They therefore provide jobs to Australians by maintaining the factory here. Holden, and their parent company, General Motors are fully aware they can get labour cheaper in many other countries around the world.

Holden (and General Motors), know that to survive in a competitive market, they need to be innovative. They must ensure the product they sell meets the demands of their target markets, and keep the costs of meeting that objective low, in order to produce large profits  - so they can firstly maintain the business, and secondly satisfy share holder return on investment targets.

The basics of business. You find your market, you do whatever you can to capitalise that market, and you innovate to stay ahead of competitors.

I’m not surprised that Holden again is asking for a government handout or risk large numbers of jobs being lost. But they shouldn’t.

Holden being Holden merely need to make the business decision. Is it affordable to build the same car elsewhere, cheaper and import it, or is it cheaper to maintain the factory in Australia and pay staff the wages they do, at a rate which will no doubt demand increase just as Toyota attempted.

We don’t need to put government funds into competitive markets, they are competitive markets because others have found a way to do what Holden do, cheaper, or in a manner that the market decides is better than Holden, i.e. Toyota sell so many cars for a reason, Holden wasn’t the choice. Mazda are gaining sales in Australia because the market likes the Mazda offering.

Holden don’t need government funds, they need to find what the Australian market wants and deliver on that – and thinking for just a nano second, fuel prices are rising inline with demand for a limited resource – so targetting that more could yeild more sales. But Holden’s parent company already did that – through the Chevrolet Volt- an electric car.

If Holden still can produce the same car elsewhere, cheaper, and by a significant margin, then they shouldn’t pester the government for funds to stay in Australia, they should just get on with it – the profits will always be tempting no matter how much the government tries to meet them.

When more than too many of our jobs have been lost off shore, then, perhaps the market will again adjust to accept that there is in fact a limit to how high wages can increase and it’s flow on effect in the larger picture.

I don’t get it – why would you unnecessarily pay staff more money to do the same job? I know cost of living pressures increase the requirement for an increase – but then those pressures simply stem off other industries who also increase wages, pass the costs on to consumers. There’s got to be an absolute limit to that increase, I’m just now sure how that can be determined.

I’ve long seen this effect – from seeing Rental prices increase from what I thought was reasonable, at $160p/w to what now is $320p/w. Or the price of a bottle of Coke – $1.80 to $3.50.

The problem for Holden is where competitors have products in the market, think Nissan, Hyundai, who have a stronger price advantage – Holden can only go so cheap before they make next to nothing, and so lose sales in that way.

There used to be buy Australian Made adverts on TV – you’d think that those would have made many people think differently – but not so, at least, to me. I don’t care too much where a non-food item originates. It’s the quality and it’s value for money that will be my first consideration.

How does government funding of Holden change that? It doesn’t. It merely delays the inevitable, and forces tax payers to keep the temporary situation possible. It might only be cheaper if we assume the workers will all go to unemployment indefinitely – not so – many will find a job as soon as possible to maintain their lifestyle, whilst others would start their own pursuits, and then, you’ll have a subset stuck in unemployment for short to medium terms (as they have worked, they won’t want to be unemployed so are far more likely to find unemployment).

Funding Holden will only delay their inevitable decision – workers strike as they don’t get a pay rise, and Holden then decide they can’t afford that, and so pull out. Mitsubishi did similar as far as I know.

I was aiming to use the hardware driven serial on the Arduino’s ATMega328 chip – the reference docs claim it can support custom baud rates, so I figured it should just work.

The code base over at OBDuino suggests that Serial.begin(10400) should also work. I was blaming the circuit used for the lack of communication, which would make sense, but it does work with NewSoftSerial. I tested this last night by using 9600 baud with an ELM327 cable. The test fails using the baud rate of 10400 in the Hardware serial.

With NewSoftSerial working at 9600 baud, the missing link then becomes how to use 10400 baud with NewSoftSerial.

The answer was simple enough thankfully:

#if F_CPU == 16000000

static const DELAY_TABLE PROGMEM table[] =
{
// baud rxcenter rxintra rxstop tx
{ 115200, 1, 17, 17, 12, },
{ 57600, 10, 37, 37, 33, },
{ 38400, 25, 57, 57, 54, },
{ 31250, 31, 70, 70, 68, },
{ 28800, 34, 77, 77, 74, },
{ 19200, 54, 117, 117, 114, },
{ 14400, 74, 156, 156, 153, },
{ 10400, 106, 218, 218, 215, },
{ 9600, 114, 236, 236, 233, },
{ 4800, 233, 474, 474, 471, },
{ 2400, 471, 950, 950, 947, },
{ 1200, 947, 1902, 1902, 1899, },
{ 300, 3804, 7617, 7617, 7614, },
};

The baud rate 10400 is simply 10400 / 9600 = 1.0833333. Then for each of the 9600 rx and tx values, divide by 1.0833333.

Testing this with the OBD wake up that gets sent every second or so (ox01, 0x3E, 0x3F) gets the correct data as it would be at 9600 baud (and matches what I tested with the ECU in the car).

It’s not ideal though, software serial is using CPU clock cycles to fake an actual serial port, there needs to be a reason as to why the Arduino didn’t like 10400 baud, this is against the knowledge that it works with the OBDuino – a project that’s been used numerous times in the USA, and would therefore be successful.

It really should come down to whether the circuit is correct (I’ve tried the variation here; http://blog.perquin.com/prj/obdii/, and here elmelectronics.com/DSheets/ELM323DS.pdf, and the very simple zener and resistor circuit here, http://sterntech.com/obdii_protocols_iso.php) – not to mention variations to those to see if it was a TX related issue (- I was leaving TX empty for receiving only).

Being the holiday period it’ll take too long to track down one of the IC chips used in the OBDuino, and the MC33290 IC used there is End of life.

I’ve looked over this circuit by someone else who tried the same trick as the first link above, but that’s really only adding protection, and looking through his blog, I doubt he found a result – he claims he got the initial init – but that’s it)..

Logically thinking, the serial would be processed as one might expect, the data bits are logic high and low – 5V high, 0V low, the standard used in the car is that the circuit idles high and goes low when bits are being sent – so 0, 1, 0, 1 is simply 0V, 5V, 0V, 5V. That should be received, but perhaps the arduino’s software is discarding it – though that makes less sense compared to the circuit not producing enough current to trigger a logic high / logic low as need be. I don’t think the pulses are long enough for the DMM to pick up either.

I’ll have to toss up on how to solve this issue another time, I’ve got something to work with now that’ll get me the test setup I need for data transmission.

I tried a few methods of discovering just what the ones and zeros were telling me, and tonight, a break through, I now know precisely the 5 bytes used to initialise the Nissan ECU for Consult II protocol (and the ECU reply)!

The next is to then get discovering the raw data. The bytes always require calculation to derive the real value (i.e. Hex: 0A is what might be returned for RPM – but you won’t find a car doing 10 RPM). Of course fishing out what the PIDs are and those calculations is going to be fun.

I do hope to discover most of the information available and gather it then set up a microcontroller and small LCD display with it for data logging purposes.

That can then store info on real time fuel economy, giving the driver feedback as to whether the current style matches desired consumption (important with fuel prices catching reality). It has other reasonable uses too, log speed and attach a GPS and you can get some idea of what the car was doing and where. Get cameras and the above GPS and you can log useful information there too.

That’s off in the distance, I’ve still got to get the connection going, get the bytes moving and get the code written.

But on that note, why is it that when the simple solution is staring me right in the face (literally in some cases), I take the longest road?

I looked over the Granny Smith apple tree, trying to find if any of the flowers had started to turn into fruit, I look over them from time to time to see if they’ve got any issues – and typically just from the one side, this afternoon my partner had a look at it from the other side, and we’ve found something…

Two apples had been hiding behind the leaves at the top of the tree that I didn’t think there was anything behind..

I was well aware of the Lemon tree making progress – it’s got some fruit forming that’s a few months old and should be ready to harvest after the season is up.

The tree is still small, but it’s certainly larger than it started – this tree was the smallest of them all at the nursery, and had just two leaves and a very thin trunk at the start. It’s grown.

We’ve tried growing a heirloom variety of tomato this year, it’s called Black Russian, and is slightly unusual in that the fruit is a very dark colour. The plant is only about 5 weeks or so now and has put on strong growth with lots of fruit. I should add that there is a cucumber plant that’s very fast growing strangling it – it’ll be a competition – the strongest plant would win.

I don’t think there is a garden on this planet that hasn’t had issues with damned snails eating up young seedlings before they’ve had a chance to get big enough to support such an attack. So, we’ve just this week put in some snail traps to catch them – the trick with the trap is to have yeast and salt in combination. They like sugar and yeast type scents (the very same logic applies to alcohol, but sorry snails, you just aren’t worth that much..), so a bit of yeast, a bit of salt – done.

However, we weren’t planning on catching one of these….

