WVvan
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Maptester nailed it! Just heard back from the Forest Service. It's a remote rain gauge. Remote being the operative word since it's at least a two hour hike from the closest road to reach it. Of course if it was closer to a road some yahoo with a gun would have shot it up by now.
* This post was
edited 04/09/12 02:17pm by WVvan *
Open the pod bay doors Hal.
Once I exit Hal, this is what I do.
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MAU MAU
New Hampshire and Maine
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Joined: 01/15/2012
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"And what do we have for our winner Johnny?"
"Well, first off he will be transported to West Virginia via Peter Pan Bus Lines where he will be met by Hals owner and creator. From there he will be whisked off in Hal for a whirlwind tour of the area including a meeting and photo opportunity with Mary-Lou Bialoski, Kielbasa Queen of the Allegheny Plateau.
Congratulations Maptester! (cheers from audience)
Roadtrek 170 Popular
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WVvan
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Quote:a meeting and photo opportunity with Mary-Lou Bialoski, Kielbasa Queen of the Allegheny Plateau.
Hey Mau Mau,
New Hampshire is listed as your current location yet you write like a native. Did you used to live around these parts?
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WVvan
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House battery frame and venting, Post 5
Need to add vent fans to the lid. Even though hydrogen is lighter than air and should naturally flow out if the vent outlet is higher than the inlet I want to give it some assistance. The amount of hydrogen gas produced by a charging battery at any one time is fairly small so I won't have to move a great deal of air. I'll be using small 12 volt "muffin" fans. This is a induction type fan so it has no brushes that might produce electrical sparks like a regular motor.
I'll make the fan enclosure from some scrap pieces of plexiglass. Create a mock up from cardboard first.
Then use some smoking matches to see if it will really move air through a hose. It does.
Start work on the plexiglass version. As an added safety feature stack wire mesh to create a flame arrestor between the fans and the inside of the vent lid.
Countersink the edges of the hole then sandwich the wire mesh between two plexiglass pieces. The countersinking allows the two pieces to be in contact over their length with the wire between. This will be the base of the fan enclosure.
Start cutting and drilling plexiglass pieces as I come up with a design.
While most of the enclosure is glued together I want to be able to replace the fans if needed.
Drill and countersink holes for nuts.
Starting to take shape.
Added small rectangular pieces to the inside to keep the fans in place.
Use a bead of silicone around the edges of the fans to increase air flow. Then do the same to the edges where the enclosure screws together.
Completed.
Hook it up to a power supply to check that the fans run and I didn't gum them up.
Attach a length of hose and see if it will move some air.
It does. It will almost blow out a lit match.
Figure out where to position it on the lid.
Add connectors to clean up the wires.
Use a bead of silicone where the fan will bolt to the vent lid.
Here's the view from inside the lid looking into the fan enclosure before I cleaned out the excess silicone. Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a jellyfish?
This is the original vent lid I made for the first battery box. I'm about to use a hacksaw to remove the bungee cord hold downs from the lid ends.
Success.
Here they are attached to the new lid.
continued -
On a different note this is what I've been working on today. The kitchen cabinet is starting to take shape.
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MAU MAU
New Hampshire and Maine
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The new battery box looks great and I like the muffin fan setup.
I was a Physics and Geography major in college so I am a little familiar with land masses. I fly over West Virginia quite often and always marvel at the true beauty of the region. Hal will become quite handy as a base of operations during your future explorations.
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maptester
Georgia
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Actually, I'd rather meet Bob the Supervisor and get a welding lesson. 
MAU MAU wrote:"And what do we have for our winner Johnny?"
"Well, first off he will be transported to West Virginia via Peter Pan Bus Lines where he will be met by Hals owner and creator. From there he will be whisked off in Hal for a whirlwind tour of the area including a meeting and photo opportunity with Mary-Lou Bialoski, Kielbasa Queen of the Allegheny Plateau.
Congratulations Maptester! (cheers from audience)
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WVvan
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House battery frame and venting, Post 6
With the vent fan enclosure done next up is the vent outlet. Here's what I bought to be the outlet on the side of the van. It came from a online marine store. It fits a 5/8" ID hose.
First decide where I want to mount it on the side of the van. It has to be higher than the level of the batteries but not too much higher to keep the hose run as short as possible. It's a trade off. It also has to be where the inside of the outer "skin" of the van can be reached so I can tighten the nut on the vent fitting.
Here's a picture of the inside of the van shortly after I bought it. Look just above and to the right of the fuel intake "hump". There is a roughly oval shaped indentation on the inside metal framework. That's the area I'm aiming for.
Here's that same area with the insulation in place. I've already drilled a pilot hole in the location I picked.
The view from the outside of the van. Having cut and drilled so many times on this van already it shouldn't be that big a deal putting another hole in the side but there's still plenty of trepidation before starting the drill.
Use the hole saw sized for the vent fitting and drill through the van.
On the inside of the van I'd cut the insulation before drilling but it was still in the way.
Perfect use for a couple binder clips.
Need to drill a hole on the inside metal framework layer that will allow me to work on the vent nut so size the hole saw to the nut.
Mistake. I should have used the pilot hole as a guide for the larger inside hole before drilling through the outer skin. Without the pilot hole to keep the drill centered I tried to hold the drill steady. The scratches in the metal show I wasn't totally successful at keeping it centered.
