I hope I don't lose my membership

 In the Procrastinators Guild.

Over the last couple weeks I sealed up the hydraulic tank on my garden tractor loader project. I got the machine back in 2017, you guys might have forgotten about it. Checking back it looks like I haven't written about the loader since 2017 which is weird, we've come a long way...

Heres a shot from back when I got it:

Last week I reinstalled the tank, it had leaked where I added the hose fittings so I slathered the inside with POR15 gas tank sealer. It didn't leak overnight so yesterday I fired it up. It did NOT want to run but finally got going, smoked a lot but I'll be darned if it didn't work pretty good.

I moved some snow out of the shadows on our yard over to the storm drain which gets more sun.

Everything was going great until:

That's the upper bucket cylinder mount, or rather there should be a mount there. Apparently I'd only tacked it on and the tacks broke. I wanted to move the mount a little higher anyway.

While I was working I finished cutting the bucket down: 

I took 3" off each side of the bucket, bringing it down to 38" which is still about 2" wider than the machine. Took probably 25# off the weight of the bucket making it much more manageable for the machine. There's still some more to come off but it's much improved.

I'm going to take it over to buddy Ben's house for final welding, he's got a big stick welder so I can really burn in the mounts, my MIG works okay but doesn't really have enough heat for the job...

My first computer

Some time ago one of the younger folks (I think he was 17 at the time) at our game night said something like "Oh that reminds me of an old computer game."
I replied "I think your idea of an old computer game and my idea of an old computer game are not on the same scale."

To which he replied that the game in question was about 10 years old. I fired back "Oh, okay, well my first computer had 16 kilobytes of RAM and we saved programs to an audio tape drive..."

At that point one of the 20somethings in the group decided to chime in "I'm going to call shenanigans on that one." but here it is, my TI99/4A

The conversation left me thinking about my good old TI, this was my first computer, we got it around 1982, I'd have been about 6. This was a time when having a computer was kind of a big deal. The TI was already on borrowed time, it was discontinued in 1984, and as we didn't have a whole lot of money we didn't have a ton of accessories for it but it still holds a place in my heart. The TI was a big force in my life, it helped me to learn to read and do math, to learn how to type and a lot about how computers worked. When he brought it home my dad declared "This will take the boy through college." Actually it didn't even get the boy into high school. In junior high we got an Atari 130XE, an Atari mostly because my friend Nate had one. That computer was on borrowed time too but thats a story for another day.

Anyhow my favorite game of all time is "Tunnels of Doom: Quest for the King" which was basically the first RPG, a party of up to 4 adventurers descends into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power. Actually what I didn't know at the time was that while the basic game came with "Quest for the King" and "Pennies and Prizes" there were other adventures that could be played with that one cartridge. The game actually came in 2 parts, the cartridge and, in our case, a cassette, that had the adventures. There was a disk based version too but we didn't have a disk drive to use that. I remember vividly the 200 seconds it took the load the cassette, forever at the time, even as an adult waiting for the cassette to do its thing is agonizing, there was to be a better way.

Well there is, look at the picture of the TI again, notice the thing on top? Thats a Raspberry PI, if you're not familiar the Raspberry PI is a credit card sized computer originally intended to get kids interested in computers, this one is connected to:

The conflagration hanging off the side of the computer is commonly called a sidecar, TI used this mostly for the speech synthesizer, in this particular sidecar is a 32K RAM expander (more than twice the original RAM) and a TIPI. The TIPI (pronounced tip-ee) is really more like a TI-PI and connects the TI to the Raspberry PI. This allows for all sorts of new things but mostly I bought it to have the PI act like a disk drive for the TI allowing me to load Tunnels Of Doom nearly instantly and easily save my games in progress, a 10 level dungeon takes many hours of play.

Overall this project has been tremendously fun although its also quite frustrating, I'm not a computer developer by any stretch of the imagination and the TIPI has stretched my skills to the limit, often I've told people "I'm not really sure I'm smart enough to have this thing..." which isn't far from the truth. I've really just scratched the surface of what its capable of but I'm having fun.


Oh and as a side note I've probably paid more for the TIPI, 32K RAM expansion and PI than my dad did for the computer in the first place...

More lanterns making electricity

Experiment 3 started with me cutting out a plate the same size as the top of a 228E vent. I attached the peltier and heat sink to it and fired the lantern up.

Early results were very good, 1.7v soon after light up. I think the thin steel plate heated up faster, I also got a better coating of heat sink compound on the peltier and on the heat sink.

Unfortunately as the rig got thoroughly heated up voltage dropped to .5, my little heat sink can't shed heat fast enough to keep up with the lantern.

I tried stacking a heat sink on top of the existing heat sink which seemed like it was working at first but in the end just added thermal mass, once the add on heat sink was heat soaked it dropped back to the same .5v I was seeing with just one heat sink.

So I've managed to get the hot side plenty hot, I've got a USB booster that will take anything over .9v and boost it to charge a USB device, the 1.7v I had when I first lit the lantern is plenty, I'll probably need more current but I can get that with a couple peltiers in parallel. What I need now is to keep the cold side temp such that the voltage stays up.

More experiments to come!

New project

Back in the saddle again...

As if I needed any more projects I've started work on something new. I saw some videos on YouTube of people using peltier devices to charge cell phones. This got me thinking that a Coleman lantern makes a ton of extra heat so why not put that heat to good use.

This is a peltier device, if you put electricity across the two wires it'll make a cold side and a hot side, so it transfers heat from one side to the other. If you work it the other way around, that is apply heat to one side and cool the other it will produce electricity.

Which leads us to:

A Coleman 228E with a peltier strapped to the vent. The outer vent edge shown gets to about 150F. In testing the outside of the heatsink was getting to around 100F. With that temperature difference (delta) the peltier was making around 1/4 volt. Thats proof of concept but not really enough power to do anything...

Experiment two got us more heat, the top of the vent is more like 250F, the ends of the heatsink were now reading more like 120F and you can see in the picture we got around .85v. This is a semi-useful result, I could run several peltiers in series to get a useful voltage but its still disappointingly low. I sprinkled some water on the heatsink and got 1.9v which is a very good result.

This tells me the issue is insufficient temperature delta, the hot side is plenty hot but the cold side isn't cold enough. The heatsink I was using is really small, I've got another much larger one from an old computer case to try next but before I go there I need to make a better system for mounting the peltier and heatsink. Lantern vents are rounded at the top, I really need a flat surface 40mm wide to mount on. I'll work on that next...