Yes, it’s a cockroach in the snail trap – I wonder if that could be adapted for indoor use ?

The strawberry patch has been growing for some time, it started off with just a few seedlings, but spread itself out and took over the garden bed. The kids like strawberries, so the best solution – let them grow (the kids too). Not a lot of fruit though, damned snails get to them.

The chickens came along last year, they’ve been laying lots of eggs. We’ve had them escape before too. They aren’t too bad though, not noisy, and not a lot of maintenance too them.

Which one is for dinner? – They sit there thinking they were going to get some scraps – instead they got a photo.  As can be seen in the background, nothing is as good at getting rid of grass as a chicken. They’ll tear the ground up, get rid of the grass, crap all over it and scratch it over again – stopping any chance of the grass growing back …

Until you move them.

The corn and tomatoes are in there, they’ve grown over the tree stump. The chickens helpfully destroyed all grass, ate corn from their feed, ate cherry tomatoes from last years massive harvest, crapped them out, dug it over again, and that is the result after we moved them so that we could start on removing the tree stump – yes, progress has been slow.

The rain water tank is full, I was worried it’d be too dry over summer making it useless. Apparently not.

There is a nursery that we’ve started on in the backyard, however the mesh hasn’t been sewed together, and so the rest of it is unfinished.

Just like progress on seeding the follow on plants to replace the current lot.

Those are a few weeks old now, nothing. Nada. Zilch. The soil isn’t much either.

There are some Zucchini plants and Cucumber plants that are productive.

The Banana plants have some extras spawning off the side that we’ll need to transplant so that they become the replacements.

The first is the Solar Hot Water system, which is where I wanted to start – wirelessly read some temperature sensors, and send them to the server for logging purposes, and set up a warning to turn on electric heating if need be (it’d be a relay if it could, but it can’t at the moment).

The original point was so we could gauge some idea of how much hot water was flowing out to the flat compared to the house, but then looking at the system since we’ve again emptied the flat, the solar hot water is easily serving our requirements – it’s obvious the source of waste was the flat. Still would be useful to have wireless information on.

Next, I have some thoughts on monitoring the moisture and temperature of the soil, and then have a pump trigger as appropriate, to find and keep them in the ideal growing range. Not enough time to put that together in a good way.

Wireless data is easily done with the Arduino microcontrollers and the NRF24L01 from Nordic, and another use which I have just started putting together is wireless data transmission – I’ll be hooking it up to the serial line in the car to get that data wirelessly transmitted whilst I get the protocol data. Store this, read it, and then it’s just a matter of sending that data out correctly, to get the same data in reply.

The difficulties are not in the circuit (though this can be somewhat not so simple to put together), it’s not in the code (that’s easy, even if you do forget to allow for some events), it’s in the enclosure – putting them together in a way that allows the board, battery, and additions in a neat manner is not so easy.

Creating a custom board with the microcontroller and wireless chip on it would be a better idea – with inputs and power planned in the design.

I drove out to Gosford to get the car registration sorted, and then I went over to the Gosford RTA – I arrived 15 minutes early as specified. It was the wrong RTA branch (I booked in Erina – we were at Gosford). They were kind enough to let me take the test, very nice of them – I would have tried to make it to Erina (a 15 minute drive away) but sure, why not take it where we were. Nice service which is great from an organisation that charges through the nose for each of it’s services.

I took the test for the first time and got a perfect score – the lady at the RTA said it doesn’t happen often – just 6 people from what she recalls had a perfect score.

The DQT is similar to previous tests but more difficult in the required responses – multiple responses are required in some cases. The tricks are to only take the safest of safe gaps, and don’t overtake unless you have complete visibility – I didn’t overtake at all.

I prepared for it though, there is a handbook on the RTA website that if you don’t read, will cause you to get some of the questions wrong – the questions are far from common knowledge in some cases and so the answers must be known. I also practised using the SA Mylicence HPT, some of which are actually in the DQT test.

After I passed, I took the P plates off the Pulsar. That answered my partners question to whether I passed or not (or I like getting fines..).

The best option they have is 5 years for $157 – so I took that which gives an effective price of around $30 a year (as long as you don’t lose it by points or physically).

I could complain about how the system is extremely flawed and should be changed to require better driver training instead of pissing around with log books and touch screens, but I won’t.

Then, after I got the licence, I reversed out of the parking spot, drove forward and failed to stop at the stop sign at the carpark (I reckon they catch L platers unprepared that way too). 15 seconds into my full licence and first road rule violation. Licencing isn’t perfect, and neither are humans.

After I got back the Sonata got a wash at last, and then jump started and moved to the front, an ad now exists on Gumtree to get rid of it if anyone wants it registered and working (Cancelling the rego would make it harder to move). We already have a call about it- but I’m reluctant to drop $100 in it’s first hour.

I thought it might be a storm water issue after having rain pool at a specific spot and so dug around only to find there is no storm water pipe along that part of the house – the PVC pipe from the back of that side runs out to the granny flat’s pipe work then back around to the front via the driveway.

So with that ruled out, and council useless as usual, and water pooling under the other side of the house as well, I decided we’d stick in a drainage trench to remove the water from the side of the house next to the wall, and see if that fixes the water going under the house on the other side (it might if it’s travelling under or over the foundation brick work).

The painful bits of the trench are digging it and trying to plan a usable path for it. I didn’t put a lot of thought into where we were going at the start, originally planning to run the trench toward the backyard, and link to storm water there, but we have plans to extend over that part of the backyard, and the foxtel dish is in the way.

So the other way, towards the front yard seemed to be OK – and this was what we ended up doing – the path the pipe takes is actually not unworkable – there’s a good garden beds space on the side of the fence facing the pipe – so it’s not going to get in the way.

After digging the trench and walking around in mud, the next bit was to get the gravel and sand. I came stuck planning on how the storm water connection was going to work from the pit considering the water was going to be 400mm underground and the storm water is at 110mm.
The fix to that was to use the angle we are on to our advantage and connect to the pipe further down – 9m down from the pit – but again, all worked in well because the fence and pipe leaves about 900mm of room to have a garden bed in without interrupting the pipe.

We then glued the pipe in and started on lining the drainage trench with geotextile fabric, then inside this was a layer of gravel, and then the ag pipe goes in, and fill with gravel.

That was 2 weekends worth of sorting out.

We got sand and turns out we got by without it – the sand was originally going to line the trench to make grading it easier – turns out you are better off grading mud. The kids have been playing with it – so may be they’ll have a sand pit (and even a gravel pit if there’s gravel left).

Last night, I was determined to see it start flowing after having the pipes in place and seeing water build up behind the pit. I pushed the pit into the ground a touch more and it started bubbling into the pit through the ag pipe.

After going out and coming back, the water was flowing through the storm water connection out to the street. No more water pooling near the house now.

Of course, now we have the drainage trench in, it’ll hardly ever rain until next winter, I bet.

There’s always the clean up and finishing bit – that is, finish filling it with gravel, get the soil somewhere else and make it look good again.

The hope is also that the front lawn will be less soggy and so more green grass. I can only hope.

With that out of the way though, this afternoon after work, I made a start on the Sonata, it’s sitting around doing nothing, so I’ve been planning on tidying it up and seeing whether anyone wants to buy it. Today, I stuck in thicker oil to sort out a leak it had developed. The rocker cover has a bolt or two in it that seem to let oil seep around it, but also, it seeped out and onto the exhaust manifold.
The alternator of course had oil drops on it. That was with 10W30 oil.

So I stuck in 20W50, thick oil. Not good for fuel economy, but should sort that leak out.

I now need to rip out the front door lock assembly and fix or replace it because you can’t open it from inside – not good to pass rego with that.

Once that is sorted out, we’ll have to refit the glove box – I took it out when I installed the fuel monitoring circuit direct to the ECU. Never got around to putting it back in because the leak in the windscreen had to be traced through there too.

Once that’s done the Sonata can probably get a clean and see what people are prepared to buy it for and good timing too, because the Pulsar’s rego is due soon – there goes $900.

I’ve been keeping an eye on it’s consumption and it’s getting 6.4L/100kM at the moment, far better than the 10L/100kM the Sonata was pulling – of course they are both very different cars and very different engines – the Sonata has a large 2L engine.

The problem turned out to be the spark plug, which would work but go crappy after the motor had heated up.

I didn’t realise this until after I cleaned it with Isopropyl Alcohol and a screw driver scratching away the crap that built up on the plug (I didn’t have any sand paper).

The Isopropyl Alcohol is very flammable, so would assure a spark (or flame of some sort to get the mower pushing along). This got the mower going for a while and then the plug would get black again and then stop.

So I went out to Bunnings later today, and got a new plug, tried it and still no joy, took the old plug did another clean, petrol in the spark plug hole, Alcohol on the plug, and it worked until it went black and stopped.

So I took the best of both worlds on the new plug, Alcohol and a firm push on the spark plug connector, and it started first pull! Damned – could have done that yesterday – or earlier today when I was going to get a new spark plug. Oh well, it worked.

