded the two browns together.

FYI, the black/white wires on the left go to the electric brakes, which are not currently in use and the red/brown wires is 12V DC to the 12V lighting and the vent fan inside the trailer. These will be connected to the converter and battery at some point soon. Not today.

I failed to take pictures of a LOT of work involved in getting the plumbing kinda working. There was a slight leak on one of the hot water pipes, easy to fix. Then the temperature pressure relief valve on the water heater itself was the next leak. To test what I could, I bypassed the water heater and got water flowing to the kitchen sink.

The greywater drain seems to be ok, too. There is something amiss with the faucet itself, though. Whenever it is open, water drips under the counter. We have a replacement for it anyway, so it’s not a big concern, just something that we were already going to do later.

Sometimes, little things are very important. This chandelier is one such thing. I added a pullchain switch to it and this was the first interior light completed.

The venthood and kitchen light were the next to complete.

At some point, this light will be connected to one of those two switches next to the door.

The vent hood suffered some rust during the 5 year storage wait. We will be repainting it, but for the debut we decided that sanded spots were much better than rusted spots. We also need to find an appliance size bulb to fit in there. A standard bulb may be too large. At this point, the vent to the outside is still sealed up, but we don’t need the ventilation just yet.

The final interior light is the one over the rear bed. You may also notice all the curtains are now in place. I don’t think I have mentioned those as yet.

There was so much that we had to finish up that I didn’t bother to take pictures of. The bathroom door got remounted, rugs put in, curtains hung, beds made and remade, cabinets secured, wires tied down, skin stapled down, the oversize cotterpins in the wheels replaced and the hubcaps installed, tire pressure adjusted, 5 months of debris cleared from the driveway. A few days earlier, we even put new tires on the truck. In all, we worked until 3AM Saturday morning….

October 19, 2024:

… which made our plan to leave by 11AM difficult to achieve.

We left about 5:30PM.

Other than arriving later than we wanted, everything worked fine and we slept like royalty.

We have a few things to work on, like the cabinet that was originally a bathroom cabinet does not know how to keep it’s drawers shut in an RV. The chandelier lost one of it’s dangly bits, but not until the trip home.

So, there you have it. 160 days of almost daily sculpting, but especially weekends. There have been some days off, even a week here or there. Weather has been remarkably cooperative, rain-wise. Then again, we haven’t really tested for leaks, have we?

The list of things remaining is still a long list, but generally none of the items are what I would call Major Items. Nothing big left to build, but a lot of things left to do regardless.

A Path Blocked

Ok, last path metaphor, I promise.

Plus, while it was extremely maddening while it was happening, it was actually resolved pretty quickly and could have been resolved three different ways. Really, other than its temporary effect, I probably shouldn’t say anything.

Before all that happened, I had been slowly resolving little issues bit by bit.

I have assembled what might be V1.0 of the Activator hardware board. The Trigger hardware board will probably be very similar, if not identical. Really, identical board with different software could be ideal.

I say might because I find that I do not care for these particular green terminal strips. When I ordered them, I was expecting larger units. There is not a good sense of scale here, but these are eyeglasses sized screws. Actually, you can see that the screws are about the same size as the solder pads on the circuit board, which are about 0.075″ in diameter. I have already cross threaded one by opening it too far.

Otherwise, from left the right, the first terminal strip is for the battery negative and positive and the external power switch. The next strip is for the plunger reset warning light and the plunger sensor switch. The three pin header is for the servo that trips the plunger.

Above the connectors, left to right are the 5 volt regulator to run the controller, the 12 volt regulator to run the warning light and possible future things and a dual H-bridge board that currently drives just the warning light.

Finally, above that is the star of the show, a clone of the unbiquitous Wemos D1 Mini Pro, so called Pro because it has an external antenna connector, which will be handy since this board will be inside a steel box.

I had two power mishaps with this board. Really, it was one power mishap that caused two problems.

When I was researching what equipment to shoehorn into this system to implement wireless, I had some realizations that could be visualized like rungs on a ladder. First, I knew that my controller board was necessarily going to have to take up some space and my Activator device is pretty crowded inside already.

One step up on the ladder.

