My Silly Pondcam – Post 15 – An unexpected bonus…

Now so many of you that are bothering to read this blog know me very well, but for those of you that don’t. I would like to explain something. My real job is not like pondcam, but does have to do with technology. I am not an electrical engineer like my mother, which is why I stick to the simple math of Watt’s law and Ohm’ Law. I am a network engineer by trade and do a whole bunch of stuff with firewalls and operating systems. Customers hire me to make sure they are secure and won’t get hacked… And if something does happen to someone’s computer that is related to security I help with that too. I almost never get into soldering and measuring voltages. Literally, the last time I used a soldering iron at a customer site was like 9 years ago and before that it was another 9 years (Both for “cold solder joints” which is an easy fix even for someone that doesn’t do it every day). And I don’t know if I have ever had to use a voltmeter on site like we do with pondcam all of the time.

So here is what is strange…. Last week a customer wants me to make sure every computer in their office has a UPS (Uninteruptible Power Supply, we got our batteries for pondcam from one of those) so when the power goes out their computers they still run for a little while so the users can shut their computers down so they don’t lose any of their work. That part is not strange. Lots of customers want that. So I do an assessment and tell the customer to order 12 of them and some surge protectors. It took a week or so for it all to come in. Me and a coworker installed them all. The next day they are all failing. They are beeping and beeping and all the users are getting really distracted and ticked off. We mess around with them for a bit and realize that the batteries are not getting charged. We talk about it for a while and figure that we have to just get the whole batch replaced because they are defective.

The customer says they will call the company they bought them from to get them all replaced. This is a piece of cake I think, it is a bad batch of UPSes and they will just replace them all. That was last week when I was thinking that.

Today I get a call from the customer and guess what? He is really ticked off. The tech at the manufacturer didn’t believe him that they were all dead and thought it was just batteries, so he wanted the customer to take a “voltmeter” and measure the voltage across the outputs of the transformer that charges the batteries”. When I was talking to the customer he was beside himself and pretty much told them, “NO WAY, I am not going to do that, this stuff is crap, just send me new UPSes that work!”. The tech on the phone with him pleaded and said, “Look… All I want to do is know if I should send you batteries or new UPSes”. As the customer is venting to me about this whole conversation, I am thinking… Crap… I literally just did this exact same exercise a whole bunch of times over the last month…. Which is trying to figure out if our solar panels will get our batteries charged.

Then I say what I absolutely love to say to customers. I say, “Don’t worry, I will take care of it”. If I didn’t make pondcam I may have said something like, “Oh… We are IT guys we are too high end for the crap, let them just send a whole new batch over and be done with it”, but not today. Today I said, “don’t worry I will take care of it…” Why? Because I have experience and while I am talking to the tech from the manufacturer of those UPSes, I will be trying to figure out a way for him to read about pondcam!

I get on site and do a bunch of other work for them first, but the whole time I am working on the other things I can’t wait to look at a defective UPS. There is clearly a defective one that is at a desk I was using as the battery was showing almost no charge on it’s display. I flip it over and open it, pull out the battery and sick the voltmeter on it. Here is what I see.

That is 15 volts I think. OK… Cool, the batteries are 12 volts and they are being charged by a little over 12 volts. Well, I think… Let’s see what the batteries are doing. They have been on the charger for over a week, they are probably going to show nothing.  So I stick the meter on them.

Oh.. That isn’t right at all. I can see right away something isn’t right. 25.8 volts from the batteries? These guys are in series which doubles their voltage. I want to learn all about the way a UPS works now so I run around testing any and all that are defective. When I am done messing with all of them I see they are all working correctly. It took a few days of them being plugged in, but they are all just fine. I go back to the first UPS that was clearly not putting out the correct voltage and it just started working as expected.

I took a lot more pictures, but I won’t bore you with any of them. I learned something at this customer site. I learned about our solar panels, our batteries and how a lot of stuff in the network world runs. UPS batteries charge at 24 volts. That means that UPS batteries have to be in series. They need two 12 volt batteries put together to drive a 24 volt system. Here is the neat part… Pondcam’s power supply can work with a 24 volt input. The Solar panels work with a 24 volt output in full sunlight. I am supposed to be working with two batteries instead of one.