I let it idle and adjusted the mixture to stop it popping and shaking about (due to my earlier efforts in trying to start it today), and it worked nicely. At idle. That wasn’t going to knock down all the clover and long grass we had under the trampoline.

So I took another go at refitting the governor spring, which is the spring that goes from the throttle, and it got the revs right up and stayed there (because the throttle was full on).
The spring is in a sad state, coming off the assembly when adjusting from idle to full rev to empty the catcher for example, so I’ll simply have just an on and off state for now until I track down another spring.

The throttle cable on the handle has an issue when being pushed down in that it falls out of the bottom, it’s probably split so will need fixing later as well.

The new spark plug was $4. The petrol to overfill the tank was $3. The mower itself was $20!

The lawn mower works, the grass is cut, took the entire weekend to get there, but it’s done.

I might keep a supply of that Isopropyl Alcohol. It’s good s@#t!

I found one on Gumtree (which is good, because I was originally considering adding it to the proxy filter list due to the useless ‘central coast’ searches).

A mower was up for sale for $20, about 30 mins drive from us:

http://centralcoastnsw.gumtree.com.au/c-ViewAdLargeImage?AdId=308682622

Looks alright for $20 – doesn’t work she says, she’s not mechanically minded. I figure it might be something simple, or might be only scrap metal, either way it’s worth a shot for $20 (a cut costs $50!).

I get it back today, start it up – won’t turn over, it pulls and tries to start, but it won’t. So I take a look at fuel – there’s some in there, unknown age. The spark plug connection is loose, but there’s contact. The air filter – is in a poor condition.

With each pull you can start to see oil coming out of the exhaust of the mower, so we keep pulling and getting more oil out, but more closer to progress, and then it starts!… and stops.
Then it starts again. And stops.
And again. More oil on the deck.

Then after a few more pulls, it finally starts and stays started. I let it run for a bit as it smokes out the yard and remainder of our street.

Then I get to cutting, I start with a small easy patch to avoid it stalling and progressively start cutting the lawn, and get to the clover growing near the clothesline, it cuts through just fine.

I probably got 20 minutes into cutting it and it stalls. Catcher was just emptied and I ran over a small patch of clover, so it wasn’t struggling.

I tried pulling off the fuel tank and cleaning up the fuel a bit, it’d start but wouldn’t stay started stalling within 1 second of starting.
I checked spark plug, seemed OK to me, dark but not oily.

I then thought the fuel might be crap (we don’t know when it was last used) – but after draining the fuel and refilling again, no joy.

I couldn’t get the carby off as I couldn’t find a flat head screw driver – how is that, that I have 4 philips within arms reach, but no flat head to be found easily anywhere.

I know there is spark from testing the plug outside the hole, it was sparking as expected.

Hopefully it works tomorrow so I can finish cutting the grass, there’s about 25% of the back yard that looks good, the rest looks crap as it’s badly overgrown.

Many of the stone fruit trees look the same as they did last week, however the Citrus varieties are showing growth, most notable is the Lemon tree.

That tree started as just a small twig with two leaves, it seemed like the odd one out, but we bought it anyway.

In just a week it’s put on a lot of growth and going from just one flower to 5, and has new leaves all over. It’s put on significant growth and continues to do so.

There was also a Mandarin tree we bought a few months ago. The kids love Mandarin’s so having two of them is a great idea. The new tree is smaller than the tree we bought last year, but is already flowering – it has potential to fruit if it gets pollinated.

The apple trees are slowing down, so it might be getting to an ideal point to get them in the ground somewhere.

Our chickens will need to be fenced out of the vegie garden and tree areas, I can see they would have the ability to dig out a tree, or destroy the garden beds with their scratching.

I’m currently looking for fencing. Two kinds, a nice-ish loop and spike type in Primrose colour to fence the front off. And any kind of fencing for the garden beds / tree areas to keep the chickens out.

Another idea also occurred to me this week, we want to remove a tree stump. We’ve ruled out stump grinding for many reasons, so some sort of mechanical means is necessary – cutting the roots off, and then digging the stump out is likely, but I kind of like the idea of a winch, to pull it out of the ground – they can pull 4WDs out, so the tree stump (with some preparation) should be easy. Or just dig it out.

I came across the Consult II hand held scanner manual which specifies 3 protocols used of which ISO9141 and KWP2000 are specified as using the DLC-II connector in the car (the OBDII connector).

ISO9141 is mentioned in the service manual as being used for OBDII communication (with any generic scan tool) – however I confirmed in our version it definitely doesn’t support the OBDII standard, whilst, KWP2000 is used for the Consult II protocol.

Not a lot to go with initially, but I also came across a manual for a key reprogrammer (the keys for our car are coded to the immobiliser and then to the ECU – meaning if you replace the key, the ECU needs reprogramming, if you replace the ECU, the new ECU needs reprogramming).

The baud rates mentioned there are 9600 or 10472. My bets are on 10472 baud being used.

With this, it’s now going to be a case of setting up a test of KWP2000 to the ECU at 10472 baud and attempt to request information from the car.

The KWP2000 protocol is documented, but the requests and responses, the calculations to translate the hex responses to valid data just don’t seem to be publicised.

I do know there are two items out that apparently accomplish very similar to the Nissan Consult II scanner (4000.00 on Ebay). The alternatives are the BlaztII cable for $120 USD (requires a PC in the car), or a handheld scanner from china – “Memoscan N607″ – also typically around the $120 mark.

As I considered last time I was thinking about this, the ECU really is just calculating values from sensors around the car. There’s no reason why the sensors themselves couldn’t be monitored directly and then calculate the same desired information.
I just don’t really want to be running additional cables through the engine bay to get the desired data when a perfectly good data line already exists.

If only the request / responses were readily available!

We have plans to eventually remove that building, so paying Telstra $300 plus wasting a weekend digging a trench just to ensure she would be responsible for whatever usage for the very short time she plans to be there is nonsensical (the price is nonsensical at any time).

Instead, I think we can manage this using a wireless network that we had setup previously for the flat, and lock it right down so that only allowed traffic is sent over the link.

I haven’t done it yet, only thinking about it.

First, I’d specify a specific IP and set that in my Cisco router to allow access to port 80, 1863 only. No email, Skype, P2P or other hassles.

Then, I’d setup the wireless link using the Linksys WRT54G I have running DD-WRT. It would be a client of the main network, a static IP configured to ensure access-list compliance.

The password for the Linksys router being secured, should ensure that she can’t ever try and circumvent the measure by resetting the router – as it would remove the connection settings thus requiring my Cisco wireless password to get back online.

The Linksys router would then have wireless security applied (a second network at that, as DD-WRT can run as both a wireless client and a wireless AP). The Linksys router would be configured to drop traffic to all hosts with exception of specific hosts (i.e. hostnames ‘facebook.com’ would be allowed).

The other alternative would be for the Cisco router to forward that traffic through my proxy server first and have it filter out any requests for websites that aren’t allowed, but that adds needless delay – configure DNS in the Linksys router to point to itself, and specify a list of IPs and hostnames so that all that it can resolve are those hostnames.

Since only port 80 & port 1863 are allowed at the Cisco side of the network, there won’t be any traffic allowed for DNS (well, there is if they prefer to do web queries for every hostname they look up – but the specific host names only being allowed would stop that).

No Virus issues, no Spam, no P2P, just simple web browsing and some MSN capabilities. Sounds pretty secure. Theoretically, one could P2P using it, but since the only allowed hosts are specified – that removes that possibility.

My partner wants her to have limited internet access, since I didn’t want the traffic so just said no access at all – this sounds like a good compromise between nothing, and ‘very little’.

I was getting tired of setting up SSH port forwards and thought about using VPN, given I have both a Linux server and a Cisco router that both can easily fulfill the function, I decided to see what the Cisco would be like to setup for PPTP VPN.

I was expecting to have to use a Radius server for authentication, but found that the local usernames on the router are good.

IP ranges on a VPN don’t need to be different, it can work with the same IP range, however traffic for that specific IP must be explicitly routed to the router, else it won’t work – it’ll attempt to find the host via Broadcast address.

Rather than doing that, I have a second LAN subnet used primarily for the ADSL modem’s web interface, this works fine – so I used that.

Unless you really are using a radius server, I wouldn’t bother with ‘aaa new-model’ as suggested elsewhere.

Commands to setup a Cisco 871W for PPTP VPN:
vpdn enable
!
vpdn-group 1
! Default PPTP VPDN group
accept-dialin
protocol pptp
virtual-template 1
!
!
!
!
username (username) password 0 (password)

interface Virtual-Template1
ip unnumbered BVI1
ip nat inside
ip virtual-reassembly
peer default ip address pool vpn
no keepalive
ppp encrypt mppe auto
ppp authentication ms-chap ms-chap-v2
!

