richfiles

Went in a slightly different direction today... This was my first real day off in nearly 2 months... Got my work done, got my sleep in, and yesterday morning, I actually woke up early. I still question why they didn't just make the digit the full height of the module, and stuff that tiny little chip inside the bottom half of the "8" instead of having it sit below... Anyway, I wanted to test the HDSP-960 smart LED displays that I had bought all the way back in May. First off, I wanted to verify they all actually worked, which they did! I also really wanted to give the seller positive feedback before the response window closed. These are some pretty specialized and uncommon parts, generally only seen in very high end gear, or in military or aerospace applications. I wanted to test before giving feedback, but if good, I absolutely wanted to give the best feedback for making these available. The cost of these parts was rather high... About $10 a digit. That really adds up when you have an 8 digit display, but the visual of the HDSP-960's 4x7 element matrix just looks too good for the role of a singular readout. I absolutely love the retro look and feel of the display. Pretty much all modern dot matrix LED displays use a 5x7 matrix. Part of the delay in testing stems from the fact that, while I have breadboards, over the years, my wire supply got used up. I ended up ordering an 840 pack of precut and formed breadboarding wires. They worked quite nicely, although I'm starting to realize this old breadboard (I got it as teen, back in the 1990s) is showing it's age... Many holes contacts are warped and bent, and it's often very difficult to insert parts or wires. Might be time to put ol' faithful up on a shelf and buy a nice new reliable breadboard. Easier to reminisce about old memories, than try to insert some new old stock memories into those pesky holes! Anyway, I did eventually get a test circuit wired up, and I was able to cycle through all the binary inputs... At first, I thought I had things wired wrong... I was fine... I had just misread the datasheet, and it turns out the binary inputs are active high, but the decimal point is active low... Go figure. I had the binary wired so a switch turned on would output a 0, which is why when it displays all 0s, the relevant switches are all on. All binary lines high is a blank state, which explains the lack of digit displayed. I also could not get the latch data line to work... Normally, you set the data on the binary input, then pulse the latch data line, and it updates the display to reflect and hold the new data. Once I got it to finally light up, it would update the display as soon as I changed data, and not when I pulsed the latch data input. That one was entirely my fault... I was initially powering this with a 5 volt, 400mA power supply... NOPE! These are toasty little power gobblers. It's easy to forget that these are NOS... New Old Stock... These particular ones were made in 1992. It IS a vintage display, after all. These were first manufactured in 1972! I find these displays to be nice and bright, and very readable. I guess, to get an LED to be that bright back then, you had to use a bit more current than we do with modern LEDs. Turns out, I had to switch to my bigger bench power supply. These suckers draw a combined 1.16 AMPS when displaying the "all pixels on" test character! That's 201mA per digit! When displaying a more normal "all eights", the current draw is a combined 824mA, or 103mA per digit. Obviously, some of the heat is being generated by losses in the on chip LED drivers... I notice with all pixels on, the current per pixel calculates to 9.57mA, while with only 15 pixels on (the number required to display an eight with a decimal point), the current draw calculates to only 6.86mA per pixel. This tells me that between 15 and 21 LED pixels, there are an additional 2.71mA of losses, per pixel. Don't know what vintage tech those "smart" driver chips are using, but that's an extra 57-58mA being burned by the chip, just between having 21 vs 15 pixels lit. Fun fact! This is not a video! It is a sequence of still photos, taken by carefully holding the phone in the same place, taking a shot, and then setting the DIP switches for the next shot, all strung together as a GIF, specifically pronounced the correct way. Actually, digging even deeper, with my DMM, it seems that the LED pixels might not be drawing nearly that much power... The chip on the other hand... WOW! 378mA is drawn from all 8 digits, even when not a single LED pixel is lit! That's 47-48mA quiescent current, per digit! Turning the decimal on draws an attentional 55-60mA, about 7.5mA per digit, regardless of what character is displayed, even if no other character is displayed. The negative dash symbol (b1011 / d13 / hD) is the lowest pixel count, non single pixel character (4 LED elements), and it draws a combined 544mA, or 68mA per digit. Displaying a 1, which lights 7 LED elements results in 667mA combined, or about 83-84mA per digit. It's abundantly clear that the driver chip is burning a lot of the extra energy. These modules are made from glass and ceramic, and actually get pretty hot to the touch. They got up to 157°F / 69°C after letting them run few minutes. Nice and toasty... Since the bottom half of each module is ceramic, what I may end up doing, is to use an aluminum block behind them as a heatsink, and add a bit of thermal paste, to help draw out that heat, through the block, and into the aluminum front panel. I can have header sockets above and below the aluminum block, and can wire and secure those as required. I only need 5V+ and Ground, 4 binary data lines, a decimal line, and 8 latch lines, one for each digit. I can likely just hand wire the header sockets and then epoxy them onto the sides of the aluminum block. All I gotta do then is apply thermal paste to the block, and plug in the displays. I want to find a bar magnifier lens to give some extra height to the digits, and that can rest directly on top of the displays. I can easily find clear ones, and I can slip a green gel sheet between the displays and the magnifier, to provide them with green filtering. So long as my bezel ends up fitting perfectly, it should apply just the right holding force against that lens and the displays, so they can never loosen or free themselves from the aluminum block. That ought to help keep them nice and cool, and the bar lens will give it that nostalgic 1970s LED display look! LEFT: Remember bubble LEDs... I certainly do... I could try to find a bubble lens for my displays, but getting a bubble lens sized and spaced just right for the HDSP-0960s would be near impossible! RIGHT: The alternative, is me feeling that cylindrical bar lens vibe for this project... I feel this vibe, because It's actually not unobtainium!

