Dirod electrostatic generator build

Just a couple of Pics of my yet unfinished Dirod generator. I have designed the parts myself and printed them on my reprap.

Electric Vehicle Build, Quad as donor!

• Updates for 11th November 2014

Wired up the controller temporarily, still getting issues with heat after putting in 10mm squared cable, seems to be in the brushes now.

• Updates for 30th October 2014

Found a 48v 400a controller on ebay for £100, so going to use this for time being. It is made by Navitas and is commonly used in forklifts and golf carts.

• Updates for 10th October 2014

I had previously used a 3d printed part to hold the sprocket onto the motor which surprisingly held up at 12 volts. Well it lasted a millisecond when I tried 48 volts, hey ho I expected that.

One of todays tasks was to make the sprocket holder in metal. After wasting time with precision engineering firms etc I decided to start with a '1610 Powerdrive Taper bush' for less than a tenner with 6mm key steel.

I had to drill the bolt holes, so I used a couple of sockets and some card wrapped around to keep the bush and sprocket central, I then drilled through the sprockets bolt holes to mark where I needed to drill before removing the sprocket and finishing off the holes.

The next task was to fillet off one side to make clearance for the chain like in the models above. To do this I grabbed a long socket and put the bush on whilst holding this to a bench grinder allowing the bush to spin but not too fast, so some friction is required, so wear gloves or loose fingers!

The only other thing I had to do was counter sink the non chain side of the bolt holes as this bush is quite deep, I found out I had no space and the chain was out of alignment.

It is still very Heath Robinson at the moment, eg jumpleads are too thin so they get quite warm, my speed controller is a couple of bits of metal jammed into a pedal config hot glued onto the quad etc.

Todays run was at 24 volts, video is below enjoy! 

I had an old faulty controller lying around so i'm going to give a new lease of life! It could never deliver enough current, so i'm going to use it as the driver for my bank of power mosfets. So far it is working on my bench, yay!

• Updates for 5th October 2014

I wanted to test the drive train so I threw on a 12 volt battery and made a make shift foot pedal on off switch (it crackles a bit). You can see for yourself it goes just great (not fast with only 12v, 10+mph).

So now the next stage is to stretch out the frame to accommodate more batteries, rework brakes and steering positions and see where I end up.

• Updates for 28th September 2014

Motor Mount finished and raised several inches

Chain shortened and tension adjusted

• Project Started 9th of September 2014 

Well I've took it upon myself to build an affordable electric vehicle, sure I'm not likely to have the luxuries of an automakers offerings, but I'm pretty sure I can do it for under a few grand!

Now due to some steep learning curves, I have not got the project to the point I was happy to post. However I have decided to just post some build pictures I have.

3D Scanning 'real world frame' into CAD

I will just point out that whilst I have successfully used a kinect sensor to scan a 3d image of the quad frame I'm remodeling, it has not been without frustration. So therefore I would recommend anyone attempting similar feats have high end CPU and a nvidia CUDA capable card to prevent despair of relocating to last position or software utterly loosing the plot at slow frame rates! I found 'ReconstructMe' to be better suited than 'Scannect'.

The other thing to note is the number of triangles in the acquired 3d scan, they will be in the order of 250k, you need this to be at 10k for certain cad programs to import natively else they will run at a turtles pace. Hopefully soon I will have concept drawings online!

I used Meshlab to trim out and cleanup the scan data, your best to do this with the high poly count(it will chug a bit), make sure to use the wire frame to spot hidden clumps (these waste your detail when you come to reduce the poly count later), I was switching between this and the standard view. when trimming I was mainly using the select faces, using 'esc' to switch into view orbit mode, 'ctrl' to add more selections, and 'alt' to select only viewable faces, and 'shift' to remove accidental selections. Once thats done I run 'Filters' > 'smoothing, fairing and deformations' > 'Laplacian Smooth' using defaults.
Then I run 'Filters' > 'remeshing, simplification and reconstruction' > 'quadric edge collapse decimation' set options as below, we are aiming for 10k polygons so it can import into other cad tools.

3D Scan data after cleanup and and splitting. Each section is only 10k polys so looks rougher.