I use BVI1 as this is a bridge between my wireless LAN and wired LAN.

I created a pool of IP addresses specifically for VPN:
ip local pool vpn 192.168.1.5 192.168.1.10

Then I added that IP range to the access-list (well it was already there, but you need it for accessing the extenal connection)
access-list 1 permit 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.255

You can then connect to it (using Windows or Ubuntu PPTP VPN).

sh users gives:
Interface User Mode Idle Peer Address
Vi5 (username) PPPoVPDN 00:04:40 192.168.1.5

You can of course apply access lists to limit the access of users.

When setting up the VPN client, I first always, unselect the box that states to use the default gateway on the remote network.

After all, we don’t want to use the remote network for all traffic – just the traffic that matters to that network.
This creates a problem though, since we aren’t using the default gateway on the remote network, our traffic for the IPs in the LAN range i.e. 192.168.0.1 (and not the VPN IP Range – i.e. 192.168.1.1) would be sent to the default gateway of the PPTP Client.

To fix that, you need to add a static route on the machine you are connecting from (the PPTP client).
Windows:
route add 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.5
.. will give routing to the 192.168.0.1 IP via the VPN 192.168.1.5

Ubuntu is far more friendly, allowing you to create routes in the connection definition to save having to do it at each time to the VPN connection is lost. This is in VPN connection properties under IPv4 Settings, then click Routes.

Specify Address, Netmask, and Gateway.

Obviously, you cannot have both networks in the same LAN IP range and be successful at routing across both networks.

After much, much, much Googling and some testing, I concluded that there is no OBDII support, and the car has only Nissan’s Consult II protocol available.

That’s bad in terms of support for performance monitoring, as the protocol for Consult II doesn’t seem well documented (and those who do have it, don’t seem to be detailing it – rather going to lengths to conceal their own findings).

There’s always more than one way to skin a cat, and I was reminded of that again today, in trying to solve another issue. The original intention was to get real time data on fuel – and I can do that just as I did in the Sonata – injectors get turned on and off, so use that signal. The car has a working speedo, use that signal.

I spent hours upon hours over weeks searching and found as much as I could about the protocol available – I flicked through the service manual and of course it’s there in black and white!

Getting data from Consult II is not out of the question though – bit banging is a well documented technique for discovering protocols and the data being carried across them. It’s a fair bit of effort though.

I tried to test for OBDII specifically, but that didn’t work. The battery in the car went flat again too, and I was really only in it for 30 minutes or so with the music and sometimes the light on. 30 minutes with such a low load (stereo couldn’t be too much!), suggests either the speakers in the back are very high, or this battery is needing some maintenance or investigation. Luckily I have jump start cables from the last flat battery, and the Sonata is still lingering around.
Now it’s out on the street (in case I need another jump start, it’s difficult moving a car around a tight corner), maybe after we finish getting the Tyres and Servicing on the Pulsar, we’ll find a new home for it.

Ignoring that, we’ve been planning some extra fruit trees for some time now, we were waiting on some trees ‘taller than the seller’ to become available at the local markets over several weeks – we gave up waiting and got some from the nurseries instead which seem taller than us.

Our choices were limited primarily to what we know the kids love to eat. The vegie patch has been pretty bare so we moved the garden beds from the back corner of the yard and bought them forward more, making room for the trees to go in on the side and planned spacing between them allowing for growth.

This created it’s own problem – the Citrus trees need to go in the ground from their temporary homes (a great idea at the time). They can’t now as they are all putting on rapid growth and any transplanting would likely cause them harm.

The space available for the trees is limited, so the shed will need to go for that to happen – which is already planned.

I didn’t see it was on as it was raining last night and I was too focused on getting the oldest kid inside.

I tried to clutch start it, figuring it was just the interior light, couldn’t be that flat, surely.. stuck it in 2nd, rolled down the driveway, but just nothing there.

I’ve been planning on either selling off the Sonata recently (fully disclosing every single issue with it), to deregistering it and leaving it there to rust out or getting it to scrap metal.

Thankfully progress has been slow, and so the car is still registered. It’s battery which was sure to be flat was surprisingly capable of starting the car – and no more belt squeal for some reason. That’s probably related to the trip out to the dump last weekend – though it needed a charge to make that trip.

I was tossing up between charging the battery in the Pulsar overnight or getting jumper cables and taking it for a spin to get the battery charged – speedy jumper cables won, and worked surprisingly well (I was expecting to have to get the Sonata revved up – but not so).

Fuel was low (as expected, I wanted to run the fuel down in the Sonata so it didn’t sit there with a lot of fuel), I drove it 20ks to work and figured it probably would run out of fuel on the way home at some point – so had to add more fuel. I’ll burn it off somehow.

The Sonata stinks too though, it had a bad leak on the passenger side, and pretty much had a lake on the passenger side that soaked the carpet – it stunk and still does.

Back to it though, I’ve been trying to find a feasible method of communication with the ECU of the Pulsar. The Sonata had used MUT (Mitsubishi protocol), for data. Nissan have their own Consult II protocol, which doesn’t seem to have much on the net in terms of how it operates.

OBDII is non existent I think. So I’m looking at other communication methods so I don’t have to solder on to the injector and speedo wires as I did in the Sonata for the Carduino. The Data connector exists, perhaps OBD II is there but the cable I used to connect was not functional – so I am going to attempt that.

Then I will sus out if there is “CAN” communication – “Controller Area Network” communication, this allows the ECU to talk to other parts of the car – such as Transmission in Auto cars, or in the case of ours, the Combination Meter (Odometer display) also would be talking to it. If I can chase that out, I can run that to the OBD II connector and that would give me communication to the ECU.

I dislike having to use the remote to skip tracks / set random mode that our head unit has – so I want to rig up something with that to send signals directly, mounting some buttons above the unit.

Then I want to add an annoying speaker to the interior light, thus if it’s on, it’ll be damned annoying, and only turn off with the doors shut (or turned off), thus preventing it happening again.

I understand the key concept – a tyre with a lower rolling resistance takes less power to get moving, and keep moving, and thus will be more efficient. Simple.

Finding exactly which tyre has the lowest rolling resistance, in theory, isn’t hard. Grab some low rolling resistance tyres, let them roll, the one that rolls the furthest wins.
In theory.

Finding a tyre shop that has that kind of space, and isn’t affected by wind, and will let you take some tyres, fit them to some rims, inflate them to 40 PSI and roll them down the road by applying the same force to all, is not easy.

And I would have thought the manufacturers looking to pimp their black tyres with green advertising involving kids, clouds and nature (as if tyres are somehow environmentally sustainable!), would show that data.

“When subjected to a force of X kg, the tyre fitted to a rim, inflated to x PSI, rolled x metres before finally coming to a stop”.

Then, for the customer shopping around, it’s easy to say “That tyre costs $20 more, but only rolls an extra 1 metre”. It’s not.

So you have to troll through all the ‘green’ advertising for the Michelin Energy XM2, Pirelli Cinturato P6, Bridgestone Ecopia, Goodyear’s whatever the heck it was, and the like and see if there’s a hint of a number of how ‘low’ is the rolling resistance.

We came across Choice’s article online, but I dismissed that because I remember finding that new tyres will have a coating from the manufacturing process on them still and that needs to be worn off first.

Nitrogen was another to check into, but dismissed because the car is never on the race track, the likely result will be a slightly higher than is already in air content of nitrogen in the tyre.

The prices on them are variable too, I get that some are likely to last longer than others – that’s a quality thing, what really would help them sell one tyre over another (except for those lured by green advertising), would be to show the real world numbers on them.

For now, Michelin’s XM2 is the likely candidate – Pirelli’s website doesn’t leave much to work with, Bridgestone’s website doesn’t do a great deal with a Planet Ark logo and ‘green’ Ecopia logo – but no data to really say exactly what the tyre is capable of.

Pirelli and Bridgestone are cheaper than the Michelin tyres, but there’s nothing there to make a purchase decision on, more simply put – I might as well just put Budget tyres on as they were at least $120 cheaper.

Michelin’s got some information in Google from others who have used them, and a website fit to sell them – it’s easy to see:

- “20% Extra Mileage”, cool, so the tyres cost 40% more yet last 20% longer.
- “10% less rolling resistance”, ok, so that’s not going to translate to much in fuel economy.

Looking at the US Dept of Energy’s website they have numbers on percentage reduction in fuel consumption per percentage decrease of rolling resistance. The best number is 0.19. That is, for every 1% decrease in rolling resistance, you get 0.19% reduction in fuel consumption.

Michelin made that easy, 1.9% reduction in fuel consumption by using their tyres.

They last around 50,000kM according to my Googling (maybe longer, maybe shorter). I know my current car is supposed to get around 6L/100kM. So, to travel 50,000kM, I need to use 3000L (around there, say 3500L if we were getting 7L on average). At 1.9%, we’ll save 66.5L a corner, 4 corners is 266L. At today’s rough price of $1.41 (I use 95RON min, Ethanol is actually worse off for our food supply and the planet) – 266L is $375. Not a bad result at all. I might be confused and the result doesn’t need to be multiplied by 4, in which case the savings in fuel come to $93.