Well, I got all my phone parts, and I put everything together, and now my phone looks like it's brand new!!! Too bad the speakerphone doesn't work right, and the OLED panel I was sent is defective (bottom 3/4 has issues with bright flickering, and a horizontal dark line intermittently appears at the border of the flickering area. I can't win... Now I gotta take the phone apart, RE-install the broken OLED, and send the dumb defective OLED back. Seller is being really dismissive too, trying to claim that if it didn't happen day one, then obviously nothing was wrong and I must have done something... Ain't happening. I initiated a return with ebay. Seller's just gonna have to deal with it... Don't send me polished trash if you don't want returns! I sent all the photos of the lines and flickering and what not to ebay and the seller both... I don't even want a replacement... I'll spend an extra $10 and find someone with a better rating. Ugh... of course, now I gotta FIND my old screen. I kept it... somewhere...

Honestly, I lack any faith in KSP 2. I hope I will be pleasantly surprised, but they haven't even seemingly bothered to even guarantee whether it will even run on Mac or Linux machines... Two years in, and we still don't even know that... Yeah, no faith... We have no idea what Take Two's influence will be on the game... I want it to be great! I really do, and I certainly hope the game beats all my low expectations, but given the history of it's development, the pulled rug, T2's notoriety... I'm keeping my expectations SUPER low... Again, will be happy to be surprised, but not surprised if disappointed... That having been said, I have every major version and most intermediate bug releases and betas between 0.25 and current, along with some of the really old versions, from the before Steam days, all backed up onto my computer. I only wish the 0.90 memory leak had been patched before they switched over to 1.0.x... 0.90 could have almost been my favorite version. Sadly, 1.0.something broke flexible docking ports, and I don't think that ever got fixed. I'd started building mega-rovers by constructing rocker bogey suspensions out of structural girders and docking ports. The flexibility was incredible! This was also the time I started collecting parts for an instrument panel... Feature creep and a desire to create the absolute best instrument panel I could led to a 5 year project that has been worked on, on and off, between work and shipping times for parts... I still have a long way to go, and in all reality, development of KSP 1.x will now officially end before my project is even finished... But I know KSP 1.12 will be waiting for me, along with OPM and MechJeb, Tweakscale and GPOSpeedFuelPump, among countless other mods... and of course, the all important KSPSerialIO mod, to let my instrument panel communicate with the game. KSP 1.x is dead... Long live KSP 1.x

Well... I started looking into re-glassing OLED panels. My phone's screen is cracked, but the OLED was fine. The process is finicky, but it figured I could do it with the tools I had, and I had my older cracked screen as a fallback. I ended up ordering an $8 replacement glass, which ought to arrive any day now... Unfortunately, my OLED panel had an exposed corner that apparently got damaged. Now I have a blindingly bright vertical line of pixels stuck on... Great... So much for the cheap fix. Instantly went from $8 to $120... Joy...

Some minor thoughts on mounting the scales and the top diffuser plate... Turns out the diffuser plate is just thick enough that with the scale sheet in place, the pointer just skims on the surface... This could be an issue, but I have a few options though... A: I cut the center out of the plate so it slips around the meter movement assembly. I then print the scale sheet, and cut out a square shape, and put holes where the four cover plate screws go. I cut a second sheet of diffuser plastic with a hole like the diffuser plate, to fit around the meter movement assembly. It too would be cut to match the square shape and the holes that line up with the cover plate mounting screws. I would sandwich the rigid diffuser plate between the lower diffuser sheet and the scale sheet, and the scale sheet would then screw to the two front mounts of the meter movement. The two sheets secured tightly from the four corner screw posts should tightly sandwich the rigid diffuser plate between, and screwing the scale down to the meter movement assembly makes sure it is tight at the center too, and flush with he top of the assembly. B: The second method will likely still have me mount the scale sheet in the same manner, but would skip an extra diffuser layer sandwiching the diffuser plate. Instead, I would make a new diffuser plate altogether, this time mounting it to my mill (lathe would be better, but mine is not set up, and I can cheat with the mill). What I would do is mill out half the thickness of the diffuser plate, just at the center where it mounts over the meter movement assembly. By halving the thickness there, I make enough clearance for the plate to mount solidly and securely to the meter movement, without it being thick enough to interfere with the pointer's movement. Option A is the easier method, but it puts 4 diffuser layers between the LEDs and the viewer's eye. Not sure if I want that much light reduction. Each layer softens hotspots and spreads the light, but also dims it by a little bit too. Option B takes more work, and is slightly inconvenient because my lathe isn't currently set up, and my mill needs the space around it cleaned up a bit, plus it requires me to do some wonky tool mounting to do properly. As for the diffuser plate itself, I got *plenty* of material, so I can even afford to botch a few till I get it perfect. That's no big deal. All the diffuser sheets and plates are salvaged from my Grandmother's old TV... Sadly, it was being stored in a trailer parked beside my father's barn, and a sheet of snow "avalanched" off the roof last winter. The impact of all that snow against the trailer knocked the TV over and shattered the LCD. Unfortunate too, as it was a really nice TV. At least I'm reusing it's parts for a good purpose. I'll likely use more of the diffuser plate as the backing for the horizontal control surface as well. It'll make something nice and solid to support the illuminated legends for the various controls. That's something I'll get to when I finish the instruments and begin that stage of construction.

