Electronics – DoogieLabs

Cooking some batteries and making skirts

February 26, 2017February 26, 2017 doogie

So I put up a sort of How to video on the process I did when I made a skirt for my hovercraft. It should be pretty easily for others to replicate based on my techniques in the video. The first water test with the new skirt was very successful. Increasing the skirt pressure a bit did make it run okay across the water. I want to do a full

RC Hovercraft night run with roll over crash

February 15, 2017January 17, 2019 doogie

This night run was pretty interesting. With unusually high winds it certainly made control a challenge. All in all, it actually puts up with the wind quite well. After reviewing the footage of the run, you can tell that the front lifts up just enough to catch more air and then it lifts right off the ground. It looks as if I may need to add a spoiler on the

1st Hovercraft night run and new project page!

February 13, 2017February 13, 2017 doogie

So yesterday I did the first string of POV camera tests with the hovercraft. All in all, it went well. The new motors are holding up alright so far, and I'm pushing them pretty hard. I've drew 138amps peak on this run: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rhfv6qP3qI[/embed] I also setup the official project page on here for the hovercraft, which you can find under projects in the menu, or here directly: https://doogielabs.com/high-performance-rc-hovercraft/

Igloo 12V electric cooler arduino modification for the van

May 22, 2016 doogie

At the thrift store I found another one of these 12V Igloo electric coolers. They have a 35W Peltier cooler installed in them and can keep food and drinks nice and cold even on a warmer day. This particular unit I managed to score for only $7.00, which I thought was a good deal.After getting it home and plugging it into 12V, I discovered that it didn't work at all,

Amazing clock made from vacuum tubes, well, televisions actually..

April 26, 2016March 23, 2023 doogie

I wish I was the originator of this idea, and am proud to say that I was able to make a contribution. This is simply amazing. A gentleman that hangs out in our chatroom by the name of Tripp, or treehouseman as he's known in the IRC, has been working meticulously over the last couple months on a concept that has netted him title of the coolest clock I have

April Update 2016

April 26, 2016March 23, 2023 doogie

The G5 quad is doing great. The system has been up for more than 175 days now after traditionally it crashing out after 30. I am currently running the stock cooling system until issues are resolved with the other one. Though, I'm out of town, so hopefully the factory one holds out well. I feel that it will since I am actually running the cooling system more aggressively than it

New Corrado, Vintage PC Goodness to come, October Update

September 29, 2015March 23, 2023 doogie

Hello all! As you may or may not have noticed, comments on this site were broken, and now are fixed. Since I have been consistently updating wordpress, but not really wanting to update my theme, comments ended up breaking within the last month or two with the recent updates. At any rate, I have updated the theme to the latest version and now I have comments again. I ended up

Nature Power 2000w Inverter Test and Review

July 13, 2015May 22, 2016 doogie

As a part of the Cadillac Camper project we decided to install a NaturePower 2000watt inverter (model 38320). This inverter was purchased at a local camping world. Before I go into further detail, I'm aware that there is a power inverter and converter that is combined into a single unit. For this project, we explicitly chose to separate the two, so in the event of a failure we would still

Zoneminder is back! More security cameras woooo! DIY CCTV

July 1, 2015May 22, 2016 doogie

For those of you long time DoogieLabs site visitors you might remember this post from long ago when I had my old house and was using zoneminder to monitor the security cameras: http://doogielabs.com/2010/11/news-for-thursday-september-25th-2010/ It has been years since I've used it, though I have been longing to use it again because I had great success with it. This time was a little bit different, because I could finally use the

Corrado Update, Blog, and News for Friday 5-16-2015

May 16, 2015May 22, 2016 doogie

The new server hosting DoogieLabs.com -- Click for the new G5 Quad page -- So, this site has been a bit dormant lately. Not to worry folks! It's not going anywhere. I am now on a new server, one I've dreamed of having for a very long time and now it's finally here and "almost" sorted. I will actually be leaving the server running on a processor that is

Apple G5 Quad “Fookushima”

May 16, 2015March 23, 2023 doogie

Realtime system status can be found here. There no need for me to write out a lengthy introduction for this machine as my intent was very clear with this project, and outlined here in the below video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF7xIHKx6As This machine, as of May 5th 2015 now hosts the DoogieLabs.com website and all other associated websites and services related to my ventures.This system is fast, it really flies with Linux and