Sorry for a lot of writing and not a lot of pictures (I have got a few complaints about how long my posts are… I always say, “they are mostly pictures!”, but in this case they are not… I will try to fix that moving forward).

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Before doing anything on pondcam, I need to take an assessment of where we are right now. Here is an executive summary:

1) Pondcam still works. I tested it. But haven’t tested it in a while (I am afraid with all the stuff I do to that thing, eventually it will just end up broken).
2) Pondcam has a new light. It is way brighter, but wider. It uses more power than the old light.
3) Pondcam needs a new case. I know how to cut plexiglass now, I need to get it back together so I can stick it in the pond.
4) When I busted open my wireless access point and moved it, I broke my wireless network at home. I didn’t blog about this before, but that ended up in a series of events that made me buy my wife a new computer, a new printer, her own wireless access point… My wife now has an entirely separate network that is more powerful than mine…. I did it happily because she doesn’t complain about me working on pondcam…. And I never want her too. She doesn’t care about Pondcam, but my plan is to have her be really happy that I am working on it.
5) Pondcam does have a dock, but I don’t have enough empty water bottles to make it float the way I want it to. I have been working on this.
6)  We appear to be on top of everything else… I learned more about power so I think we are going to be OK there. I think we are pretty good on connectivity, because now I have a wireless access point with all sorts of possibilities.

What do we do next? Well first I want to get everyone up to speed on where we are with our dock. I have been a big pain at making my kids and wife  to give me their empty water bottles over the last couple of weeks. Here is what I have.

That is not enough to work on the dock. I need at least another bag and a half (it was one and a half bags when I first started collecting them… We need to drink more water).

As I have mentioned, over the last week or so I have been messing with cutting Plexiglas and getting it perfect so I can epoxy it together. I couldn’t bear to take pictures and bore everyone with the trial and error so I will give a summary of how I cut perfect (or as perfect as I can make it) Plexiglas:

1) I use my table saw and cut 3″ by 8″ strips. (This is for the front ant he back).
2) I cut two more 3″ by 7″ strips. (This is for the sides).
3) I cut two more 2 and 1/2 ” by 3″ pieces (This is for the top and bottom).

I sand and sand and sand some more. I start with 100 grit sand paper then move down to 200 grit to make it smooth. Here is what I end up with. All sides to our new camera case as perfectly measured as I can get them.

I didn’t spread them out on the table because I wanted to draw attention to the sides. They are really clean and straight.  I also did the same trick with the blow torch to get the brass fitting for out top as I did with the last case. These guys are ready to be glued together, but I need to do something first.

Here is my problem. I need to test all of my connections for the antenna that go to the camera. Everyone should know how sensitive wireless equipment is to connections. If they are not really good the wireless doesn’t work well. I need this camera to send good video data back to my network on the other side of the driveway when I sink it. So I need to test my new connectors, but I have to do it in a way that will be exactly the way pondcam ends up. So I have to squeeze these….

– The Ethernet cable.
– the new thicker antenna cable.
– and the power cable.

Through this…

It took a lot of messing around… I took out some motor oil and greased each cable separately so they would slide through it. It seemed to take forever. My hands were hurting from trying to grip the greasy cables and push them through the tube. After about a 1/2 hour… I ended up with this.

Now I have to connect the antenna end and the Ethernet ends for the camera. Ethernet is easy for me so I won’t bother to post that. I crimp two ends on and will test that later (remember I need to have the Ethernet outside of pondcam in case it gets reset back to its defaults for some reason, jut like it did when it got wet). The antenna though… I am not so sure about. I do the same trick as I did on the other side. I strip back the shielding on the two cable ends I want to bring together and solder the center… then put some goop glue around that solder to protect it.

Well… I have to let that dry. I try to think of more to do and can’t because I am too tired. I will stop for now, but really hope to put together the case really soon.