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elbekko

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Posts posted by elbekko

    Help with an onboard Road / Off Road Sat Nav !

    in International Forum

    Posted

    I use my GpsMap 62s connected with USB to my toughpad. There I run GpsGate to handle sending that signal to multiple applications. Bonus is that the GpsMap can show you a different map at the same time, and can be used for on-road nav.

    Also have a Surface Pro with built-in GPS, which works ok, but haven't messed with it much.

    OziExplorer is nice, but good (and recent) maps are hard to come by. There isn't much else available for Windows anymore, sadly.

    A recent experiment worked quite well: run my Samsung phone in DeX mode on the Surface Pro, and open up Gaia GPS. Uses the phone's GPS signal, but projected onto the bigger screen.

    Mog 404 axles

    in Modified Vehicle Builds & Special Projects

    Posted

    9 hours ago, Stellaghost said:

    I was thinking of hinging both ends and using the cross member for storage ie; a place to put ground anchor pins, the caps will be very easy to remove, 10mm welded plate end caps not so easy ..lol

    Not sure storing recovery gear in a location that is likely to be buried when you need recovery is the best idea...

    Thoughts and Musings on the Ineos Grenadier

    in The New Ineos Grenadier

    Posted

    7 hours ago, Escape said:

    What's wrong with just a switch and possibly a relay??

    Well, it's never just a switch and a relay.

    A taillight has, at a minimum, the taillight itself, an indicator, a brake light, maybe a fog light, maybe a reverse light.

    So that's a separate cable for all of those. That's a bunch of weight.

    Then you duplicate half of those to the instrument cluster.

    Then duplicate all of them for a trailer plug.

    You can replace all this with 4 wires and a small, simple module. Something says "I'm braking", and the taillight thinks "hmm, better turn on the brake light". Have a trailer hookup? That module sees the same signal, and lights up the trailer's brake lights. Remember when we put the towbar on my Merc? One power wire, one ground, and a 2-wire plug for the CANBus. Want a 7-pin plug? Then put in a 7-pin module. Want a 13-pin plug? Put in a 13-pin module. The rest of the car doesn't care, and doesn't have to care.

    Same with the taillights again. The body computer doesn't need to care if you have an old-school bulb, or LEDs, or an OLED panel. The only thing that ever needs to know about that is the taillight itself.

    In software development we call this separation of concerns. Don't talk directly to dependencies, talk to an abstract interface and stop caring about how it works.

    Thoughts and Musings on the Ineos Grenadier

    in The New Ineos Grenadier

    Posted

    14 hours ago, deep said:

    I think car reliability probably peaked over twenty years ago.  The electronics they pretty much all use now are shocking.  You get a small problem and it sends you in circles for ever.  Plug in a diagnostic machine and it gives you an unhelpful code (one on my Peugeot cracks me up - why is the car sometimes miss-firing?  Plug in the scanner, check the code.  "Engine is misfiring"!!).  That's the sort of nonsense I would expect the Grenadier to rise above.

    Oh, god no. I'll just give a wave in the general direction of the P38. Hundreds of separate wires for everything, ECUs that on the inside look like they're from a computer from the 80s (tbf, they were). The BeCM that controls everything, and thus needs feeds to and from everything.

    Modern cars are a miracle of reliability, in general. Especially looking at powertrain, imagine plopping a RV8 and Flapper EFI in something now. People would be livid that they'd have to change the timing chain before 4 oil changes on a modern car. The electronics now are much better developed and much more robust internally. Most of the problems with new cars are infotainment related, because it's so in-your-face that people notice it. It doesn't matter, your car won't stop driving because your infotainment is rebooting. And if they'd just fix the network in cars, single modules would have a much reduced chance of bringing down the whole system.
    CANBus is a good idea, executed not-so-great, that's all. Don't forget that also started 20+ years ago. Stand-alone modules communicating on a central bus is so much better than a monolithic system. It's the same as in software development: cars now are more of an event-driven microservice architecture.
    People mock a taillight ECU, but I prefer it being an isolated job over the body computer having to care about how to drive the taillights. If you have memory seats, exactly 2 things *need* to know about them: the button to operate it, and the seat itself. But you can have the infotainment system listen to the same message, so it can display a "hey driver x, welcome back". Or save dashboard layouts based on the memory selection. 0 cost, 0 extra wires, the body computer doesn't need to give a single damn. Want to control the passenger seat? Easy, just send a message to that instead.

    If you want your diagnostics to give you more helpful codes, you'll need even more sensors that can go wrong. And then people will moan that the codes only show up because the sensor is broken.

    The biggest failing of modern cars is that everything is locked down. If the CANBus was well-documented and open-source, fault finding would be much easier. So would tuning, swapping out components, ...
    An engine swap *should* be electronically trivial these days, as you'd just need to plop in a module that translates manufacturer X messages to manufacturer Y messages. Sadly, it isn't, because everything is closed and even encrypted now. Partially because of automakers being greedy, partially because of people being afraid of the evil hackers that'll make your car shut down from the next lane over, partially because of emissions requirements that can't be tampered with.

    I can guarantee you the Grenadier will fix exactly none of this. They've taken all of this from BMW, who will not want their IP exposed. Fault codes will be exactly the same as you get on a BMW, because that's what Bosch developed for them, and of course they're just going to reuse that system. One can hope they did a better job of waterproofing the CANBus connections and the ECUs, but who knows. Probably not.

    (Sorry for the unstructured rant, that's how my brain works...)

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 1

    Thoughts and Musings on the Ineos Grenadier

    in The New Ineos Grenadier

    Posted

    43 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

    That's not much of a metric if the vehicle as a whole is using a similar "level" of electrickery, it's not like anyone round here is cracking out the soldering station and replacing individual microprocessors in ECU's on the regular... and TBH ECU's are generally robust & reliable things... it's the underlying reliance on the systems, and falling over / going into limp mode / diagnosing the issue when there's a problem, and I'm not really sure how much I believe the hype that this thing will be any "better" to work on than any other modern vehicle in that respect if it's got all the same systems fitted (likely from the same OEM suppliers too).

    Indeed. If they really want to improve electronic reliability, they'd improve the CANBus system so one bad module doesn't take out the whole network ring. Computers moved past that 20 years ago, time for cars to start using some more intelligent networks.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 2

    Welder wire feed motor

    in Tools and Fabrication

    Posted

    So finally had a moment to have a quick look at it yesterday.

    This is the motor that's in there:

    20221207_213528.thumb.jpg.303c518bac9ef6a755da3ca03930580c.jpg

    (Note the totally-not-redneck way of improving spring tension because the rollers kept slipping when I just got it)

    The motor has no markings on it, but I tried to measure voltage and it fluctuated between 9V and 13V, so I'm guessing it's a 12V motor. Very clearly sounding unhappy.

    So I guess one of those generic 12V ones should work. I'll order one and try.

    Side mounted pull-out weather shelter

    in Defender Forum (1983 - 2016)

    Posted

    I had a quick google of the Fiamma stuff, and nearly fell off my chair price-wise.

    I still don't get how a bag, a tarp, a roll, and some aluminium poles are worth that much money. For the 270° awnings I somewhat get it, there's some R&D involved there, but still...

    Might be cheaper and easier to just carry and easy-up partytent. Comes with sides too.

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