Here's the fitting in place and tightened down. There is enough room between the fitting and the edges of the hole in the metal framework to work needle-nosed pliers. In this picture the scratches have already been painted over.
The view from outside. I used silicone II on the hole edges before tightening to try and keep it watertight.
The vent hose attached to the inside of the vent fitting. The green hose in this picture has been changed out for heater hose which has a thicker wall and is less apt to kink.
The vent hose attached to the fan enclosure on the vent lid. In this picture you can see how the top of the lid is angled so the hydrogen will rise towards the fan enclosure end.
Here's an example of serendipity. I originally was going to have the bungee hold downs on each end of the lid but the fit is too tight between this end and the sofa-bed end. So moved the hold-down to the front of the lid at that corner. Started thinking about how to create an attachment point when I noticed my far less than perfect welding on the battery frame had created a little spur. The hold down hook fits it perfectly.
continued -
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MAU MAU
New Hampshire and Maine
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How will the marine fuel vent handle the acidic fumes from the batteries?
The finishes on these vents tend to pit quite rapidly around salt water.
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WVvan
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House battery frame and venting, Post 7
After completing the venting lid with it's exhaust hose and enclosed fans there was the question about how to control the fans. I didn't want the fans running all the time since they would just drain the battery. If my only charging system was the alternator then I could power them from the running van but I'm going to have solar so that wasn't the answer. How about having the fans run when the batteries were above a certain voltage that would show they were being charged. That wouldn't work either since the resting voltage of the batteries will probably change as they age and anyway I'm not sure of the voltage level put out by the solar charger and how it will fluctuate with the sun.
I'm no expert on electronics but I have dabbled in them before so I went to Digikey and started searching around for something that might be used with a charging battery. I found the Maxim MAX4376. If I was reading it's datasheet correctly it might work. So ordered a couple.
Ran into the first problem. Here is a MAX4376 sitting on a penny. It's a really small surface component chip. Never messed with these before. Don't think I'll be able to solder on something that small.
So started searching online. Found a way to solder something this small. It involves solder paste and a electric skillet. So order some solder paste. The paste comes shipped with a ice pack to keep it cold so you store it in the fridge.
Also ordered a small circuit board that is made for this style chip. Put the paste on the circuit board pads then place the chip legs on top of the paste.
I used a dental pick to clean off the excess paste after taking the picture.
Next get an old electric skillet.
The paste has a specific temperature versus time profile you're supposed to follow. Took me two tries to get it right.
It works. Here's the chip soldered into place.
The circuit board is big enough for me to solder pins through the eight holes and use on a breadboard.
Here is my test rig. I have both a load on the battery and a charger connected.
I've got the chip mounted on a breadboard and connected to the battery via a sensing resistor as recommended in the datasheet.
When the battery is under load but not charging the MAX4376 outputs a signal of .008 volts.
When charging the signal jumps to .021 volts. This value changes as the current into the battery changes. The signal voltage range can be changed with a different sensing resistor.
OK now that I have these value what do I do with them. Well I always wanted to learn about microcontrollers so these seems as good a time as any.
Here's the microcontroller I decided to learn on. It's an Atmel ATMEGA168P-20PU. A microcontroller is like a limited function computer. So a computer for $4.85 is a pretty good deal.
The low price is the good news. What's the bad news? The fact that I knew next to nothing on the subject of microcontrollers. At the beginning of the battery venting project I talked about hitting a slow patch. Well this is it. I had to learn a new whole subject. Here is a picture of all the manuals/info/tutorials I downloaded off the internet and printed.
I won't say I've read everything in this stack but I've read most of it. And some of it more than once. This took weeks and weeks. I won't go into much detail about how microcontrollers work since this post is already pretty boring by now. Basically you write a computer program and load it into the microcontroller which tells it what to do then test it. If it doesn't work like expected you change the program and load it into the microcontroller again and see if it works. It can be very tedious so patience is required.
I'm writing the program in assembler language which is a type of computer code. I had a class in it once a long long time ago, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, so that helped a little. By the way if you've seen the first "Terminator" movie you've seen assembler code. It's what scrolling up the screen when you see the world through the Terminators eyes. " Hey, buddy. You got a dead cat in there, or what?"
So I built a circuit on the breadboard that includes the microcontroller.
Add it to the rig and start testing it. After much work I got it to do what I want.
Here's a simplified version of what the microcontroller does in this setup.
Every 30 seconds check the output from the MAX4376 chip. Decide if the battery is charging. If it is then make sure the fans are on and functioning OK. Sound an alarm if there is a fan problem. When the battery stops charging run the fans for 5 more minutes so to be sure to purge any gas from the vent lid.
There's more to it than that but if anyone is interested in the gritty details they can PM me. If this one application was the only use I had for microcontrollers then this would have been overkill for just the vent fans but there are several different projects I have in mind. This just gave me a good excuse to finally buckle down and tackle the subject.
Haven't built the final version of the circuit board that incorporates everything yet but I'm far enough along to be sure I can get it done. It won't be needed until I can get the house batteries charging system in place. So I'll stop posting on the battery venting project until then. Next posting I start on something else.
* This post was
edited 04/21/12 10:02am by WVvan *
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WVvan
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Quote:How will the marine fuel vent handle the acidic fumes from the battery
Not really sure. Guess I'll find out.
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