Pump My Ride - Ninety on air

[steve b]

31 minutes ago, landroversforever said:

I've wondered about it for my 90.... not done anything about it get mind  

.........Is this the quote of the year ?  Have you been able to get in your shed yet Ross ?

An interesting thread TC been following it with interest , the 90 gives an added challenge with the short wheelbase making front - rear pitch more significant .

cheers

Steve  b

[landroversforever]

2 minutes ago, steve b said:

.........Is this the quote of the year ?  Have you been able to get in your shed yet Ross ?

An interesting thread TC been following it with interest , the 90 gives an added challenge with the short wheelbase making front - rear pitch more significant .

cheers

Steve  b

I’ve decided against it for the moment. Would be just my luck to get some carp in my eye even with specs on. 

[Turbocharger]

1 hour ago, cackshifter said:

There was a thread on here where it was proposed to replace the 110 CSW Boge Strut with an air spring (from an air suspended cab) . It had occurred to me that would let you vary the pressure in the outer bags if you needed to adjust roll stiffness while maintaining the load capacity.

I'm hoping by controlling airflow between the two outer bags that it'll achieve the same aim - a kind of 'virtual' central bag. Only experience will tell if that works though.

Bits turned up for the Disco 2 bags today, so that's the next session covered for fact seeking and investigation.

I'm going to need electrical plugs to match the height sensors and ideally the P38 solenoid block box too - any ideas where to source these (at sensible money)? Otherwise I'll just cut them off, extend the wires and find something suitably waterproof which I can populate the pins myself.

[landroversforever]

3 minutes ago, Turbocharger said:

I'm going to need electrical plugs to match the height sensors and ideally the P38 solenoid block box too - any ideas where to source these (at sensible money)? Otherwise I'll just cut them off, extend the wires and find something suitably waterproof which I can populate the pins myself.

What do the plugs look like John? 

[mickeyw]

Doesn't @PaulMc on here know all about connectors used on LR stuff?

[landroversforever]

Just now, mickeyw said:

Doesn't @PaulMc on here know all about connectors used on LR stuff?

He certainly does

 

[Turbocharger]

There's several plugs. For each I got the corresponding length off the P38 but that's a limited supply and the wires are old and brittle.

Compressorhas a chunky plug with (I presume) power, ground and something from the pressure sensor to trigger it.

The solenoid box has two plugs (red & purple) and presumably the slave ECU (yellow) which does the PWM magic. I'll be replacing this with MOSFETs controlled by the Arduino.

The purple plug is internal to the box and presumably runs one of the solenoids or a sensor. The red plug would be handy to interface with:

Looks like I was smart enough to get the corresponding bits off the P38 too so should be ok with these until I break either.

The height sensors each have a short tail of old brittle loom so these will be more of a problem in the longer term.

Any ideas for these?

[landroversforever]

That last one looks like an Econoseal as found on the back of a later defender stop/tail.

[landroversforever]

In fact,  I think they are all differing versions of an Econoseal. @paulMC will know for sure.

[mickeyw]

Sometimes manufacturers use what look like generic plugs, but they like to complicate matters by throwing in an non-standard orientation tang .

I've been caught out by this in the past 😕 

 

[Ed Poore]

3 hours ago, Turbocharger said:

P38 solenoid block box too - any ideas where to source these (at sensible money)?

I may have one...  I think.

Do yourself a favour and throw the Arduino in the bin and get yourself an STM32 Nucleo board. Same form factors as the Arduino, cheaper than the proper ones and waaaaay more powerful! The two I've got sat on my bench at the moment are based around the STM32F446RE. They take Arduino shields but also have additional pins on the outside, the 446RE has a shed load of PWM signals (was using it for prototyping a 3 phase motor controller) coupled to an up to 180MHz Cortex-M4 core. I think it was the extortionate price of £8 next day.

They also support all the Arduino code but then also supports proper C++11 and bunch of proper development tools.

[Turbocharger]

46 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:

Do yourself a favour and throw the Arduino in the bin and get yourself an STM32 Nucleo board...

Convince me further. I like the wide community support available for the Arduino - I think it'll do what I want and I can appeal to the cleverer people when it doesn't work properly... 😁

[Turbocharger]

Now, what have I done wrong? Td5 Disco airbag has a screw fitting in the top, 7.7mm OD across the threads which corresponds to 1/16BSP. I ordered a push fit connector (from China 😷) but it's turned up far too small, at 4.4mm OD. 

Looking at the eBay picture, that's what they were selling (scaling from the 6mm push-fit pipe), so is the mistake theirs or mine?

[landroversforever]

More likely 1/8” BSP. About a 10mm spanner? 