If the result is $93, and is divided by 4 for the 4 tyres, it reduces the price per tyre down to $109, and counting the extra life of the tyre, that’s easily worth it (it’s around $20 extra from ‘budget’ tyres, and these last 20% longer for an 18% increase in price after fuel savings subtracted).

That of course, assumes a few things, like, Michelin’s website contains no misleading or incorrect marketing statements, and the promised benefits are actually realised. I’d like to have been able to check that against the other possible candidates. The Planet Ark logo isn’t enough to sell me some tyres. A splash of ‘green’ tells me nothing about the product.

It stopped enough today but I took the time to get the radio working (only CDs were working, and one CD gets very repetitive day in, day out).

I pulled out the dash surround thinking I’d find he’s done something odd with the amp that he had hooked up (i.e. left the antenna unplugged or something). After isolating it as much as I could, there was still no reception on radio. Got out the multimeter, and checked continuity from the antenna to the plug.

So, I pulled out another head unit we had from China, and set it up, the wiring job for the previous Sony head unit was a bit messy, a electrical tape job which seemed to have loose wires – when I was removing it, the speakers were dropping in and out, and that wasn’t just the ground connection (which is simply a wire tied to the chassis).

So the best solution was to find the right wiring for the car and chopping the mess out, and then soldering and heat shrinking the connections to the connector we have. I pulled up Google and found the wiring diagram here. I checked that the colours matched and they do. I taped the connections together, the heat shrink I have is too small for the cables to fit into well.

The head unit has video support, USB, MP3, DVD and SD support – awesome set of features for a media player – but we need to get a video screen to use it’s video features. We don’t go on enough long trips and our kids are well enough behaved to not need it – but it’s USB support is nice to have for loading up music and updating it without having to burn CDs (and it can play them too).

It doesn’t have any fancy crap like bluetooth integration or navigation in it, not needed.

When it stops raining, I hope to get out the back and check on the passionfruit vines – they are exceeding the height of the trellis, so probably need to be given some direction and feeding. And the Cherry Tomato bush which has litterally outgrown the area it’s in will have to come out as it’s starting to show it’s finished with.

There are some more seedlings to go in, and hopefully, some more to harvest. The chickens need to have their home relocated away from the tree stump whilst we figure out the outcome for it. And with the fence next door nearing completion, it’s time to find out what style fence will go out the front, so we can tackle that.

One day, we will have the answer to our flooding back and front yard issues, our neighbours on one side are getting flooded out as well, and the townhouses on the other side are finally fixing their driveway. I’m not sure if it’ll sort out the run off into our yard, and the flooding or not. I hope it does, the elderly neighbours next door are pretty pissed off – I’m just annoyed I have to walk through sludge to get to the car. Council seem to be pretty slow at responding though – charge us two arms and a leg for rates and take 2 months or more to investigate a drainage issue.

It’s really only a problem when it rains though, no rain, the backyard is fine (unless your digging fence post holes, where you’ll find around 5L of water after a 600mm hole).

Hopefully next weekend the rain gives us a break, but then there’s a trip to the dump due then for some old crap that’s got to go (and hopefully the side fence makes that trip!).

And I still need new tyres.

The few things that I immediately noticed was – the headlights are much brighter than on the other car. The ability to see the road at night is a welcome change from the previous short distance on the old car.

There’s less engine noise in the car, that’s not just because it’s a 1.8L instead of a 2L, it’s definitely a lot quieter in the Pulsar then it is in the Sonata, but this isn’t easily related to the body, it was raining on the freeway on the way home from Sydney, and it was definitely noticeable.

There’s a few issues with it, Tyres – there’s barely any tread on them, that is, there is nearly none on them.
The seller took the tow ball off (didn’t realise til I got home).
The stereo works for CDs only, FM gets nothing (antenna might not be connected).

I do like the interior light coming on inside the car at night when unlocking, I didn’t get out of work til after 6pm tonight, so I immediately noticed the interior light staying on, allowing me to find the key and start the car (at which point it immediately went off).

I like that it’s got an OBDII port readily accessible – this will make installing the Carduino much more simpler then the previous (OBDII puts out data that can be used for monitoring, where as the Sonata required soldering Cat5 to the ECU connectors and then calculations done based on pulses on a circuit to get the data).

Mechanically it’s got nothing obvious wrong, I’m getting used to the short shifts, and the car driving more like a car. I took it to a carpark tonight, to get it into tight turns to see if the CV joints were going to give us trouble, and the turning circle is noticeably tighter than our old car.

Insurance – since the car isn’t old, and worth a bit more than we paid for it, I figure if we get Comprehensive insurance, at a good rate, and then we can downgrade to Third Party after it’s a few more years on. I looked at a few of the big names advertising lately – “YouI” – I dislike them, previously getting a quote with them, they called me the next day – I don’t like that when all I want is a quote – and you have to get an SMS for a code to get a quote!

Next was Budget Direct, claiming that they’ll give you $50 if you find a better price elsewhere – $800 for coverage at $6700 – not what I wanted.

Progressive Direct came in at $616, which is very good, but I couldn’t get any good feedback online about whether they have a bad reputation on repairs (like AAMI).

Then, Bingle, which was cheapest of all $500-ish. I read online that one of the sticking points for their customers is the ‘not at fault’ claim, they require the excess until they get the funds from the at fault driver.

Now, on Friday, as I was driving down our street to go out, I reach the main road that intersects our street, ready to turn left. There’s a car already there waiting, so I wait a distance behind as I do (still seeing back tyres to give an idea). She starts reversing back (no idea why), and so I beep to get her attention, make sure she realises I am there…
She keeps going – I stay on the horn, and she hits us.
It was a solid bump too, the car felt as if it was being pushed back and the brakes were stopping her.

So she pulls around the corner, as she should, and she gets out, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking” – too damned right you weren’t looking.

I figure she’s damaged our bumper, sweet, we can get that new bumper I’ve been wanting to get (or have her insurer write off our car). I look at our bumper, pop the bonnet, look at the radiator and can’t see anything at all wrong with it. I look at the back of her Hyundai Elantra – nothing wrong with that, no scratches, nothing.

How’s that for (un)lucky, she’s reversed into our old car, and not a mark or scratch was made to either.

Back to Insurance, she’d be at fault there, and she told me she’d call me with her insurance details (she has NRMA Roadside membership lol, no insurance). She never did call back, but, in that case, we’d have been an additional $500 out of pocket for the excess to Bingle, until they successfully recovered the full amount from her, then Bingle would refund us that $500.

I know some people are broke, flat broke, they’d never pay, or they’d be ridiculously slow at paying (and Third Party is cheap, $200!). However, if the base premium for $6000 coverage, on a car we paid $4500 is $500, and the worst case, we’d have to pay an extra $500 for a not-at fault accident, where we’d get that back “eventually”, then it’s not so bad – $500 + $530 = $1030, just a slightly bit more expensive then the likes of AAMI, but still cheaper than CBA ($1600!).

And it’s not like you claim every year, so the savings end up stacking into your favour if you are a careful driver and avoid at-fault claims (and not at fault).

Self Insuring is OK if the car is worth a lot less (i.e. $1500 – you probably wouldn’t claim on the policy in 2 years), saving the money for a new car. But, don’t have “no insurance” like the idiot who reversed into us Friday.

She just got lucky that nothing got damaged (and I was looking for a new bumper insurance payout too >.< ).

Back on topic, I like our new car. It’s not boring like a Corolla, and it’s not gutless like a Mazda 121.

I like the description of the new job, it’s integrating differing systems and I think I like that best (beats Support easily).

Downsides of a new job is meeting and working with different people. And the fact it’s not work from home is another minor downside.

But it’s better paying and uses more of my skills. A big win.

A new car – I had set about finding a new car, the rust on our car’s firewall is pretty significant, it’s not something I’m able to see an end to, we’d patch it up again and it might last another year or so, but then it’ll rust again.
The current car has formed oil leaks as well (it’s due to the car getting an oil flush once, it probably robbed the necessary gunk that replaced the seals many years ago).

I was originally looking around for a Mitsubishi Lancer but found just one – the bonnet looked like it had a person’s head hit it, and the back was scratched up – we went to inspect it closer, but the car was sold as we were getting there.

Digging around on carsales.com.au two cars caught my eye – a Hyundai Elantra 2003 model, going for a steal at $3300. The seller’s explanation was the body is at 97% due to being a country car.
I figure, well, our roads are probably worse than whatever that’s seen, and the pictures don’t show anything wrong with it – so we go to Sydney and check it out.
It’s body is nothing like the seller says, the minor dents are just as if it had hail hit it in a few spots – nothing wrong with that.