Universal Servo Mount – Automate the Corrado heaterbox

June 9, 2014January 17, 2019 doogie

Progress has been continuing on the Corrado. Trying to get the heaterbox all finished up so I can get it back in the car. A couple years ago, I started to convert the heater box to electronically controllable flaps. I was looking at different ways to mount a servos onto the heater box. I ended up using Autodesk inventor and created a part to suit my needs: This is a

Troll HD Camera Housing Hacking S750

April 26, 2014January 17, 2019 doogie

Project Introduction: So we were given a Troll Systems camera housing with everything except the S750 master controller. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on a master controller, we're going to break out the connector and control the camera ourselves. Here are the pics of the circuit board and a diagram of the pinouts. Here is the pinout of the Hirose 10P 12 Pin connector that is on the

November 2013 Update

November 11, 2013January 17, 2019 doogie

Chinese made Laptop Battery Review: I got a new battery for my IBM ThinkPad, I took a gamble on one of those cheap Chinese batteries from eBay, as seen here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190800977853 This battery was not the greatest in my opinion and great care should be taken when purchasing such batteries from eBay. This is the second one of these batteries I have purchased, the first one didn't work correctly at

Project Thumper made Hackaday!

September 29, 2013January 17, 2019 doogie

The new video is out for Thumper, and it ended up being posted on Hackaday (click here for the original post) I was very excited to see this on Hackaday, and then was disappointed when I read comments like: "Maybe it’s just me, but I love the Geek Group too. However, Chris just rubs me the wrong way. I know he means well, but sometimes I feel like his personality

Late January update!

January 31, 2013 doogie

SGI Fuels are now in stock! Well things have been kind of slow in the way of progress of personal projects because I have been busy trying to get my stuff together and listed on eBay. I recently made the next round of purchases of computer equipment and a bunch of it will be listed up very soon. If you are looking for a laptop or an SGI Computer this

VIDEO: $25 46 inch Samsung Computer Monitor

November 10, 2012 doogie

Late Sept News Part I and SGI Woes

September 19, 2012March 23, 2023 doogie

SGI, HPC with cost as no object; but what did reliability cost? SGI has been a very interesting new road for me, it was the better part of 10 years before I was able to clinch ahold of Octane2 un-obtainium. After gaining a better understanding of how the Octane / Onyx racks work with their NUMA Link and Crossbars, I knew that I wanted to have one as a server.

LCD Monitor has been repaired!

June 17, 2012January 16, 2013 doogie

My Prized 25" Flatpanel monitor lost it's back light about a month ago. As it turns out, one of the CCFL tubes ended up getting a short in one end. The short caused the panel to get really hot forcing me to run the display at reduced overall brightness, and then the problem got worse when it started to take multiple attempts to get the display to come online. The

News and Blog for Tuesday, May 22nd 2012

May 24, 2012May 28, 2012 doogie

Working away getting more done. I have some new stuff to share, I have picked up some vintage computer goodies. I am now the proud owner of a pair of functional Silicon Graphics machines (Octane 2 and O2) which [caption id="attachment_606" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="I may be in windows, but most time is spent in Solaris"][/caption] I also haven't really shared my new alarm panel

SunFire V250 Power Supply Repair is complete!

May 8, 2012 doogie

Here is the video of the repair, I liked how fast the time lapse turned out, it's really cool;

Doing more work, more goodies coming!

April 19, 2012April 19, 2012 doogie

Quick silly random update / preview of some stuff coming down the pipeline since I'm off this weekend, whooray! If anyone needs this done on their Sun Machine, please get in touch with me. This will also be added soon once I get the shopping cart all working and in order; Play safe, Doogie

Power supply cap order list

April 14, 2012May 4, 2012 doogie

So this is more my personal notes, buuuuut then I thought about it and this may actually be handy to someone else wanting to fix an expensive power supply. This is the list of Capacitors and values that one would need to order up when recapping this power supply. Use your ESR meter, you'll likely find the larger filter caps okay, but the small 2.2µ, 4.7µ, and 10µ will not

News and Blog for Tuesday, March 20th 2012

March 22, 2012March 23, 2012 doogie

Whats up all! I have been pretty busy with stuff here at the shop. I have had a few repair jobs, and a couple of unforeseen projects. The first repair job is recovering or resetting the BIOS password in a Dell Inspiron 1000 series. Since there is no security chip on this particular machine, and the password is stored on the eeprom that holds the bios itself, I actually

It’s back up!

