Refreshing old Skills

One of the current things in the life of the OTG is refreshing the brain matter, I am writing another book and the process of transcribing and adapting old diary entries into some sort of readable, enjoyable form is triggering many memories of old tech, and in turn, having excess money floating around I am enjoying buying some old and familiar items like calculators and more recently, pocket computers.

This is a pocket computer I have never had, but now I do. One reason why I could never have it is that it was only released in Japan, but operates in English. The PC-G801 is quite popular on eBay and sells for less that would be expected, I suspect the main reason for that is there appears to be no English language manual available, I have searched, and will continue to search, but up to now, nothing.

They called this a pocket computer and it must have fit in pockets back then, they would have been quite large pockets back in the day.

Online, there is a Japanese manual and in addition, a translated PC-G850V manual available, and the operation of that other model is quite similar, so I have been able to program some silly stuff on the PC-G801 and since obtaining this item I have had quite a few hours down memory lane, playing with BASIC programming, a way of justifying the purchase, keeping my mind active.

The programming part of my brain has been neglected now for most of the time I have been retired, so seventeen years, but like riding a bike, it is easy to get back into the saddle so to speak. The little program I wrote here examines the character set and prints it out on the screen based on input limits, I will enter it here for future reference as I intend to write an English manual for the little computer:

10:INPUT "START =";B,"FINISH =";C

15:FOR A=B TO C

20:PRINT CHR$(A);

30:WAIT 10

35:NEXT A

40:END

I have also bought myself a Casio PB-700 which is a "pocket computer" that I did own back in the 1980's so I will report on that one when it arrives, I know there is an English manual for that one.

Prepping for the Zombie Apocalypse

On the subject of hammers, it is always wise to keep your growing collection in good shape for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.  It is a continuing debate if that is actually going to happen, however, better to be safe than sorry as they say.

In addition, I consider that this sort of activity helps to maintain a healthy marriage, with the good lady feeling safe and secure knowing that her good man is in his happy place, dutifully polishing his hammer.

Great find at the swap and shop

In these days of irritating, expensive, rechargable tools it is not often that one of these traditional beauties comes up for sale, especially in this condition, a great addition to my electronics toolbox, especially for detailed work

Typically, I was excited and bought the electric hammer in a rush without noticing that it was a left handed unit, but that is not the end of the world, I am looking for an adapter so if anyone has one for sale, let me know.

The state of selling off the oldies, July 2024

This might be a regular thing to post, here we are in the seventh month of the year and the specifications of the machines that I am building to sell on Marketplace are increasing to the point when I am sad to see them go, this one is no exception.

 It is a seventh generation intel, an i7-7700 which is a four core, eight thread processor.

Fractal Design, mid tower ATX. 2 fans with an EVGA 500W 80 Plus power supply, MSI B250M Pro VDH Motherboard, Intel i7-7700 CPU 3.60 GHz, Adata 16GB DDR4 RAM single stick, SSD 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe Boot Drive, HDD 500GB Data Drive, MSI NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU 6GB HDMI, 2.4GHz WiFi card with blade antenna and a Lenovo Keyboard and Mouse.

Fresh Windows 10 Pro Activated, Reset, fully updated with all drivers installed. $340

A year ago I would have been buzzed to have this as my gaming machine, and it is true, it is a most powerful machine, but the one thing that is making me sell is that it is not Windows 11 compatible, based on Microsofts recommendations, sure, it can run Windows 11, many are hacking the OS to do that, but that means that Microsoft may not update the security features.

The machines that myself and my primary IT Client (the missus) are running are Windows 11 ready, and perhaps six months before the fourteenth of October next year, we will both be running it. I am sure that will be a blog all to itself as I have not heard great things about Windows 11, however, I did not hear great things about Windows 10 either, but that sort of settled out all right over time.

This machine ended up selling for $250

Note to self, cloning a Linux boot drive (to a larger one)

I was thinking about writing this down on a piece of paper and placing it in a biscuit tin somewhere for the future me, then I remembered that this particular strategy never works, so I shall use the old tech geezer blog approach.

In the streaming box I had a solid state 60GB boot drive (SATA) running Linux Mint Cinnamon and a 120GB data drive with my music files (mSATA) and the music player called Clementine only liked the boot drive (they call that sort of behaviour a feature) so I would use the larger drive as temporary storage and move files about within the small limitations of the boot drive. That all became very annoying, so I wanted to increase the boot drive, but of course I did not want to burn the house down.

An ancient, yet free, OCZ solid state drive was obtained, erased, and after some research, and a lot of internet bullcrap as is the way, the solution was at hand. I navigated a process after connecting "all the drives" and discovered that the 60GB boot (SATA) was /dev/sda the 120GB data drive (mSATA) was /dev/sdb and the 120GB OCZ drive (SATA) was /dev/sdc

That information was discovered using terminal and the command : sudo fdisk -l

The following command was then executed : sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc conv=noerror, sync

The terminal then sort of goes off and does it's thing of copying everything from sda to sdc and I wandered off and kept myself busy for a while, probably thirty minutes or so, and when I came back the copy had been made and I could swap the boot drive for the bigger unit. There is a method for monitoring the progress of the write for larger drives, but I just left it alone and went off fiddling somewhere else.

That command would be something like : sudo pkill -USR1 -n -x dd and I assume it would be in a second terminal window. I giggle when I read "something like" when it comes to linux commands because users of command line, linux, unix or bash will know that if the syntax is wrong, things just don't work in a very stubborn way, which I completely respect.

