Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I had something of a epiphany – for me – today. I know this is obvious, and I don’t know why I didn’t get it before.

I’m currently trying to reconfigure my (admittedly small) stock portfolio to generate some income via dividends, and also to grow said portfolio until it generates a meaningful amount of income. At the moment I can’t really do anything about this, since I’m broke.. (though occasionally I take some money that I should be using to pay off credit cards and stick it in the stock market instead)

However, it occured to me that I’m using the wrong strategy.

Instead of buying little bits of stock.. (I finally made myself not buy less than $300 of stock in any one transaction, because the commissions were eating me alive), I should be sticking my money in a savings account, watching for signs that the current economic meltdown is at its worst, and then buying whopping sums of stock at that time. I don’t know how one predicts when a economic meltdown is going to reverse, but I’m thinking there’s probably some momentum that keeps things plunging – or climbing – for a while after the input conditions no longer should dictate them doing so, so probably I’ll have several days of oppertunity to buy in. That is, of course, assuming I have any money to buy with. 😉 Still, I will try and put aside a small amount of money each paycheck towards the goal of buying a bunch of stock when the economy is worst.

You all already know why I’m doing this, but let me explain, for myself. Dividends are paid on a per-stock basis. Therefore, the cheaper you can buy the stock, the ‘cheaper’ the dividends are. I’m not interested in capitols gains or losses at the moment, only dividends, and they’re paid out very infrequently and are very small compared to the price of the stock, so there’s no reason to think that I want to rush owning any particular peice of stock so I’ll make any particular ex dividend date.

I keep figuring out little things about playing the stock market.. I should really buy one of those idiot’s guide to the market type books and read it. I’m never going to be a big-time invester guru, and I mostly play for fun – it’s kind of like a very slow game of monopoly – but I would like to be a little more aware of some of the strategies I should be using.

In other news, I now need to shut down this computer so I can vacuum it. Yes, really.

This is a test to see if I can post from my phone

Well, aparently my ‘avoid-the-news’ stance caused me to vote for the wrong candidate.. Hillary is pro-war.  Wish I could change my vote.. if we had my dream voting system, I could go slide my voter ID card into any ATM, click through a few menus, and change my stance.. after all, the actual tally hasn’t been accumulated yet. But no, we’re still stuck in the governential dark ages.

I did offset my mistake some by donating to Obama. Probably too little too late.. but it has led me to be in the amusing position of being on both Obama and Hillary’s mailing lists.. and they both say they’re winning. One could be a bit cynical and wonder if they’re drawing this out as long as possible in order to suck as many dollars out of the party faithful’s pockets as possible.

In other news, Victor thinks the problem with my car is related to the encoder cable that carries information about the shaft position from the motor to the drive. Apparently he’s seen this behavior before, which is encouraging. Now I just have to get the car back into the garage (which should be easier since it is actually possible to drive it), back up on jackstands, remove the encoder cable, test it with a ohmmeter while flexing it to see if any pin fails continuity tests… if they all pass, then I have to test the connector on the motor and the connector on the inverter..

It sounds overwhelming, but I’m going to try and get the car back into the garage on Thursday. Anyone want to come help search for problems this weekend?

In other news, I continue to enjoy bowling, often sneaking in four sessions a week. I joined a league, and one of my leaguemates gave me a ball, which I’ve had drilled and am really enjoying. Unfortunately, I tend not to notice when I’m overexerting during a session (I usually bowl continuously for one hour.. pinsetters have been known to trip their breakers when I’m bowling on them because I run them on such a hard duty cycle.. ) and so at the moment my arm is sore. I have noticed that I’m getting into noticably better shape, though.  I’m still overweight, but I’m less so, and lifting heavy objects has gotten easier. It’s so odd to have a sport.. (heh, if bowling counts as a sport) that’s fun rather than a source of unhappiness. And the other day, I bowled a 192! (My goal is to break 200. Since I started in December with a 52, and my current top score is 192, I think it’s achievable. On the other hand, it seems to get much harder as I approach 200 – I can’t even imagine doing 230.

Well, first of all, forget the suggestion about the coolant leak. The coolant goes, among other places, through a radiator that’s grounded to the frame.. if the heatsinks weren’t isolated, we’d have had troubles from day 1.

The idea that this is a problem with the rotary encoder is a little nutty as well.. when the drive is in neutral with forward selected, and it’s in cogging mode, it will also spin the motor about 400 rpm. Actually, the amusing thing is that when the drive is broken, it acts exactly like a ICE – it cogs (i.e. delivers power in little pulses rather than smoothly), it idles (i.e. spins the motor even when it’s not doing anything).. it even *sounds* like a ICE.

I would think this was a mechanical problem, but I don’t see how that explains either the inverter fault codes or the tendancy to spin the motor at 400RPM when forward is selected and the car is in neutral. I’m wondering, could some of the switching signal be being inductively coupled into the motor data wiring? Failing that, could I have overwritten some key parameter when running SIADIS from a corrupted disk? Uncommanded power output sounds suspicously like a software problem. I’m glad I opted for the EPO switch..  maybe I should test to make sure it still works..