Sometimes just thinking about something is enough reason to pick it up. Truth be told, I can't remember the last time I've been this busy with work, but sometimes you just need to take a day. I have time to finish before the deadline, and know I will meet it, so I took a few hours to work on this. First step was to drill some holes to mount the LEDs into. Very conveniently, the meter movement mounts to a fiberglass board, which also serves as a perfect base for the backlight. I put sockets where the Contact Light and Rate Warn LEDs go. I need those to rise up off the board, so I can adjust their desired height by soldering some leads to them and trimming them to the appropriate length. The rest of the backlight LEDs are all soldered in point to point. I marked off locations where screws go, so I would remember to keep those spots clear. The Backlight LEDs all light up nicely! And here's with the meter movement assembly mounted. Note that I did end up trimming the frame a bit, so that I could accommodate larger text in that location. The Contact Light LED and Rate Warn LED are socketed. I am definitely going with this particular blue LED. It's such a soft, mellow blue, not like the harsh, shrill, eyeball stabbing blue LEDs that are so typical. I have no idea what makes this blue special, but I love it, and I'm sticking with it. I may try to find a larger diameter red LED to match it, since one is a 10mm and the other an 8mm LED. Seriously though... That blue is so beautiful! I love it! I have not reached the point yet, but there will be a tube (likely just black heat shrink) around the red and blue LEDs. This will prevent light spill from the backlighting, or spoiling the colors. Another option I could take, since I am satisfied with the size, color and brightness of the red LED, is to simply think heat shrink tubing slightly past the curvature of the blue LED, and make the opening beveled, so only 8mm of the blue LED is seen... Yeah, I think that makes the most sense. It's simple, and entirely doable with zero effort, and I like zero effort! Okay, I lied... I didn't mount the meter before, I was just test fitting it. I attached the LED wiring to the rear plate first. I had to drill out extra holes to accommodate the additional lighting circuits. Initially, it only had a pair of incandescent lamps that illuminated the front of a metal plate. This was just two terminals. Now I have backlighting, Rate Warn, and Contact Light, along with a ground for all three. I used some scraps of the copper board I used in making the light shields for my edgewise meters, and made terminals, because I could not find my terminals. As soon as it was fully assembled, I found my terminals. Oh well. Here, the meter movement assembly is properly mounted and is now wired in to the rear plate. The black electrical tape holding the red wire down is only temporary, I glued the red wire down, since it wanted to stick up. Here, we can see the assembled internals, as well as the top diffuser plate. I still need to drill the LED house for the Contact Light and Rate Warn LEDs. I will fill in my errors with some plastic cement, and hope that they disappear, more or less, and that it reinforces the part... I really don't want to cut out another one... I still need to mount an intermediary diffuser between he LEDs and the diffuser plate. Unfortunately, the LEDs don't have much distance for their light to spread evenly, so I went with extra LEDs and will add more diffuser layers. One aspect I had considered, was fanning the light out at an angle, so there is artificially more spread to the projected beam. When that hits the diffuser, it'll already be slightly wider, and be less of a hotspot. Early tests show this should work quite well. I almost don't want to post this final image, just cause it looks so bad, at least in comparison to what the final product will look like, but this is where I ended: Part of the reason this looks so very bad, is because this is just a paper label, and the intermediate diffusers are not installed. There's a ton of light spill from the edges, hotspots, and it's overall WAY too bright, due to it being missing the extra diffusers. There is also no cover plate for the meter's center, and the Indicator LEDs are not installed. Yet to come, installing the intermediary diffusers, drilling the indicator LED holes in the main diffuser plate and installing those LEDs, printing the GOOD looking scale on the Nekoosa Synapse XM synthetic polyester based paper, and figuring out how I am securing the scale to the meter. That last bit is entirely up in the air. I've considered gluing it to the diffuser plate. I've also considered leaving "tabs" around the perimeter, and drilling a bunch of holes on the edge of the fiberglass plate, and strapping it down like a drum membrane using nylon floss. Haven't decided yet. Glue is easy, but I don't know if it'll hold forever. That Nekoosa synthetic paper is definitely strong enough to be held taught by tabs... It's literally how I did the previous batch of meters. I stretched out tabs till they were tight and screwed down on 'em. Anyway, that'll have to wait. I'm at a nice, satisfying point right now. I can see the light (ahem) at the end of the tunnel, and I am brainstorming how I'll do the last few bits of work on this step of the project. In the meantime, I do need to get back to work on work. I'm probably gonna be hitting that hard till at least the start of July. This, however, is some hope that I'll have breaks during that span to work on this!