The industrial relay that protects the lock motor, while a very robust device, is at it’s heart a very simple device that takes to continuous power from outside and limits it to a short half second or so pulse to the lock motor. I will be providing that lock motor power locally now, through my controller board, which is smart and can do the time limit function. The industrial relay is also pretty big, so removing it might be enough for both my controller and the battery.

Next step up on the ladder.

The lock motor runs on 12 volts. I did some measurments and found that during it’s brief moment of activation, it pulls about 4 amps. If I limit it to less than about 3 amps, it doesn’t pull hard enough to reliably trip the plunger. That is not a terrible amount of current, but as I look around for commerical off the shelf 12V 4A lithium batteries with easy connections and easy charging solutions, they all tend to be kinda big. Way bigger than the space vacated by the timer relay, leaving no space for the controller board. Batteries of other chemistries are even bigger and don’t work as well, so I didn’t even look.

DC to DC boost converters are thing these days. Actually, I have had a really successful history with multivoltage DC to DC converters back in my robotics days. Unfortunately, those blogs were lost ages ago. Anyway, I shop for converters and in a field absolutely flooded with converters for 12 volts INPUT, the few that I could find with 12V output tended to be physically large multivoltage output units for 48V+ input or if they are boost converters that work at smaller inputs, they are never more than 1A out. There are a few exceptions in the $50 range and I really want to avoid those if I can.

I did play with the *voltage* on the car lock and found that, so long as it had plenty of current available, it would reliably work all the way down to just under 6 volts. 7.4 volt LiPO batteries are common and RC car batteries have commonly available connectors and chargers. I found some reasonably high Ah rated batteries and a nice charger that wasn’t stupid expensive and got them on the way, along with some appropriate connectors.

Next step up on the ladder.

Next, I knew I needed to power the controller. I have a couple of options. I can power it from the USB jack with a converter connected to the battery, but it seems more elegant and controllable to supply 5 volts to it externally. I have batteries coming and I did find some nice 5V 1A DC-DC converters in my earlier shopping, so I found them again and ordered a handful. They came in a package of 10, very inexpensive.

Next step up on the ladder.

Big epiphany, with the controller board, I can directly operate a servo! This eliminates the need to ‘protect’ the lock motor and a servo is significantly smaller than the lock motor. I can power it directly from the board or even directly from the battery if the 5V 1A supply is not enough. That will also ensure I have more room for my RC car battery.

Next step up on the ladder.

I had tested the nice big warning light that I want to put on the Activator to remind people to reset it. At the time I chose this one, everything was running on 12 volts, so it made sense to get 12 volt lights. I got a variety of colors. I particularly expect to use red for the Activator light and red, yellow and green on the Control Box. Experimentally, I connected a red light to 7.4 volts from my bench power supply. It lights up, but not very brightly. It will almost certainly be hard to see outside even at full brightness. I need 12 volts for at least the light. Luckily, the same DC-DC converters I ordered above are actually adjustable for 5, 8, 9 or 12 volts output, so other than having to add it to the board, problem solved.

Next step up on the ladder.

This week, I had some time to tinker and got the board built and populated. I don’t think I connected power to it before verifying the power, but more on that in a minute. With the controller board out, I connected one of my batteries and found that the 5V board was outputting 7.9 volts. The 12V board was good, but 7.9V is not 5V.

The default tiny zero ohm resistor jumper settings on the boards is for 12V, so for the 5 volt board, I just removed both of them. I looked carefully to ensure there was not a solder bridge. I alternately shorted them to ensure they they indeed changed the voltage. Only with both shorted did they provide the proper 12V output. All three other settings were higher than they were supposed to be.

While I was looking up this chart to verify that I did indeed have the jumpers correct, I noticed the error of my ways. This little board is designed for 3.7 volt input.

At some point I briefly looked at 3.7 volt batteries and I’m sure these converter boards ended up in my search history at that point. Later when I just wanted converter boards, I remembered them but I was too high up the ladder to see the the voltage 🙂

As luck would have it, 3.7 volts works fine for me, other than the expense of having purchased some 7.4 volt batteries that I don’t technically need, at least not for this part of the project. My charger will work for them, too.

However, I might choose better DC-DC boards.

