Gnurple dot Net

So I wrote some stuff back on the 7^th of December and I figured what with the upcoming holidays and running around and madness and traveling that I wouldn’t be writing again ’til Christmas. Especially given my track record for frequent posting. Then I had a pretty awesome week, some of which involved gadgets and some of which involved events leading up to a most awesome Sunday which in turn lead to posting of The Scarf of Awesome. Now that the posting moratorium is officially broken I decided to spew forth a bunch of drivel about gadgets the likes of which even AZROLB would turn a little pale at.

Let the gadget postings begin:

Back in August I got myself a new music player. The there was peace and happiness in Team Norm’s Musical Corner as I basked in the luxury of all the sounds.

Skip to last month, when I crashed happy happy joy joy Musical Corner down into a pile of burning flames and rubble by plugging the new player into my car… with the wrong polarity < insert ST:TNG ‘reverse polarity’ joke here >.

A dark and stormy gloom was cast o’er the land - er, corner - for many sad days as no music came to soothe my troubled soul. Then early this week, HUZZAH! the replacement iRiver H320 that I ordered from teh intarwebs arrived at work.

There was much rejoicing and grinnage as I performed the gadget geek’s Ritual of the Unboxing of the New Toy. Even though it was a refurb (apparently all that’s left on the infinite interwebs are refurbs of this model that’s been out of production for years) it was still shiny and full of glory and majesty as I charged it up and took it home where I didn’t get very far with setting it up due to pleasant distractions.

Next day in the wee hours before work I decided it’d be easier to take the hard drive from the player I fried and put it in the new one so that all my music and settings and such would be there. I harnessed the infinite power of the internet and discovered that taking the back off to replace the battery was, although a finicky operation, not too difficult overall.

So I did this and was delighted when I started up the new player and found that all worked wonderfully and that it even remembered where I was in my playlist! As I basked in wonderous music I couldn’t help but notice that the power levels on the battery seemed to be dropping a little faster than normal. “No worries”, I thought to myself, “it could just be the new battery needs some conditioning to break it in.”

I watched as the power fell from 100% to 85% over the course of a bushel of songs. Then it fell from 85% to 75% over a handful of songs. Then from 75% to 35% in the snap of a finger before conking out like a sherriff’s car with sugar in the tank.

Oh noes! This stinking refurb unit has a battery that works as well as a drunkard driving home - i.e, not very well and then it suddenly crashes and dies. I was *NOT* a happy camper at this time.

Now a perfectly normal and reasonable person would at this juncture decide to send the crappy stinker back for replacement under its 3mo. warranty. But I am an impatient bastard with a penchant for taking things apart and causing sparks, fires and explosions. I figured I’d just got the thing and if I returned it then I wouldn’t have it for all the whole holidays, so instead I figured, “hey, I got the hard drive swapped out, how much trouble could it possibly be to do the battery?”

As it turns out, the battery is the most difficult thing to get at in this machine. You have to strip it down to its most bare state. The front and back come off exposing its naked circuitry in all their glory. There in the most inaccessible place possible is the socket where the battery plugs in.

So I figure if I’m gonna do this I might as well operate on the one I zorched first, that way if I fuck it up then all will not be lost and I can at least listen to music for a half hour at a time on my craptastic deadbatteryosaurus. So I took it apart, and then I took it apart some more, and the collection of tiny screws and little finicky metal bits just waiting to be knocked to the floor and lost forever grew until finally I had the thing stripped right down and I reached in and wiggled its battery loose.

Then I took a break to chat with the cow orkers because concentrating on tiny, finicky little electronics tends to get kind of twitchy after awhile. I got back into it and soon I had the new unit down to bare parts and I yoinked out its battery to put my old one in its place. Then I reassembled the thing, taking care to try and keep dust and crud and goo away from its exposed tender screen bits.

Finally I got it almost all back together and I was ready to give it a try. I push the power button. Curses, nothing happens! Then I think, “Hrm, the old battery was probably all sorts of dead and drained from when I last used it before I zorched it” so I plugged it in. Instead of the sparks, fire and explosions that I was expecting I saw the charging screen! I finished up the reassembly, got out the soap and water and rubbing alcohol to clean it up proppa and left it to charge while I closed up and cleaned the dead one.

Now, a weekend later, I have fully charged it and made it play glorious sappy ’80’s tunes at me for hours on end. The old battery and hard drive have taken well to the new machine and the sun is shining on the happy peoples of Team Norm’s Music Corner once again.

You thought this post was over, didn’t you? But nay, for there is more news from heli land!

I will try and keep this brief so AZROLB doesn’t go insane (would we notice?) so I will open a box of point form on the rest of this entry:

* I decided to get myself a new, more shiny and flight-tastic heli. I will do all my learning and crashing and breaking and fires and explosions on my current, cheap heli and the new one will be for the variety and fun and also it should be big enough that I might be able to use it outside on calm days;

* The new heli arrived a weekend or so ago;

* The new transmitter that I ordered to go with the new heli arrived mid-week;

* After a couple of trips to the hobby shop mid-week I got all the parts I need to completely build the new heli;

* While I was flying my old heli around the main motor died. I didn’t realize it until I went chatting with the hobbyshop gurus the next day, but apparently these cheap ($11 each, they really are cheap) motors die after only a couple hours of flight time. Since I didn’t realize it at the time, I tried to add more power to save the heli from crashing down;

* Went and got a new motor from the hobbyshop the next day. Brought it back and installed it only to find that the circuit controlling the main motor’d blown, probably from me trying to add power while the motor was seizing up;

* Went and got a new controller along with a new receiver that will work with my new transmitter. This is particularly ironic considering one of the features of this new receiver and also considering what happens next;

* I got the new motor into the machine along with the new controller. Since it is a new controller it requires that I tweak a couple of mini knobs (surface-mount potentiometers for all the geeks playing along at home). The process goes like this: (1) take off and fly; (2) land and tweak heli; (3) repeat;

* I was in the process of making the tweaks (I think I was on Tweak Number 5 or so). I put the controller down and made to go over and do another tweak but I accidentally flipped off the power switch on the transmitter;

* The simian copulators who designed the receiver in my heli decided that instead of something sane like dropping the throttle to zero and not moving any of the servos, instead when this receiver loses signal with the transmitter it goes to full power and the servos twitch erratically. That makes exactly as much sense as you think it does;

* The next thing you know it’s on for young and old as the heli screams up to max. throttle and makes for the ceiling. I grab the transmitter, duck and run as I turn the power back on. In the meantime the thing collides with the ceiling at full on power, crumples and falls dead on the floor like a swatted fly;

* I walk over to discover that the flybar is majorly bent and one of the skids is cracked, but aside from that not much damage. I think that turning the power as I ran away screaming like a little girl might have helped since at least it didn’t fall to the ground and thrash about like a fish out of water;

* Fortunately (another seems-ironic bit) I had bought a crash kit when I first got the heli that includes extra skids and a flybar (OK so not ironic at all but at least not another trip to the hobbyshop which sucks all of my money);

* I put the machine together with the new parts and lo and behold it flies!

To end the story, I rebuilt the machine using the new receiver today, reprogrammed the transmitter with tweakings and tunings for the heli. Lo and behold! After all my testing and tweaking I did its maiden flight on the new receiver it did not fall over, crash, spark, smoke, burn, catch fire or explode! It flew properly and AZROLB rejoiced (more because the damn story is finally over than on account of the happy heli).

Trackback URI | Comments RSS