I ain't dead, just got a lot of work, plus some side work. It's all been stacked up, and that meter still is staring me in the face! One of these days, I'll stare back hard enough that it's own face changes!

That's a fair argument. I understand it, in the sense that I know people who went to college for drafting and design. I can certainly see how it more or less takes a proper education and years of practice and experience to learn professional software like that, to the degree of capability you're describing. I think that a lot of open source applications probably try to imitate this capacity, while likely failing to perfectly emulate what AutoDesk has managed to refine over nearly 4 decades. The software I've tried using, so far, has been unintuitive and cumbersome. I suspect that it's trying too hard to be AutoCAD, without any of the refinement that makes real AutoCAD... The result is my suffering. A *lot* of my personal hate for AutoDesk, as a company, stems from their business practices. They have a history of buying out low level competition (products like Eagle, that were once a staple of hobbyist and small scale creators), and then taking these affordable, free with limits-to-fixed cost one time purchase products and transforming them into subscription licenses. Even if they keep the costs low, you can never buy a version sufficient for your needs and just stick with it... You must always pay the piper and follow along, whether you want to or not. Given their level of support, I understand why companies like Adobe and AutoDesk distribute their professional tools under a subscription model... It's not just the software companies are subscribing to... The problem is, AutoDesk has clearly targeted the hobbyist and the small time creators and makers of the world. They've produced software like Fusion 360, and bought out Eagle, and they even still provide aspects of these tools for free... But they still trap you into this subscription license model. It's not free... it's a 1 year subscription, for free. There is never a guarantee behind the product's continued accessibility, past the upcoming year. No matter how likely AutoDesk will be to continue the product under the free model, you are forever at the mercy of their whims, if you choose to follow their path. Oh, they decide the free subscription license version cuts too deeply into a paid version... You now have X less space to work with in said dimension. Need more space, upgrade to a paid subscription. forever. I don't want to be at the mercy of some big corporation, just to do my hobby. The cost of falling outside of the bounds of their free subscription is not worth it, and the mental cost of hoping next year they'll still do the free version and it'll not get nerfed, is simply not worth it to me. Taking away the ability for a person to buy a piece of software and just use it for as long as they are comfortable with is disgusting, to me. Subscription models have left a bad taste in my mouth. While I fully understand their value for large corporations that need the software and the support behind it, taking away even the option to have long term license options for small time individuals, and even to indoctrinate small time users into the sub model, even for the free stuff, just feels gross and shady. That's where my feelings stem from. As for my needs, I just wanna find some basic, simple tool that lets me preferably put objects together graphically, either by additive or subtractive shapes. I could figure out the line by line, point by point thing, if I could figure out relative object relationships, but I've yet to figure out how to do that in FreeCAD. Tells me I have a kajillion redundant things, yet I can't figure out how to make line A originate at line B's end point. Ugh... I almost feel like I could actually do better with some command line thing, but then, like you said, I'd need to know that "language". If I could just click a point, and then tel it to do a line, and give relative coordinates from that origin point, or click a point on a line, and tell it to add a new point to the existing line X units from the point clicked. I know these things have to be possible... I just can't intuit how to actually perform these tasks, and it's driving me crazy. I also think FreeCAD is a bit buggy (I'm stuck on an older version, cause of my Hackintosh being so out of date), so it's bugs I just need to work around, I guess. Even if I wanted to suck up my pride and use something like Fusion 360, it wouldn't run on my system anyway. My Mac OS install is grossly out of date, and it being a Hackintosh, is a very tedious process to upgrade. Fusion 360, because it is limited to that yearly free subscription, won't just keep running as an older version. It'll cease to run until the license and software are both updated, meaning it's 100% impossible for me to even run it. Another strike against subscription software, and another reason I loathe it! Why should I have any need to have a project computer even need to be online, and always at the whims of updates to potentially break a process... It's just added risks and security vulnerabilities.

I imagine, I could have made a little cash if I'd have gotten into crypto years ago, but I choose to donate my spare CPU cycles to Stanford's Folding@Home. My computer keeps me warm in winter, when I run it the hardest, and I give a little something back to medical research. The fact that for two years in a row, I've not turned on my central heat, I think offsets a portion of the extra energy used... since it's actually being used for a functional purpose. Of course, that's countered in summer, unfortunately.

Why does CAD feel so unintuitively obtuse? Why do I feel my soul die a little inside when I just want to make a simple shape, and have this thing connect to that thing, and not have to go through a billion steps to define what feels like it should be the same constraint for multiple objects. How do people DO this and not just snap!

Just one? A mere single day like that!?

