Author: Dale

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USB charging for the RV-12

I decided that the only thing I would ever use the 12V power point in my RV-12 for would be to plug in USB power supplies.  So, I figured, why not bypass the middleman and just install a USB charging plug?

It’s trivially easy to find a dual-outlet USB charging jack with the same form factor as the Van’s supplied 12V outlet.  The only downside I could find was a constant 10-15 mA current draw.  The USB power point is a switching regulator and an LED.  Even after clipping one lead to the LED it still draws about 10 mA.  Now, normally the 12V power point is wired directly to the battery positive terminal with an in-line fuse holder.  It would probably take a long time for that 10-15 mA drain to make a real impact on the capacity of the PC680 battery in the RV-12.  It would only be a factor if the battery were weak anyway — precisely when you don’t want any excess drain.  Plus, the old repair guy in me just doesn’t like the idea of cheaply produced electronics left under power all the time, unattended in an airplane parked in a hangar.  Just to be sure I could shut everything off, I moved the supply lead from the positive battery terminal to the switched side (inboard side) of the master contactor.  Now I have USB power controlled by the master switch.

It may be that at some point I will want to plug in something that requires 12 V – like a tire inflator, for example.  I plan to put some leads and small battery clamps on the old power point and keep it around just in case.

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ADS-B followup

Fun stuff…  so I’m playing around with several different aviation apps on my Android tablet, with a Stratux setup just sitting on the window sill of the spare bedroom where it can “see” enough GPS satellites to get a position fix.  I’ve got one SDR radio receiver on it, set up for 1090 MHz to catch transponders in passing aircraft.  I went in to plug the power in to charge the tablet — I’d left it in there overnight — and saw half a dozen targets displayed.  I zoomed in a little and there’s an American flight at 31,000… A Virgin flight headed for Newark…  Hey, wait a minute — one looks familiar!

Screenshot_2016-03-16-13-01-03

N151MH – a friend and fellow EAA Chapter 80 member, out in his ADS-B “out” equipped RV-12.  Absolutely beautiful day for it, too!  Have fun, Mike!

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Adding ADS-B IN

I really wanted to add ADS-B to the RV-12, for some pretty obvious reasons.  Getting weather and traffic data for improved situational awareness seems like a really good idea.  I’m also not thrilled with the tiny buttons and small screen of the Garmin 496 currently mounted in the panel.  So, I started looking at various alternatives for ADS-B IN.  I figured I had several choices…

  1. Do nothing.  No weather, no traffic, no expense.  Punch flight plans into the Garmin 496 by hand, let that drive the autopilot.  It’s not the worst fate, but there are better ideas.  Cost: None.  Benefit: None.
  2. Pay a ridiculous amount monthly for XM WX, still get no traffic.  No freakin’ way.  Cost: High (several hundred per year).  Benefit: Very low.
  3. Replace the Garmin 496 with a 696 and GDL-39.  I was almost there.  I bought and repaired a used 696 and it’s very nice.  The GDL-39 is not cheap, but I’d have traffic and WX.  Flight planning is easier, but the maps need updating ($$).  Plus it would take MAJOR surgery on the panel — like rip everything out, rearrange it all and rebuild the entire panel with everything custom.  Cost: Mid-high, even after selling the 496 (it’s a little scuffed and gouged on the edges).  Benefit: Mid-high.
  4. Foreflight running on an iPad Mini, with Stratux.  It’s almost a perfect solution…  but it won’t drive the autopilot, which means I’d have to enter the flight plan twice (once in FF, once on the 496) and any enroute changes would need to be done in two places to keep the AP on course.  Foreflight would require an annual expense, though it’s not too bad.  And of course iPad Minis are not cheap.  Cost: High.  Benefit: High.
  5. Avare running on a Galaxy Tab S2 8″, with Stratux.  Avare is completely free including charts, maps, approach plated, A/FD, all of it.  It’s not QUITE as nice or as smooth as ForeFlight, but fairly close.  And it will drive the autopilot with a bluetooth-serial converter, which FF cannot do.  I can keep the 496 in the panel as a backup just in case.  Cost: Medium.  Benefit: High.

I seriously considered 3 through 5.  If I’d been able to figure out how to reduce the amount of panel rework for the 696, or if the cost of the GDL39 wasn’t so high ($400+ used) I’d have probably done that.  As it is, I picked up a used 696 cheap, repaired the battery connector, and will sell it — probably for enough profit to pay for the Galaxy Tab.  That would make my total ADS-B/EFB setup cost under $200, even after mounting good antennas on the plane.

