Lee Devlin's Website

Fixing a broken latch on the Yaesu YSK-100 Separation Kit

I’ve maintained the Yaesu FT100 FAQ for about 10 years. For those of you not familiar with ham radio, the FT100 is a popular mobile transceiver. I’ve talked to people from all over the world on it. As time went on, the FAQ stabilized and I rarely have to do much updating to it now other than to fix stale links. This FAQ still sees a fair amount of traffic.

My FT100 is mounted in my Durango using a YSK100 separation kit. The separation kit makes this radio easier to mount in a vehicle by separating the user controls, called the ‘head’, from larger body of the radio. The head then can be installed on a faceplate that is connected to the radio’s body with long cables. The body of the radio can be installed wherever you find room in the vehicle. Mine is hidden in the center console.

About a year ago, the latch that holds the head on to the face plate of the YSK-100 separation kit broke while I was removing the head.

I’ve never been happy with the YSK100 faceplate design since the latch requires an excessive amount of force to deflect when installing or removing the head. Without the latch, the radio could still be used, but it would come off easily whenever I brushed against the head. Since the radio has been out of production for a few years, spare parts hare hard to find. So I decided to fix it myself.

The plastic latch had cracked off of my faceplate.

There had been several reports of this problem on the FT100 Yahoo Group, but no one had ever reported figuring out a fix for it. You can’t just glue it back in place, because the part is highly stressed and a glue joint would not hold up to those extreme forces.

As you can see in the above image, a small portion of the latch is still on the wall of the faceplate. I sanded this off with a small belt sander. Next I took some measurements and started bending some .032″ thick aluminum sheet metal to make my own latch. I have a small metal brake/shear, but in this case, I just ended up using a vice to bend the sheet metal since the brake has a limit on how small the bends can be. I drilled some small holes and with attached it with M3 screws and nuts.

Here is a top view of the latch.

It works pretty much like the old latch in that it’s very stiff and holds with a lot of force. I suppose a thinner material, perhaps spring steel, might have worked better, but this one can be bent to get the desired feel. If it ever breaks again, I know how to make a new one.

Here is a side view of the latch.

New metal latch with head installed.

I hope that others are able to take advantage of my description and pictures to help them to fabricate their own latch in the event that they break the plastic one that comes on the faceplate.

Finding the OBD port on a BMW E36

A few weeks ago my wife’s 1997 BMW 328i illuminated the ‘check engine’ light and she called me asking if she should immediately take it to the dealer to see what was wrong. Since I had just changed the battery on the car and thus the electrical system had lost power a few times, I thought that it might be a false alarm and told her I’d like to look at the diagnostic trouble code (DTC) on its OBDII port before spending any money at the dealer. Taking a car to the dealer with a ‘check engine’ light is giving them permission to charge your for an hour’s labor for what might turn out to be nothing.

I had purchased an OBD scan tool at Amazon.com that hooks up to a USB port on a computer and it’s based on the ELM327 chip, which means it can read any of the standard protocols available on the OBD connector. However, when I first tried to use it on the BMW just to satisfy my curiosity after purchasing the tool, I recall not being able to locate the connector. On U.S.-made cars like my Dodge Durango, these OBD connectors are located under the driver’s side dash and are usually exposed and thus easy to locate. In looking through a few BMW forums for help on where the port is located, I found some conflicting advice about the port being under the hood and having a special round plug that was unique to BMW. Some forum responses assured me it was down there under the dash next to the clutch but it was covered.

After getting a flash light and putting my head under the dash, it was almost embarrassing that I didn’t find it sooner. BMW put a cover on it that was clearly labeled OBD, but unless you’re a contortionist and get your head under the dash, you won’t be able to read that cover. The cover is easily opened by turning a screw head with a coin and the cover will hang down from a tether. Similarly, the connector itself has a cap over it which can be pulled off and it is also tethered. After pulling off these covers, the OBD plug was plainly visible.

Please note, the photos below are taken from the driver’s side floor looking up at the bottom of the dashboard.