Had to download FreeCAD 0.17, due to my out of date OS. Mac OS 10.10 barely managed to successfully install on my Hackintosh setup, and I've got so many older apps that will never see updates due to the companies that created them going the way of the dodo, that I kinda need to completely start from scratch when I build my next rig, cause a LOT of older stuff will break on newer Mac OS versions. Obviously, with PC part availability being how it currently is, building a new PC right now is not necessarily cheap, nor easy, and with Apple switching to Arm, even Hackintoshing may be out the window in the next couple years. For now, I just wanna get a modern Hackintosh OS setup going, even if it's running on some older hardware. I do have a 4770k and motherboard I can use to build a second one with... I'm still going nuts trying to figure any of this all out though... For the time being, yeah, I think I'll give that older revision of FreeCAD a try. Honestly... Once the world finds new chips once again, I wanna just build a top tier PC for my workshop. Someday™ As for Fusion 360, I avoided it because I don't wanna give AutoDesk the time of day, much less register an account, just to download a free application. I don't really trust them to not someday completely change their monetization strategies (look at what happened when they bought Eagle), so I will forever distrust and ignore them. As a hobbyist, they are simply not worth my time.

I just got an Anycubic Photon Mono SE. It looks like a pretty cool 3D printer. Now if only I could make heads or tails of ANY piece of 3D modeling software! I'm giving Blender a shot, since it's open source, but honestly, it feels like overkill. There are so many features that are just not needed for a static 3D model, and it's hard to see through the clutter to the basic tools I need. I've yet to figure out how to even manipulate the starter cube, much less generate new shapes! Good Lord, I am so lost! I don't know if there's a more suited tool for creating 3D models on Mac, but I'm bound to eventually learn... I hope!

Apollo did have a number of round meters, and had a relatively unified style for them. Most of my meters are edgewise meters, reporting on resources or temp, but there is one meter that stands apart. The Vertical Velocity Meter in KSP stands out as an ideal use for a round style meter, and I was able to snag a very nice meter a while back. The Vertical Velocity Meter is the round one, as follows: Anyway, i removed the meter's scale plate and scanned it at 600dpi, the same setting that my printer prints at, so i would have a 1:1 ratio image to work with. I took measurements, made modifications, and slowly but surely drew a usable meter over the old scale, and made sure to mimic the Apollo meters as best as possible. Then I realized my multiple mistakes and started almost completely over. D'oh! One thing I had considered was cutting a small segment out of the metal piece that supports the scale plate. It would permit the backlight to shine closer to the center, and allow me to increase the size of "Vertical Velocity", but with adjusting the spacing between letters, and pushing it outward a bit, I think I've got it. My current scale revision is shown below. I think I have everything figured out, as far as backlighting goes. The entire internal structure is mounted on a sheet of blank FR4 PC board material, so what I'll do is just drill a few holes in it, mount LEDs and resistors, and design it to shine onto the back of the scale. For the logarithmic scale, I used an old slide rule, measured out the ticks with a regular ruler, and then converted the ratio to something that looked good on screen. It's not perfect, but it's close enough to actually convey the shift in orders of magnitude. I really had to tweak with the text size and space between characters to make some of it fit. Originally, both LEDs were gonna light together as a warning light to indicate decent was too fast for landing, but adding another terminal to the rear and cutting a wire trace would permit the two to light independently. I considered duplicating the Contact Light that will be on my DSKY here as well... Honestly, I just had a blue 8-10mm LED sitting around (I forget the exact size, but it matches the RED), and on the Lunar lander, the Contact Light lit up blue. It was the only instrument that lit up in that color, and was pretty prominent. I kinda wanna mimic it. As a side note... back to that first image... This is the first time I looked at these particular photos up close. I had seen toggle switches that seemed to have some weird reflective anomaly, but I I never realized it was because the tab levers were clear plastic. I've always seen the metal toggles, and assumed the shimmering ones were maybe wear polished... Nope! Just another thing I've learned about the Apollo program. I suppose all those toggles on the Lunar Module are plastic for the weight savings. I haven't dug through enough pics to determine if every LM used these, or only later ones.

And with this, all five of my analog edgewise meters have been completed!

The five edgewise analog meters are ALL completed! I discovered I don't have enough cosmetic trim pieces to cover the calibration screws, but I can probably just order a few from the manufacturer. Worst case, I make a trim piece that covers all four of the vertically oriented meters. The Atmosphere meter has molded trim, so It can't be missing! Total current draw of all 5 meters at max brightness is around 670mA. Internally, there are 52 individual LEDs, and 25 rectangular LEDs, with a combined 66 individual LEDs across all the 25 modules (each module has either 2 or 4 LEDs, with their own individual connections. Means I soldered 118 individual LEDs and just as many resistors, between all 5 meters. I'd rather have more evenly spread light, with each LED being a little more dimly lit, than to have only a couple LEDs, but with hotspots. Each LED only average 5.6mA. And here's a shot with my workbench light off. The color bars really pop! Honestly, I did the temp the way I did it, just to break up the monotony of the other meters. I've said it before, but the same is true of the atmospheric density meter. I chose to use SI unit prefixes for units of one Atmosphere at Sea Level (ASL), rather than doing a percentage That was purely to break up the monotony of 0-100% ranges. Not actually a lot to post here... You've all already seen what goes into making them, with the first build posts. This is just the conclusion to a very long and drawn out portion of the build, and I am SO GLAD to have finally finished this stage! Next step is to start cutting openings into the front panel for the different instruments. I'll finally be able to get a good idea of how much room I'll really have for the Δv meter.