Agni Motor Specs 

Original Sites here

Model	rpm/V	max. V	A cont. @48V	cont. output power@48V	max rpm	cont. output power	max. power for 5sec
							kW
95-R	71	84	220	9.5 KW	6000	16 kW@78V	ca. 30 k

Top Speed calculations

Handy Calculator for speed here

Engine Sprocket Teeth = 15

Axle Sprocket Teeth = 37

Axle / Engine = 2.46r as ratio

108mph @ 6000rpm

90mph @ 5000rpm

72mph @ 4000rpm

12volt = 852rpm = 15.5mph

none of these calculations take into account the effect weight will have!

Build Pics

First chop, removes upper frame from original quad.

I was Originally going to center mount the motor, the poor welding is a result of stick welding, I have now got a mig.

Much improved welding with a Mig, the mount is actually two flats bars butt welded.

Adding further supports into the motor mount

I had ground out the original engine sprocket to put on the motors 19mm shaft

Chain zip tied on to check alignments

Vmware Driver Injection post migration, Fix stop 7b

Driver Injection Files for Windows 2003 32bit

Files can be grabbed from here

// p2v pre migration driver injection Lsilogic controller for vmware
Import Reg files on the source migration server
.sys files need to be copied to %windir%\systems32\drivers
system should boot and no post migration task need be performed

// p2v post migration driver injection lsilogic controller for vmware
failure to do pre migration task will result in stop 7b error/blue screen
to resolve;
1. boot hirens bootcd on the vm and select 'mini windows xp'
2. when booted, click the Hiren menu icon in the tray -> Registry -> Registry Editor PE.
5. When asked to, set the remote Windows directory (usually C:\Windows) and press OK.
6. Click OK on each window to select the related registry hive. If you want to edit a registry
value from HKEY_CURRENT_USER you will need to select Yes when asked if you want to load an
NTUSER.DAT and locate the file in the user directory, however this is not required.
7. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and the hives will automatically load with the _REMOTE_ prefix.
Navigate to _REMOTE_SYSTEM. Check the number of the ControlSet, reg files have been made for 001
and 003, if another number shows up then you'll have to copy a set and edit accordingly.
8. Goto File > import all reg remote control set00X that are required one by one.
9. .sys files need to be copied to %windir%\systems32\drivers on the offline os
reboot and system should boot.

Sources
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?
language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005208
http://www.webbosworld.co.uk/blog/?p=306
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-edit-windows-registry-key-values-without-booting-in-windows/

Electric Bicycle with a petrol range extender

I think electric bikes are great, theres nothing greater than whizzing somewhere on one until the batteries go flat. So I figured I could use off the shelf parts and knock up my own prototype vehicle.
After some trial and error, more error than trial, i've come to point where I am satisfied with my efforts and want to share it with the world since I've not seen many other people fuse this simple idea into reality.

I took my standard bicycle (£100) and added an electic motor kit (£250), plus sealed lead acid battery 12ah @ 48v (£90), it is great as is and can acheive 10miles with combined cycling, now that's not enough to get me work yet alone home. And I assure you upto the 12th mile this was very arduous with 20kg extra weight and flat batteries.

So I picked up a cheap bicycle trailer (£30) and a cheap petrol generator 800w from aldi for £70. The problem here is howto to tranform the mains voltage to something that the bike controller is happy with, and theres over current protection to think about also. I initially thought about using a stepdown transformer but they are expesive and hard to get at the spec i needed. I tried an arc welder, but the voltage was a little low and the current too high. I could rewind it a little but I want to get results fairly quickly, so I instead opted to use regular computer PSU used in parrallel to get the voltage needed, plus they were rescued from the skip.

The biggest problem is the motors inrush current ~35amp, the psu's I had were max 18amp, so they would go into protection mode and shutdown. I originally wanted to use the power from the generator alone, but because the psu's kept tripping I added in the battery as a buffer. I could use a resistor but the commercial products would cost hundreds (needed 3.3ohm 1080w), so I used some springs as resistors, they will probably get hot and possibly melt, I'm hoping they last long enough for me to assess the range gain I can get.