The BMW's OBD port is covered

BMW OBD port shown with covers open

BMW OBD port with cable attached

After connecting the scan tool and running the software to check the codes, I found out the check engine light was complaining about a past event where the coolant sensor had reported too low a value. I checked the radiator fluid level and everything looked fine. I figured the car’s computer may have gotten confused when I was replacing the battery. I used the scan tool to turn off the check engine light. It’s been a few weeks and the light has stayed off, so the little device has paid for itself several times over just for that one usage.

I wanted to document this here in the blog in case someone goes searching for how to find the BMW’s OBDII port since a few pictures of it sure would have been helpful to me.

Expanding the Boot Camp Partition on a Mac

I got a MacBook Pro about a year ago and, coming from a background of using Windows, I installed Boot Camp on it so that I could run Windows programs. I find that I actually use Windows most of the time on my Mac computer. However, after a year, the 30 GB Boot Camp partition was reaching its limit. I found that in order to install some new program, I had to uninstall something else. I did a web search on how to expand the Boot Camp partition and was greeted with lots of advice from various forums, much of it conflicting, some of it untested, on whether it was possible and which tools to use. At first I was hoping to just find a utility that allowed me to move a slider bar that would shrink the Mac partition and expand the Boot Camp partition. However, after reading numerous postings and websites on how to perform the task, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. I saw a few recommendations for Camp Tune, which supposedly allows an easy way to resize the Boot Camp partition without deleting it but that program is no longer free and some have reported that it didn’t work all the time.

I dutifully backed up the Boot Camp partition several different ways and then committed to changing it from FAT32 to NTFS. I had set it up as a FAT32 partition initially because that would allow me to write to it with the MacOS. The MacOS can read from but not write to NTFS partitions. However, I found that I never used that feature and the free tool I was going to use (WinClone) didn’t allow you to expand a FAT32 partition. It could back it up and restore it, but it would stay the same size. So I had to convert my Bootcamp partition to NTFS. That’s actually easy to do, but it takes some time. You just need to boot Windows and then go into the DOS prompt and use this command:

convert C: /FS:NTFS

You may have to reboot to get this to work because it may be unable to unmount the partition to convert it. In my case it required two reboots, both of which ran the chkdsk program before the partition converted to NTFS.

Once this was done, I used WinClone to back up the Boot Camp NTFS partition to an external USB drive. According to one of the comments, WinClone may not work with MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I’m running Leopard (10.5). After backing up the Windows data, I used the BootCamp Assistant in the Utilities to delete the Bootcamp partition, and then to resize it to 120GB. After that I used WinClone to restore the image to the Bootcamp partition.

I followed the directions on this YouTube video:

That video gives you the impression that the steps all take a few seconds. However, some of them can take hours so you need to be patient.

Beware that some people have reported losing data while attempting to perform these steps, so it’s critical to have a backup of all of your important data prior to embarking on any partition resizing project.

Replacing a Seiko Kinetic Watch Battery

I’ve owned a Seiko Kinetic model 5M62 watch for about 8 years and I really liked the fact that it never needed batteries and would run for days without winding. The Kinetic watch is self-winding, and instead of using a spring to store the energy, it converts the mechanical motion into electricity and stores it instead. This gives it the convenience of a self-winding watch along with the accuracy of a quartz movement. However, a few weeks ago I noticed that it would stop running if I took it off for a few hours. Sometimes, when I was just typing on the computer and not moving my wrist around, it would stop running. Below is a picture of the watch.

I figured there was something wrong with the energy storage system, possibly a dead battery or bad capacitor. After a web search, I found out that the watch does have a battery, which is sometimes erroneously referred to as a capacitor, but it is indeed a battery. All rechargeable batteries eventually lose their ability to hold a charge and after 8 years, this one had simply worn out. The problem with changing it is that the Seiko Kinetic battery is not one of those standard watch batteries that you buy in a store and easily change by yourself. However, I found that it could be purchased from a number of vendors on Ebay, Amazon, and other on-line websites for around $15-$20.

In our disposable society, I’m sure this issue would have been an excuse to go shopping for a new watch. But once you become attached to a watch, and this one is water proof so I hardly ever take it off, it sort of becomes a part of you. I hated the thought of replacing it, especially because I felt it had many more years of service.

