some wildlife at the ranch

Some recent wildlife at the ranch.

she gave me a heart attack - Brunnhilde had no pulse

 

I was doing a bunch of stuff, including giving more thought to the rooftop PV panel installation and the tradeoffs. I also wanted to reset the service reminder that has been plaguing me during the trip to Florida in February. Disaster struck.

Brunnhilde said that is too loud

 

The Coleman Mach 8 Polar Cub roof top air conditioner is a very loud machine to operate, partly because of its low profile design at the time. I am not at all impressed with all the RV rooftop ACs designed in the US. They are very crude in design, loud, and far from ergonomic, but this is the market we are in. There were not much choices when I install it about 5 years ago. The excessive exterior noise is one of the biggest problem, and I finally ready to confront it head on.

brunnhilde wants some sun

 

I have been pondering the difficult challenges of installing photovoltaic panels onto Brunnhilde but the roof area small and all have been utilized except the curve front portion. I am not interested in the flexible kind of panels due to their relative poor reliability as well as the difficulties of securing them from aerodynamic lift, short of drilling holes into the fiberglass high top. I know people have installed them with high strength tapes. It is not something I would do as the bond is only as strong as the weakest point, and with the James Cook top it is the paint finish.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 10

 

I did some final things to wrap up the Ink Bird cum refrigerator control for the Dometic fridge. I met all the goals I set out and the out of pocket cost is just $13. I open up the compressor compartment again to put in the CPT module, and a piece of note of instruction on how to revert back to the Westfalia Central Electronic Console should the Ink Bird fail on the road. It is very easy to forget all these a few years down the road.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 9

 

It is an anticlimax to wrap up the Ink Bird as the digital thermostat and control for the Dometic refrigerator. I dread the final steps which involve running a cable from above the burner hobs over through the overhead cabinets, down the closet to the water boiler compartment, then into the cabinet that houses the refrigerator.

brunnhilde's ventilation fan - part 2

After days of endurance test of the ventilation fan, I am pleased that it is here to stay. The best things about it is it consumes very little power and moves reasonable volume of air, and is whisper quiet. It works well in windy location where it is not safe to fully open the skylight, but leaving it in the safe mode.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 8

 

Living within my means is always the motto. If you have very little battery bank reserve you just find ways to reduce power consumption. That is why Brunnhilde have no power hungry appliances. The roof top air conditioner does not count as it requires shore power or the generator to supply its power, and during use, any other power consumers are insignificant in comparison. Now with the refrigerator, water boiler, or the diesel furnace. They need to consume as little current from the house battery bank as possible.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 7

I decided to forge ahead and cross the Rubicon, that is modifying the Black Water (as dirty as the Black Water Iraq war badass covert contractor) level indicator panel and repurpose it for the refrigerator control panel. As it turns out there are many constraints on where I can cut the opening for the Ink Bird. There are the existing graphics that I want to obscure and preserve. I have to comprehend the cabinet opening which turns out to be not symmetrical WRT to the faceplate. It is offset to one long side.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 6

 

I thought I would spend a little more time looking closer in repurposing the black water level indicator faceplate for he refrigerator thermostat. My goal is to make the hack look factory without showing any sign this is a hack.

brunnhilde's refrigerator control - part 5

 

I have a setback in my desire to add a display blanking feature to the Ink Bird temperature controller. When I formulated the idea, I didn't give much thought of the complexity of the segmented LED display. While I was right to expect it being a dumb segmented display, I didn't give much thought to the number of segments this purpose made display has, and the number of pins that requires to support them. A rough count I found 34 segments to be switched on/off. Yet there are only 13 pins on the package.