Like most kids are probably uttering, “Where did the summer go?”, so am I. I will admit it. I am a late 30s’ juvenile. It’s worked for this long, why change now.

Typically my summers consist of the following:

• Working on projects around the house
• Building things that I really didn’t need in the first place.
• Relaxing on the patio with the wife, a cold sun brewed ice tea or excellent German brew
• Working in the garden
• Playing a relaxing game of golf with friends
• Playing some games of horseshoes

I can’t believe that summer is almost at an end and I’ve done very little of any of these things. How sad indeed for me. I would be hard pressed to come up with any material for my “What I did over my summer vacation” essay.

This summer funds are short. So little has been done in the way of home improvements. Is the economy to blame for this, no. We’ve been saving for a trip to New Zealand and this has reduced our pool of funds dramatically. Cutting back on home improvements was needed. Cutting back on building things that I really didn’t need was removed entirely. I’ve also had to retire my 1999 Subaru Impreza and go with something more dependable.  I really liked my Subaru, though I didn’t like the name, “Impreza”. It kind of implies that I should be impressed, but since it doesn’t really say “Impressed” it kind of sounds like a cheap Mexican companies knock off. Enough of my tangent rant about names. The point is I ended up purchasing a Kia Souls Exclamation Point.

I have to say that I am impressed by the Kia Soul Exclamation Point, but Kia marketing of this car has left me with a new list of complaints. I loath the Kia Soul hamsters. I loath them so much that if I would have seen the commercial in it’s entirety, I probably wouldn’t have purchased the car.  Its just the principle. As for this cars name, I could have lived with the Soul, but the ! as it’s model name? It make me feel like the artist formerly known as Prince soiled some groupies in my cars back seat after purifying himself in Lake Minnetonka. This is why I will continually refer to my car as the Exclamation Point.

This summer has also offered some nice bounties from my garden as well as the CSA co-op that I’m a member. Some tasty meals with a good beer.

I also had the opportunity this month to travel to the Hofbrauhaus in Pittsburgh.  I had a wonderful fried meal (not what I would typically eat) of potato pancakes, fried pickles and soft pretzels. The carbohydrates were calling me. I couldn’t resist buying a 1 liter stein from the Hofbrauhaus either. He is a photo of it filled up whilst I play video games.

The wife and I have been doing a bit of walking at the local park. Lately we’ve been spotting some people that are apparently nostalgic for kings and knights. I wonder if they’ve got nostalgia for the black plague too and burning of the red heads for witchery ? Oh black plague and red (orange) heads, that really brings be back to some good times.

Last week I was in Boston for work. Not much to say there, it’s called work for a reason. I did have a nice meal and some good beer at Jacob Wirth Company on Stuart Street. Excellent Reissdorf Koelsch and Radeberger pils. The flight from Boston to Pittsburgh was about 1:30 minutes. The traffic in Pittsburgh about 2 hours.

Here is my Promos for working and living in Pittsburgh. If you live and work in Pittsburgh, this is where most of your time will be spent.

This was 35 mins to travel 1.3 miles. I think I’ve seen this in the movie Office Space before.

This was 40 mins to travel 2 miles. If you see the sign is says there is a wreck 1 mile up the road. After 40mins, I traffic cleared. No sign of a wreck to be found. Maybe someone forgot to clear the sign and maybe people read the sign and decided that there was suppose to be a traffic jam.

Ohhh Pittsburgh! Your highways are the colon expressway of Satan.

Quick Geek post,

For anyone that has been looking for the comparative command to Cisco’s powerful “show mac address-table” for a Dell switch, look no further.

On the Dell switch you can use:

show bridge address-table

This will show you the VLAN, NIC MAC, Port on the switch it’s connected from, type (dynamic or static).

I just wanted to throw this up there because as always when searching for it, I get an EXPERT EXCHANGE link. The Expert Exchange solution can be easily viewed by blocking the cookie that comes from their site. Then just scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and the answers are there. Never the less, the answers are not always correct. Especially in this case of using the show mac address-table translation to Dell switches.