I started reading a few of the websites that talked about replacing the battery as a DIY project, but wasn’t sure if I was up to the task or had the necessary tools. I never had taken the watch apart and looking at the back of it, I didn’t think it would simply pop off like my previous watches that had user-replaceable batteries. I talked with the jeweler where I bought it and they told me that they would have to send it away for repair and thought it might cost $65 or more to replace the battery. The local jewelery repair shop had a similar assessment. So, being an adventurer and inveterate fixer, I decided to do it myself.

You can see from the image below that the watch had notches on the back of its case. This meant that it needed a special case opener wrench.

I decided to get a Jaxa style opener (shown below) which clamps down on three notches since it seemed like it would do the job better than the openers that only grabbed the case on two notches. These can be found on the Internet for less than $10.

To make things easier, I decided to remove the watch band. Most of the watches I’ve owned had spring-loaded pins that were pretty easy to remove, but this model had pins pressed in that held the watch band in place. I was able to push them out with the tool shown below.

I used a paper towel to protect the watch and gently gripped it in a vice and was able to unscrew the back with the watch opener. It took a fair amount of torque to loosen the case back. In the image below you can see what it looks like inside. The battery is the brass-colored part in upper side of the image below. To get to it, you need to remove three very small screws. I had several small jeweler’s screw drivers around the house, but these screw slots are so tiny that I found it necessary to use a file on one of my screw drivers to make a very sharp tip in order for it to fit in the slots of these screws.

The center screw holds the winding weight and gear in place. These items can only go one one way as the shaft is keyed. Actually, they can go on two ways, but both ways are correct. However, you can put them in upside down, so pay attention to how they are installed as you remove them. The gear must mate up with a smaller gear so make sure that it does before installing the winding weight and screw.

When you get all the parts out, they look like the image below. There are 3 small screws, the winding weight, a gear, a red mylar insulator, a battery hold-down clamp, and the battery. To re-assemble them, just (carefully) put them back together they same way you took them apart. You’ll find a pair of sharp tweezers useful to handle the screws and other parts.

Here is the package I got from SwatchBattery.com through their Amazon store. It came with a red mylar insulator, a hold-down bracket, and the Maxcell TC920S battery. You may not need to replace the insulator or bracket if yours are still in good shape.

In addition to the tools mentioned above, I also used the magnifying headset shown below which I highly recommend. I think that the magnifying headset (with built-in LED lights) was instrumental in allowing me to work on such a small device. They can also be found on the Internet for less than $10.

If you’ve stuck with me this long, I’m going to give you a bonus. I mentioned that I had owned the watch for 8 years so now I have a confession. I always wondered what the push-button at the 2-o’clock position was used for. Sometimes it would advance the second hand 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds and then it would sit there and stop. Then it would start running after the time had caught up with it. I had no idea why it did this because I had never read the owner’s manual and don’t even know if I still have a copy of it. So, in case you’re wondering, here is a copy of the page from the owner’s manual I found online that explains it (hint: it’s a sort of ‘gas gauge’ for the battery):

Incidentally, when the watch battery had begun to fail, it was impossible to get the reserve indicator to advance the second hand more than 5 or 10 seconds even after vigorous winding. Now with the fresh battery, it jumps forward 30 seconds whenever I push it.

Would you like to know how to correctly wind the watch and how much it takes to keep it moving for a day? If so, here is the explanation, again from the Seiko manual:

It would appear that if you walk more than 720 meters (about 1/2 mile) you’ll impart enough energy to keep it going for a two days. Here’s another interesting tidbit: If you see the watch second hand jumping 2 seconds at a time, that means the battery is low and that you have less than 24 hours of charge left on it.

So, there you have it, a way to resurrect a watch that should last for decades. If you have one of these Seiko Kinetic watches sitting in a drawer gathering dust because of a dead battery, I hope my explanation gives you the motivation to get it working again for minimal cost. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or just want to share your experience with other readers.

Solar Powered Air Conditioning?

LG is getting a lot of media coverage for its Solar Hybrid Air Conditioner (model F-Q232LASS) but so far, no one has bothered to do any technical analysis on it. Most blog articles have nothing but enthusiastic praise for it. So, please allow me to provide an alternate viewpoint.