The mechanical side, his done himself apparently, that’s OK if it’s been done correctly. So I pull out the dip stick, when was the last service? About 500KM ago he says – the oil was fairly dark, I wouldn’t have thought 500kM, but I don’t bother with it – oil can be changed – it had oil, so that was fine.

He replaced the shocks and 2 CV joints (country car, fair enough probably needed it), I look at those and they look real good – turns out he got the entire axle cheaper than the joints themselves – that’s the spirit, don’t work too hard.

Next sticking point, Timing Belt – the Beta engines need them changed, being a car from Korea, you wouldn’t want to risk going over the recommended times. So when was it last done?
Car was bought from a first owner, so the log books tell the story there – warranty up, timing belt due – car was sold.

Has he done it ? Nope. Never had to apparently.
So what happens when the timing belt is not done? Oh, it just makes some noise if it starts to snap. Maybe.

What actually happens when the timing belt snaps? Pistons and Valves that are usually kept apart by precision timing are not – so they smash into each other, doing more damage than the car is worth, thus destroying the car.

But since the rest of the car checked out except that, I was suggesting to change the belt as part of the sale with an increased price (being in Sydney, it’s too far for me to arrange the change at a mechanic, and I wasn’t going to risk the trip home with a belt that’s logically, 4 years overdue for changing). He declined – his loss.

We had rang up about the only other car that wasn’t a Daewoo or an Astra (both of those were not going to be bought), and found a 2003 Nissan Pulsar.
The seller described it over the phone earlier that week as being keyed right down the sides, so I decided at the time we wouldn’t bother with that.

But on the weekend, we were already down in Sydney, so we’d have a look and see what it was, and perhaps it might buff out if it wasn’t too bad with the damage he described (having previously seen the Hyundai’s ‘damage’).

I go have a look and there is no damage down the side, his keyed down the sides was just two very minor scratches, close together on the front, which haven’t even dug into the paint.

That was all that was wrong with it aside from the black paint showing signs as being washed with a bad brush (can’t help car parks and carwashes).
I had a look for any signs of rust as well, and couldn’t see anything, there was leaves on it, but his description of what happened matches – the car has been parked since he has a work car – under a tree. Autumn having just past, it makes sense that there’d be leaves there – nothing a good clean won’t fix.

It had less ks on the clock, and everything else about the car seemed fine (though the shifter seemed very close together compared to my current car – my current car has longer spacing between the gears where as the Pulsar was very close – nothing wrong with it, just different).

It’s got a Timing Chain as well – no timing belt to replace makes up for my inability to haggle on price.
So I’ve bought it!

Wasted time on our current Hyundai Sonata? Nah, I’ll probably strip out the useful and not so useful bits out of it and then decide what to do with what’s left.
I already have someone wanting it’s tow bar.

The last two tanks of fuel had the jumper wires that were jammed into the connector, come loose, and so I’ve never really had solid tank data – in the last case, I saw the kMs increasing without any actual driving happening – that’s no good.

So fixing that, installed the cable more permanently, and I’ve nearly finished moving the circuit off the breadboard and onto some protoboard.

The next will be the case, I was contemplating a few alternatives, making it out of aluminium crossed my mind, but that has headaches with making sure no connections are shorting out and so on. Forget it. Acrylic was another option, MDF the next option.

I am settling on MDF, it’s easy to jigsaw, paints well, and at 3mm thickness with smoothed edges, isn’t going to be any issue.

The size of it with the arduino board and the circuit will be too big to sit similarly sized as a GPS. The solution to this would be to get a custom PCB made. I had issues getting a design together that I would think worked (but now I’ve soldered the board, perhaps it would be easier to design). I won’t bother now though, I’ll stick it further back down the dash, with the display facing me, the angle of the dash should make it less of an obstruction.

The task of soldering the cable into the connectors (I wasn’t going to cut them), is much easier with the Glove Box out, and since it was already out from when we fixed the leak, now is the best time for it.

Lack of light made the task very annoying, taking 2 hours to get the connections soldered in place (I thought 30 minutes!), the time increasing exponentially as light levels decreased (we really need to some lighting sorted).

I’ll add some more screens in code soon too (currently I have the ECU errors, and a second screen set for RPM, O2, Air Flow & Temp, Radiator Temp, Injector Pulse Width, and Octane (this is calculated).

The ability to add more / change the code on the setup is easy since the USB port will be accessible from the case I make.

I have the ability to setup displays for each of the items listed here (well, what the car supports anyway – no Turbo, and no Knock sensor here).

And I was still looking at EV conversions last night.
With a possible daily commute of between 20 and 40kM coming up, the very short trips will likely stop.

Next up for our car, Rust Repair. Still have to find the damned paint. You can’t exactly get a firewall from a wreckers.

I figure if it’s cheap enough, it’ll help cover up a lot of the rust converter and give it a bit of a better finish.

I do some Googling, searching for touch up paint, note the first result is my search with .com.au.

I check out the website, it’s pretty slack in terms of information – it’s not very user friendly.

I found the contact page and asked them some simple questions by email:
- How many mLs of paint do the kits have?
- How much coverage do they get?
- Can they get the color code for my car ?

And from the reply, I don’t think they could have tried any less to get my sale, the reply was written by someone who couldn’t care less if I buy from my reading:
“Yes hello
All bottles hold 15 mls.
Thank you for your enquiry
From the team at xxx”

That was the last reply of course, I asked them questions before that, to which the replies made little sense, referring to kits but not answering anything I asked.

I took a last effort at asking if they could get the exact colour and what quantity, and that’s it for them.
I think they need someone with a bit of care answering their sales enquiries.

So the next angle – overseas – why not, I get a lot of other stuff there. I asked a company in the US – the website was good, helped find the right color, gave me a few size / price options – perfect. They don’t ship outside US / Canada. Damned.

We did previously buy paint from Auto One at a local store, but they’ve gone now.

And that makes me then wonder what is it with retail in Australia – is it that the first retailer is right, in that they don’t need to care for customers to get sales – if you were going to buy it, you would have regardless how slack they are at informing you ? Or is it the second, if you can’t get it overseas, you just can’t get it ?
Or, the last – where you could once get it, has closed down shop.

I was also looking towards Super Cheap Auto, but the color I need is Stone Gray Metallic – I can’t find a match in their online search.

I’m sure someone, somewhere can match the colour though, and give a decent amount at a reasonable price. I know I can get clear coat and sandpaper from Super Cheap, along with other rust repair items.

Wait – there are good sales people still in Australia, “Used Car” and “Real Estate”.

I had a look at Hyundai’s ‘hmaservice.com’ website which contains the workshop manuals for all Hyundai vehicles and came across a section on “Body (Interior)” – had a look at noted that the padding for the front pillar – is actually just clipped in, so pulling at it will cause it to come out.

And it did, this then gave us the ability to trace back where our long term water leak has been coming through, it has been a bad leak for a while, if it rains, we end up with a lake in the passenger foot well.

I was peaking at the firewall again today to see if there was rust that was doing it – Nope, there are more rust holes, and the bonnet looks like shyte, but it’s not the cause of the water leak.

I previously attempted to stop the leak by overdoing it with more sealant on the outside, but still with no success.

After pulling out the glove box yet again (I was checking the ECU connectors to see how easy they would be to open and solder some additional cables to), I saw where the water was coming through, which was ‘somewhere behind and above that pillar cushion thing.

Removing that cushion, and spraying some more water showed the water was coming through the black sealant that is placed down with the windscreen, some of it must have moved or cracked or something. Our windscreen is only 3 years old, so I would think this is unusual – but oh well.

I got some more black crap from Bunnings and stuck some of that in from the inside as high as I could get to, all around the passenger side of the windscreen. I think this will help remove some of the flooding that our car boat gets.

Next issue to attack is Rust. With another rust hole in the firewall, and some rust hiding under the windscreen, behind the bonnet hinge, we are likely to fail rego without an adequate fix in place.

I’ll check it again after the sealant dries to make sure the flooding has stopped – then we can look at the interior – it is soaked, and stinks from the water sitting there for so long. The ECU has rust lines around it from the leak too – I don’t think it’s a candidate for Rust Converter though.

I’m not sure on my abilities to fill in rust, the fibreglass job we had a friend take care of didn’t seem to be adequate – Rust Converter wasn’t applied and I can see behind the fibreglass is rusting again.

The other way to fix this is to rip off the bonnet, take out the firewall, transfer over the VIN and compliance plates, and weld the new one on, but I don’t have a welder and can’t be sure I’d get it right (sounds like more hassle then the car itself is worth!).

Then I still want to fix the bonnet – sand it back, rust converter to clear up the rust, and then paint it, put on some clear coat – and apply lots and lots of wax.

There is the idea of a 4G63 Go-Kart, for the kids of course.

Update: It definitely seems fixed – after leak testing it today, there was no water leaking through.

Then the first set in Autumn never really came through due to the soil mixture used.