I mentioned that these are inexpensive boards. $10 for a 10 pack. The voltage selection chart silkscreen on the actual board is completely illegible. All four setting for A & B look identically blotchy. And for what it’s worth, the output power pins are spaced 0.4″ apart, but the input power pins look at a glance like they are 0.2″ apart, but they are not. They fall somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3″. The output seems to be good for about 6 watts. The specs are somewhat iffy, but hints that higher voltages are probably at less than the 1A specified for 5V. The examples they give all work out to slightly more than 5 watts. This is fine for my needs. I don’t expect to need more than 150mA for 12V.

Until I put Activator board together, I’d been running this controller on either a laptop USB or a USB power pack. Now that I had it put on the board and running on my bench supply standing in for the 3.7 volt batteries that were enroute, it was nice to leave it on the kitchen table where it was close enough to hear the servo cycle, but but off my desk which was cluttered enough with the Trigger and ControlBox modules so that I could hit the buttons on them and observe the display on the ControlBox. For some reason, I had to interact with the Activator. I don’t remember why. While I was near it, I smelled that classic ‘something is hot’ smell. Since I had thrown over voltages at it earler, I finger probed and discovered that the inductor on the 5V board was pretty hot to the touch. I immediately shut off the power supply. I pulled to control board off, turned on the power supply and noted that the voltage was indeed 5 volts, so that’s good.

I presumed that the little 1A supply was having trouble keeping the controller and the servo both supplied, so I rewired the servo to run directly off the battery. That is a little below spec for it; it is rated for 4.8 to 8.4 volts, but in testing, it worked fine and still pulls plenty strong. I do not expect it to be a limitation for the Activator sear. Of course for the testing, the controller was plugged back in and in just a little bit, I smelled ‘hot’ again. I probed the power boards again and while it was not as hot, the 5 volt board was definitely getting warm. I probed around on the controller and ZOWIE a chip on the board was hot enough to immediately cause pain. I removed power again and pulled the board out. It turns out to be the USB serial chip. Once it cooled off, I plugged it into a USB cable on my laptop and it got seriously hot in a couple of seconds, so it definitely has a problem.

As mentioned earlier, I don’t think I connected the 7.4 volt battery to the system with the controller in place, thus applying basically 8 volts to its 5 volt input, but I can’t authoritatively say never. Plus, after working for weeks under various conditions, it acted up the day it was running on the new carrier board. The CPU seemed to be working, by the way. The USB chip was smokin’ hot, but even before I discovered it was baking, the device was responding to ESP-NOW messages and operating the servo. I’m just not sure it would have lasted much longer.

Happily, I have one not in current use, so I could swap it out. It is a slight pain to update the MAC addresses in the software to use the new device, but at least this one doesn’t sterilize the air around it. As these are my favorite boards for this application, small cheap boards with the external antenna connector and not a lot of unecessary IO, I may need to order a few more of them. I do have some 40 pin ESP32s with external antenna connectors, so I’m not without a way forward if needed.

In other hardware news, I have been using a slick device with a built in screen for the ControlBox unit. I don’t know if this will be the final controller for the ControlBox, but it has it’s advantages.

It is an M5Stack Core. I originally got this for ESPHome use and HomeAssistant, only to find that it was not yet supported there. I have not rechecked lately. Anyway, it is an ESP32 in a nice case with a few built in goodies, most importantly for this, a 320×240 TFT display and three front mounted buttons. It also has a speaker, a TFCard slot and, while I’m not sure how long it can run on this, it has a 110mAh battery built in. I am thinking about building a little program to send a message to another module once a minute, with the other module logging the time and see how long it lives.

For use as a real ControlBox controller, it has one drawback. There is not a really strong way to secure external connections to it. It has a row of exposed pins on one side and exposed pin jacks on three sides. The pins are not ideal ones for reuse for my purposes and the pin jacks would be even more difficult to really secure the connectors to for a device that might get tripped over or dropped and has to travel on gravel roads in someone’s trunk or pickup bed. In the long run, I may need to use some descreet components for these setup.

But for now, it seems a good way to start, with a caveat.

This was before I had it doing anything with text fields. I was sending stuff I would normally dump to Serial0 to the TFT instead.