I think this is a product intended just for PR purposes. Some people may look at it and think it is a solar powered air conditioner. Much of the news coverage uses the unrelated logic of how much CO2 it saves or, even more curiously, how it’s like ‘planting 780 pine trees’. As a side note, when someone starts describing an energy benefit with the lifetime CO2 savings and avoids discussing actual costs, be aware that you’re about to be bamboozled. The solar panel on top of the air conditioning unit produces a small amount of energy; according to LG it’s 70 watts. In case you’re curious, that amounts to about $12 of electricity per year, assuming a cost per kW-h of $.10 and average capacity factor of solar panels. That also assumes the electricity it generates can be used by other appliances when the A/C unit is not running and I’m not sure if that’s the case or not.

The air conditioning unit is rated at 28,000 BTU/hr. Assuming a SEER of 13, that translates to a 2800 watt draw, not including the fan the circulates the air through the evaporator and the house, which can add another 900 watts or so. That would mean that there’s a 52:1 difference between the air conditioner’s energy draw and energy produced by the solar panel. I am assuming that there is a grid-tie inverter that puts the energy generated when the air conditioner is not running into your home to offset other energy consumption. If not, then the solar panel output would only be used when the A/C was actually running and that would reduce the $12/year of annual power generated considerably. Also of note is that most residential air conditioning loads occur from around 4-6 p.m. when people return home from work. At that time the sun is much lower in the sky and solar output is about 20% of a solar panel’s maximum rating.

An air conditioner needs to get rid of the condenser’s heat and so it’s best placed in the shade. In this case, however, the condenser would need to be placed in direct sunlight, which counteracts what it’s trying to do, namely to get rid of heat, so that would negatively affect its efficiency. In addition, the condenser needs unimpeded forced air flow which is generally done with a fan that blows air from bottom to top to get the added benefit of natural convection since heat rises, but this unit’s fan has to blow air from side-to-side because the solar panel on top would block bottom-to-top air flow. I should also mention that solar panels work best when they are cool so attaching them to a hot condenser doesn’t help their efficiency either.

You’d be better off with having a solar system that is completely independent of the air conditioning unit because it introduces too many compromises in each of the respective systems’ design goals.

Nice try LG, but this product is no better than one of those solar powered attic fans which is another idea masquerading as a solution to a problem that it doesn’t solve.

I should mention that I am a big fan of solar energy. We use a solar array to power our home and it is a net energy producer, generating more electricity than we use on an annual basis. I hope to someday use the excess for a plug-in hybrid car. The reason I felt compelled to write about this topic is because I just get tired of rip-offs and scams that prey on people’s trust (and ignorance) when it comes to energy savings schemes so I have to call them out.

Energy Saver 3000 and other PFC nonsense

My friend Jack recently asked me to write about the Energy Saver 3000 and whether it will save money on your electricity bill. I saw this product advertised on TV about a year ago and nearly fell out of my chair when I heard the ridiculous claims being made about saving money using a power factor correction device. And I understand other charlatans have jumped on the bandwagon and have begun offering similar devices that are supposed to ‘pay for themselves in a few months’ with the money you will save on your electricity bill.

Few people understand what power factor means and I guess this makes it an ideal way to extract money from consumers who trust that anything that appears on a TV ad must be legitimate. Basically, the power factor is an indication of phase alignment of the voltage and current in an AC waveform. In a purely resistive load, the alignment is perfect, which gives it a power factor of 1. On loads that have energy storage elements in them like inductors and capacitors, it can get out of alignment and the power factor falls below 1. A power factor below 1 doesn’t mean that all the energy is getting lost, it’s just that a portion of it is being returned to its source. Whenever energy is transmitted through wires a small amount of it is lost in the resistance of the wires, so it’s preferable to minimize the amount that gets returned. The power company has a vested interest in keeping the power factor as close to 1 as possible for the same reason. However, unless you’re a commercial customer, you don’t get charged for power that is returning to its source. You only get charged for actual power consumed. And in the grand scheme of things, the amount being returned is rather small as a percentage of the overall total, less than 10% for the average household. Since about 7% of all power is lost in the power company’s transmission lines, the overall loss due to having an imperfect power factor is 10% x 7% = .7%. This means that if every household in the nation were to have a PFC device (one that actually worked) the maximum potential energy savings is .7%.