 

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Sorry, I don’t read Chinese…

For the past several weeks I’ve been getting a fairly large amount of Chinese language spam leaking through. Since nearly all of the data (From:, subject, etc) are Chinese characters, my regular Postfix spam filters have not been effective in eliminating it. I finally got tired enough of it to do a little Googling. It’s trivially simple to just reject any incoming email with Chinese characters in the subject line:


/^Subject:.*=\?GB2312\?/ REJECT Sorry, this looks like SPAM (C1).
/^Subject:.*=\?GBK\?/ REJECT Sorry, this looks like SPAM (C2).
/^Subject:.*=\?GB18030\?/ REJECT Sorry, this looks like SPAM (C3).
/^Subject:.*=\?utf-8\?B\?[456]/ REJECT Sorry, this looks like SPAM (C4).

I made the change last night, and this morning came in to find no Chinese spam and several rejects in the mail log… all from pretty obvious spam sources, like this one:

Jul 6 01:12:51 newman postfix/cleanup[30385]: 99EB31A6D3: reject: header Subject: =?utf-8?B?44CQ5Lqk6YCa6ZO26KGM5L+h55So5Y2h5Lit5b+D44CR5bCK6LS155qEZGFpbmlz?=??=?utf-8?B?6I635b6XMTAw5YWD57qi5YyF5aSn56S85rS75Yqo6LWE5qC877yM6aKG5Yiw5bCx5piv6LWa?=??=?utf-8?B?5Yiw?= from spamtitan2.hadara.ps[217.66.226.109]; from=<wkh@p-i-s.com> to=<dale@botkin.org> proto=ESMTP helo=<spamtitan2.hadara.ps>: 5.7.1 Sorry, this looks like SPAM (C4).
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How much is your time worth?

Lord, I hear this question so often as justification for an overpriced widget or service.  Apparently some people think one should spend any amount of money to avoid doing a few hours’ worth of work.

The latest example is a neat little box for use on experimental aircraft.  It replaces the traditional master battery and starter contactors, as well as a current measuring shunt and maybe a fuse or two.  I think there may even be a diode or two thrown in for good measure.  It would simplify the wiring on the firewall side of an experimental plane, sure.  It might even shave one or two nights off of your build time.  Maybe.  You’ll still need to do some wiring, and of course there’s a nice canon plug on the back side, so you’ll still need a crimp tool and it’ll need to be connected to various switches and stuff on the panel.  All in all, I’d say it would be a nice little $200-$300 box.

The problem is, they’re apparently going to want about $1200 for  it.  Say what?  that’s about $1050 or $1100 more than I’d spend on the parts to do the job the old fashioned way.  On one of the very few online forums I use any more, there is a little bit of discussion about it.  And just as sure as Godwin’s Law it’s only a matter of time before someone chimes in with, “How much is your time worth?” – as if that justifies any expenditure, no matter how ridiculous.

Well, I’ll tell you.  For one thing, my “internal billing rate” — how much time I’m willing to expend to avoid an expense, or conversely how much money I’m willing to spend to avoid work — varies greatly with how much I enjoy or do not enjoy the work to be avoided.  Self-surgery?  Yeah, sure, I’ll pay a professional to avoid doing that work.  Mowing the lawn?  It better be cheap, I’m not shelling out $40 a pop for that.  Wiring work on an airplane I’m building?  Well, let’s just say $1200 will buy an awful lot of hours.  I figure it will probably take about 2 evenings of work — let’s be really generous and call it six hours — to do that wiring, of which maybe half would be saved using the new whiz-bang box.  So that works out to – oh, let’s see, carry the one…  roughly $350 an hour, and if the bloody thing ever breaks I have a plane out of commission for God only knows how long, versus a trip to Auto Zone for parts.  I don’t know how long they will be manufacturing and supporting these, but I’ll bet my airplane is flying for longer than that…  meaning that some day this thing is almost certainly going to cause a time consuming and expensive problem.  Hmm, there goes all that time we “saved” on the front end.

I’m sure they’ll get some customers, but I’m afraid I won’t be one of them.  And I won’t even feel like a tightwad.