So thats where i'm at with this idea, it's not pretty or efficient this I know. My first run was 8 miles with a battery at 50v which dropped to 47v, at that point I had no bridge rectifier or resistor, and I suspect the battery was being drained first, as i was only using 4 psu's 48v.
I suspect now that the source with greatest voltage will be drawn upon first, and without the resistor on my now 5 psu's 60v it would shutdown a couple, but now it draws from the psu upto 15-18 amp ensuring they all remain on and then draws upon the battery for another 7-9 amp.
I'm thinking of adding some big cap's after the resistor to provide some burstable current as really I want to be able to operate in 3 modes, Engine Only, Battery Only and Both.

Hopefully the storm will be over and tomorrow I can get some stats.

I have a couple of videos here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxvo0Wz3Umo
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2WinTF1lVg

Where i'm ultimately going is for a custom tricycle like a velomobile, and an electric start generator with a custom winding so I can do away with the 4-8kg of PSU's, maybe mod the engine with HHO or a fuel vapouriser, and possibly think about a huge joule thief for auxiary lighting, and perhaps smoothing caps, and I could think about regen braking into a super cap bank.

Thats it for now, and thanks for reading.

Reprap Mendel 3D Printing Lesson Learned

Having started my fascination with 3d printers back in 2011 when an associate showed me some youtube vid's, I was completely mesmerized by how cool they were. Then I would dream of all the things I could make, then the things I could design, and blah blah blah then metal printing and so on.

So that was it the Idea had been seeded and I decided to plunge into something I had absolutely no idea about or even where to begin. Having done a bit of search engine revision wolf strapping had caught my attention, so that was it I spent one weekend with a pile of wood some draw runners and knocked up 2.5ft by 2.5ft by 2.5ft monster of a frame. And the following week my large stepper motors had arrived Nema 24 I think, fist sized anyways. Then I got some pulley/cogs but they needed boring out, needless to say I did this unfortunately not in a straight manner! I was so excited I just wanted to click my fingers and it would be built! Anyhow I'd got this contraption to a reasonable state and with the Makerbot electronics I'd ordered I had one heck of a time getting the machine calibrated just for correct axis movement. It was quite exciting seeing something I had built in motion, Computers tend to be rather static!

It wasn't until it was built to this point that I realized why the wolf strap never really had any descent documentation, It was a bad design especially exasparated by my over sizing, The Z axis would flap 10-20mm. So ok I made a mistake and it was time to move on, So this time I ordered a reprap mendel frame, of which my nema 24's wouldn't fit so I ordered the right motors and hey ho onto the next stage.
Hotend design, still in my rep strapping idea I made a hotend from fire crete and some brass tube I threaded and a heatsink drilled and tapped, I kind of got it to work a little but staying at temp was an issue, eventually I got fed up and ordered a parcan hotend, much smaller than the one I made lol.

So my next problem was getting a decent print on a makerbot driven mendel using replicatorG! I think this was my biggest mistake, but anyhow I took to IRC and asked lots of questions but no one would help someone with makerbot tronics, fortunately scribbleJ was great, so i'd loaded sjfw onto it ditched repg and used pronterface! I was in business finally, prints were coming out quite good, even got a few upgrades printed, then one day it wouldn't print. Boy was I pissed, I mean I had many moments when I thought about just tossing the printer on the floor, but that day was the worst. printer finally worked for what seemed like 5 mins then the extruder fried...... something I should chase reprap.me up for actually!

Well what you'll find is 3d printing can be like this alot, one minute fine the next a problem! so given the lack of support for MB stuff I was looking for the next best tronics I could get, now not being to adept at this hobby I applied computer buying logic...... go for the biggest number init! so I ordered a Gen7 kit off ebay, built the thing then spent months trying to get it to work. I would have a couple of problems in teacup then in sprinter the problems would switch somewhere else. but in anycase between the two all hardware was tested as fully functional so no my soldering was not the issue, any way I binned the gen7 and ordered a sanguinololu 1.3b and the ramps 1.4 i think, which could be used with the arduino mega I had! I did this to be sure I could get my printer working again. fortunately I chose the sanguino to try first and touch wood it's been brilliant since!

