Category: Blog

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies. COVID-19 cases are higher in our Gwinnett county than any other county in the state of Georgia.

Plans: Stay home and order everything online.

• 07:00 Up and sipp’n coffee.
• 08:00 Eating breakfast and making plans for the day.
• 09:00 Getting ready for church
• 10:00 Church service
• 12:00 NAP
• 14:00 Built AC source relay
• 15:00 Ordered Instacart groceries
• 16:00 Put groceries away
• 17:00 Eat’n dinner
• 18:00 Using the lawn mower as a vacuum.
• 19:00 Watching Cheers
• 22:00 Killing time

Narrative: I’ve built half a dozen AC source relays that have the task of keeping something powered while changing the power source. A UPS is great for keeping a computer alive, but what do you do if you have to change the UPS?

The answer is to put a relay with two power cords on it as the power source. That way EITHER cord can power the equipment. The relay has an AC coil so it activates when the second power cord has power. To date I’ve not had an issue with anything dropping out when the switching of the relay causes a short interruption in power. Most of my source relay boxes have fuses on the output line to protect the relay from arcing across the open contact.

To test projects like this I use an inherently limited power source. Usually a battery powered inverter that has just enough current to support the test. In this case I used a bench power supply that I can set the voltage and current limits. FYI, in most cases it didn’t matter that the source AC was a modified square wave inverter like the one below.

To keep the currents within reason I use 12 V for 100W or less, 300-600 Watts I like 24 volts and I use a whopping 48 Volts for 1000W and above. FYI 48V is very close to 60V for a lead acid battery. A great deal of care must be taken on choosing fuses for 60V battery banks. Automotive DC fuses are rated for 30 VDC and 3AG glass fuses are NOT rated for much above 60VDC at 7 Amps. High quality 15A, high voltage fuses are ceramic (Not glass) and filled with something to dissipate the arc when they open. (They are pricey too) High DC voltage fuse holders are like $10 each.

Feelings: According to our black families in our church that spoke up today, racism and prejudice are still rampant in the USA. Worse, they described their run-in’s with police often harassing them because of the color of their skin. They were very emotional describing their clashes with white people in authority not treating them or their children equally. The data supports some of their conversation today and they did not speak to the large number of black men belonging to gangs with guns in our cities.

Tomorrow: Monday, voting day. I’ve not applied for SS yet either.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies.

Plans:

• 07:00 Up, sipp’n coffee and having breakfast with the wife.
• 08:00 Having a serious conversation about BLM.
• 09:30 Testing my UPS batteries and writing in my blog.
• 10:00 Looking up sheds
• 12:00 NAP
• 13:30 Organize, checking weather
• 14:00 Mow Lawn
• 17:00 writing in my blog
• 18:00 Ford v Ferrari (le mans 1966)

Narrative: mom wants to purchase a building rather than build one. Marion county requires a permit for any building bigger than 10x10x13. I went for another plan entirely, a folding stand for two solar panels on the ground that could be deployed after a storm takes out the power.

Feelings:

Tomorrow: Sunday services.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies.

Plans: Mail my ballet today. (Last day)

• 07:00 Up late, 4 eggs and coffee.
• 08:00 Getting organized and writing in my Blog.
• 08:30 Working on my ballet.
• 11:00 Mailed my ballet, wiring my new batteries. Storms outside the homestead.
• 12:00 NAP
• 15:00 Delivered a loaf of bread
• 16:00 Working on the new battery bank
• 19:00 Helping the wife

Narrative: Bought new bank of batteries for the 2nd 48V UPS.

It is difficult to get four perfectly matched batteries, so I bought a battery equalizer. It sequentially connects a large capacitor across each battery to equalize the voltages. There are wires that will be across all four batteries that needs to have fuses put on them. These batteries can supply a hundred amps or more and the equalizer is maybe 22AWG wire.

Added two intra battery 30V ASO fuses to protect the end batteries from shorts and a $20 high voltage half bank fuse to protect the bank. 25Amps at 55V is 1,300W, a lot of power!

The UPS has internal batteries that would provide sufficient current to blow the fuses if I just connected this bank to the UPS without equalizing the voltages. To equalize the two battery banks I used a long 18AWG wire to reduce the current between them. Once they have equalized I removed the thin 18AWG wire and installed a much shorter/thicker 12AWG wire to power the UPS. The high voltage ceramic fuse is 15 amps at the center of the bank. The low voltage fuses are 25A are only between the end batteries.

