What Did You Do Today???

[Rob Lancaster]

Wow; a lots happened since I checking in last...

Tony,, I got's to know,,, where was that damned antenna? LOL!

Well guys, I broke down today and bought the LAST of the Mohicans, Trex 450 Pro from my LHS...
The tail mechanics on my old clone was good because I upgraded those parts back there. But now when I put the new Trex head side by side, with the clone, the deference is obvious.

As you can see, I can't wait to start the build.. I can see that to take all the electronics from the SE-V2 clone and cram it all into the Pro will be a challenge..
As always, when I need help and I always do, I'll know it's time to start another thread.

 

[Tony]

Congrats on the new heli!

As for the missing antenna.....

 

[Tony]

Dear Mother Nature,

Can you please take your medication for your hot flashes.... THX!

Sincerely,
Sweaty Redneck About To Have A Heat Stroke

 

[RandyDSok]

While we've finally gotten off of the century mark on the temps... Looking at the overnight forecast, it will only get down to about 80° by morning... I may not be turning the AC off overnight..

 

[leedude1]

LMAO.... thanks Tony, I need the giggle my man. I'm in New York with family and been stuck on the upper(outside deck) of a tour bus in the pouring rain for 2.5 hours.
You've just saved my sanity.

 

[Tony]

This heat has brought up another issue that I must take care of now... I noticed that the AC had been on for quite a while, so I decided to stick a thermometer in the vent and measure the AC temp coming out. It was 60ºF. Yea... So I took off the cover on my air handler and there were not any frozen tubes (sign of low refrigerant) and even the tubes were not that cold. I decided to head outside and put my gauges on the system. Maybe it was so low that it couldn't even frost over the pipes. So I connected my gauges to the compressor and it read 45lbs on the low side (I don't check the high side unless I absolutely have to. Requires gloves and a clean pair of drawers when you take it off...). 45lbs is more then enough to cool this thing down to about 40ºF on the air temp on the inside. So I decided to take a look at the fins. It seems that my AC unit outside is clogged just on the inside of the fins. Enough to where it will not pull in enough air to cool down the refrigerant that is going through it.

I grabbed the hose and a nozzle and sprayed down the coils and the pressure dropped by 8psi. So it is confirmed, I need to take the top off of the condenser and spray it from the inside out with high pressure water. If that doesn't work, I will need to order some chemicals that are made to do this job. Pretty much dissolves anything that is made of fiber, and leaves metallic objects alone. We have cotton wood around here really bad as well as other 'weeds' that produce very small "float in the air" seeds. That and dirt, lots and lots of dirt lol.

And glad I could help out Mike lol. Sucks that you are stuck on a bus. Man, I wish I was raining here.....

 

[Rob Lancaster]

Oh man Tony, I can't even come up with a bs theory as to how the antenna fell up and wound up in the heli frame.

I finished stripping all the electronics off the clone.
As I look at it all, I'm think'n,,, it's going to be like stuff'n 10 pounds of ka ka in a 5 pound bag..

 

[Tony]

Imma tell you, I flat can't catch a break. I went outside at first light to spray some chemicals on the garden since the bugs are taking over. I pull out the 3 point sprayer that I made, connect it all up, fill it up with some seven and plug it in. The pump primes for a bit and then chemical just starts spraying all over the place. Last winter it seems that I emptied everything out except the handle. Apparently it still had some water in the grip on the handle and in the freezing temps, it froze and cracked. Great... So I come inside to my 4 gallon backpack sprayer and naturally, that one will not fit the 15 gallon. So what do I do? I cut the hose off of the handle on the 15 gallon, took the handle off of the metal extension rod on the sprayer and put the hose onto the extension directly. I don't have on/off functions, but I can plug it in and unplug it. But I got the garden sprayed. And naturally, it looks like it is going to rain, so that is going to be a waste of chemicals.

So I posted about my AC unit outside being clogged up and checking the pressures. Well, I went ahead and took the top off of it and used the hose to blow it out and yea, it was a little dirty. Not as bad as I thought it would be though. I did check the temp before and after and I went from about 62ºF to about 54ºF on the inside air temp coming out of the vents. The evaporator coil temp is at 34ºF so that is about as cold as it can get without freezing up. So why did I do all of this? Because yesterday my AC couldn't keep up with the temps outside. The outside air temp and sun was heating up the inside of my house faster than my AC could cool it down. So, clean the outside condenser, check and added just a touch of R410 (shh, don't tell anyone ) and clean the filters inside and boom, we have colder air coming out of the vents inside. We will see today if all of this work payed off. Man I hope so...

