As far as supporting the needs of 10 to 12 people during the heat of a LAN party is concerned,the truck so far is doing well. We’ve installed 16 Ethernet jacks throughout the inside of the box as well as 4 jacks on the outside. Using a Cisco switch with VLANs it is possible to reassign the ports to operate on different networks (secure and insecure comes to mind) as well as connecting to a WiFi router that can have multiple SSIDs.

Power for the rig comes from a salvaged 900 Watt APC uninterpretable power supply connected to two strings of 3 115Ahr deep cycle batteries (total of 6 batteries = 345Ahr@24V). The inverter is normally powered by a standard RV hookup located on the front driver’s side of the box (120V household power) but it can also be run off of the Deuce’s 60 Amp alternator. After some testing I found that I would get about 50 Amps from the alternator while idling, which is enough to power the inverter at max load (around 30 Amps) with enough power left over to charge the battery bank at the same time (around 20 Amps). We have a battery isolator connected off of the starter that allows the alternator to charge the drive batteries and the luxury load batteries at the same time without damaging or discharging them. I have a disconnect switch on the dashboard next to a 60 Amp Ammeter so that I can select between charging or not charging the rear battery bank. Once the weather clears up I need to replace the belts on the engine because they are in bad shape and squeal whenever I recharge the batteries.

The orange glowing switch on the left toggles the connection between the inverter and the umbilical. If it is in the up position it is disconnected from the RV plug on the outside and instead connected to the small blue “starter” inverter on the right. If it is in the down position it is drawing power from the RV plug. It glows orange whenever there is any source of power leading into the inverter. The two jacks next to the switch are connected directly to the RV plug so that I can run loads that draw more power than the inverter can put out (such as vacuum cleaners or even an AC unit)

The body of the Deuce seems to be in really good shape. I got lucky and fount a 1985 Deuce, so there aren’t nearly as many signs of age as their usually are on these trucks. There were a few spots that had surface rust but those were easy enough to clean up. The biggest problem is on the front passenger side of the box there are some rust strips that go clean through the box. I think there might also be something on the roof in that corner as water seems to seep in from the top and drip down to the floor. The floorboards were rotted in that one section when we got the truck. This spring we are going to pull some of the shelve/desk units out so that we can working on cleaning that mess up.

All of the stock electrical lines seem to work, though there is a ground fault issue on the driver’s side power strip. It works adequately; we just can’t connect the truck to a GFI outlet. I’ve replaced the 5 interior lights with 3 Watt LEDs to save on power. I’ll probably upgrade them once LED technology gets a little better (and cheaper) but they work well enough for now. It’s like bright moon light. The 24V lights also work, though we hardly ever have the power breaker thrown off to use them. We plan to mount a few halogen lights around the outside of the box so that we can have some area lights for when we use the truck at night.

You can probably figure out that all of this gear lends itself well to helping out in emergency situations, like when a storm comes through and knocks out power to an area. Eventually I plan on buying a 3kw pure sine wave inverter so that refrigerators can be run off of battery power, but that is a bit down the road. John and I have a lot more plans for this truck.

The new Ammeter and switch on the dashboard

The front passenger side network jack

The rear passenger side power jack.

Rear Center Network Jack

The Breaker Boxes and Raceways

The front driver's side electrical sockets and umbilical

The engine and the two tubes that lead to the Ammeter and Switch

The Battery Isolator connected to the Starter and Alternator

During the testing of the UPS system I drained the batteries rather low. To recharge the batteries I can either run the Diesel engine of the truck and use the alternator or I can use a smart charger that uses mains power. The battery bank is rated at 345 Amp hours at 24 Volts which takes several hours to charge. The alternator on the truck seems to output an average in the neighborhood of 50 amps at 28 volts while the car charger can only output 15 Amps at 14 volts.

Sorry for the shaky camera work, I didn’t have any of my usual weights or stands with me.

Fun fun fun.

We got somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 inches this past weekend (the “Snowpocalypse” according to the media) which effectively immobilized all of the vehicles on my street… except for my Deuce. The snow plows don’t usually come down my road until well after the storms so I decided to take maters into my own hands. Using the 18,000lbs of the truck I compacted the snow to a much more manageable 2 inches so that other cars and trucks could drive again.

Throughout the course of the day John and I also helped pull/push/winch a car to safety and helped a lady in another part of the neighborhood get to work. We also had a lot of fun in the process.