Feelings:

Tomorrow:

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies. Air Conditioning is unreliable, there may be a bad connection because of all the bugs in the ODU. But for now I am grateful it is working.

Plans:

• 08:00 Up and eating breakfast
• 09:00 Getting groceries
• 10:00 Drove the silver Focus, it’s been sitting for two months.
  • Made plans with the wife for the day
  • Computer network is running on solar.
• 11:00 Vacuuming floors.
  • reporting ads on FB
• 12:00 Lunch and a NAP
• 15:00 Get more batteries

Narrative:

• Recharge aaa batteries
• Check ODU, vacuum out bugs

Feelings:

Tomorrow:

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status:Plans:Narrative:Feelings:Tomorrow:Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies.

Plans:

• 05:30 Up, Sipp’n a cup of coffee
• 07:00 Making plans with the wife
• 08:00 charting solar power waiting on Mom and Ricky.
• 09:00 Talking to mom
• 10:00 Recording Solar and eating lunch
• 11:00 Charting solar power then a NAP.
• 14:00 Looking over prayer lists for tonight.
• 14:30 Checking on the hurricane, still headed towards Louisiana
• 15:00 Watching “Wind River”
• 16:00 Eatin Din Din
• 17:00 Disconnected the solar panels and watching “Wind River”
• 18:00 Getting ready for services tonight at 19:30
• 21:00 It’s 80 degrees and climbing.
  • The ODU compressor is not running.
  • I’ve turned off unused routers.
  • I’ve shifted the UPS heat back into the garage. (Should have done that already.)

Narrative: “Racist” card? At church tonight we were having a roundtable discussion and a young mother offered her experience with her child that couldn’t get into the gifted-and-talented program. She went on to explain how her child was being discriminated against because he was black. That may possibly be true, it is also possible that every mother of an “A” student thinks their child should be offered the gifted program. (I know several “White” families of talented children that were denied access.)

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Google Foo: Looked up the number of incarcerated males to see the race distribution among them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States

Last year, more than 1,000 people were killed by police, according to Mapping Police Violence, one research group.

“Black people were disproportionately among those killed, the group found. Black people accounted for 24% of those killed, despite making up only about 13% of the population.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/george-floyd-death-police-violence-in-the-us-in-4-charts.html

Race	Total	Male	Female
White	6,088	4,255	1,832	1
Black	7,407	6,237	1,168	2
Other race	395	273	121	1
Unknown race	233	149	59	25
Hispanic or Latino	2,173	1,752	421	0

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

Opinion: It’s awfully difficult to start judging our police when they have a very difficult job of balancing preventing crime against individual rights. The pay doesn’t make it, it has to be a personal commitment to the community? Now with every one with a camera ready to post any discord to public media, they are under extreme scrutiny. It’s also worth mentioning that China would love us to get so divided that they could take over this country as their own.

https://www.imdb.com/ Red Dawn 1984

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Feelings:

Tomorrow: Groceries in the morning.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies. Gwinnett is NOT social distancing, we’re higher than anytime this year.

Plans: Absentee ballets and applying for Social Security.

• Absentee Ballets
• Apply for Social Security
• 06:00 Wake up sipp’n coffee and making plans.
• 09:00 calling mom
• 10:00 Getting organized
• 16:00 LONG EMOTIONAL DAY

Narrative: Worked on our piles most of the day.

Sent mom some hurricane supplies and she ended up needing them on the first day. The power went off right after they charged up the radio with the sun all day. They also got two new battery powered fans today that might come in handy since the power is off.

Feelings:

Tomorrow: Get mom prepared for the weekend.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies. Gwinnett County case count is more than anytime this year. We’re not going anywhere soon…

Plans: Need to knock out some things on my bucket list.

• 00:00 Trying to find a replacement NAS.
• 02:00 Ordered a NAS, it will take until Saturday to get here. (Strange for Amazon.)
• 07:00 Up and sipp’n coffee.
• 08:00 Weed-n-feed the front lawn and took a walk
• 09:00 Changing battery Focus
• 11:00 Checking on a new battery.
• 12:00 Drove and got a new car battery
• 13:00 Connected solar panel to car to charge battery.
• 14:00 Nap time
• 15:00 Swap Cars.
• 16:00 Clean out blue Focus
• 17:00 Emissions test for Saturn
• 18:00 Clean out blue Saturn
• 19:00 Sign title and position three cars.
• 20:00 Shower and planning.

