Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Zelandeth]

One problem which had become apparent with the new thermostat was that it kept dropping the connection between the base station and remote. The receiver being stuffed inside a metal box probably had a lot to do with that.



It's not obvious in the photo, but the front panel there is metal behind that plastic "trim" piece as well.

Given I needed to go back in there today to install the one for the ground floor I took the opportunity to adapt things to push the base units forward proud of the face of the enclosure.





It's a bit ugly but works.

A while ago I mentioned the intention of ripping the rather senile electronic brains in the air conditioner/heater that lives in my room. Most of the bits have been in a box in the corner of the room since I bought them, but I kept forgetting to buy the bulbs needed for the power switch. They finally turned up at the weekend, acting as a bit of a kick in the behind to start actually start putting some bits together. So started today with the power switch.

A while ago I made a legend for it - and promptly forgot where I saved the file. Lost the best part of an hour looking for it, and getting distracted by what I found while looking for the blasted thing. I'd have been quicker just recreating it.

However eventually I did find it, and finally had an excuse to use one of those fancy printable transparency sheets for something practical.



The end result?



That doesn't look too much like something I've made at home.





The camera has murdered the colour of the red - it's a nice deep red rather than the magenta the camera has picked up.

Having seen these things lit now I can definitely see why they were used heavily by the likes of NASA, the on/off contrast really is very good even with very low power lamps and even under decent lighting.

Yes, I did find far too long figuring out the "right" typeface.

I'll be using a similar method to print the legends for the other buttons and status indicators - though they'll mostly just be graphical rather than needing text. Far more status indicators than we need...but this is me so that's no surprise.

Next step will be to plan out and start building up the control panel itself. I think I still have an acrylic sheet in the garage which should be a pretty perfect size for what I want.

The next big step then will be taking a brave pill and starting to rip out all of the original control gear. The only thing I'll be using on the original control PCB will be the 230-24V transformer for the control logic. There's nothing wrong with it so no reason to make more work for myself.

At the end of the day though I'll hopefully have something which can just regulate the room temperature without requiring any intervention from me whatsoever. It will also no longer require me to thump the thermostat a couple of times a week! As we don't need the thing so much at this time of year, now is the time to do it.

[CitroJim]

Excellent work Zel, I like how the transparency legend printing has turned out - looks very professional

[Zelandeth]

Uuuugh...just lost a whole post thanks to the sodding browser crashing on this thing.

Take two.

Probably the single biggest challenge, well aside from dealing with the inevitable spaghetti when this bundle of relays gets wired up to replace an overcomplicated PCB that has a microcontroller running the show...



Will be to actually make a new control panel.

At least half the buttons on this original control panel don't even work because I've had to hotwire and disconnect things to get around the issues we have with it doing daft things like trying to run both cooling and heating at the same time. Not ideal when it's 30C outside.



Additionally the power button is hanging on by a thread, the membrane has cracked nearly all the way around the button.

There's basically no clearance behind the existing panel. My plan is to switch to a "portrait" oriented panel over to the right.



The timer isn't something I have any need for and isn't even connected anyway. Likewise the IR receiver PCB and the entirety of the ioniser module both vanished before I got this. The mechanical thermostat is something we'll be replacing, so nothing really in our way - especially as there's a huge chunk of empty space behind this area.

Given the texture etc on the front of the unit we obviously need a panel to build our new control set on. Turns out that the bit of plastic I had been thinking of in the garage was really too flimsy for this job. If you've ever done anything like this before you've probably discovered like I did that buying small volumes of acrylic or polycarbonate sheets for odd projects is actually really annoyingly expensive. You know what isn't expensive and by pure chance turned out to be near millimetre perfect in terms of width?



Yep, normal car number plate. Which was £12 from Mileham's rather than £30 plus postage from eBay - which I'd also have had to cut down to size and probably buy again because I'd probably mess it up. This will need to be trimmed down at one end, but that's ONE side I need to try to get square rather than three! Because of the various rules and regulations surrounding the sale of registration plates they couldn't just sell me the base without the printing, but as my plan has been to paint the panel anyway that's no big issue. Even if I had to add painting to the to do list that would be a worthwhile compromise for the cost and hassle saving with it being so close to the size I wanted.

I had a shot at throwing together a first pass at a possible layout. Complete with a mistake.



Additionally to what's on here there's a double pole isolator switch, but that's on the side of the unit rather than the front and I'm just leaving that as is.

From the top, left to right.

Power switch/fan speed control.

Fan speed indicators (low/medium/high).

Temperature controller which is most of the brains of the operation.

Cooling and heating mode enable switches.

Compressor running and heater on indicators.

This is where the mistake is - the amber indicator on this row should be on the left, being an indicator to show the condensate drain pump is running.

Last row is a pair of warning lights to show if the condensate tank is full or that the heater overheat protection has cut in.