The last step after making the bigger drive the boot drive was to expand the partition, as I cloned a 60GB drive onto a 120GB one, it made sense that there was about 60GB of unused space on the target drive. This final step is not that tricky when you know how, I had to boot from a Linux Mint installation USB drive (so that the new boot drive was not mounted) and execute a program called gparted, then simply expand the partition so that all the space could be used.

There you have it future old tech geezer, I hope that helps!

Acura RSX DRL Control relay repair

The DRL light on the RSX had an occasional habit of staying on until I put a bit of amperage through the circuit by switching the main lights on, high beaming or cycling the lights. I had researched the issue and it is a common one, the solution being to remove a little circuit module from under the dash near the steering wheel and check the relay solder points and resoldering as needed. 

In typical fashion, even though I have all the time in the world, it has taken well over a year to actually do the job, various and numerous reasons getting in the way, winter for one, sickness and a healthy reluctance to get my body into the pretzel type position to access the relay. However, in the last week or so, the DRL light has been coming on more, occasionally flickering, being very annoying and I suspected that perhaps my driving lights were doing the same in the daytime, so it was time to pull my finger out and do the responsible thing.

Here is the module :

The problem area can be seen on the flip side of the circuit board :

I inspected the soldered connectors for the relays, and you can see the discoloration of the six main connectors and also the four additional joints. The numerous, very handy, youtube videos online show that reflowing these joints will fix the issue, so that is what I did :

Removing the module was an uncomfortable five minutes or so, but rather easy and accessible depending on your ability to strike the pose of a pretzel in the drivers side pedal bay. Then another five minutes to set up all the tools in the right place, suitable magnification for old eyes and then heat up the thing that burns fingers quite frequently. The reflow of the ten joints, with a little extra solder and flux, took another five minutes.

Installing the module back was equally, if not more so, uncomfortable, but after testing it went back into it's holder without too much of a struggle and the annoying under dash panels were replaced and the job was done in under half an hour. 

This is one of those little repairs that Honda would love to have the opportunity to fix, more than likely they would charge a couple of hours troubleshooting/labour and whatever the price of a new Honda part would cost. The investigations on eBay show that a NOS replacement Dorman 704306 can be had for around $75 shipped from the USA, so it would not be that bad if the module had completely failed and a DIY replacement obtained and installed.

However, my cost was zero and perhaps a week of mild sciatica. A small price to pay for one less irritating, false, warning light on the aging chariot.

DeWalt Batteries, Real and unreal

I had researched a little online, enough to be marginally dangerous, and had sourced what appears to be a bargain pairing of replacement batteries for my DeWalt drills. I'll say right up front, buying replacements that are not manufactured by the OEM is always going to be a risk and potentially a waste of money, short term or long term. However, to "do science" on a very small sample, for the heck of it, I spent a small amount of money and will review what I received, remember, what I receive may not be at all what others are presented with, as they say "your results may vary" and that is the truth when navigating the online marketplace/minefield of foreign stuff/crap.

Left to right, (a) new 12v DeWalt 2Ah, (b) used DeWalt 1.5Ah and then (c) the replacement battery, which is touted to be "upgraded" 4Ah - a figure I highly doubt and will attempt to calculate based on the cell type within. The DeWalts use (a) Korean cells and assembly in Mexico, (b) Japanese cells with additional processing in China and the replacement is assumed to be 100% China. I'm not reviewing or benchmarking all of the battery packs, there is far too much of that going on online, I am just going to report on the cheap one, and by golly it was cheap, from Amazon two of the batteries were $22.40 delivered to my door, that is a mere $11.20 each compared to $48.60 for the genuine 2Ah units. (Canadian Dollars)

The build quality is reasonable, apart from the soldering, the cells appear to be clean and new but could be recycled, overall for the price I am sort of impressed, and if the assembly will fail, it will be the soldering, or the questionable circuit board. The cells are PROS18650 3.6V with a code of 22G2015Y15 so I will see if I can find out exactly what that means. I am going to assume that finding out what those identifying numbers mean will be somewhat of a rabbit hole, so I'll end part one of the review at this stage, sort of a cliffhanger...

Well, not so much as it took less than five minutes to find the datasheet on similar cells and the reported "facts" being that they are Li-ion and the individual cells are probably 2150mAh which means, as they are in series, that the capacity of the complete battery pack, if new, is approximately 2.15Ah. but there is also some information out there that these particular batteries could be other capacities, which was completely expected for mysterious Chinese products.

The 18650 number is 18mm diameter, 65mm long and circular shape. The second code, 22G2015Y15 is the enigma, I will check....

An educated guess is that capacity is 2.2Ah which is first two digits, then manufactured date is 2015 and week 15. In this research the internet was not at all useful, although it appears that the PROS relates to Henan Prospower Technologies. I have put an enquiry into their website, we will see if anything of interest comes back.

Time passes...

I have no test equipment, besides multimeters and the like, so I did a "real world" test during the ongoing reinforcement of my old garden fence over the past week and have used one of these mysterious battery packs from a full charge, screwed a total of 186 wood screws, 1-1/2" long with at least enough juice to get to the 190 mark. I did not wish to drain the battery to zero, so finished while I was ahead.

I would say that represents a good return on a single charge. I subsequently charged the battery using the DeWalt fast charger and it took about 30 minutes, so that supports the idea that the mysterious battery pack is about two amp-hour, not the imagined four that the original listing reported.