MapleEngineer

Other right-wing accounts variously reacted by describing the move as Orwellian, lamenting the death of free speech and even contemplating leaving Canada for good.

Oh no. Not that. Please no.

<Tee hee!>

This is the replacement controller I built for the wheelchair lift. The controller itself is in the middle. The four board on the left and right are a testing harness. The red and black wires are 24VDC and the green and white ones TX and GND for monitoring with a terminal program on my notebook (puTTY).

Without the test harness it looks like this.

I was trying to squeeze a LOT into the BID box that I'm using for this project. I had to stack boards to get everything in.

The bottom most board is a standard bottom board for the BUD case. It has holes along each side for 2.54 screw terminals and pluggable screw terminals. I'm only using that board to mechanically connect the project to the BID case and for the screw terminals. I almost always use pluggable screw terminals because they're awesome. I can unplug four plugs instead of unscrewing 36 screw terminals and trying to keep the wires straight.

There are two top boards. The one on the left carries four relays which turn the negative logic of the Darlingtons into positive logic for the lift. They send 24VDC out to the contactors that run the motors and the door lock. The other small board at the rear has two safety relays which switch power coming in through a bunch of safety switches out to the battery relay and the main contactor.

This is what it looks like assembled into its BUD case.

This is all built around an Arduino Nano with a program that I wrote in Great Cow BASIC.

I'm working on replacing the Schneider SmartRelay on an Atlas Vista 613 wheelchair lift that I bought for my dad. The Atlas technician agrees that the SmartRelay is probably shot and the replacement is $1,000 wholesale. I built a replacement using an Arduino Nano, a UNL2803A Darlington array, a switching 7805, a bunch of Zener diodes, and a handfull of Schneider industrial relays.

Unfortunately, I let the smoke out of my very last Nano and needed to keep the project moving. So...I took a small piece of protoboard, an Arduino ProMini 168, and some jumper wire and created this Frankenduino. It's the same pinout as the Nano with none of the nice supporting stuff like an ICP port, USB, voltage regulators, etc. It will keep the development moving while I'm waiting for the 10 Nanos I have on order to arrive.

I give you Frankenduino. It's an Arduino ProMini soldered onto a piece of protoboard and wired up to the Nano pinout.

I have 10 Nanos on order but I really needed to keep the project moving.

This ProMini has an ATMEGAS168 chip on it but that's good enough for what I'm doing.

I think that the vast majorly of us are all for this. I can't wait to hear how they're going to build the 3,500 km of wall that are under water. I assume they will just build the wall on the waterfront on their side of the Great Lakes?

This would solve the pornlemmy of what to do when the christofascist dictatorship finally takes hold, down there. I'm very concerned that 30 million refugees are going to head north across the border. They really should head south since there is no way that we can house them here over winter and millions of them will starve and freeze to death.

My wife made potato salad to bring to dinner at friends' house last night. It's about half hard boiled duck eggs by volume.

Delicious!

We were invited friends house for dinner last night. My wife brought potato salad. I like lots of eggs in my potato salad. We had a couple of dozen duck what in the fridge so my wife boiled up a dozen and added them. It's about half by volume hard boiled duck eggs and it's delicious.

What are these MAGA clowns doing in Canada's Parliament. The Conservatives are embarrassing to us as a country. The fascist virtue signaling is sickening.

For two or three weeks each spring and fall it gets very noisy on the homestead.

My wife has a large dehydrator. She had to fly to Vancouver suddenly a week and a half ago and left me with a huge box of fresh peppers from the garden. She asked me to dehydrate them so I spent an hour chopping them up last night while my son made dinner. Then, I put the diced peppers in the dehydrator and left it running overnight. These two 250ml canning jars were the result. Apparently she can add these to things during the winter and the rehydrate up nicely and no one can even tell.

They smell pretty good, too.

This is just stupid.

I'm an atheist. A devout atheist.

This is not "secularism", it's stupidity.

As atheists, my family celebrates the traditional secular commercial Christmas. We will also happily attend Chanukah celebrations, Kwanzaa celebrations, winter solstice celebrations, Nicholas Day celebrations, Yule celebrations, Festivus celebrations, or whatever else we are invited to attend. Our beliefs are not so delicate that they could collapse just from being exposed to others joyous celebrations. We love participating in other people's joy.

This sort if fanatical secularism sucks all of the joy out of the season.