So where did I find this information? I RTFM for the Dell switch. If you’re interested, you can find more at this link.

http://docs.us.dell.com/support/edocs/network/5P788/CLIG/address.htm

Hope this helps anyone looking for it.

Hello and greetings again. If you’re still reading this blog, you maybe the only one. Regardless of who is or isn’t reading this, I still like to keep a journal of the things tinker with. So here goes another one.

In previous posts I setup a rain barrel from used olive barrel containers. I’ve not been successful in capturing rain until this past week. The Eastern United States had been experiencing a sweltering heat wave for the past week an a half. There was plenty of sun, but no rain to fill the barrel. This only hindered the tests of most recent modification I had created.

Solar powered rain barrel pump

In order to get this started I needed some supplies. All of which I could pick up at the local hardware store for around $20.00 – $30.00.

Lets see what I got;

• Cheap section of hose
• A 150gph drill pump
• female hose fittings
• sprinkler pack

Since the 150 gph pump had male to male connections on it, I had to cut the cheap section of hose and reconnect a female hose connector to it. This provided me the connection from the pump to the rain barrel. So far this is the easy part. As I did this, my friend Ted stopped over. So here is a photo of Ted on his new 4G Android phone using it as much as possible to justify his need for the toy.

Congratulation Ted! This is your second appearance on my blog. Me think-est you’re becoming a blog whore Ted.

The hard part was here. The top of the $10.00 drill pump needed connected to a DC motor that worked and had some decent torque to it. The drill pump is not easy to spin by hand. What better then to use the orbital gearing system from my broken cordless drill. If you’re think it, then yes. I am one of those people that saves parts from broken devices/electronics. It saves money and sometimes they come in handy. The down side is building needless things just to use some left over parts. This is what is left over from the drill.

In using the existing orbital gear system, I was sure to get the torque I needed. I also used the exiting chuck-less lock to affix it to the pump axle. The only problem was the motor. I needed a motor that would work between 6v -24v and have enough torque to turn the orbital gear system. After looking through my parts, I found a motor that might fit the bill. I salvaged it from a broken high duty cycle HP inkjet printer.

Sorry about the picture quality here. I have about 5 snapshots of this but this is the clearest. The issue I had with the motor is the cog on the end of the motor pin. The gearing was not matching up with the one needed for the gear housing assembly. It took some time but I was able to pull the cog from the old broken drill motor and switch it for the new lower power motor.

There was also some issue of trying to keep the motor in place on the gear assembly. We tried gorilla glue, with no luck since the torque was too high. At this point there was a minor rebuild of the orbital gear assembly because Ted tipped it over and caused the ball barrings to fall out of place. Once everything was all back together, I grabbed the zip ties and started zipping the motor to the gear assembly. This seemed to hold after a few revamps of the zip ties.

Here is the results of the first proto-type.

With clips attached to the DC power leads and that to the solar panel, we started pumping. The results were less then I hoped. I was hoping to get enough pressure to run the sprinkler, but I got barely enough to get up the wall the garden. Then I noticed that it was about 6pm and the sun is some what behind the trees. This being a solar panel, sun is a required element. So we packed it up and waited till the next day.

So here is the pump in action. Sorry for the grainy video but I try to keep the videos under 6 megabyte.

Here is the water coming out in a trickle. This isn’t the best result, but a trickle is how One should water the garden and with it connected to the soaker hose, it still works well.

So what now? Well, this is just my first version of the solar water pump. I have somethings I will be re-working.

I’ve been perusing the “Jameco Electronics” catalog for motors ($17.95) that offer a higher rotations per minute without sacrificing the torque. In order to get better motor control and power efficiency I am also looking at a DC to pulse width modulator ($24.95 @ Jameco) to control the DC motor.

As far as a revamp on the housing unit, I am looking at “ShapeLock Design Plastic” ($14.95) that will permit molding a assembly system for the next version.
I will have my fully operational solar pump with adjustable speeds!

Thanks for reading.