Oh I forgot to mention Use the best oil you can buy and oil daily for best results. seriously I had major issue on my z axis until I used a decent oil

Small Business Server 2008 and free SSL certificates for remote access

Introduction

Whilst looking for a free SSL certificate to do some testing against the self signed cert's that SBS2008 generate I bumped into https://www.startssl.com/ who will give you for free at no cost, a basic domain verified cert that last's for 1 year. This means your users no longer have to click ok, to accept the self signed cert anymore.
The reason I was looking is because the SBS remote access portal showed the following error when users were attempting to RDP to their desktops.
"This computer can't verify the identity of the RD Gateway 'your.domain.name'. it's not safe to connect to servers that can't be identified. Contact your network administrator for assitance."

RDP error

by changing the cert to a verified one from startssl this error is resolved! you will still get another prompt due to the RD gateway still using the self signed cert, you cannot avoid this by applying the public verified cert since the RD gateway will use the netbios hostname which will not match either the public root verified cert nor the selfsigned cert. A public cert will also save your users from the annoyance of this;


SSL certificate error page



Certificate Details



Step by step guide

Generate CSR: IIS 7 Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Follow these instructions to generate a certificate request (CSR).

1. Open the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. From the Start button select Programs > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services Manager.
2. In the IIS Manager, select the server node on the top left under Connections

In the Features pane (the middle pane), double-click the Server Certificates option located under the IIS or Security heading (depending on your current group-by view).

From the Actions pane on the top right, select Create Certificate Request. The Distinguished Name Properties dialog box opens.

You will be asked for several pieces of info which will be used by GeoTrust to create your new SSL certificate. These fields include the Common Name (aka domain, FQDN), organization, country, key bit length, etc. Use the CSR Legend in the right-hand column of this page to guide you when asked for this information. The following characters should not be used when typing in your CSR input: < > ~ ! @ # $ % ^ / \ ( ) ? , &

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP! Enter your site's Common Name. The Common Name is the fully-qualified-domain name for your web site or mail server. What ever your end-user will see in their browser's address bar is what you should put in here. Do not include http://

nor https://. Refer to the CSR legend in the right-hand column of this page for examples. If this is wrong, your certificate will not work properly.

Enter your Organization (e.g., My Great Company Ltd) and Organizational Unit (e.g., Sales). Click Next.

Enter the rest of the fields using the CSR Legend on the right right-hand column of this page for guidance and examples.

Click Next to continue.

The next screen of the wizard asks you to choose cryptography options. The default Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptography Provider is fine and a key bit-length of 2048.

Click Next to continue.

Finally, specify a file name for the certificate request. It doesn't matter what you call it or where you save it as long as you know where to find it. You'll need it in the next step. We recommend calling it certreq.txt.

Click Finish to complete the certificate request (CSR) Wizard.

Now, from a simple text editor such as Notepad (do not use Word), open the CSR file you just created at c:\certreq.txt (your path/filename may be different). You will need to copy-and-paste the contents of this file, including the top and bottom lines, into the relevant box during the certificate processing.

 

Signing up and processing startssl CSR 

Signup

1. Firstly browse to http://startssl.com click on sign up and fill in the mandortary details.
2. You will sent an verification code to the email address you registered with. copy and paste this over and click continue.
3. They will verify your address etc and send another code, copy and paste this over after opening their link, click continue.
4. you'll be asked to generate a private key leave it as medium grade, click continue.
5. you'll be prompted to install the certificate to your browser, click yes (I was using internet explorer). This cert is to log you onto your control panel. you may need to click the install button on their website again.
6. Now I suggest you export the private key to a secure backed up place, open internet options > content tab > click certificates. highlight cert just installed and click export. Click next, select 'yes, export private key' and click next, tick 'include all certificates in the certificate path if possible' and 'export all extended properties' then click next, type in a password and click next, browse to where you want to save the file name it etc and click next, click finish.
7. back on the website click continue.

 Validate Domain

1. you may need to refresh the page to show the control panel wizard tabs, first we need to run through a validation wizard to add a new domain.
2. From the type field select domain name validation and click continue.
3. fill out the domain name and click continue.
4. they will want to verify by email so choose the address that will get through and you can access, I used postmaster@mydomain, click continue.
5. Check your email copy and paste the verification code back over to the website and click continue and then finish.