My favorite solution is finding the correct part before I have to resort to cutting another one... Advice I wish I could have followed. As for my past few weeks... My car is acting up. It is intermittently misfiring, suddenly going from 4 to 2 cylinders, and then randomly returning to normal. I wanted to discount other ECU based errors, and be certain it was purely an ignition system problem, and not bad sensors or some otehr system, so I ordered an $8 bluetooth OBD2 diagnostic dongle. And so begins my adventure in frustration... First, the arctic decided to migrate south for the winter. If you think Texas got cold... Try Minnesota! This meant going outside for more than a few minutes at a time often risked frostbite, or required working in enough gloves and coat to restrict my motion to that of an animal in a "Rolling Wild" animation (Look it up, they're hilarious, unlike a Minnesota winter!) I quite literally signed up for one of those $1.99 one week Prime trials, JUST to beat the cold weather... Some items I ordered arrived the next day, others in 2 days... It took 9 days, very much NOT beating the upcoming cold weather. When it arrived, I discovered that my LG V40 was refusing to connect to the device. It would show the device, attempt to connect, then fail and attempt to repeatedly reconnect. After half an hour of trying, I found online that Android 10 has known issues with establishing connections to some bluetooth devices... joy... Cold days and slow work, specifically, not having any near approaching deadline for the work on hand (Most of my work is soldering at home) meant I really wasn't in a rush to use my functional (most of the time) car. It normally would only act up only once fully warmed up. Basically, it meant that a week went by between my first and second failed attempts to read the ECU's error codes. I ended up needing to run to the hardware store for some hardware for my Kerbal instrument panel's analog meter backlight modifications, and decided to stop at a local auto part shop, cause I knew they had an OBD2 code reader. I don't know if it was cause it was a trash reader, or cause it was so cold the reader was just nopeing out, or both, but it literally froze up, and we were too froze up to wanna spend any more time messing around with it in the cold... Attempt three thwarted... At this point, I remembered that I still have my old 2012 LG Spectrum, running some variant of Android 4.x... I knew it would run an OBD2 reader app, so I booted it up, went to the Play Store... And it crashed while searching, and proceeded to get stuck in a boot loop... popped the battery (remember those wonderful days... When you could just replace a battery! Yeah, I miss 'em too...) and restarted... and still boot looping. Crud... I pulled the battery, let it sit a bit, and tried again, aaaaaaand still boot looping. Oh well, RIP LG Spectrum, 2012-2021. Oh, except it suddenly got better! RIP LG Spectrum, 2012-202x??? I was gonna use it to try to test the car, but unfortunately, when I got out to the car (on Sunday), I discovered the Dome light wasn't turning on. Oops! Turns out the diagnostic port on a car gets power whether the key is in the ignition or not, and I left the dongle plugged in since Thursday, back when the LG died LOL nope, it rose again three days later... NO! It was my battery that died hard. So, queue today... I've had a battery charger trickle charging the battery, thanks to three extension cords and an outlet all the way across the parking lot. Fortunately, the battery appears to be fine, although time will tell if I have any capacity issues. At least as far as I can see, I don't think it was permanently damaged. I was gonna test the car, but I got a bit distracted, to say the least... I decided to check my mail while finishing up the battery charging, and low and behold, I find a letter from the housing office saying that I hadn't paid a $25 fee in January, and as a result, I was having my income adjusted rent program terminated. This would have more than doubled my rent on the spot... Needless to say, I was pretty freaked out, especially since I distinctly remember making that payment! I made a call, got voicemail, left a message that I'm 1000% certain probably sounded ever so slightly extremely frantic, insisting I made said payment! I proceeded to try to find the receipt... Which of course, I could not find for the life of me. After such a long half hour, they called back and informed me that there had been a filing error, and to disregard the letter. Someone had just not recorded my statements properly... Yikes! I thanked the lady for getting back to me so quick, and for resolving the error, and mentioned I needed to cash my last paycheck anyway (bank is across the alley from the housing office), so I'd likely just stop in and make this months payment right away, so it's done with (and so I'd have a receipt saying my payment was current)... She left and closed the housing office early. Fine... I got paid, I need to get the car dealt with anyway, so I drove to a different auto parts shop. I realized, with te battery dead, all the codes might have gotten reset, but like magic, the engine started it's misfiring mere blocks away. Thanks perfectly timed intermittent engine fault! For once things are going right... in going wrong... When I arrive, see the OBD2 Reader is in use by another customer. That's fine, I can wait. Other customer finishes. Misfiring. Ah, you too. I know the feel. I scan my car, get a pure single error code of an ignition misfire, with no other detected faults. That's good enough for me. I see that this auto shop has a complete ignition kit with both the coil pack and the ignition module, and replacement spark plug boots, for barely more than the coil pack alone at the other store. Nice! I decide to go whole hog and add new spark plugs to the order, and with a discount code I had, ended up getting the whole works for the price of teh coil pack and half the cost of the ignition module at the other store. Lets hope when it all arrives tomorrow, things go well! And that's why my Kerbal instrument panel's analog meters ain't done! Spoiler alert: I'm 20 LEDs, 20 resistors, 4 wires, 4 light shields, 2 meter movement installations, and 4 cover plates away from being 100% complete! This is just a few hours of work that was supposed to happen today, and didn't because shenanigans!