There will be one more warning light to be added to show if the circuit breaker has been triggered (which would happen if for instance the heater and compressor ended up running at the same time - which I have a relay logic interlock to prevent being possible). That last light will probably go in the middle of that last row to make it a trio rather than a pair.

I'll need to bunch this up a bit when I actually put it together, and may even totally change it yet but this was just a first pass before I had to go to make dinner.

[mickthemaverick]

Looking good Zel. I have a number of old number plates if you need any more rather than coughing up at Halfords. Just shout.

[Zelandeth]

Looking good Zel. I have a number of old number plates if you need any more rather than coughing up at Halfords. Just shout.

Was a little independent I bought it from so don't feel so bad - would have been £20 from Halfords I think!

Hopefully will only need the one. Reckon I'll probably cut it near enough in half so hopefully should have two shots at this anyway.

Not going to rush too much as I'd like this to look at least reasonably presentable when done (I will need to look at it every day!), and my creations do have a history of generally working reasonably well but looking...well...sub par. So going to put a bit more effort into keeping this looking tidy.

I have had to resist the temptation to add a lamp test button, as who doesn't love a good lamp test feature?



I used to remember what the one that's out in that photo is but I've long since forgotten. Thank you Google photos for reminding me that last time I drove that bus was 13 years ago near enough to the day. That doesn't help make me feel any less old at all.

I still don't know why Leyland didn't see low oil pressure as serious enough to warrant a red light...Though admittedly now I think about it, Volvo commercial vehicles of the same era had a yellow light for oil pressure as well. Better than green I guess at least as was still the case on some cars at that time.

However it would be a right faff to wire up and there's going to be more than enough spaghetti in there as it is. So that's a feature we won't be pursuing. The control system in here will be 24V AC as well which would make preventing crosstalk through any testing function way more of a pain.

Other features I would *like* to have.

[] Fan interlock. I'd like to make it impossible to turn on cooling or heating without the fan running. Though because there's a separate power feed for each speed to the fan, the relay logic involved quite quickly spirals out of hand. It absolutely could be done, but we're already using £100+ of relays for this project! Thinking out loud now, a less annoying way to do it would probably be to use a current transformer on the neutral from the fan to trigger a relay to enable those modes - I might look into that in the future.

It's also not absolutely critical. The thermal cutout for the heater is really close to the heating element so I reckon would be quite effective. It's also unlikely to be an issue in my application as the fan speed control being separate to the power switch means it will most likely just be left set to high and be left there forever more.

[] Freeze stat. If for some reason the evaporator were to get too cold and start to freeze up I'd like to have functionality to shut the compressor down (because that can cause liquid refrigerant to flood back to the compressor which really isn't good for it). Most likely cause for this other than something getting sucked onto the front panel would be the failure of the fan. Though given how close to the evaporator the temperature probe is I reckon it would show a sharp temperature drop if there was no airflow and likely cut out due to that anyway. It's also something that will be pretty easy to add later. Just in the absence of any proper high/low pressure switches you'd have on a more fully featured system I'd like to incorporate at least SOME features for protection of the compressor. At least the new temperature control includes an anti cycle timer which is probably the biggest help for it.

Eh, it's just been a while since I've really had a silly-but-actually-useful project I can tinker with, so it will probably see a few amendments before I call it done.

[Zelandeth]

Any real productivity the last couple of days has been somewhat limited by having picked up a stinking cold.

A nice little project I could dip in and out of though was to make up icons for my AC control panel. Being able to print on transparencies has definitely allowed this to end up looking more professional than I'd previously been capable of.



Likely layout (with my mistake from last time fixed).



I'm probably going to redo the light for the condensate drain pump to match the high water level light.

Now...this is a great example of where I can demonstrate how the camera on this phone just doesn't stack up well against the one on my previous one.

Here's the condensate tank high level warning light taken on the Huawei P30 Pro - just the first shot as it turned out.



Then the same component from the same distance using the Pixel 9 Pro.



This was NOT the first try. Must have retaken this ten times to try to get a better result.

Similar comparison. P30 Pro.



Pixel.



How soft the red ends up looking is the same even if shooting RAW images, so it's not just JPEG compression causing issues - it's something funky going on with the actual image processing from the sensor. It's just as bad using OpenCamera as the stock program - just massively more grainy as well. Given this is five years newer than the P30 Pro and they've been shouting loudly about how wonderful their camera is, it's just very much left me unimpressed.

Yes, if you take a photo of something outside in the world that's red...like a car...it looks *just* as bad.



Not great, and really disappointing for what's meant to be a flagship device.

Hoping I'll be starting to feel a bit more human soon! Yes I know it's only a cold, but I still feel distinctly miserable!

[bobins]

The Pixel has a 'better' DOF though and is sharper all round.

