Day Ten Fifteen

Day Ten to Fifteen

So I’m not doing that well at documenting my December Adventure (though its been busy)

Solarcene.community Mastodon Instance

The main focus of the last few days has been trying to keep the mastodon instance running. We’ve had basically cloud for the last 2 weeks coupled with Storm Darragh. This has meant that out of the last 14 days we have had 8 days where the panels have only generated < 100Wh. Even with the current power saving setup the watts add up and the battery dipped down to critical levels and then cut out. I was then able to use my portable backup battery for 48hrs - just enough time for finally some sun to appear and get the battery back to a point where it can survive.

Its going to be a challenging winter to keep the system online - I’ve adjusted the on time to only be on for 4.5hrs during the peak sun.

Psion Hacking

I’ve had a bit of time thinking about how I might add networking to my Psion Series 5 following the addition of the CF card switch. With the media buttons removed its freed up a small amount of space, I’m currently exploring whether it might be possible to place a HC-05 Bluetooth to Serial Module in the space, it would then need to be wired up to the serial port on the Psion. This will be a complicated procedure, it would make more sense to identify the RS232 chip on the Psion and solder the Rx, Tx lines to the TTL side of the chip, this would avoid needing to add in a RS232 chip to down convert the signals. It will be a fairly complicated hack as the Max232 chip is on the keyboard side of the motherboard. Once in place it should then be possible to create a bluetooth bridge and in theory run PPP over it giving the Psion network access. Just to remind me it it may be necessary to pre-program the HC-05 to reduce the UART speed as I’ll probably try and avoid using hardware handshaking (though from the looks of it the HC-05 has the pins for it). I’ve ordered two modules off ebay to play with.