 

[Tony]

Decided to give my mechanical keyboard another shot for the lulz. Pretty sure I'm not going to like it and I'm also pretty sure it is going to kill my wrists like it did before. But, before I toss it into the trash, I'm going to give it one more go. I really need to get me a proper keyboard....

The FN key on this keyboard is in the perfect spot for me to hit it with my palm. So far I have brought up the right click menu as well as somehow opened up the inspector which is normally f12, but I was no where near that key.

 

[Tony]

Now I remember one of the issues that I had with this keyboard. The right menu that I was talking about was right next to the FN key and I would hit it and I would hit a key, not sure which one, that would select all text then delete it all. Yea, this keyboard is going in the trash.

 

[Tony]

And I'm back on my wireless keyboard, but I'm still using a different mouse. And the reason for that is because I HATE that delay that the mouse has when it goes to sleep. I would rather just plug one in that is immediate.

So I'm doing the final proof of the next Goblin video. In this video, I make custom Spektrum Satellite Rx Wires. Yea, Nice clean wiring!!

 

[Tony]

Alright, doing the first video render on the new 6 core CPU. One issue. It is not turboing up for some reason. @rdsok, why is it not turboing? Not OC'd, stock bios settings.

It is rendering at about 15 frames more per second than my i7 though, so that is a bonus, even without turbo boost. Just imagine what this thing will do at 4.3Ghz.... hehe

Oh, adn I'm only using a max of 80% of the CPU during this render. Not sure why it is not using 100%.... Randy? lmao. But it is hitting all cores/threads.

 

[RandyDSok]

It'd be just a wild guess since ever BIOS has different settings available to them...

Look close for turbo/clock settings ... Linus ( of LTT ) had a similar issue on a motherboard he was playing with and it was just a setting or two in the BIOS that was the cause.

 

[Tony]

The weird thing is it was turboing when I first put it in. Not sure what changed.

 

[Tony]

Working on cleaning up my desktop... On the computer... There are way too many things on there right now..

Oh, and I did play around with the OC on the X5675 and I was able to get it up to about 4.4ghz with auto voltage. Yea, that was not a good idea lol. I just wanted to see what would happen.

 

[Tony]

Tried to do a stream, but nothing is working so no stream I guess. I will work on it, but I think I will just reinstall my OS instead... This is going to suck.

 

[Tony]

Well, since I can't do a live stream today, I figured I would cut the heat shrink off of the little square on the Micro Beast Satellite Rx adapter. I needed to know 1. if it was a voltage regulator, and 2. how it was put together. So I did....

First off, yes, it is a step down regulator. It uses the KB33 voltage regulator which is a 3.3 volt 150mA regulator. That is perfect. Now, I needed to know what the other components were. There are 3 of them, 2 ceramic capacitors and one resistor. The larger capacitor is for the input and is a 3µf cap, and the smaller one is a 1µf cap. Simple. The resistor is a 562 smd resistor which is a 5.6kΩ resistor.

Okay, we have the components (yes, that is all of them) now all we have to do is map out where they go. The signal wire is a straight passthough, nothing in the way. The ground is also a direct passthrough, but it connects to the ground side of the capacitors and the voltage regulator. The positive in connects to the in gate of the regulator and the out gate of the regulator goes to the positive pin of the satellite Rx. The positives and negatives, as stated, have the capacitors sitting on the rails for a little extra punch when it is needed.

The part that is weirding me out is that 5.6kΩ resistor is sitting between the positive output rail (going to the satellite) and the signal wire of the satellite. I have no idea why there is a resistor there, but it's there. The signal wire from the gyro to the satellite is a straight through trace. This is interesting.

But I now have enough information to make this drop down converter so that I can make another one of these for the other MB gyro that I have. Although by the time I order all of the parts, it will likely be more expensive and definitely larger than the OG lol. Very interesting though.

 

[Tony]

Finally reinstalled the clean OS on my computer. Now to put everything back on it... yea, this will be fun...

 

[Tony]

Sooo.... After reinstalling my OS on my desktop, I started installing some updates and now it will not boot up. It boots all the way into Windows where you have to log in, but once it gets there, it freezes and a program (that I can't remember the name of, I'm on my lappy right now) says not responding. Why do I see another install in my future. Or maybe me throwing that computer in the burn pile and setting it on fire.

 

[Tony]

Just when I am trying to relax during this awful heat and stupid electricity rates, the jackass contractors outside decide that they are going to hit a gas line right in front of my house. Thankfully it is just a residential line and not the MAIN that is going through my yard.... So now they have the road blocked off, no one in, no one out. Which is fine with me lmao. Other than hearing the fan on the fire truck kick on and off once in a while, it's actually quiet back here lol.