So, today the cogging problem returned to the EV drive. Mercifully, it doesn’t seem to have extended to actually setting fire to the power stage (yet.. knock on wood) but things are definately broken. I had hoped the problem was the current/voltage limit, but since it is still doing it fully charged, that seems unlikely. At the moment I’m inclined to blame a faulty rotation encoder, the encoder wiring, the encoder input system on the inverter, or a bug in the inverter software. Also possible is that there’s some current leaking somewhere it shouldn’t.

I don’t even know where to start in debugging this. I’m somewhat depressed about it. I emailed Metric Mind, the people who originally sold me the drive, and I’m hoping they will have some helpful hints. I’m going to get the car back in the garage, up on jackstands again, and thoroughly clean out the inside of the motor access plate – not that I think it’s dirty, but it’s something to do. I’m also going to take contuninity readings of the encoder cable.. again, not that I think it’s broken, but it’s something to do. There aren’t really any tunable parameters on the inverter that I see that could be causing this cogging – I had thought it was just because I was operating the drive in reverse, but it seems to exist going forward, too.

This problem started when I swapped out the Evercel battery pack for the lead acid one. I’m trying to think what changed.. pack voltage, obviously.. probably the stiffness of the pack, since lead acid doesn’t sag as much as NiZn.. I redid the cooling loop, but I don’t see how that would have anything to do with anything.. unless.. there is a tiny coolant leak next to the motor. I *assume* those heatsinks are isolated.. but maybe I should stop assuming and start fixing… again, it’s something I can do..

A lot of what’s frustrating is that there’s very little documentation for the system – Victor of Metric Mind has done a great job documenting, but there’s still a whole lot of variables that I don’t have any way of guessing. I bought the drive because I thought it would be bulletproof – after all, Siemens makes industrial drives all over the place, and they generally just work. If this drive doesn’t work out, do I try and get another? without the assistance of a community college’s shop, I don’t see how I could hope to swap drives.. although, it’s true that I wouldn’t *need* a lift.. then there’s the money question – how do I pay for another drive? – and the engineering challenges, which nearly drove me nuts last time.

On the other hand, I’ve learned a lot.. if I tried again, it might come out much better. And there’s always the hope that Metric Mind will send me a firmware update that will fix everything, or something..

So, I’ve decided to change my design philosophy on the innards of the master computer.

In particular, I’ve decided to embrace this whole MQ idea. I’m hoping to find a very lightweight implimentation of a message distribution daemon written in C or Cpp – if I can’t find one, I’ll write one – with a good Perl interface. Then, I’m going to have the bus feed into a topic on that MQ. A daemon will take care of logging the data sent and receieved to a Mysql database that lives in RAM, another one will take care of sending out regular polling requests to collect data from the individual nodes and a third one will take care of writing charge policies. The startup scripts will suck the mysql data off the disk and post it to RAM, and the shutdown scripts will move the data back from RAM to the disk. (If anyone is wondering why all the funny mysql stuff, it’s because I want the system to boot off of flash, and I doubt if mysql and flash devices get along peacefully).

However, I think the next logical step is to get the MK3 boards up and running and able to answer pings under the new codebase, using a KISS serial driver on the linux side. I seem to be somewhat blocked on making forward progress on this, for no reason I can identify. On the other hand, I was blocked on making progress on the car for over a year, so there is hope.

In other news, the car did a 9 mile test drive today and still seemed plenty perky when I floored it at the end. I forgot to take a resting voltage reading, so I don’t know what percentage the batteries were at when I stopped. However, we can sort of guess by how long it takes the car to charge.. I plugged it in at 4:45 and the charger is currently set for 13 amps off of the 110V feed. This works out to a paltry 4.3 amps at 330V (the median charge voltage), which means a totally empty pack would take 10-12 hours to charge. (Depending on how totally empty totally empty is – I haven’t yet figured out what a rational peukert-corrected value for the pack is. I’ve been guestimating 40AH, since they’re 56AH SLA/AGM batteries)

Today’s trip involved some serious hills, and I had Kayti in the car, so I’m thinking it was a pretty good test. If the car can do twice that distance tomorrow, I will try and take it to the DMV on Tuesday. I would be very suprised if the car didn’t have 20 miles of range, since it had between 60 and 100 on the Evercels, which were 90AH batteries.

My next house will have 220 in the garage again.. waiting for the car to charge off a 15 amp 110 circuit is a exercise in patience – I’d like to be able to use the car for several trips during the day, knowing that the charger will finish bulk charging in a hour or so between trips. That, however, requires a fatter feed.

To add to the fun, I’m actually not getting the power from the garage.. it’s coming through one of my handy 20A extension cords that I bought to power the Mackies, from a outlet on the side of the house. The garage power is pretty much tapped out running the 12 computers that are in there. 😉

I have two tickets to see the Ducks play in Anaheim on Monday. Anyone want them?