 Sign Request

1. Now you can sign a CSR for that domain. click on the certificates wizard,
2. change certificate target to 'web server ssl/tls certificate' and click continue, click skip since we will copy and paste the contents of the CSR over and click continue.
3. click continue again, select the correct domain and click continue.
4. enter www for the subdomain and click continue and then continue again.
5. You should normally see a page displaying the signed certificate contents from which you can copy and paste to your server, but on this occassion my request had to be manually checked!

Import Certificate Windows 2008

There are some general steps below to import a certificate:

1. Import the SSL certificate into IIS. Run IIS Manager, select the ServerName (left side Connections).
2. Under the IIS Features view (middle section), open Server Certificates, import the SSL certificate here (right side actions).
3. Select the Web site (left side Connections), open Bindings (on the right side Actions) and associate/bind the wildcard cert with the appropriate https,host,port(443).
4. Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration, If you want to change the certifcate, open properties on 'RDP-Tcp' at the bottom of the 'General' tab click select and choose the certifcate needed, if you want to change back to the self signed cert click default.

Sheeva Plug Basic Loading Fedora Arm 17

This is a rough post i'll tidy up later!!

basically you will be writing an image to usb or sdcard on your laptop/pc.
then on the plug you setup uboot variable.
then you boot the media in  the plug.
then consoled onto the plug you setup your software.
----------------------------------------------------------

Uboot settings are below for either sdcard or usb

#boot from usb
printenv
set bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda2 rootdelay=5'
set loadInitrd 'fatload usb 0:1 0x7400000 uInitrd-kirkwood'
set loadImage 'fatload usb 0:1 0x6400000 uImage-kirkwood'
set bootcmd 'usb start; ${loadImage}; ${loadInitrd} ; bootm 0x6400000 0x7400000; reset'
saveenv

#boot from sdcard
setenv bootargs_console 'console=ttyS0,115200, root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=5'
setenv bootcmd_mmc 'mmcinit; fatload mmc 0:1 0x6400000 uImage-kirkwood; fatload mmc 0:1 0x7400000 uInitrd-kirkwood'
setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_mmc; bootm 0x6400000 0x7400000'
saveenv

--------------------------------------------------------
Do this stuff from your laptop

#howto write an image to raw device! note the fedora image will resize upon boot.
xzcat (imagename eg>)f17arm-latest-arm-rpi-xfce-mmcblk0.img.xz |sudo dd bs=1M of=/dev/sdb(or other device)

#howto open terminal quickly to catch boot interupt
sudo chown uucp /dev/ttyUSB0; sudo cu -s 115200 -l /dev/ttyUSB0

------------------------------------------------------------
now put your stick in your plug and boot up!

initial root passwd for fedora is fedoraarm, do change the password

setup network
For static IP configuration you need to edit the following files using a text editor such as vi. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network as follows, enter:
# cat /etc/sysconfig/network
Sample static ip configuration:


NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=fedoraArm
GATEWAY=10.4.50.5


Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, enter:
# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
Sample static ip configuration:


# Intel Corporation 82573E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper)
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
DNS1=208.67.220.220
DHCPCLASS=
HWADDR=00:50:43:01:c1:e6
IPADDR=10.4.50.30
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes


Edit /etc/resolv.conf and setup DNS servers note you can't, it set by script


Finally, you need to restart the networking service, enter:
# /etc/init.d/network restart
To verify new static ip configuration for eth0, enter:
# ifconfig eth0
# route -n
# ping 192.168.1.254
# ping google.com


#To enable routing etc on laptop for allowing sheeva plug through my laptop over wireless. set eth0 to static 10.4.50.5
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

#change password for root
passwd

#setup dev tools to build cgminer
yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'
yum install libusb libudev openssl-* ncurses-* libcurl-devel

mkdir /root/src
cd /root/src

#compile cgminer
wget http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/cgminer-2.7.5.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf cgminer-2.7.5.tar.bz2
cd cgminer-2.7.5
CFLAGS="-O2 -Wall -march=native" ./configure --enable-bitforce
make
make install


#compile bfgminer
cd /root/src
wget http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/bfgminer/2.7.5/bfgminer-2.7.5.tbz2
tar -xvjf bfgminer-2.7.5.tbz2
cd bfgminer-2.7.5
./configure
make
make install