December 16, 2011March 11, 2012 doogie

Finally got the server back up and running, it blew ALL of the capacitors! yuck Here is a shot of the load testing, seemed to work just fine. It was not very fun to fix, this is the SECOND DELL that has taken a shit on me when used as a server. I am finally fed up, even though it's fixed and will probably last forever, I think it's time

Whaaa?

September 20, 2011March 11, 2012 doogie

Welcome :) Finally got around to getting the new site together. Totally new look, totally new foundation. Freaking awesome. Its taken some adjusting to the new format but I'm finding it more useful than the old layout. So, whats new at the shop? Lots, I have started shaving the engine bay of my Corrado (project page coming soon) and getting ready for a long winter of purchasing goodies for the

News and Blog for Friday April 29th, 2011

April 29, 2011March 11, 2012 doogie

Whatsup everyone! Almost the end of the month, got a few things going on, some experimentation and renewed motivation.. I have been doing mostly electronics still, I get people coming in for car stuff here and there, but my main focus has been playing catchup on setting up the electronics lab so I can crank out experiments and projects. The Holset VGT Controller and instrument cluster solutions ebing two of

News & Blog for Sunday April 24th 2011

April 24, 2011March 11, 2012 doogie

Happy Easter! I'm having a good weekend off, I actually have been working on some electronics at the shop. I finally got my developer board almost finished. I haven't made boards at the shop yet since I had been there, but have designed a couple of boards that needed to be tried out. One thing that I was working on was a developer board for myself. I like to breadboard

News and Blog for Thursday, April 21st 2011

April 21, 2011March 11, 2012 doogie

Whatup Yo! So I got a few of these cobalt power steering motors on hand, these are the recalled units that have the overheating tendencies or whatever. They don't spin all that fast however they are torquey as hell. (I guess they're 1.2KW motors or something like that) Actually, these things are quite useful but I decided to mess around with PWM current control this week doing some experimentation for

Blog & News for Sunday, February 20th 2011

February 20, 2011March 23, 2023 doogie

So much has happened over the last month and a half, lets start with the latest and work backwards. .. I now have a shop! I signed a 1 year lease on a 2860Sq foot shop space, complete with office and showroom, I am going in with my buddy Mike on it. We're looking at creating a performance shop that caters to all related tendencies... Including computers and electronics! The

News and Blog for Tuesday, December 21st 2010

December 21, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Wow so what is up? Lots, actually I have been very busy with my regular job so I haven't had time to post the progress I got. I am working on things here and there trying to plan out what I need next or how something is going to work out. I have decided to give this Holset H1C a fair chance on the Corrado, before moving into the VGT

Blog & News for Thursday, December 30th 2010

December 20, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Lots of projects at the same time, for many of us is a reality. This time of year is no exception, I tend to want to play more in the summer time, so I save a much of the electronics and computer stuff for a time when you're forced indoors. Trading off between indoor and outdoor hobbies is great. In the continuation of what the bootdisk was for, I have

News for Thursday, November 25th 2010

November 25, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Whats up! Happy thanksgiving everyone! It has been almost a month since posting, I have been getting settled in but lets take a look at whats been done so far. I moved into a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house, its a very large place inside and has an over-sized 1 car garage. Fortunately, the Corrado is able to en-habit this parking space unless a current project does, in which case

News & Blog for Wednesday, October 20th 2010

October 20, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Finally got the footage up I took of the last test&tune at Bandimere for 2010: The Corrado has been great over the last week. I finally got some things debunked that really needed looked at. The first was the strut tower bushings, the setup that I came up with wasn't quite corrected and got rid of the G60 bushing in favor of the MKIII bushing that came with the setup