Narrative: I’ve lost a movie library, but I don’t have time to work it right now. I have backups, but everything isn’t in them. 1st priority is to move my shared drive onto a new library. Bought a 4 Bay NAS, i’ll populate it once I find four hard drives for it. The two Hitachi drives in the DNS-321 I was using for my video library died together. (They both died!) I’m leaving the three NAS off until I can build a NAS to push the data onto. I probably have twenty hard drives around here that need to be organized.

I also lost a SSD in a laptop and all the data on it. 🙁 I need to get back to using a network attached storage from using the hard drives in a workstation. I can use Microsoft cloud storage for now.

DLink no longer makes / supports NAS drives so I had to look around. The Buffalow NAS looked pretty good but they are a little old and Windows 10 wasn’t listed. I’ve spent a good couple of hours on this. 🙁

I bought a new NAS, it will get here next weekend. I’ll put an empty hard drive in it to make sure it does what it says and then spend the $400 more to get the four hard drives for RAID5.

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Bought mom a couple solar panels and charge controller, she’ll get them tomorrow.

I am pretty happy with the performance of the 600W on the roof, but surprisingly it is not enough to support the refrigerator and our CPAPS. I’ve given this some thought and my starting point has to be the CPAPs. I have four 24V UPS units that are very efficient (And very quiet) I think what I am going to do is put one of them in the bedroom. The hard part will be charging the battery at current, Need about 7Amps for 10 hours, what I really have is 12 Amps for 5 hours.

Just found out that my lawn is being taken over by “Creeping Charlie” which is an IVY plant with fairly large leaves. Apparently cutting the lawn without bagging the clippings exacerbates the growth of the plant.

I got my exercise in today. The Saturn ran out of gas in the emissions line. I had to push the car across the parking lot and get fuel before returning. The emissions passed and I signed the title over to our neighbors.

Feelings: I am still angry about the destruction in our cities.

Tomorrow: Tuesday, get organized and get something done.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies

Plans: Church services this morning amid city destruction all across America.

• 07:00 Up and Sipp’n coffee
• 08:00 All IOT2 clients are offline in the homestead?
  • Slate 11 died and I had to reboot it.
  • Ordered moving pads for Nancy.
• 09:00 Getting ready for services.
• 12:00 Service went well, went to bed
• 14:00 Solar panels working well.
  • The East facing panels may not be worth keeping.
  • The West facing panels produce a lot of power.

Narrative: Looks like the solar charge controllers are about 80% efficient converting 24V into 48V. I don’t know if I could better that.

We’re making about 2KWH / Day which is about 300WH short of running refrigerator. I need at least 100 more watts and since I’m 24 volts that takes two panels. I still need 600WH/Day for my CPAPS which means two more 100W panels for a total of 800W on the roof.

I lost my movie library today. Back to playing DVD’s…

Feelings: I am really distraught by all the violence the last couple of days.

Tomorrow: Monday, hopefully not a day with the investors.

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To

Status: Sheltering in place, we have plenty of food and supplies. Georgia is NOT social distancing!

• 07:00 Up Sipp’n a cup of coffee.
• 08:00 Walking around the block
• 09:00 Testing solar power generation.
• 12:00 Nap
• 14:00 Voting selections
• 16:00 Dinner and space X launch
• 17:00

Plans: Maybe take a walk. Submit our absentee ballets.

Narrative: I’ve measured the distances of three possible locations of solar panels on Grandpa’s farm

• 800Ft of 12AWG wire is 2.54 Ohms, we’d loose 44W (11Volts) with 800Ft of wire.
• 800Ft of 10AWG wire is 1.60 Ohms, we’d loose 27W (6.66Volts) with 800Ft of wire.
• 800Ft of 16AWG wire is 6.40 Ohms, We’d loose 110W (27Volts) with 800Ft of wire.

Feelings:

Tomorrow: Sunday Services

Injuries: Arguments: Exercise: Feeling words: Travel: Noteworthy: Accmplishments: Purchases: Project: Theme: Engineering: Repairs: Pi News:

From the book “Triggers” by Marshall Goldsmith
Did I DMBT make my wife feel loved? Yes
Did I DMBT help my wife today? Yes
Did I DMBT be happy? Yes
*Did My Best To