[Turbocharger]

The OE LandRover fitting is definitely 7.7ish OD. Question is why the 1/16BSP fitting I ordered has turned up and is 4.4mm?

[landroversforever]

Hmmmm.... supplier got it labelled wrong?

[Ed Poore]

37 minutes ago, Turbocharger said:

Convince me further. I like the wide community support available for the Arduino - I think it'll do what I want and I can appeal to the cleverer people when it doesn't work properly... 😁

OK - it is to all intents and purposes an Arduino with a load more bits thrown in (I'd say for extra but actually it's cheaper?!). You can genuinely take an Arduino sketch and run it on an STM32 board. See here for a tutorial: https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/getting-started-with-stm32-development-board-stm32f103c8-using-arduino-ide

The "next" step up would be to upgrade to Mbed which is a much better framework for writing stuff and almost as simple as the Arduino wiring language except that it's not aimed at school kids but maybe secondary / 6th form / University students who've done a programming course. You can do everything online or you can do it offline as I do because I don't like relying on internet stuff.

Then some of the chips are powerful enough to support a real time operating system like FreeRTOS or even Linux on them. So really I don't see a downside . It gives you options, basically with an Arduino you're always fundamentally using an ancient (in electronics terms) tiny little microcontroller, which have their uses but quite often you see on the Arduino forums people running out of space. I remember when I was doing my degree we ended up having to choose the biggest Arduino because basically there wasn't going to be enough space to fit the intended program.

Now before people start ranting over optimising the code - you should always write the code for a human to read first and foremost and then start optimising if you must. Trust me having been involved in the development, rearchitecture and maintenance of a 10+ million lines of code software defined radio framework you really appreciate when you have well written code. There were also some wonderful comments and essays left by people as they came across genuine problems they had to work around.

Slight off topic but an entertaining story - I designed the electronics and wrote the vast majority of the software for a development kit we sold. A (the) customer came in one day and they had been struggling with getting some register writes to work and eventually gave up and had a look at my example program. I'd left a little comment in there saying something along the lines of:

Quote

I have no idea why we have to write this value 3 times rather than the 1 required for everything else but it has been tested thoroughly (see doc x) and appears to work...

I think it was later determined there was a bug in the silicon for that device. But the customer was extremely grateful that I'd left that comment in there in the example code.

[mickeyw]

This would be the first 1/16" BSP fitting I have come across.

The designation PC6-M5 says to me Ø6 pipe and M5 thread.

[Ed Poore]

@Turbocharger

With regards to the push fitting it looks to me like a fairly standard 1/4BSP  size: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Push-fit-brass-male-stud-connector-1-4-bsp-thread-to-6-8-10mm-or-1-8-to-8-6mm/.

I've got a load of those lying around somewhere (think probably in the Defender) and somewhere in the blacksmiths barn there is a set of P38 air bags so I can try and see if they fit in to confirm for you?

[Turbocharger]

1/4BSP would be 13.1mm OD though, this is 7.8mm ish. An M8 bolt screws in "a bit", same for a nut onto the fitting, which says it's something pipe-thready?

https://www.thehosemaster.co.uk/bsp-pipe-threads

[Turbocharger]

18 minutes ago, Ed Poore said:

OK - it is to all intents and purposes an Arduino with ...

<here Ed went into a discussion about programming which suggests he lives in that dark world between coding and wires>

I'll have a look at this. Arduino still has a leg up because I already own one, but it looks like I'll run out of IOs if I want a display and any accelerometer or GPS (for road speed) input, so I'll look at alternative hardware then.

[landroversforever]

This thread seems to thing they're M8.

https://www.aulro.com/afvb/discovery-2-a/126913-thread-typre-into-rear-air-bag-suspension.html

Which if you can screw in a bit would seem to match. Does the thread taper? 

 

[Ed Poore]

2 minutes ago, Turbocharger said:

<here Ed went into a discussion about programming which suggests he lives in that dark world between coding and wires>

It's a pleasant little world I live in 

[FridgeFreezer]

I throw a lot of STM32F103 "Bluepill" boards in stuff as they are cheap, powerful, and they're not arduinos

But, if you've learnt Ardunio and are happy with it, I'd say just stick with it - you can use anything to skin this cat and honestly these days it's all cheap & easy.

If, once you've got it working, you want to port the code to something else, it's all doable.

The micropython boards are a lovely thing for getting stuff working without too much tedious overhead and without being arduinos too

[Blanco]

10 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

honestly these days it's all cheap & easy.

... oh pheww!, there was me thinking my AO level in Computer Studies from 1979 was going to waste, .... all I need is a 'Bluepill',.   hang on a minute... I've seen Bluepills advertised haven't I?