Author Topic: The Fiji Project advances (Read 4744 times)

BT Humble · « **on:** June 05, 2005, 11:16:11 PM »

Well, I'm getting geared up to produce the next batch of stuff for our[1] Fijian Rural Electric Light project.

First up, prototype #2 of the Solar Box. You might remember prototype #1, I've done some work to make it cheaper and simpler to construct.

The major changes are that it now only has a single cigarette lighter socket, and the other 2 switches are for hard-wired loads. I've also done away with the connector strips, the connections are now made via home-made ring connectors[2] and screws into the baseboard.

I've also built a sheetmetal folder, sized specifically for constructing the boxes:

If you're into making PCBs cheaply, I've stopped buying the special $8 lacquer ink pens and started using liquid-paper correction pens instead. The results are quite good. I've also given up on ferric chloride etchant, since I discovered that copper chloride is far cheaper and somewhat more environmentally friendly.

...and finally, here's the computer lab I'm setting up for the school. The laptops are Acernote Light 370 machines, with a P133 processor and 64MB of ram. They were cheap[3] because they have no hard drives (easy to replace) or caddies (impoosible to find), so I've set them up to boot from the CD-ROM and load DR-DOS and Breadbox Ensemble into a ramdisk. It takes about 60 seconds from powering up the machine to being able to do useful work, which I think is quite reasonable.

The printers are HP Deskjet 340s, which need 10.6VDC @ 1500ma. A simple LM317 voltage regulator should provide that quite comfortably. The computers specify 18VDC, but work just fine from 12VDC. Each machine takes about 1500mA to run. The lab will be hooked up to a 12V/500Ah battery bank, which will be charged by 80W of solar, a 200W wind generator, and a 12A battery charger (for the 4 hours per night that the generator is running).

I've also sourced a couple of automatic 4-way printer switches, which are much simpler to set up that network cabling.

BTH

[1] "Our" = Richard and Me.

[2] These are made by making a loop in the end of the wire, then tinning it thoroughly with solder.

[3] Average of $10 each from e-bay.

jimjjnn · « **Reply #1 on:** June 05, 2005, 05:56:25 PM »

BTH. I have heard the term "Caddie" before but can't recall what it is. Can you enlighten me, please? Thanks. Good luck on forthcoming marriage.

TomW · « **Reply #2 on:** June 05, 2005, 06:03:27 PM »

Jim;

Laptops usually use a "caddie" to hold the hard drive so the generic laptop hard drive fits the specific laptop. Sometimes called a "backpack" too.

BT Humble · « **Reply #3 on:** June 05, 2005, 06:10:10 PM »

BTH. I have heard the term "Caddie" before but can't recall what it is. Can you enlighten me, please?

Essentially, it's a little tin box with adaptors that holds the laptop's hard drive. It lets you quickly remove and swap the drive between machines. When corporations and governments send their old computers out to auction these days they usually get paranoid and require that the hard drives are destroyed, not just erased. To do that they usually take the whole drive-and-caddy unit out and throw it in a crusher.

Replacement hard drives are easy to find, but unfortunately the hard drive connector on the motherboard of these machines is a weird mini-centronics thing that I can't find anywhere. If I could find these plugs I'd convert all the machines to use compact flash cards instead of hard drives, which run faster and use far less power.

Thanks. Good luck on forthcoming marriage.

Thanks. 81 days to go! :-D

BTH

jimjjnn · « **Reply #4 on:** June 05, 2005, 08:43:03 PM »

Aha. Now I know what you are referring to.

If your notebooks have USB ports, I'd use the flash drives in those. My dau bought a portable one time. Lo and behold. No USB ports that she needed later. Now everything has USB. My desktop has 9 including one internal port. Wonder why they put it inside?

Again BTH, I saw the pix that you posted of your fiance. You are a lucky fella. Hope she is as heavy into the alternative energy scene as you are. That would be perfect.

Happy wedding day to you both in 81 days.

commanda · « **Reply #5 on:** June 05, 2005, 09:16:45 PM »

If you're into making PCBs cheaply, I've stopped buying the special $8 lacquer ink pens and started using liquid-paper correction pens instead. The results are quite good.

Overhead projector markers work well too.

Amanda

srnoth · « **Reply #6 on:** June 05, 2005, 09:40:39 PM »

Very cool BT, keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Stephen.

BT Humble · « **Reply #7 on:** June 05, 2005, 10:32:54 PM »

Overhead projector markers work well too.

I'll give them a try. I tried a permanent marker, but found it difficult to get a thick enough ink trace.