You can improve the power factor of an inductive load such as a motor by adding a properly sized capacitor to it. This is what these power factor correction devices claim to do. But the problem is that they can’t match the capacitance to the load because most of these motors run only intermittently and so when they are not running, the capacitor will cause the power factor to become out of phase in the opposite direction. And none of these devices has active monitoring to switch the capacitor in and out. That is why these devices simply cannot save energy. Even if they did actively monitor and correct the power factor, the savings would be nowhere near what they claim since, as mentioned, the average savings would only approach .7%.

The Energy Star website has an interesting entry on these devices:

“ENERGY STAR does not qualify any Power Factor Correction Devices. Please send us an email at logomisuse@energystar.gov if you see one that claims to be ENERGY STAR certified.

Power Factor Correction Devices claim to reduce residential energy bills and to prolong the productive life cycles of motors and appliances by reducing the reactive power (kVAR) that is needed from the electric utility.

We have not seen any data that proves these types of products for residential use accomplish what they claim. Power factor correction devices improve power quality but do not generally improve energy efficiency (meaning they won’t reduce your energy bill). There are several reasons why their energy efficiency claims could be exaggerated. First, residential customers are not charged for KVA-hour usage, but by kilowatt-hour usage. This means that any savings in energy demand will not directly result in lowering a residential user’s utility bill. Second, the only potential for real power savings would occur if the product were only put in the circuit while a reactive load (such as a motor) were running, and taken out of the circuit when the motor is not running. This is impractical, given that there are several motors in a typical home that can come on at any time (refrigerator, air conditioner, HVAC blower, vacuum cleaner, etc.), but the unit itself is intended for permanent, unattended connection near the house breaker panel.

For commercial facilities, power factor correction will rarely be cost-effective based on energy savings alone. The bulk of cost savings power factor correction can offer is in the form of avoided utility charges for low power factor. Energy savings are usually below 1% and always below 3% of load, the higher percentage occurring where motors are a large fraction of the overall load of a facility. Energy savings alone do not make an installation cost effective.

Power factor correction devices are NOT eligible for a federal tax credit.”

Most of the ‘evidence’ to support claims by companies hawking these devices is very unscientific, often times just unsupportable anecdotes by shills talking about how their energy bill went down after installing one of them. This could simply be due to behavioral changes one naturally makes when focusing on an area of improvement, behavior that a customer who purchases an expensive power saving device is likely to engage in without realizing it. To truly measure improvement, you need to run a controlled experiment and I’ve yet to see a legitimate experiment demonstrated when it comes to these devices. Even the videos on the websites don’t bother to measure actual power, just current or power factor before and after which to me means that they are intentionally trying to mislead customers. There are many inexpensive power meters out there such as Kill-A-Watt and yet there are no demos with a power meter used properly, i.e., showing watts consumed before and after installing a PFC device. Instead, they show power factor or current before and after, which makes for an impressive demo, but tells you nothing about the energy savings you’d experience.

If you’re thinking about buying one of these devices, I’d recommend you buy a whole house energy monitor like the TED5000 instead. It will cost less than a useless PFC device and is likely to help you figure out where your energy is going so you will be more aware of how you can save energy. It will also tell you exactly what your power factor is at any moment. As I type this, my furnace blower (a 900W load) is running and my power factor is .94, which is close enough to 1 that it’s hardly worth worrying about.

EntConnect 2010

I posted over a short article on my consulting site about the upcoming EntConnect conference and I figured I’d make sure that anyone who checks in here gets the message too. The EntConnect conference that sprung out of Midnight Engineering magazine in the 1990s will take place in less than a month, March 25th-28th in downtown Denver. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, or would like to become one, you may want to join us. You’ll learn a lot and have some fun while you’re at it.

Fake Virus Scanner Scams

By now you’ve no doubt visited at least one website, usually one that appears in page one of Google’s search results, that does a redirect and all of a sudden, what appears to be a virus scanner is now running on your computer screen. It may look something like the window below.

Click on the image for a larger version of it.

The image on the screen is animated with the green bars filling in and the % complete changing, and shows that it’s scanning your drives for viruses. It finishes in a surprisingly short time. However, it’s just a JavaScript animation, nothing more, and it’s not doing anything with your files because browsers cannot open your computer’s files without your help. Invariably, it will find threats and invite you to download a product to ‘fix’ them. The other messages that pop up may look like the following:

Most of the popups are harmless, but the last one is an attempt to get you to download an executable file that, if you open it, invariably will end up taking you to a site where you’ll have to put in your credit card number to pay for the virus scanner to remove the viruses and to ‘keep you safe’.