Well, things continue to improve.  Today I put on the access covers to the shiny new PVC boxes that I replaced the old crappy/rusting/not outdoor grade metal junction boxes with, lowered the car to the ground, and backed it out into the driveway, then fought with the cooling loop until it agreed to flow again. (Memo to self – next time do not forget expansion res placed higher than rest of car). Then I drove the car from this cul-de-sac to the next one six times, then across Crown Valley to the Shell station. The tags are still dead, so I had a nervious moment when a cop went by, but apparently he wasn’t paying attention. (I did print out a insurance card and bring it with me, so all I would get – I think – is a fix-it ticket for dead tags). I cleaned the windshield, put air in the tires.. (I had to pay $0.75, because it would be kind of hard for me to claim to be a customer – the hood was still off at this point, and just about anyone could tell the car was not powered by gasoline).

So far I haven’t climbed any serious hills nor gone over 35 mph. The power seems okay, the cogging problem on starts seems gone. Tomorrow I’m going to try and drive the car to the local elementary school and back, which at least involves some hillclimbing. If it does that okay, I’m going to try and take it to the DMV and get tags.

I’m trying to decide which of the following projects to tackle next on the car:

1) Top for the rear to cover the battery boxes so car is no longer open to the road in the back (and hence quieter)

2) Rewire hairball of a inverter interface

3)  Get Peltier heat pump array working.

4) Get LCD module talking to mk3 LCD driver, and put back together user interface

All of them are major undertakings, although probably with proper planning none of them involve the car being undrivable for more than a couple of hours.  I also want to take the car to a body shop and get the right headlamp repainted and reaimed, and the marker light replaced, and possibly look into some other minor cosmetic bodywork. I also need to figure out the sunroof switch and wire up something to take it’s place.

Probably the next logical thing to do is to get the mk3eb base code working well.. then I can start using the mk3eb modules everywhere for those little microcontroller-friendly tasks. I also need to get a SBC to replace the peice-o-crap-laptop that finally died. Anyone know a good, easy to develop for SBC? Must have several serial ports, a ethernet jack, and the possibility of adding wifi..

Today I connected back up the front battery pack and started the inverter – the MC closed with a satisfying ‘clunk’. After some debugging, I managed to get the drive to select forward – which really is forward now, so apparently my swap of the motor leads worked as advertised. The motor spun up, and when I selected a forward gear the front tires spun. (They’re off the ground since the car is on jackstands, so it seemed a bad idea to spin them up too much). There’s a lot of dragging noise from the front brake pads which one would expect since the car has been sitting for over a year.

Tomorrow I need to buy some distilled water and put it in the cooling loop, and reconnect the vacuum pump and cooling pump, and charge the traction pack. Unfortunately my house doesn’t have 220 in the garage, so it will be a somewhat time consuming charging process.

I’m all kinds of encouraged by progress. I’m not quite ready to put the hood back on, but I am ready to call Geico and add the car to my insurance.

One might very well wonder why I’m so upset about LiveJournal banning users for having imaginary descriptions of underage sex. One might also wonder, given that I’m not gay, why I’m so consistantly up in arms about this whole gay marriage thing.

Part of my answer is to just insist that it’s not right to ban people for imaginary acts, and that it’s not right to deny group A rights that group B has simply because you’re not comfortable with their lifestyle choices. However, these answers seem more than a little weak given how strongly I feel about it.

I guess in the case of the imaginary sex, it disturbs me that livejournal is playing the censor. My ISP shouldn’t refuse to pass me packets because they don’t like the contents of them, and LiveJournal shouldn’t refuse to host my journal because they don’t like what I write about. That my journal isn’t in violation of anything isn’t the point – the point is that somewhere, someone’s journal is, and that once you start making exceptions to free speech, it isn’t too long before they start coming after people who hate the government i.e. me, people who hate the dominant religion i.e. me again. So I’m speaking up for those pervs over there.. even though in many cases I’d really rather not read the things they’ve written.. because I figure they’re just the beginning. Once you start caring about the advertisers more than the paid users, there’s a slippery slope that turns really steep, really fast. How many advertisers would want their banner ads appearing on <i>my</i> journal?

There are all these things I feel strongly about that don’t directly affect me – for example, I doubt if I will ever get to exercise my right to choose not to have a baby, since I’m not biologically capable of it – but which I nonetheless have very strong opinions on. I wonder where a lot of these attitudes came from – a number of them don’t very closely resemble my parents – they do resemble my friends, but I think that’s more because I select my friends based on my beliefs than the other way around.

By all indications, politically I am in the minority – I am 1 in 100, maybe 1 in 50.. I’m never going to have any real power, and I don’t *want* any real power.. I just want for other people not to have power over me either.

Just for the record, I am absolutely against any nonconsentual sex, or any sex with someone who isn’t capable of comprehending the emotional ramifications of consent. I have no problem with rendered kiddie porn, but I’m strongly against the real thing. (Although, I don’t know that I have a problem with the Lewis Carroll varients that just involve photographing children naked, providing it’s not upsetting the children and providing you don’t hold onto copies of the images if the children request that they be destroyed.)

I sent a email off to LJ commenting that I wasn’t the biggest fan of their pro-censorship policy.. I wonder if that combined with this post will be enough to get my account suspended..