Our WC53, “Franklin”

This one is for Sascha.

This update is not a lot about the carryall. It’s mostly just to let you know what’s been going on and why there have been no blog updates for awhile. I’ve been told I should let people know. Sorry about that.

After getting the window fixed, I left the machine out in the rain to see how everything sealed up. The new window seems fine. There are leaks around the rear door, the passenger door and all the other windows. So it looks like, for now, I’m still going to need a tarp to keep the rain out.

Bother!

That was pretty discouraging and, I really needed a break. On top of all this, the truck, besides the leaking, is starting to act almost like a reliable vehicle. So I decided to to take a break and work on other things I’ve been meaning to get to for some time now.

Things causing trouble:

Fuel tank sender is now binary! Fix!
Rear differential seized up. Fix.
Carburetor is flooding all over! Fix.
It wont go anymore. Fix.
New differential is leaking oil like crazy. Fix.
Frame to bell housing grounding strap is falling apart. Fix.
Tie up the main power cable better under truck.
Fuel system looses prime. New fuel pump fixed this!
Headlight switch gets so hot it burned my finger. Look into this.
Roof leaks in the rain.
Passenger side wall leaks in the rain.
Strip out old window box.
Fabricate something to cover hole from missing window.
Spark plugs are cracked, replace ‘em.
Get rotted wall cut out.
Get rotted wall sand blasted.
Have new metal welded into rotted wall.
Prime & paint repaired wall.
Passenger window box has dissolved. Need solution to this.
Get window box fabricated.
Put the window back together.
Re-drill interior panel mount holes.
Replace gasket on oil pump.
Get gasket for oil pump.
Seal up cowl vent.
Get cowl vent gasket.
Window cranks. What to do?

Expedition upgrades:

Get a five gallon bucket for washing things.
Find the bucket, I lost it.
Some sort of awning for rain.

Thanksgiving! Big feasting day for Americans. Danny, our kid in college up in Bellingham, wanted the family to come up to his place to celebrate. Cool, I’ll bring up the girls in Franklin. Its about an hour drive in a modern car from our home.

As we’re packing I find this has been broadcast online by daughter Alex. (of WABDR Fame).

No faith, I tell ‘ya.

See? We made it. That’s Dan’s college house in the background. Think “Animal house” and you get a pretty good picture. He was the only one there for the holidays. So at least it wasn’t a giant college party. Just us.

Mmmm.. Turkey dinner...

Then Julie and I took Franklin for a trip to celebrate our 27th anniversary. The plan was to go to Port Townsend on the Ferry. But at about the time we got to the ferry landing, both ferries broke down. So much for that idea..

Plans were changed and we drove off to the southern end of Whidbey island. Found a really ritzy hotel. (Had a great time)

Came back from fancy seafood dinner to find someone had plugged Franklin into the Tesla charger. I wonder how well that worked out?

There was a round about way to get to Port Townsend and that was to take a ferry over to the Seattle/Everett area, then another further south back out to the islands, cross a bridge, head back north... Took all morning. But I’d picked out a really cool restaurant for lunch.

The restaurant was right across the street from the water. Next to the wooden boat building school. I was starving.

“We don’t serve lunch, sorry.”

So we went out to locate a hotel for the night. And that’s when things started coming a bit unglued..

After checking into the hotel, across the cove from the restaurant, we hopped back into the truck to go have dinner and.. Franklin was dead.

Oh lord! Is the battery dead? Is the generator broken? Fan belt too loose and it ran down? Or did the starter fail? How am I going to get this thing home from way out here?!

In the midst of me freaking out about the truck, Julie gets a text from Alex.

Shelby, our youngest, is in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder! Both Alex & Shelby live in Seattle. Shelby had tried a trapeze class and something had gone wrong.

So here we are, stuck out on the wrong side of the water with a broken truck and our kid’s in the hospital. I looked into getting the machine towed home, but was getting nowhere. Julie was like a caged animal. Rough night.

After a bunch of texting back and forth with Alex, we got the word that she’d gotten Shelby home to her dorm. Julie finally fell asleep. And as I was nodding off, it came to me what had to be wrong with the truck.