Downloading an .exe file won’t do anything by itself, but if you open an ‘.exe’ file, then all bets are off, because it can do anything it wants, including installing a real virus, which would not be a stretch for a company that is trying to steal from you already.

The safest place to click on the pop-up windows are on the red X’s in the upper right hand corner to close them, but sometimes you’ll find that you can’t get out of the web page or browser because they keep popping up. If your browser keeps a ‘memory’ of the sites you were on when it closed (like Firefox does), it feels like you can’t get rid of the offending site. But there is a way to safely extract yourself from the clutches of these evil doers.

You can disable JavaScript temporarily and all windows will close when you close them and the popups will stop. To disable Javascript on Firefox, just click on Tools->Options->Content and uncheck the box next to JavaScript. You can re-enable it after you’ve gotten out of the website. For Internet Explorer, to disable JavaScript, you can select Tools->Internet Options->Security->Custom Level and scroll to the “Active scripting” section of the list (under “Scripting”) Click Disable.

JavaScript by itself cannot harm your computer, but if you give it help, by actually acting on the pop up messages and saying ‘ok’ or ‘yes’ when you’re in this situation, then you can do yourself some harm, and pay the price for what will be, at best, a useless virus scanner. It’s pretty hard to use the Internet these days with JavaScript disabled, because so many sites depend on it to work properly. So trying to disable JavaScript permanently isn’t really an option.

There are a number of real virus scanners out there, and a popular one is AVG. You can download and install it for free, although it may do some unsavory things such as change your default search engine to Yahoo and install yet another toolbar. These things are easily reversed, of course.

So, you might wonder, how does this happen that a website ends up in page one of Google’s search results and yet is a site that is so obviously evil that it’s trying to extort money from you? It’s usually done by cloaking. When Google’s search bots go looking to index websites, these sites give the search bots a different page filled with keywords that look like an exact match for what you’re searching for so they score high enough to reach page one. However, when the website detects a real browser, it will redirect it to another website that tries to convince you that you have a virus and now must buy some protection. Google and other search engines hate cloaking, but they have a hard time detecting it, since a website can tell whether it’s being visited by a search bot vs. a browser.

If you’ve visited a site like this, you should to do a real virus scan, particularly if you allowed it to download and execute the .exe file. As long as you didn’t open the .exe file, you’re probably OK, but for peace of mind, a scan with AVG or similar virus scanner may help your computer feel just a little less slimy after visiting one of those sites.

Bear Chews up Plane, Duct Tape to the Rescue

I am amazed at the resourcefulness of Alaskans. During a private “fly-in” fishing excursion in the Alaskan wilderness, the chartered pilot and fishermen left a cooler and bait in the plane. And a bear smelled it. This is what he did to the plane, a Piper Super Cub.

The pilot used his radio and had another pilot bring him 2 new tires, 3 cases of duct tape, and a supply of sheet plastic. He patched the plane together, and FLEW IT HOME!

Click on any image below for a higher resolution version.

How would you like to come back from a day of fishing to find this?

The bear destroyed a plane… all for some bait fish…

And a few tasty tires…

Looking good!

Good enough to fly…

I like the way he ‘kept it legal’ with the tail number written by hand on the duct tape. You have to click on the image to get a bigger view and squint to see the tail number written over the duct tape, N9368D.

Preserving Digital Memories

There’s something fascinating about people getting all excited about a product that you helped design. That’s what’s going on here on the HSN channel. These women really understand the concept of the product. I helped design the Picture Keeper to solve a real problem that people are now encountering on a regular basis, that is, the loss of all of their digital photos due to a hard drive crash or virus. I have photos of my family that are over 80 years old. Below is a photo of my aunt, uncle, and mother taken in Ireland in the 1920′s. You can bet my photos are backed up at least 4 different ways, including to my Picture Keeper.

If you want to make sure your digital photos don’t get lost, head on over to PictureKeeper.com to get your Picture Keeper today.