I had to saw 2x4 rectangular multi-LED modules into pairs of 1x4 modules, in order to make the color bar backlighting for my Kerbal Instrument Panel analog meters. The diffuser epoxy was a breeze to saw through, even if it took me a while to saw all the pieces... No... It was the reinforced fiberglass circuit boards that the LED dies were bonded to. I wore out two blades sawing through them, by hand, since the parts were too small to really use power tools on. I have since assembled all the modules, and just need to do soldering, a little epoxy, and final assembly. What do I find today? Why it's my stash of 1x4 rectangular green LED modules... Of course!

It would have been if I had noticed it before trimming the sides down. Notice how the black portion extends to the sides of the meter, but the white portion is narrow? That's because it gets trimmed down to the width of the polycarbonate section I'm reducing the length of the gap for the pointer to travel along, to get those wide top and bottom black spaces, like the Apollo meters had. I just didn't see it when it was wider, but once the gap got trimmed down, it became more obvious that there was a misalignment... Eh, it's not a vertical alignment, and I expect a small amount of bloom from the light shining through it, so I'll live with it. It'll simply be indicative of fine Kerbal quality construction. That'll be the meter sourced from... checks notes... "Found lying by the side of the road"... Okay... Small update, not worth a new post, I think... I got ALL the dremel work on ALL the remaining meters done. Visually, it don't look like much, but this means I can proceed to finish with nothing more than epoxy, soldering, and basic assembly. Literally nothing is holding back the finishing of these meters now, especially no "I can't use the Dremel this late, cause I don't wanna disturb the neighbors" spiel!

Progress! ™ I made one minor error securing the scales to the housings, and I'm sure any keen eye will spot it's glaring obviousness. I will live... It's taken me far to long to get to this stage, and though it is a clearly visible error, I shall live with it, in the name of moving forward with the project and extreme laziness in not wanting to rework it. The misalignment is only about a millimeter-ish... For those not interested in not playing a round of Where's Waldo Kerman, and *somehow* can't spot the error... Apparently, I was also delusional in my belief that these would be finished today. My decision to individually current limit every individual LED with it's own individual resistor added a lot of individual moments of extra soldering time to this individual Kerbal fanatic's schedule! It took a long time to make all the color bar LED assemblies. Took a good while to mount the scales to the fronts of the meters too. That pile of resistors is the pile that goes onto the three circuit boards inside the meter, where I'll mount the Blue-Green LEDs. Both resistors and LEDs will need to be mounted, and the color bars epoxied into grooves cut into the back of the front polycarbonate. I can imagine all that taking only about a day, so see y'all next week! Not gonna lie... I'm really looking forward to seeing this cluster of meters completed, with all trim installed, including the side bezels. This will also mark the start of attempting to mount components into place in the aluminum panel. I will be jamming those meters as far to the left as I can make them fit. I can work out how I want to mount the tape meter. I'll have to focus on figuring out how to construct the bezel that will wrap around three sides of the navball. That bezel will contain the velocity digital readout, and three LED bar graphs to represent Rate Gauges. Once I'm at that point, I'll have constructed half the instrument panel!

Just got the correct screws and finished mounting the meter movement. Figured I could snap that shot I forgot to take. Just a small touch that I personally prefer... A lot of my equipment is salvage, surplus, or pre-owned. In the case of this meter, it used to be in use with a utility. I had to remove that label to make way for the backlight screw terminals, but rather than discard it, I trimmed it in such a way as to allow it to fit back on the back. It's a detail only I would know about, but I kinda like it.

Just posted the build details of the Atmospheric Density Gauge on my build thread. Man, i really love how this one turned out!