As an aside.......
I've taken many photos in challenging conditions with my DSLR - mostly underground and with poor lighting. I took some a few years ago in such a situation and a couple of mates stood next to me and did the same with their nice iPhones. Their images really pulled out the detail and depth of the site whilst mine didn't. Mine, however, showed a true likeness of what it was like down there. Their's showed a nice image, mine showed a true (or more accurate) record.

[Zelandeth]

The Pixel has a 'better' DOF though and is sharper all round.

As an aside.......
I've taken many photos in challenging conditions with my DSLR - mostly underground and with poor lighting. I took some a few years ago in such a situation and a couple of mates stood next to me and did the same with their nice iPhones. Their images really pulled out the detail and depth of the site whilst mine didn't. Mine, however, showed a true likeness of what it was like down there. Their's showed a nice image, mine showed a true (or more accurate) record.

I'm not even sure the Pixel is actually sharper - rather than that it's doing an absolute load of post processing (no doubt including some AI nonsense) to sharpen the image. The text in the background of the last image for example definitely wasn't fully in focus on the screen when I actually pushed the button. So it's either doing some serious post shot processing, or has actually taken several frames using a different aperture setting and given us a composite of the result. Also worth mentioning that the two photos there from the Huawei were just the first click without any messing about, rather than having taken several on the Pixel to try to get the best result. Especially as it takes great pleasure in changing the focus point you had set to something totally different in the scene if you move the camera more than a millimetre.

Aside from when red is involved (when it blows out horribly like that photo of the Metro), photos just tend to look really flat outside. It also has two other issues that I've noticed. One is that it presents very visible "stepping" on slight curves or diagonal lines - which isn't something I recall really seeing since we stopped using 800*600 pixel images as full resolution - and that's still visible even if this is set to 50MP. The other is that it sometimes does some really odd things when presented with repeating geometric patterns - which again I think is down to some post processing trying to be far too clever for its own good. Two images I remember seeing that most on being a brick wall which had what looked like ripples in the brick courses that I know weren't there, and straightish lines on a gravel driveway which I know full well don't exist. The UI is also an utter mess...having to go two levels deep to turn the flash on/off is just stupid. The flash modes available are also stupid. It allows you to have off, automatic "night sight" - long exposure to normal folks, or flash on...there's no automatic flash mode. Not that it really makes a huge difference given that the flash has an effective range of about a foot anyway.

About the only areas I will concede the Pixel's camera is better is that it has less barrel distortion and sharper corner focus. The autofocus is marginally quicker as well.

In all honesty even if the camera was vastly better than the P30 Pro it still wouldn't make up for the fact that it does a far poorer job of actually being a phone in pretty much every way. Plus the text handling features make using it as a portable computing device far more frustrating than the P30 Pro was - which is one of the reasons you've been seeing less updates here in the last month or so. I'm actually tending more now to wait until I have the opportunity to sit down at my desktop PC for a while, which just isn't something that happens all that regularly.

[CitroJim]

Looking good Zel and I like that Metro!

May you be feeling better very soon

[bobins]

I'm not even sure the Pixel is actually sharper - rather than that it's doing an absolute load of post processing (no doubt including some AI nonsense) to sharpen the image.

I was thinking much the same last night as I pondered the issue. Normally you might start with looking at the spot metering and white balance amongst others, but lord knows where - or more accurately, how - it meters those values and, more improtantly, how it processes the information it gets. Roll artificial incompetence into that and you're left with a camera that does what it wants and you're just the bystander. It's a shame no-one's come up with a custom firmware that removes all attempts at 'user assistance' and allows the user to do what they want. Too clever for its own good.

[MattBLancs]

Making stuff from numberplate - very me!
Bit posh doing it with new stuff though! Like Mick, I've never thrown an old plate out (and gained a few yellow ones from trailer number plates made redundant by car changes) so it's my go to for quick rough jobs.

[Zelandeth]

Today I hacked off the extra length on the panel and threw a first coat of paint at it.



Suddenly starting to look a bit less like someone messing about with a bit of number plate.

I'm keeping the bottom edge straight as it will line up with an edge on the machine when it's in place, though it could do with a bit of smoothing before the final coat of paint goes on.

No a couple of indicators aren't perfectly straight, but for something made out of a bit of number plate I don't reckon it looks too bad, especially as once it's in place you're really not going to be looking at it too closely.

[CitroJim]

That's looking very professional Zel

[MattBLancs]

Suddenly starting to look a bit less like someone messing about with a bit of number plate.

Oh that's very much not me now - you panel looks great!

Painting the plastic: plastic primer needed or does the (hammered finish?) paint adhere to it ok as is?

[mickthemaverick]

Zel, I just came across an auction with a number of old apple macs and also this Amstrad which I thought you might be interested in. Jim and I have been meaning to take a run up to Norfolk at some point and I may be after some other bits in the sale. Let me know if you would like it collected if you decide to go for it! https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auct ... 2800c28760