BTH

BT Humble · « **Reply #8 on:** June 05, 2005, 10:35:48 PM »

If your notebooks have USB ports, I'd use the flash drives in those.

No USB ports, which is another reason why they were cheap. And I can't get the DOS drivers to work for the PCMCIA ports either. Oh well, when I get hold of an external floppy drive for one (hopefully this week) I'm going to make up one for each machine so that the students can save their work.

BTH

richhagen · « **Reply #9 on:** June 05, 2005, 11:26:40 PM »

BTH, That looks like a neat project. All off of a 12V solar setup. Keep up the excellent work. Rich

jimjjnn · « **Reply #10 on:** June 05, 2005, 11:36:47 PM »

BTH, are there serial port drives? I don't know if I have seen any for sure. Just seems like I may have

BT Humble · « **Reply #11 on:** June 05, 2005, 11:58:41 PM »

BTH, are there serial port drives? I don't know if I have seen any for sure. Just seems like I may have

You used to be able to buy floppy drives that plugged into a parallel (printer) port, but they had some custom interface hardware built into them.

These laptops have a 26-pin "external floppy drive interface" socket, and if I'm lucky it'll be a pin-to-pin conenction with a standard floppy drive...

BTH

domwild · « **Reply #12 on:** June 06, 2005, 01:00:50 AM »

BTH,

Great stuff! Neat work!

All the best on your forthcoming wedding!

hvirtane · « **Reply #13 on:** June 06, 2005, 07:05:39 AM »

Very nice.

You are speaking about

'Rchard':

"Our" = Richard and Me.

I have got a friend from Australia

and he is building wind machines

on Fiji. Using sometimes a kind

of 'Reinikainen' blades, which

idea we a bit developed together.

His name is Richard, too.

Do you know him?

- Hannu

BT Humble · « **Reply #14 on:** June 06, 2005, 03:57:46 PM »

You are speaking about

'Rchard':

"Our" = Richard and Me.

I have got a friend from Australia

and he is building wind machines

on Fiji. Using sometimes a kind

of 'Reinikainen' blades, which

idea we a bit developed together.

His name is Richard, too.

Do you know him?

I know him quite well, in fact I spent half an hour on the phone to him last night! ;-)

(Yes, we're talking about the same chap).

BTH

hvirtane · « **Reply #15 on:** June 07, 2005, 01:25:04 AM »

I know him quite well,

in fact I spent half

an hour on the phone

to him last night! ;-)

(Yes, we're talking

about the same chap).

BTH

----

==

Really nice to hear

about that.

I wanted to get

in contact with

him again.

I also wanted to

see more pictures

of his 'Reinikainen'

blades.

He sent

some picture of unfinished

blades by email to me,

but I haven't seen any

picture of finished blades.

Could you, please ask him

to post something about

his developments on this site.

Also please tell him that

also my email address has

now changed at least for

some time.

It is now:

hannu(underline)markus

(underline)virtanen(at)yahoo(dot)com

- Hannu

kitno455 · « **Reply #16 on:** June 07, 2005, 12:45:58 PM »

bt- dont know if your app requires DOS, but i have had much success with using linux boxes that boot from a cdrom or floppy, and nfs mount their root disks. you would have to get pcmcia netcards for these things, but they are pretty cheap.

also, if you find that you need a server of some sort, look at www.nslu2-linux.org. that is a project i am involved with to replace the software that comes with this tiny low power device, with a more general purpose linux. this device uses a very small 5V power supply, and it has been run off of batteries by several people.

allan

BT Humble · « **Reply #17 on:** June 07, 2005, 03:31:52 PM »

bt- dont know if your app requires DOS, but i have had much success with using linux boxes that boot from a cdrom or floppy, and nfs mount their root disks. you would have to get pcmcia netcards for these things, but they are pretty cheap.

There was a bit of a learning curve issue involved - I know DOS, but I'm still very much a Linux newbie. Also, I still think that on a low-powered machine like this you get a fair bit better performance from DOS than Linux (I can't see one of these booting up X in 0 seconds!) ;-)

Once the hardware is over there and running, I can fool around with better software setups at my leisure. And I will.

*off to look at your site now*

BTH

TomW · « **Reply #18 on:** June 07, 2005, 04:14:22 PM »

BTH;

Just a fine point that may elude some folks. X is not Linux. X runs on Linux. You can also use one hotrod machine to export X to others or the applications anyway. Everyone seems to think they need a GUI these days. Us old command line warriors are a vanishing breed I guess.

Cheers.

