The Lodge
Me, my life and I
Car changelog
0Just the TR6 this time, fitting the new polyurethane bushes to the rear wishbones of the TR6.
* Cleaned bush sockets on the wishbones
* Fitted bushes
Jeenode & Smart LED Strings
0Recently I bought two packs of 50 Smart RGB LED lights to play with whilst attached to one of my Jeenodes. Subsequent discovery of data by D has allowed me to get them up and running, and to learn more about bit shifting and clock rates.
To wire them up, first make sure you’re plugging the IN end into the Arduino or Jeenode. The SPI bus has a distinct IN and OUT feature, and won’t work otherwise. We found this out the hard way 
Next up, hook the red wire to +ve, yellow to MOSI, blue to Ground, and Green to SCK. I’ve found that the regulator on my JeeNode will drive up to 100 of these LEDs.
The library code that you’ll need can be found at http://code.google.com/p/fastspi/, and an example by Xalior can be found at https://github.com/Xalior/FastSPI-Christmas. The FastSPI library will take care of disabling interrupts, so will be able to drive the lights at a rather phenomenal rate
Car Changelog!
076 days
It occurred to me that I should keep track of things I do to my cars. Typically I’ve done most of the work to the Landie over the past 2 years, and now it’s just minor fixes, but here goes..
Land Rover
* Replaced oil pressure sensor
* Replaced alternator bracket
* Replaced alternator
* Replaced rear fog lamp (thank you Kenny!)
* Re-fitted handbrake expander spring
TR6
* Cleaned rear suspension wishbones
Land Rover Series 3 Alternators
080 days
Recently I had the misfortunate to wear out my alternator. It started under-charging, and my battery would slowly discharge over the course of a week. It was time for a replacement. This would normally be a routine task, if it weren’t for a massive potentially £200 gotcha that seems to befall a few of us.
The Series 3 originally comes with a 28Amp Lucas 16ACR alternator, and this is mostly superceded by the 17ACR – a drop-in 35A replacement that everybody seems to use. Well, it’s mostly drop in…
I found out the hard way, when the new alternator chewed through a fan belt in under 20 miles. Further inspection showed that the alternator pulley was about 6mm further forward than on the previous alternator. Much searching on Google revealed that in the cases of those with engine numbers starting 901, 904, 361 or 364, with suffix A or B, a bracket is required. Specifically part ETC4357 or 574855. Everywhere you search for this part will offer it for the best part of £200. If you’re unsure what your engine number is, look on the left hand side of the block, just behind the face that the water pump mounts on, and just below the first exhaust port. Scrub it clean, wedge your head into the engine bay, and get the number. A list of prefix and types can be found at http://www.glencoyne.co.uk/engno.htm if you’re also interested.
Unsure about where to go from here, at 9.30pm I got in touch with Dom at LR Series, who replied within 15 minutes. Talk about customer service! He advised that a second hand part is available at a much lower cost if you order it on their website and let them quote for the part. Suffice to say, not only was the part much *much* cheaper, it was also express couriered up and will be at home in less than 24 hours. This, your honour, is the solution to the bracket-for-slightly-less-common-engines problem, and how you make loyal customers
Epson SX235W on Linux
0Recently my parents purchased an Epson Stylus SX235W for use with their Linux laptops. It’s a combined inkjet printer and flatbed scanner with wireless network support, all for a decent price.
My dad uses Ubuntu Lucid, my own choice back when Lucid was current, and it was also conveniently on Long Term Support (which it still is) – this shouldn’t be too bad.
Printing
Out the box, CUPS does not support the SX235W printer. This was easily resolvable by heading to Epsons website and following through the various procedures to get Linux support. The download center at http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/search/01/search/searchModule seems blissfully unaware of the SX235W printer that they gleefully sell, but it does know it under the model SX235. Select that option, and grab the version of epson-inkjet-printer-201108w that’s applicable for your architecture.
Once you install the package, the standard ‘Add Printer’ tools in Ubuntu will be able to find the printer on the network. A word of warning though – be patient. It will take up to a minute for the printer to be discovered on the network. Once found, you can add the printer, let it search for and find the driver, and then you’ll be off and running.
Scanning
Scanning was a slightly different matter. This is supported through the use of the iscan package, along with the iscan-network-nt plugin. The key here is that unlike the printer driver which uses DNS-SD to find the printer, SANE has to be configured to look at the correct network address of the scanner before it will allow anything to be done. My parents router is a nice little TP-Link TP-WR841N running OpenWRT, so a quick delve into /etc/config/dhcp to give the printer a static lease had the printer on a readily discoverable IP address within a couple of minutes.
Once the printer was on a dedicated IP address, installation of the iscan and SANE packages followed. For SANE, just ‘apt-get install sane-utils’. For iscan head back to the Epson Driver Download Center mentioned above, and download both the “core package&data package” and the “network plugin package” package for your architecture. Bear in mind that as Lucid uses libltdl7, you’ll need to grab the version suitable for libtdl7 or later. Make sure you download and install the iscan-data package first, before trying to install the core package. Once those two are installed, the network plugin package can be installed.
Remember previously where we set the printer/scanner up with a static DHCP lease? This is where it comes in important. Edit /etc/sane.d/epkowa.conf and down in the network section put in ‘net 192.168.1.50′, and substitute the correct IP address.
All sorted. Execute ‘iscan’ at the command line or “Image Scan! for Linux” from the Ubuntu menu, and it should detect your scanner and offer to scan. Job done
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