Month: August 2007

Charging Circuit

I’ve been trying to put together a better charging control circuit for Mintball. The thing with Mintball’s control panel is that it is all low current – the heater and starter switch drive relays and the no charge light is a “fake” in that its not actually driven by the IND line off the alternator.

Being low current allows us to do sneaky things like disconnect the starter and heater buttons when the engine is running and the No Charge circuit is energised.

We do have a problem in that the Engine revs need to be quite high before the alternator excites which means the alternator is spinning at a few thousand RPM when suddenly bang – a whopping 60 amp load is placed on it, which makes the belt squeal. Obviously we need to excite the alternator at a lower speed by giving it more juice.

The circuit digram below (created using a great free application called ExpressSCH) is my first pass at a circuit that should hopefully do the job. Before anyone points out that there is no No Charge light on the diagram – it would basically be where it says “To Start / Charger circuit) which will only carry 12 volts when the ignition is on and the IND line is at 0 volts (i.e. the alternator is not producing output). I’ve a few concerns about the circuit but hopefully some minor adjustments will allay these fears

charger

It’s raining cats

Well the week at work seemed extremely long for some reason. Maybe the three day weekend on the boat made it seem that way, or maybe its just work.

Tuesday Night the Out Of Town Pub Night Group  went to The Fleet Inn at Twyning which was very pleasant : three Real Ales, and staff who were very friendly (like actually asking before last orders if we wanted to get one last beer in!).

Today we’ve been just working on the house – tidying it up and moving things round. Stuff needs doing outside but, once again, it is raining so its just general pick up and throw away inside. Of course all the cats are helping out – supervising mostly but from time to time deciding that something we are moving is a suitable target for a pouncing attack

Its going to be a short week as we are off on the boat again for the Bank Holiday weekend – the parents are coming down from Wigan and we are going to do the trip south again, primarily because its easy and doesn’t involve doing the 15 locks at Audlem… twice!

A couple of days on the boat

On Saturday it will be 5 years since Kathy and I got married.

So to celebrate we are off on the boat for a short break. Heading up after work on Thursday and then heading towards Autherley. No great plans or schemes, we’ll take it as it comes and turn round half way through.

We’ll probably be in the Talbot on Thursday so feel free to say hello 😉

Blogs

Andrew Denny has a post on his blog GrannyButtons about blogs and links.

Basically he’d commented in his blog about a post on another blog about a new Marina development. As you’d expect he had included links to the original blog entry in his blog.

The writer of that blog seemed to take offence at Andrews interpretation of the blog entry and posted a new blog entry going off in a bit of a huff about Andrew’s interpretation.

Rather than link back to Andrew’s blog entry this person simply referred to Andrew as “a pretend boater who only spend a few days a year on the Cut”. This person also doesn’t allow comments on his blog entries.

Now I’ve always believed that blogs should be dynamic. Posting a blog entry with no links from it and blocking comments and trackbacks is rather like publishing a column in a newspaper and never publishing any feedback. By adding links and trackbacks to a blog entry it adds context to the entry – for example you can easily, in one click, go and read Andrews original article which made me sit down and write this blog entry.

Of course linking and trackbacks on blogs do more than just add context to that entry, they also help raise the profile of the blogs/websites concerned as search engine spiders will follow the links. This second fact is the whole drive behind the spamming of blogs and abuse of trackbacks – if you have a popular, well ranked site, then getting links off your site to a site selling dodgy drugs will help the spammers.