 

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Why I fear for Western civilization

I really wish I could just drop our cable T V service altogether.  I am beginning to think that just having the cable signal inside the house is lowering our IQ.

With crap like The Bachelor and the rest of the voyeuristic garbage on network TV, and the horde of brainless bullshit on the cable networks…  what have we become?  A nation in which Honey Boo Boo (and her circus sideshow of a family) can become cultural icons scares the hell out of me.  We’ve got pageants where toddlers and young girls are made up like street hookers and paraded in front of the crowd.  We can’t forget Dance Moms and now its growing horde of imitators.  And the phalanx of wedding dress micro-dramas.  And I see now Kate is back, minus spouse, but having picked up a few aides-de-camp along the way.  I can think of no more certain way to remain a single mom than to demonstrate on TV just how much of a train wreck you are.  So-called “Gypsy” clans, and the most ridiculous attempts at exploiting Amish culture that I can imagine – oh, to be Amish and have no electricity!  Then you wouldn’t ever see the fake “survival” shows, the fake “moonshine” shows, and the fake everything else shows.  I could go on and on and on. 

Honestly…  if I were of dating age and raised with a TV in the house I’d probably enter a monastery.  :shudder:  The fact that such shows find enough viewers to make them financially viable makes me question our collective futures.

 

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Why am I such a tightwad?

Yesterday in the mail I got a really nice invitation to contribute to an organization whose goals I support.  They even sent me a nice little pocket sized copy of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.  And these guys are good; I really do like the work they do.  And I won’t send them any money.

Why?  Because it means that they will immediately add me to their list of people to harass constantly and incessantly for more, more, more.  I have had this happen with any organization to whom I give a dime.  I donated a couple of times to the Wounded Warrior Project, with a letter asking them very plainly to not waste their money (the money I donated, in other words) sending me crap in the mail begging for more.  I know who you are, I told them; I know where to find you and if I decide to donate more, I will do so without their prompting.  Furthermore, I told them, if they did decide to waste the money I donated on mailers and phone solicitations to try and get more from me, I would cut them off.

Unfortunately, since then they have wasted much of the money I donated on mailing me crap every week or two begging for more.  Sorry, screw ’em.  Not another penny, since they seem to be more focused on soliciting money than anything else.  I won’t donate to organizations that will simply waste the money.

I told the NRA the same thing.  After I joined I was inundated with junk mail begging for donations.  I wrote them a nice letter telling them that if they continued wasting my dues on sending me junk mail, I wouldn’t renew.  The junk mail stopped, and I’ve been a member ever since.

Most of the solicitations I get, though, go unanswered.  It seems that too many organizations are no longer charitable or activist or whatever their nominal purpose is — they are focused on fundraising, apparently for the sake of fundraising.  If I could kick in a few bucks and be left in peace, maybe I would.  But I hate paying for more junk mail.  Sorry if that makes me a tightwad.

 

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Small business shipping made easy

This may at some point begin to sound like a commercial, but it really isn’t.  I promise.  I receive nothing from anyone in return for writing this kind of stuff; I do it just to hopefully help out fellow small business owners.

I know (and know of) a lot of owners of small businesses who regularly ship packages all over the US and worldwide.  Most of them expend a lot of time and effort on shipping.  I suspect this level of hassle is the norm for small businesses; I have talked to several large dealers and distributors who offer to be my exclusive distributor and relieve me of the crushing burden of shipping and order fulfillment.  The truth is, order fulfillment and shipping take up a very small amount of the total time I spend running my business.

I know people who pack up each order, write the recipient’s name and address on the package (or print a label), drive to the post office and stand in line to have packages weighed and postage added.  Ugh.  Incredible.  I used to do that too, but it was years ago.  And filling out Customs forms for overseas shipments?  Torture!  At one time I seriously considered just NOT accepting any orders from outside the USA – -including APO/FPO addresses.

Others use on line tools like USPS’ Click-n-Ship to prepare labels.  It’s a lot better, but the user interface is clunky, and you either spend time cutting and taping paper to packages, or pay through the nose for expensive labels.  I looked into it, I even used it a few times.  It’s only marginally better than the trip to the post office.

If you ship more than a few packages per week, you owe it to yourself to go with a postage supplier.  I use Endicia, a choice I made after looking at them, Stamps.com and one or two others.  Pitney Bowes was at the bottom of the list by a wide margin.  I don’t remember the specific disadvantages of Stamps.com, but Endicia was the best suited for my needs.  With any of these services, you pay for postage on line, print your labels with postage included, and drop your packages off or have them picked up.