TomW

BT Humble · « **Reply #19 on:** June 07, 2005, 07:58:05 PM »

Just a fine point that may elude some folks. X is not Linux. X runs on Linux. You can also use one hotrod machine to export X to others or the applications anyway. Everyone seems to think they need a GUI these days. Us old command line warriors are a vanishing breed I guess.

I understand. However from an education point of view it's better to give the students a machine that at least has a similar look-and-feel to the current "industry standard".

I mean, it'd be all very well to give them a lab of TRS-80 machines running Electric Pencil (for example), but that's not going to be as useful to getting them a job in the "real world".

(Sorry for the quotations, but I hate giving credibility to buzzwords).

BTH

sandovalch · « **Reply #20 on:** June 08, 2005, 07:08:53 AM »

Try this, I have found them the most reliable, sometimes a little bit tricky to work with in the beginnig, but the result is almost perfect.

http://www.techniks.com

kitno455 · « **Reply #21 on:** June 08, 2005, 01:23:42 PM »

dos is most definately not industry standard. no one but us unix hackers have to use the CLI anymore.

oh, and X is alot lighter than you think if you use a distro specific for low bandwidth machines.

allan

BT Humble · « **Reply #22 on:** June 08, 2005, 08:49:13 PM »

dos is most definately not industry standard

So far as I recall, what I actually said was:

a machine that at least has a similar look-and-feel to the current "industry standard".

That's why I'm putting GEOS/Geoworks/Ensemble/whatever they're calling it today on the machines.

BTH

ghurd · « **Reply #23 on:** June 09, 2005, 06:58:36 AM »

Nice job!

Even if I don't understand half of 'Windows'.

This has been on my mind since the Fiji windmill post.

Not relevant to anything, just curious.

How does one become involved in a project like this in Fiji???

Is it your job, do you know someone, or just an accident?

Not sure I ever met anyone who has even been to Fiji!

G-

BT Humble · « **Reply #24 on:** June 12, 2005, 06:17:14 PM »

This has been on my mind since the Fiji windmill post.

Not relevant to anything, just curious.

How does one become involved in a project like this in Fiji???

Is it your job, do you know someone, or just an accident?

Not sure I ever met anyone who has even been to Fiji!

About this time a year ago I decided that I was pretty well off and that I'd start giving a tenth of my income to those who were less fortunate[1].

I was intending to do this same kind of thing (small-scale solar home lighting) in East Timor, but I didn't have any contacts there and knew almost nothing about the place. Then I met Richard (who had already started this work in Fiji) via this board, and the rest is history.

It's not my job, I work as a computer programmer with the Department of Veterans' Affairs in Australia. We're just 2 guys who decided to make a difference, and have achieved a small measure of success.

BTH

[1] This isn't a religious thing, I'm an atheist. And for those who say "charity begins at home", I say that there are remarkably few people in Australia who are as badly off as those in your average 3rd world country.

ghurd · « **Reply #25 on:** June 12, 2005, 11:27:57 PM »

Wow. I'd call it an accident. Me too, but local.

G-

Bruce S · « **Reply #26 on:** June 15, 2005, 04:30:05 PM »

This is one of my strong points.

If you are looking for a way to drive the PCMCIA ports, go looking for the old Mega-hertz software sets. They may even still have them on their website. This will work with just about ANY PCMCIA card, all the ones I've used anyway.

I'll dig around my "DOS" stuff and if there are no legal hurdles I can either email them or post them here.

I'm going on 18 great years now!

Congrats and Best of Luck

Cheerz!!

BT Humble · « **Reply #27 on:** June 16, 2005, 03:41:07 PM »

This is one of my strong points.

If you are looking for a way to drive the PCMCIA ports, go looking for the old Mega-hertz software sets. They may even still have them on their website. This will work with just about ANY PCMCIA card, all the ones I've used anyway.

I'll dig around my "DOS" stuff and if there are no legal hurdles I can either email them or post them here.

Bruce, this would be a lifesaver. I've tried the "Cardsoft" DOS drivers that were available from the Acer support site for this machine, but had no luck using a Compact Flash card and adaptor. If you have some drivers that might possibly work, please let me know.

BTH

Bruce S · « **Reply #28 on:** June 29, 2005, 11:42:11 AM »

Sorry for not getting back to you; been playing and Unfortunately destroying NiCd batteries.

I used the drivers for an old compaq Armada running Dr. Dos and I'm sure it sees the memory cards just perfect.I'll check and make sure.

Bruce S

News:

Author Topic: The Fiji Project advances (Read 4744 times)