Day Six Ten

Day Six to Ten

I’ve had a busy few days both at work and also at home so my December Adventure has slightly fallen off so I’ll lump the little bit of work I’ve done together into a single post.

Psion Hardware Hacking

Recently I’ve been taking the train to work (its more expensive but I feel better inside, quite enjoy the journey and also appreciate not sitting in infuriating traffic), the train only takes 14 minutes and I’ve been playing with my Psion Series 5. While I’m really a big fan of Psion Revos I have to admit that the Series 5 is a superior machine to work on (the keyboard is just awesome). It turns out that my S5 wasn’t detecting a CF card, initially I thought it might be that my 21 year old card that was sitting in my damp garage was dead but it turns out there is a small internal switch in the S5 which when closed initiates the CF card interface. The switch is switched by the CF card door which in my case had broken. I therefore opened up the case, identifed a the signal line for the switch (adjacent to the nearby LED) and then soldered in a new switch. To make place for the switch itself I removed the ‘media’ buttons as I really don’t need this feature and then with a bit of careful superglue secured the switch (be careful not to get glue in the switch mechanism as it will be game over for the switch).

Perhaps more interestingly by removing the media buttons I’ve now got an interesting bit of space, I wonder if I could squeeze a bluetooth or wifi module in there.

Solarcene.community

Documentation has been limited partially due to time but also we’ve had days of cloud, the solar setup is rarely getting more then 100Wh a day right now. I’ll likely keep the main server offline tomorrow in the hope that we get a bit more sun and the battery gets to a better level. While its a little annoying its also one of the challenges of running a solar powered system.