So why Endicia instead of Click-n-Ship?  With Endicia, I get a slight discount on postage and free delivery confirmation/package tracking.  Their software is installed on my PC, and can communicate with a USB postal scale to automatically weight each package.  I don’t use one simply because I know what 90% or more of my packages weigh, but when I see a good enough deal on a scale I’m buying one.

I use 4×6″ thermal labels.  They’re available for very little money, since they’re produced in vast numbers for UPS, Fedex and others.  I buy cases of 400-label rolls.  They go into the used Zebra LP2844 printer I picked up for under a hundred bucks on eBay.  In its former life it was used in a UPS store, and it’s given me three years of trouble-free service so far.  The really nice part?  I can print ANY kind of postage.  First class parcel, Priority Mail, Express, and international — INCLUDING the Customs form.  It’s SO nice to never have to fill out that stupid non-printer-friendly green form again!  Some forms, like an Express International package, can’t be done on a 4×6″ label.  For those I have the regular printer and USPS-supplied stick-on document sleeves.  Endicia prints all the required forms with postage, ready to go.

For $15.95 per month I get the ability to print labels without the postage amount shown…  so I don’t have to explain over and over to customers why I charged them $2.50 for shipping when the postage was only $1.93 (boxes, labels, printer paper and ink for the packing slip, packing material and gasoline are not free). I can get a refund on labels I don’t use; I can print return labels when a customer needs to return something.  In short — my shipping is as close to effortless as it can be.  And the post office employees love it when I drop off a tub full of packages WITH a USPS scan form so they don’t have to scan each package, just the form that puts each one into the system for tracking and delivery confirmation.

If you’re still writing out shipping labels, or if heaven forbid you’ve got a postage meter, you really owe it to yourself to check out Endicia.  They’ll usually give you a free trial period, and you don’t need anything special to get started — you can use your existing printer and plain paper or a box of Avery labels form Office Depot while you try it out.  Then you can develop your own process and streamline your shipping to take up less of your time and energy.

 

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Various stuff…

First of all, sue me…  I’m loving the iPhone.  I never thought I would.  There are a few little annoyances, but overall it’s a great little widget.

Went to the Ak ARC flea market Saturday.  I had a table to sell kits, but I don’t know why I bothered.  I did (just barely, maybe) cover my breakfast, the table and my gas to drive there and back, so I guess it was OK.  Honestly, I think most of the stuff for sale was the same crap I’d seen last year.  There was, however, a table set up by the Omaha Maker group, and separately a ham had a 3D printer running printing out something or other, I never did figure out what.  So why did I go?  It was good to see and talk to some of the hams I only see once in a while.  Jack WA0SAQ was there, Dave WJ0Z and some others I seem to only see once every year or five.

I did some CNC engraving on the end panels for a new flavor of PicoKeyer.  I think it turned out pretty well.  It will be a little extra work — OK, a lot of extra work, but I think it will be worth it.  This will also probably be the motivation I need to finally break down and make a better fixture for the end panels I use for the boxes.  Maybe something I don’t have to stand there and hold each one in place.  It would be a worth a lot to me to be able to not stand there the whole time the mill is running, holding parts and trying to avoid getting an end mill through a thumbnail.  McMaster, here comes an order!

And…  some days I miss not having something that looks like airplane parts in the garage.  In a couple of weeks, though, I should have a “canoe” going and by Spring it should be looking airplane-y again.

That is all.

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Technical stupidity.

It baffles me how people let their stuff get so messed up, and how companies will go so far out of their way to NOT be there for customers.

I got a phishing scam email supposedly from First National, where we used to have accounts.  Being the nice guy that I am, I figured I’d let them know the specifics.  After all, some people are dumb enough to fall for stuff like this.  A fake “IRS agent” almost managed to convince my 88-year-old mother to wire a few thousand dollars to avoid going to jail — never mind that she doesn’t owe the IRS a penny, never has and has never tried to cheat on her taxes.

Well, of course the only way to contact FNBO or FNNI is via a web form.  So I spend several minutes sending detailed information to them — the target web link, the email header, etc.  Then I hit the “Submit” button…

And got an error message.

Screw ’em.