News & Blog for Monday, September 27th 2010

September 27, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

9/28 Update: Got more done on the Corrado, decided I should share what I have. Installing the Frankenstein shift-box and cables into the car: More hooking up stuff: Looks good up front, aluminum crack pipe as well as a low temp thermostat: I built a great sandwich holder: Discovered that VR6s have a built in belt stretch indicator today too, that was pretty cool! Removed the intake manifold for a

News and Blog for Thursday, September 16th 2010

September 16, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

So whats been up this week? Lots actually, working on a wider variety of stuff has been interesting. It makes for slow progress on a specific project but its a great way to tie up some loose ends. It took me all week to make any progress on the cooling unit setup I have been messing with. I am not sure what I want to build it into yet, maybe

News and Blog for Thursday, September 9th 2010

September 9, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Things have slowed down here a bit, I have received the remainder of my test equipment back so I can start some real experimentation with my electronics projects. I haven't done any other work on the Van other than driving it and even though it burns oil it bas been doing great. The consumption has decreased to around a quart a week. Not bad when compared to a quart every

News and Blog for Sunday, August 29th 2010 (updated 8/31)

August 31, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

The weather over the last couple of weeks has been great. Upper 80's (F) into the lower 90's so I have been outside when I can. Instead of doing too much more work I relaxed a bit. I did end up finishing the truckbed liner coating on the inside before the DATR show. If you haven't seen the pictures yet click my mug: The main show I look forward to

News and Blog for Wednesday, July 28th 2010

July 28, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Whats up everyone? I hope that everyone has been enjoying their summertime! Seriously if you haven't taken the time to stop and enjoy the outdoors PLEASE DOSO! So what have I been upto? Cleaning up and catching up on things that were neglected because of my devotion of time to Albert. I have had some time to enjoy the outdoors, I want squeeze in a camping trip sometime soon so

News and Blog for Monday, July 19th 2010

July 19, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Hello everyone! Quite a bit has happened since I posted here last, so lets take it from the top. Albert has been doing great since the timing belt break. I have driven a few hundred more miles and things are sound, other than it's pig rich. It will be another couple of weeks before I am able to afford the needed Dyno time to finish sorting things out tuning wise.

News and Blog for Thursday, June 3rd 2010

June 3, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Well I have been extremely busy, with everything whizzing around I only get 2 or 3 hours here and once in a while 4 hours there to get some port-work done. The machine shop that I go through still has me in limbo, haven't actually gone over to talk to the guy to get an ETA and I plan on doing that sometime after I get through the weekend. Lets

News and Blog for Friday, March 26th 2010

March 26, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Well, we received a ton of snow here and along with it came blinks in the power. There was no actual power interruption at my house but there was enough that it reset my server continuously and blew every capacitor inside! I wasn't aware of the events for quite some time, when I received the phone call about the dirty power happening at the house the ups was already shut

Blog for Wednesday, March 10th 2010

March 10, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Got some more stuff! Things have been a little slower moving around here because of work-related reasons and the nice weather we've been getting doesn't seem to want to align with the weekends I have off. Nevertheless, here is what I managed to get done... The postman brought me a package containing 2 hella boxes: The boxes actually contain my new smoked turn signal lights: I wasted no time on

News and Blog for Monday February 1st, 2010

February 1, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

NEWS: - The DoogieLabs Vanagon page has been updated, JDM engine section has been added - The downloads section was officially moved over from Area51 - Added a poll BLOG: Disassembly of the JDM engine has commenced while I wait for my 3rd and 4th gears to come in from weddle industries. The engine has came apart smoothly without any apparent problems. I have noticed that the lower wiring harness

Blog Entry for Sunday, January 24th 2010

January 24, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

Many things are happening around DoogieLabs. Once Project that has been in the works for over a year now is my own custom digital instrument cluster that will replace the factory aging cluster currently in the van. (Corrado will be getting one as well but it will be full color) I have been searching for displays for sometime, I wanted something that could be constructed for a reasonable price.. I

Blog Entry for Friday January 15th, 2010

January 15, 2010March 11, 2012 doogie

I haven't had much in the way of extra time, between work, spending my days off wiring a project car, and tending to the usual social agenda that leaves me little free time to advance my personal knowledge, so things have been a little slow lately. I don't really mind any progress is progress, I have been most pleased in my understanding of the Subaru ECU I have been reverse