Stupid Car Part 2
More About The History Of The Stupid Car
I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.
Jaaaag
I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader….
There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.66, which amused me. It was quick, it could heft it’s 2 tonnes to 60 in 5.2 seconds, which was quicker than the Lotus Elise I used to own. So off I go to Sevenoaks and I bought it.
Buy Cheap, Buy Twice
In chasing down the issues with my car , I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6.
I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises. Immediately, a thin jet of fuel at 4 bar pressure shoots across the engine bay to land on the exhaust manifold. At first I think it’s a fault with the hoses, but no, there is a small pin hole in the tee piece itself.
Amusement
As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked.
Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server.
However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this
My Home Tech
I have a menagerie of tech at home.
Connectivity
ISP
Andrews & Arnold , who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses.
Heracles
The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT . My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus.
Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart
A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house. 5 is probably overkill. I run 4 separate SSIDs as VLANs to separate out House, Guest, Work and IOT with various rules as to who can talk to what. Alfred sits on both the wired network and the IOT one to act as a bridge. They have Bluetooth as well so one day I’ll investigate using them as a BLE to MQTT gateway instead of the couple of ESP32 I have filling that duty.
The Car
Background
I used to have a Lotus Elise
Apologies For The Inconvenience
If anyone other than me is subbed to the RSS feed, I’m tweaking a lot of things still as I learn Hugo and that is causing all the previous posts to get re-posted. Sorry about that.
Prose
I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh .
I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek.
However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears.
- No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory. After half a dozen posts with a few pictures each it became a mess. I wanted to be able to separate out the images in some sensible manner.
- There was no control over the size of images unless you appended some API parameters to the file name. This broke the image preview in a Markdown viewer which meant I couldn’t see what the image looked like until I published the post.
So, Hugo. I originally wanted to use Hexo, but the image plugin for that doesn’t install. I plumped for Hugo as https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil uses it for his blog and that’s good enough for me.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
Many moons ago I fitted a set of Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors in the engine bay as I didn’t trust the radiator. I put one in the water hose from the engine to the radiator, another in the hose from the radiator back to the engine. For air temps I put one in the air flow either side of the raditor.
To measure this all, I buried a Raspberry Pi behind the dash and came up with a funky set of three relays so the Pi could shut itself down safely when I killed the power. It never worked very well.
Send It! (to the bin)
My car now takes about 48 litres of fuel. I noticed though that the gauge was not going down. Given it is not a car that sips petrol I found this hard to believe. Fuel level sensing is done by the fuel tank sender. It has a float on an arm that moves up and down with the fuel level and that in turn moves a variable resistor.
First Hypothesis - Gauge is wrong
I fitted a spiyda Gauge Wizard when I fitted the tank as the sender and the gauge were definitely not a matched pair. Because this needs calibrating, I had it accessible in the footwell so all the wiring (+12v, ground, sender, gauge) were all usefully accessible. I removed the Gauge Wizard and connected a multimeter between the sender and ground. I then drained the tank and pumped in 10 litres whilst watching the MM. The readings did not change as they should have done. The gauge is not a suspect.