I have found that, like many of these small hardware displays, or at least the libraries written for them, you often can’t just throw text at it and have it behave the way you would like it to, like scroll like a classic screen. On the screen as shown above, I can send one more line to it, then any subsequent lines will just continue to clobber that bottom line, text written on top of existing text.

Visuino supports text fields. The field is located anywhere on the screen by x-y pixel coordinates then prints text you provide with the font, size and color attributes your provide. But so far as I can find, there is no clear command. Subsequent text clobbers what’s already there. Argh.

I had been working on this issue reiteratively in what spare time I have for a few days now. I have a nice title bar and I intend to determine and display the status of the two (currently) available remote devices and provide a 3-4 line messages window of scrolling messages about whats going on, trigger received, trigger sent, test sent, device needs reset, etc. I have a label over one of buttons at the bottom of the screen and if you push that button, it sends a test trigger to the activator. All of these things work, until you put enough text somewhere to clobber what’s already there.

The only way I have found to clear the screen is to literally clear the entire screen, write it black, then rewrite all this stuff back to it. That seems completely ridiculous and it puts it on me to maintain a screen map somewhere. That’s not what I want to do. I want to make my hardware do stuff and print stuff on the screen to tell my users what my hardware is doing for them. The IDE should know how to make the *display* do stuff.

Sparse documentation is a recurring theme here. For example, these are two very similarly named components:

If you get context sensitive help for Delay, you get a Wiki page with thin but not entirely useless descriptions of the settings for the component and what the Start, Out and Reset pins do, as well as links to some example projects that happen use it.

Maybe Delay doesn’t do exactly what you are looking for. Logically, it seems like Timeout might do a similar kind of thing but attempt to get context sensitive help for Timeout and you just get:

It offers that you can search for it in other places, but so far, that has universally not helped on anything I have searched for. I suppose it could happen. Maybe I haven’t looked for the right thing yet.

Which brings me indirectly to my brief but severe irritation last night.

Regardless of this irritation with the documentation, I like the product. I was able to reach a working point with my devices very quickly. As always seems to be the case, a lot more time goes into the user interface than to the actual device (especially if you can’t figure out how it works). Anyway, I had been running on a 15 day trial version of Visuino Pro and there were two days left. I saw no reason to not proceed with the purchase. I looked at the version matrix and while I had been running the Pro on trial, I didn’t see anything in the Pro column that I was actually using, so I elected for the Standard version with a 1 year subscription for updates. The purchase, install and registration went through without a hitch. It automatically opened after installation and I pulled up the ControlBox project and played with it a bit. After a little while, I needed to open a second instance to make a companion change to the Trigger project. When did that, I noticed/remembered that I still had Visuino Pro installed and, fatally, decided to pull up control panel and remove it.

Long story short, had I removed Pro before installing the Standard version or reinstalled Standard after removing Pro, things would have been ok, but the removal of Pro removed all the components from the Visuino library folders. There was some minimal number of components that I guess are built in to the binaries and support for only the Arduino Uno R3, but my projects now spawned a huge list of errors, most of which were missing components and many of those were specific to my missing board. Once I had seethed down to being able to write without being overly abusive, I dashed off a note to Visuino support. I don’t remember exactly the details, but in short I wondered why the uninstall script would remove user files like all my components.

Interestingly, all of this was loaded on my work laptop, which heavily uses Microsoft OneDrive. Not long after my note to support was sent, OneDrive serendipitously popped up a dialog asking if I wanted to permanently delete the several thousand files I had deleted recently. I dove into that dialog and found that I could restore the folders that the Visuino uninstall script had deleted. I ran Visuino and everything was happy as it could be. I was was exhausted and shut everything down and went to bed!

By morning, I had a reply from Visuino support, patiently telling me that a reinstall would most likely fix it and that my own projects were safely stored elsewhere. I am certain that is true and I will probably do that because in restoring those folders, I am sure I now have some Visuino Pro components that I have technically not paid for. Then again, the program and/or license may be smart enough to prevent them from working. Shrug. As I noted when I looked through to version matrix, I wasn’t using any Pro components, which consisted mainly of FFTs and other such advanced data processing components. Interesting, but not applicable to anything I am likely to need for yanking on chains by novel means.

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