Decided to Work on the Atmospheric Density Gauge, along with the other three gauges. The other three are partially completed, still have some work left to do, but they're moving along nicely. Construction of this one was markedly different than the other four. This one had a gradient scale and two entirely separate illumination zones. I painted the edge of the polycarbonate first, and fed the printed scale into place and secured that. I built up another LED board, similar to the other meters. Again, each LED has it's own resistor (on the other side of the board) for even current limiting and thus even illumination. I tweaked the angle of the LEDs to center and evenly space them as best as possible. You can also see the metal shield I cut to separate the two illumination zones. I cut a diffuser to spread the light evenly over the back of the scale, and made sure to cut it's shape to match the contour of the bent metal shield. Here, you can see the diffuser generally placed. This style meter has no provision for factory backlighting, unlike the dual meters I was working with. As such, there is no integral mounting for a diffuser, so I had to come up with my own mount. The solution I came up with was actually really simple. Drilled out and tapped a hole in the housing at each end of the diffuser, punched a hole in the end of the diffuser, and screwed it down. It was really simple, but works. With the metal shield in place, the top illumination zone is now separated. The gradient scale LED board has three colors of LED, Ice Blue, Blue, and Violet, to really accentuate the gradient. Some 1/4 inch nylon spacers were used to line up the second LED board so it sits at just the right height. Just like before, a diffuser was cut and lined up in front of the LEDs, and screwed onto the sides of the housing to secure it. I also cut and bent a spill shield to keep light from spilling through the gap for the meter's pointer. Almost fully assembled. I forgot to take a picture of the pointer movement mechanism. I misplaced the screws, so had to get replacements from the hardware store. The separation between the lighting zones work well! Really liking how it turned out! It looks great in the dark! Here is the Atmospheric Density Gauge completed! I really love the color transition of the gradient scale, and the camera simply does not do it justice. What remains is mounting two of the final three scales on the last three meters, cutting the grooves in the polycarbonate to accommodate the color bar LED assemblies, and epoxy those in, and solder them to the LED boards. I've cut the light spill shields, and already drilled and tapped most of the holes needed. This was the one unique meter, and I think the more complex meter to build, so I suspect the remainder should go quickly.

Both of those are indeed capacitors. The SMD capacitors are smaller, and can only vent downward. The larger capacitors on the motherboard are through hole type capacitors, and yes you can see the blue one has it's top bulging. That's a clear sign of failure. Notice the notches in the top of the through hole capacitors? Those notches are meant to have some give, to allow the capacitor to expand if it releases gasses internally. The SMD capacitors of the 1990s often did not have this feature, so any pressure that built up forced the electrolytic fluid to leak through the rubber seals of the bottom, and to get on the circuit board. My recommendation, if it's something you want to consider learning yourself, is to just go on Youtube an look up N64 recapping.

If the crashing gets more frequent, you might find it's not necessarily overheating. 1990s electronics are reaching an age where the electrolytic capacitors are starting to fail, and even leak. This can cause all sorts of problems, from no audio or no boot in vintage computers, to outright corrosion on the circuit boards. I am actually dealing with two N64s right now. If you think it's indeed overheating, then it would almost certainly be due to dust buildup. The N64 definitely has some aluminum heat spreaders inside, but not outright finned heatsinks like you might see in a modern system. If you are concerned, some compressed air might help to clear out dust. If concerned about the cartridge connector, put some isopropyl alcohol on some paper, wrapped around a piece of cardboard (cut to the width of the slot, to a smaller width if you work it across the surface. Insert and remove it several times, keeping the paper wet with alcohol. The paper is mildly textured, and will clean the contacts without actively abrading them, and the alcohol will safely evaporate. I recommend using 90% or higher, if you can find it. if using 70%, maybe give it more time to evaporate. I can not stress this enough though... If you have 1990s era electronics, and you want to preserve them, you should consider at the very least getting a few tools to at least visually examine them. For an N64, you'd want a game-bit driver, easily bought for a few dollars online. You can examine circuit boards and visually inspect to see if the areas around electrolytic capacitors (they look like small metal cans) look wet, have any weird staining, green corrosion, or excessive dust stuck around them (dust can stick to leaking electrolyte, making it look like patches of dust). All these are signs of leaking electrolytic capacitors, and if left as is, will slowly eat away the copper traces of the circuit board, till it fails. If you have any kind of soldering skills, it can be very beneficial to preemptively re-cap a device before the old capacitors begin leaking (or before the damage gets too bad). N64 re-cap kits are pretty cheap. You might be able to find local repair shops or online providers that can provide this service, for a fee. 1990s electronics are exceptionally susceptible to electrolytic capacitor leakage and damage for a few reasons. The late 1980s and 1990s introduced surface mount technology to consumer devices. This had the double effect of making double and multi layered boards more common place, and introducing new SMD (surface mount device) packages for traditionally through hole components. The early electrolytic capacitors were made with round leads (like a through hole capacitor) that passed though a rubber like material on the bottom, with the can sealed around the rubber base. All the capacitor's functional bits, along with the electrolyte fluid are sealed in the can. Outside the can, the leads are flattened, insert through a plastic base, and are bent out and up at opposing sides. Those flat lead surfaces are the place where the capacitor gets soldered to the board. The problem with these early capacitors, is they could only vent down, and after so many years, the rubber like seal degrades. Now add to this, the fact that all surface mount components are mounted to a circuit board that has traces on the same side of the board as the component, and not just the opposite side. A lot of commodity through hole boards seen in older devices were actually single sided boards, and the copper traces were on the opposite side of the component. SMD devices changed that be mounting the components directly to the copper traces, and that means those old leaky electrolytic capacitors are all pretty much ticking corrosion time bombs. Eventually, they will almost certainly leak, someday. Many already have. This is probably the most common reason for old N64s, among other 90s era tech, not working. I can't stress this enough... If you wanna preserve old tech, remove batteries, and recap stuff before passing 20-30 years old. It's easier to replace a capacitor, than it is to rebuild the traces on a corroded circuit board, while still having to replace the capacitors.