After putting Coir and Potting Mix together, we had better results, not great, but better.

From that mix, we put out Beans, Corn, Peas, Cherry Tomatoes.

The Pea plants try to work, but the bottom of them fast degrades and the plant shows no sign of succeeding. This was the case across around 10 or so of the plants attempted.

The Bean plant were successful, we had heaps of them, I couldn’t put a kg figure on it, as an estimate I’d say about 5kG of them.

The Corn plants tried to go, but the season ended before they finished growing. They just stopped growing (surviving, but not growing).

The Cherry Tomato plants were interesting, there were two lots planted, one at the front, and a heap on the back. The plants at the front grew huge – the trellis I put together for them was pulled back into the ground – the plant is massive. I again can not tell how many we pulled off, it was a heap. Which is what I desired, as the kids like them.

Since the last lot, we’ve been trying to perfect seedlings, and we worked it into a styrofoam box, there was much better success because it kept the temperature regulated.

The Bean plants are not actually in Season now, yet they are very huge. Peas had a 100% strike rate on seeding, we’ll have to figure out where they’ll be transplanted.

We also have some Cabbage plants out and they seem to be alive, it’s hard to really gauge any sort of success though, we can see snails have been at them, but the rain has been significant.

The strawberry patch we have is providing the odd strawberry here and there – it’s nothing significant.

The Citrus trees have been idle for a while now, but we do have a large and small Jonathan apple, and a small Granny Smith apple that has a scab or other issue with it.
The Passionfruit are quiet as well. Not a lot happening with the fruit.

A sunny weekend continues tomorrow and into next week. The Winter crops could be our best so far, and that should make our Spring and Summer even better – hopefully at the desired goal of 100% of vegetables to be grown without chemicals.

I’ve heard it many times recently, and was discussing with someone today, in the context of solar power, that there is no point adding any sort of solar power system if you don’t take the much easier, first step of watching what you are using.

And this is true. It became true recently, when our resident in the flat was sucking down all the hot water.

I’m still waiting on some 2.4Ghz wireless TTL chips from Hong Kong (yep, aussie retail isn’t as good as Hong Kong, with shipping, ask Gerry Harvey), to put together our Hot Water monitoring setup, so the best we could gather was an estimate by sound of pipes. The hot water was running for around 20 minutes or so, obviously a shower.

And then they’d wonder why the water wasn’t ‘heating up’. It didn’t really occur to them, that the solar system on the roof, doesn’t get hot with rain bucketing down for days in a row. It’s a 315L system too, designed for 5 – 6 people.

How long did it really need to take to wash yourself – even go so far as shave in the shower?

After they got the usual “reduce your consumption or we’ll remove it” warning, the hot water has been doing well.

And so that’s the point – watching what is used – being mindful of the bigger picture (that just turning a tap != getting hot water).

A shower timer is useless when common sense is lacking – else why wouldn’t they just set it again?

A micro controller listening on the pipe for more than 5 minutes of running, and a little DC motor rigged up to the tap, to turn the output off for 30 minutes would be somewhat entertaining, but not as effective as for them to simply be mindful that hot water is at a premium in winter.

A simple and short – I’m gone in 2 weeks is easily done.

I was reading through a new employment offer just now, and it’s amazing how ‘less concerned’ I could be of the minor details. I was actually writing these in here, and then I saw the Confidentiality terms.

And I then see the confidentiality terms and it’s amazing that the agreement itself is also confidential. So I can’t say anything more – got a job offer, for an unknown company.

What I can do is say I’ll be taking a pay cut, no longer working at home, but hopefully less boredom, and some more options for career advancement.

I’ve realised something I should have done when I was younger was form a career plan. It would have helped me see where I was going and even take different paths. I would not necessarily rule out something outside of the IT sector altogether for example.

I’m sort of annoyed at where I am at the moment, the advertisement for the position noted ‘advancement opportunities’ and that is just not going to eventuate with the company I am with at the moment. They seem to think having a person doing ‘nearly nothing’ for a large portion of a day, every day is ideal (no kidding, suggested two different options, even giving up work at home for a good portion of it, and the answer of ‘No’ just makes you wonder what it is they expect of a person each day).

Time to move on, in the hope of more options for advancement (or at the least, staying within the IT scope I’ve tried to position into – what I do at the moment has very little relevance).
It’s time to move on, because I couldn’t think any less of my current tasks and some of the people involved. It’s not good for them – they are throwing away money or me – wasting time with a company that has no real future for me.

The suggested future was a sales related role, I replaced “Stick it up your arse” with something a lot nicely worded.

The LCD supports loading of custom characters in addition to the standard character set – with Arduino this seems very easily done.

However the Launchpad, based on the msp430 chip from TI is still relatively new – so not a lot exists at the moment for setting up with Launchpad and getting custom characters loaded.

Thankfully there is already a large example out that has the basics of the LCD done. What was wrong from that basic setup was the ability to work with the newer msp430-gcc (uniarch) compiler – from here. I moved to this some time ago to use the full benefits of the msp430g2553 chip – it is the more beefier chip that is a drop in replacement for the included chip (also features onboard UART, great for serial comms).

The basics needed changing, “Wiring.h” had to be edited to be compatible with the new compiler, the pin out was different (the schematic at the URL above was missing contrast).

The changes made to Wiring.h are:
//#pragma vector = TIMERA0_VECTOR       
interrupt(TIMER0_A0_VECTOR)  TA0_ISR (void)        {       
//      __low_power_mode_off_on_exit(); // Restore Active Mode on return       
}

The low power mode is commented out – I won’t need to use it for the chip is low power to begin with and will be connected to mains via USB – but it’s very easy to modify the SR register to take out sleep mode.

#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <msp430.h>
#include <legacymsp430.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <msp430g2553.h>// Headers for specific device#
include "HD44780LIB.h"

To design a character, there’s a handy webpage here that explains the bits that need to be written to the display (8 possible custom characters). I wanted numbers and after having the MPGuino code handy from my ongoing project for the car – I simply converted those bits to hex and used them:
unsigned char chars[] = { 0x1F,0x1F,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,
0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x1F,0x1F,
0x1F,0x1F,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x1F,0x1F,
0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0xF,0x7,
0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0x0,0xE,0xE,0xE,
0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1E,0x1C,
0x7,0xF,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,
0x1C,0x1E,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F,0x1F };

The characters are rounded characters, they look good on the display. To load the characters, use the command and write functions as below:

HD44780_init(&theHD44780,4,3,0,5,2,1);        //this is different, I copied the Wiring functions to use P2 (Port 2).
HD44780_begin(&theHD44780,16, 2);       
HD44780_print_string(&theHD44780, "Hello");       
HD44780_pulseEnable(&theHD44780);       
HD44780_command(&theHD44780, 0x48); 
for (i = 0; i<64; i++) {
                HD44780_write(&theHD44780,chars[i]);
  }
HD44780_pulseEnable(&theHD44780);              
HD44780_command(&theHD44780, 0x01);       
HD44780_pulseEnable(&theHD44780);       
HD44780_command(&theHD44780, 0x80);       
HD44780_gotoXY(&theHD44780, 0, 0);

The init line differs because I changed the pin outs so I could use the UART on the chip (P1.1 and P1.2). I also had issues with the display not loading properly so I moved all to Port 2 and all seems well now. In the above, I also used 0×48 as the CGRAM command – it’s noted in the original as being 0×40, the 0×48 request worked – I sticked with what worked.

The gotoXY function I added t HD44780LIB.h, it is below, but is sourced from MPGuino – it’s a simple function:

void HD44780_gotoXY(HD44780 *me, unsigned int x, unsigned int y) {
                unsigned int dr=x+0x80;
                if (y==1) dr += 0x40;
                if (y==2) dr += 0x14;
                if (y==3) dr += 0x54;
                HD44780_command(me, dr);       
}

Accessing the characters is easy enough – HD44780_print_byte(&theHD44780, 2) would display character 2 from the CGRAM (which, if we start from 0 is the third character in CGRAM).

The end result being targetted is adding this LCD to the system I have in the lounge room, it has a backlight, so I’ll display the clock and a few other things that aren’t easily seen with just the TV on. I’ll cut an opening for it in a cover in the 5.25″ bay, and glue some stand off screws to hold the display upright and bury the MCU down the bottom, and tap USB from the Motherboard directly.

I’ll be adding some other functions to it as well – Now Playing comes to mind for streaming music.

There is already an LCD project that exists for Linux completely negating the need for the MCU in the middle – it’s here – but I already had the LCD rigged up to the Launchpad when I decided to start it – so I’ll stick with it.

I’m thinking of what’s ‘next’ now I see my current duties being made much lighter through the progression of those located in a different time zone taking on more of the duties I am doing.

I went through TAFE to get to my Diploma in IT, and aimed to get more external qualifications in networking or systems administration / development, in the hope that I would make a career out of that.

