Start of 2020 Update

Apologies to anyone who’s been waiting for an update on any of the projects I’ve put on here – I’ve had a lot going on over the last year and writing up all of this information takes me a lot of time so has taken a bit of a back seat. None of that information has been lost and I hope to start catching up on all of this over the next few months.

Where we are right now :

V6 Mazda RX8

The V6 engine has been fully rebuilt and has been sat in my living room next to an engine crane for about 8 months now, Partly this is due to me not currently having a garage to work in and it being winter and partly due to being very busy last summer. But yes, the project is still ongoing and hopefully will make good progress this year.

Six million dollar welder

Is still on my workbench awaiting the last couple of bits. I’ve had to swap out 24V PSU’s a couple times as they couldn’t deal with the current of the new feed motor. It now works but needs the relays mounted to the panel so I need to remember to find 4″ of DIN rail.

DL180 Server

Is still working beautifully after the Arduino fan controller mod. It’s been hosting this blog ever since so something like 12 months now without a problem. It also provides the storage for my CCTV system.

Hikvision CCTV

I’ve got a couple of updates to write about expanding the system beyond the original one camera setup I wrote up last year. Using multiple cameras with network storage seems to be poorly documented and have a few interesting quirks but after some work I got it working fine. The biggest problem I’ve had since is when the local police asked for my footage following a nearby break-in I had to supply them on a 1 Tb hard drive! High resolution digital video takes up a lot of space!

Other Projects

I’ve had various other projects going on as well. I’ve started looking into using NodeMCU WiFi microcontrollers as sensor nodes with their own web servers around my house with NodeRed requesting the page and parsing the HTML to return the information I want. I can read the temperature sensor connected to the nodes and control the LED on the MCU from NodeRed. Currently the data is not stored because I ran out of time trying to get MySQL setup. I’ll write this all up at some point

Raspberry Pi’s – I seem to have collected a selection of Raspberry Pi’s somewhere along the way. I have a Zero, a ZeroW, 1B (which in a different life I turned into a PoE CCTV camera), 2B and 3B plus I think somewhere there’s another 2B. I really should do something cool with them!

Wooden storage box – I started restoring a large wooden box some time ago. The box used to be in my granddad’s workshop as a toolbox for many years and before that I gather it belonged to his uncle so it’s been around for a long time and has suffered a bit with use and age with some areas with woodworm damage and the rope handles badly degraded. It has also been painted brown at some stage so I’ll need to get that cleaned up as well. I intend to restore it to a ‘usable’ condition so rather than trying to make it as new just tidy it up, repair the damage and make it solid enough not to degrade further but still look like the well used item it is.

Subwoofer project – Has been in constant use for ages despite never being technically finished. I really need to actually finish it and write this up!

There will be more but I think that’s enough update for now – rest assured I’ve not stopped! Especially since this morning another turbo arrived in the post, the fourth I now have here….

2 thoughts on “Start of 2020 Update”

  1. Hi Jon,

    I’m doing some similar RX8 work and was wondering if I could ask you some questions as you’re way ahead of me! Can I email/DM/smokesignal you some questions?

    1. Hi,

      Please ask whatever you want and I’ll try to help where I can. I like to keep things in the comments where I can just in case there’s any more useful information in that that someone else might want but if it’s more complex than you can easily put on here just leave me another comment to say and I can email you.

      Jon

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