I got a new tablet computer / netbook last week for taking notes in class. I really like this tablet, but it has a few quirks that really need to be ironed out. I’ll get to the complaints in a moment.

The first thing I noticed about this computer once it arrived is that it is very small and very light. It has an 8.9 inch LED backlit display and weighs around 2lbs; it is very portable. It only has 32GB of hard drive space, of which the operating system accounts for nearly half. Asus makes up for the small drive by having TWO SD card slots, which is wonderful. One of the slots is protected by a semi-permanent cover and is labelled “Expansion Slot” while the other slot is the more traditional front facing open access design. Both slots are spring loaded.

They key asset that this netbook leverages is that its screen rotates and flips down to convert the computer into a tablet. Sadly the T91MT does not have a accelerometer to determine the screen orientation automatically. Instead one must either press and hold the button next to the power switch or use ctrl + an arrow key to select the screen orientation. The button stopped functioning for me as I was removing the bloatware that came with the system, and even after reinstalling all of the Asus software it still does not function. I have also not found out how to rehotkey the rotate button.

The single largest problem I have with this netbook is how slow it is. It only comes with 1GB of RAM and uses the slower 1.33GHz Atom single core processor. I really would have appreciated the 1.6GHz chip and slightly better graphics, but I knew about all of this when I got it. It preforms adequately for taking notes, although it does struggle when I am drawing graphs during math class while recording audio of the lecture. You can’t really play games on this computer, although I did manage to tweak Warcraft III to run at around 10FPS on DoTA, which is better than some other old computers. Web sites with heavy flash usage are almost unusable, including Youtube. The videos play, but there is a lot of stuttering. I’m also not sure why Asus included the webcam as no software I have is able to stream and receive video calls (including Gtalk or several SIP programs). The camera stutters so badly that it causes the audio to ripple and lag as well, making it completely unusable.

I’ve loaded Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 to one of the SD cards and found out that the touch screen doesn’t work out of the box. I haven’t done too much work to try and get it working, but I thought I would let you know.

The power supply is also really small and very easy to carry around. The netbook runs on 12v and 3A with a 10% tolerance, so this is theoretically capable of running directly off of a lead acid battery. While it is also technically capeable of being wired directly into a cars electrical system I would recommend getting a car adapter of some sort in order to clean up the power from the car.

I’ve paired this tablet with my Android G1 in order to tether my internet access for use on the go. It works extremely well. I would recommend making a shortcut on your desktop for the bluetooth profile so that it becomes easier to connect the two paired devices. It takes a few seconds for Windows to setup the connection, but once established you get the full 1mbs connection that bluetooth can provide. In a 3G zone I consistently get 800kbs downloads and 130kbs uploads.

The battery life is nice, clocking in at around four to four and a half hours for my usage (1/2 screen brightness, high performance mode). The T91MT can be found online for around $480, so you pay a good deal extra for the benefit of the touch screen. I think that the next generation of this product should iron out most of the issues I have with this model. Overall I really like this little computer, in spite of its limitations.

It’s way better than an iPad and cheaper too

This weekend John and I installed the raceway on the driver’s side of the box. The network cables are now neatly tucked behind the metal raceway. Unfortunately, either the windows or the power strip that came with the truck was installed crooked, so it looks a little off. We also took a look at the driver’s side door henge which is bent and preventing the door from closing completely. John ran a new power cable from the network box to the main breaker box, but since we didn’t have enough raceway we had to just let the cable hang in place. Hopefully next weekend we will have more materials and be able to tidy it up.

Not the most interesting video, but some people requested that I post what video I had of the most recent LAN party. The game of choice was Warcraft III with DoTA, Castle Fight, Line Tower Wars, and Battle Tanks. There were about 12 people (depending on what specific time). We had 5 people in the Deuce and a Half and another 5 people in my computer room.

This weekend John and I worked wiring the 120v electrical system for the M185a3. Over the span of two days we were able to wire and test the electrical umbilical connections, about half of the Ethernet cables, and install the network box. More videos will be posted as progress is made.

I’ve decided to start posting some videos of the progress John and I are making on the deuce and a half. This video glosses over the progress we have made so far. Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting more videos showing specific sub-projects, such as setting up the network box, installing a seccondary breaker pannel, charging the battery bank, and other various things.