The ‘natural career progression’ that was ‘expected’ as advertised in the job description when I originally applied for my current role, just doesn’t seem to be there, so if I am to reach what I was aiming for as a longer term career – I am left with little choice but to change employer.

There’s a downside as well, if I want to catch another job, then I’ll likely have to either have experience (yep, get experience somehow, without being given the option to demonstrate that), or, get external certification now, that shows I am capable of said skills.

Direction, this is important when paying for qualifications from those companies that issue them. I like networking, it’s fun. But then I also like putting scripts, programs together. And then I also do like building and administrating internet systems (DNS, Web, Mail).

To get experience in that, a Systems Administrator role, or, a Development Role, or a Network Engineering role – would be what would give that experience on the resume.

So, let’s assume that I manage to both find the qualifications and funding to get a qualification in one specific field (noting that there are three at least that are of interest to me and I would enjoy), ignore the experience aspect (hey, I’m qualified right..) – the next issue is also of significance – Positions being available.

If there’s no demand for any of those 3 roles locally (I refuse to travel the Sydney run, I consider the travel time too significant), then I will have qualifications that are useless until something does become available (aging away, expiring).

I can stick out with what I have available at the moment, and carefully find something else locally eventually, but it’s the hassle of job interviews, convincing a possible employer that I am worth hanging on to, getting acquainted with a new bunch of people to work with.
But if it’s in the name of a longer term career, where I have something I enjoy to do – then perhaps it’s worth it.

I’ll have to try and tidy up my resume and see if I can’t find some evil, creative marketing tactics to deploy – and then see what comes up. The upside is now I know where I stand – I can either waste away doing pointless crap, or not.

For Sale, Rattles. A 1997 Hyundai Sonata Sedan. Features: Immobiliser with Anti Hijack feature, Timing Belt and Engine Mounts replaced with new. New Shocks, spark plugs, starter motor and tyres. Serviced Regularly. Flaws: Rattle sound, contains an oil leak with bonus water leak on passenger side, bonus lake of water in passenger foot well when rains. Rust holes in firewall and on bonnet. Dent on drivers side, scratches on passenger side. Front bumper marked all over. Paint issues with spoiler. Drivers side headlight faded, needs replacing.

It is one of those moments where if I knew the car was going to be this bad not too long after buying new shocks and replacing the timing belt, I’d probably have not done it at at all and just let it fail itself, saving that for a car (it’s just like not having comprehensive insurance, you bet that the car will last long enough to not require replacing thus save the money on insurance for what the payout from insurance would have been anyway).

So now I have some more things to ‘patch’. The leak that I thought was the windscreen now turns out to be from the door seal on the passenger sides (both front and rear). The front passenger foot well is litterally a lake, the water drips down past the ECU (yay!), past the relay and central locking, and into a pool on the floor which will probably rust in the near future.

The benefit from that could be seen as a ‘Flintstone’ feature – where I could ask my partner to give the car a rolling start. Fuel Economy win.

The fix will likely be some silicone to stop the water getting under and around the door seal and thus keeping the water out.

Then we pray that the ECU survives the water that has been dripping past it (it might).

The rust in the firewall is probably a more significant issue, not because rust is bad, no, it’s because the damn RTA rego inspection will fail each time the car has rust that will cause a hole when tapped (and I tapped it, yep, there’s a hole in the firewall).

The downside to it is as above, I have put a fair amount into the car to fix it up, and it’s the body that is it’s significant failure (ignore the oil leak and belt squeal, it’s aestethic). But if I ignore the cash we dumped into the shocks and timing belt, the more significant issue – the bigger issue is finding funds for a replacement (I was thinking Mitsubishi Lancer, 2000+ model). Considering we have to try and save enough to make sure the side fence can be done.

I also have a smaller issue of the time poured into trying to get the interface to the ECU going, a lot of time has been put into that – it’s nearly in a complete state.

Then you have to figure what to do with the current car, can trade it in? They’ll probably give us $50 for it. I could sell it privately, to someone so desperate that they couldn’t find a worthwhile VN. Repair the body work – this is something I’ve been contemplating – the rust being the bigger issue though, cutting it out, patching it up, and making it look neat is a difficult job for me. And professionals charge significantly for that neat finish.

It’s something we’ll have to consider eventually I guess – the extension to the house being delayed even more if we do change cars first.

But what good is legislation if all it takes is a change in government and a submission to change it again?

Legislation doesn’t seem to be worth all the taxpayer dollars that goes into producing it when it’s so easily changed to the detriment of those who made investment decisions relying upon it.

NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell introduced legislation that would prevent parliament from being shut down prior to January 26 (as part of NSW Labor’s shut down during the power sell off). What good is that legislation if it can merely be changed retrospectively?

Our governments aren’t very honest, yet we are all forced to obey and live within the confines of their legislation, or be penalised severely for it. I just don’t see it as being very democratic, it’s far more like a dictatorship – and the party in control dictates how you will live your life.

We can’t place any trust in any of the current enacted legislation, it could all be changed retrospectively. We can’t change our votes retrospectively. We can’t opt to not have a government either (I’d like this option at the moment, the whole lot are useless).

It’s bad enough that the rate was slashed to 20c for newer participants last year – it still represented an option for investment in solar, but to stab those who invested with one third slashed from the expected return on investment, why would anyone ever trust anything this government legislates?

Barry O’Farrell’s election propaganda actually included the words “Our Contract with NSW” – and the minister for energy actually stated that there would be no changes to the current users – only new users.

Well, not only have they broken their contract with NSW, they’ve also broken their promise that they would not change the rate retrospectively.

There are people out there who have invested heavily under the legislated guarantee of 60c per kWH, invested with significant amounts of money, and those will never be paid off under the scheme.

Fair enough, they probably shouldn’t have tried to use it as a cash machine, but they did operate within the confines of the scheme as legislated. It is not their fault that the previous government could not put figures into a forward perspective.

The rates of electricity to buy are likely to raise 17%, the current peak time of use rate is actually 40c, it’ll be around 48c after July, meaning the power generated is actually sold at a lower value than that of what we can buy it for.

I’m not making changes to our setup yet – it still will pay itself off, just in a longer time frame with less of a return on the investment put into it. I will look forward to see what the Stage 2 of the Summit reveals in the way of future plans for the solar industry (no one would buy a solar system in their right minds at the moment – 6c per kWH would take far too long to generate a return, if it even did).

I have two ideas in mind though (aside from leaving it as is as long as the feed in tariff covers costs):

- Off Grid – this would save us significant amounts and at the same time have the negative result that we would need to cut back our consumption during winter significantly.

- Net Feed in – Depends on the rate paid, but if it’s higher than gross, then it makes sense to simply go over to a Net Feed and use the power in the house before sending it to the grid. One would assume the Net Feed In would allow us to also make changes to the system too (the current scheme disallows any changes to the system, including selling the house – you would then lose the solar rebate, another retrospective change!).

Even with the possibilities above, it’s still a very dishonest act by this government.

We planned to have extra chickens join the current ones over the weekend, since they aren’t laying, that’s not going to happen. We’ll have to wait a couple more days / weeks and see.

Temperatures have really chilled down here too – and it’s more than just noticeable. We had a large patch of rain move through and have had nothing but cold since. Winter looks to be very cold.

Which brings me to the next item – Home Made foods. We’ve started looking at differing foods we could make from scratch – purely out of interest for what is supposed to be a sustainable future, where less reliance is placed on a retail store for the supply of foods.

Bread is one of the key products that fits in the ‘milk, bread, sugar’ types of foods – if you forget it, you’ll have to go get it. So, making our own will at least fit with the sustainable future goal, removing our dependence on oil, and retail to supply it.

We’ve tested a few recipes found on the internet – and they seem to vary greatly in what they require – so we took the simplest we could find: flour, salt, yeast, water and bread improver.

Bread Improver however contains something or other that isn’t ideal, so we replaced it after some research with Vitamin C tablets (ascorbic acid). This feeds the yeast to get the bread to rise.

So far results show it works good, and it warms the kitchen up too. The bread itself tastes alright – not the same as the store bread – but that might just be a good thing.

Next up won’t be milk (council laws prohibit cows on residential land), and it won’t be sugar – not enough land. So, pasta seems like something else worth trying from scratch.

The vegie gardens have slow progress – we’ve had a heap of beans but there isn’t a lot happening. We have a monster Cherry Tomato vine that is fruiting but taking a long time to ripen. Some seedlings which are slow progress. Shallots which we don’t use a lot of (and probably couldn’t kill em if we tried). Beans – which we’ve got maybe 3 handfuls off one plant. Some corn which is still growing.

The fruit trees are dormant at the moment. Apples are not moving much at all, Citrus are slow. Banana is moving but slowly and Paw Paw was just planted recently so is still too young.

If we give it a couple of weeks though, the seedlings should be more advanced and a few weeks after there fruiting, ready to be replaced yet again.