First thing next morning I opened up the battery box and sure enough. The battery cable had come loose. 3 minute fix and we were back on the road.

As we were traveling I’d been working on parts of my next project. I’d decided to build my own cell phone.

Its not as hard as it sounds. You see, when companies set out to make cell phones, they buy pre-made cell phone chips. Basically all they do is make up a case and tie everything together with some software.

I’d already bought two pieces of hardware that had the cell phone chips on them along with a Arduino type processors.

This is my setup for testing the hardware. In the plastic can hanging out the window on the mirror arm is the cellphone hardware. This is tied in to my laptop bungie corded to the map board in Franklin. Using this setup Julie and I were able to text back and forth to the kiddies. Now all I needed was a case and some code.. No problem!

3D printed case with all the phone guts installed and wired in.

Ok what are we looking at here?

On the far left the big blue board with the silver thing at the top is the touchscreen. The silver thing is a SD card slot. (SD card = Hard drive)

On the far right, the brownish board with the white square on top is the cell phone hardware. Actually the cell phone is the white square with the red stripe on top. This would be the chip that cell phone companies would buy and build their phones around. The rest of the board is a pack of supporting goodies one needs to build cellphones. Power supply, battery charger, microphone amplifier, speaker drivers etc.

But the cell phone board only has 2k of RAM. Not enough to do much, especially trying to run a touch screen. So I added the little middle board. This has 64K of RAM so it ends up being the controller of everything and the one interacting with Mr user.

Above the boards is the antenna, speaker and underneath that a little rechargeable LiPo battery.

Since thanksgiving or so I’ve been writing code for this thing. 95% is going into the little processor to run the user interface. The phone works, its just really tough to get it to work like you’d expect a phone to work.

During the holidays I did make a wreath for Franklin. Julie shot a short clip of it here.

Home screen. Notice the cool icons along the bottom? I stole those off the internet. They were so much cooler looking than the original ones I made myself.

Phone, Text, Contacts, Calculator, Question game & Breakout game.

I already written the calculator & Breakout game some time ago. I set this machine up to host multiple programs, just like a real phone.

Phone dialing screen. This part really works. You can call people and actually have conversations with them.

Contact list. You can add contacts, delete them, call them. You can’t text them and you can only have four because I’m not finished writing scrolling or sorting of them. That’s what I’m working on now.

What I thought would be a quick diversion, is turning into a massive code writing extravaganza. I’ve been at it for three months without a break. Now that I’m “rolling my own” I’m amazed at the complexity of what ties all your contacts, messages, call logs and everything else together. And, using our smart phones, we all take it for granted.

My calculator. About four years ago, the origin of this project began when I got tired of looking for a calculator and just wrote my own. It was a originally a Mac application. Then I ported it to one of these little processors with a touch screen.

Now I‘ve rolled it into my phone.

The question game. This was a test application for the file handling code that the contact list is built on. I polished it up some and added it in as well.

Basically tries to guess what your thinking of by asking yes/no questions.

Breakout! Another game I wrote some time ago. Nasty reflexion on the screen there, sorry. The other picture was worse.

This was originally written for a tiny 1.5”x1.5” screen with a control knob. I’m using this as a test bed for scrolling stuff.

Scrolling stuff that I’m not working on tonight because I’m writing this.

But yesterday...

You truck people still reading this?

That geeky bit was probably pretty boring & painful. A bit of a rough patch there.

Yesterday was bright and sunny, so Julie drug me and my truck out to test out our new portable BBQ.

It looks kinda’ like a lunch box that folds out into a BBQ.

Trying to set it up.

This was before we realized the legs weren’t folded out yet.

We were actually successful in that we got it going (using charcoal). We cooked two cheeseburgers on it. Then figured out the burner box had legs too. That would have been much better.

But it worked, we’ll do better next time, and the truck made it home unassisted. Yay!

Anything else? No.. that about covers it. Sorry to be so light on the wrenching, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Franklin is having a spot of reliability. I’ve been running him as my daily driver for awhile now.

Oh wait! One other thing. Julie is liking the camping so much, she made me buy her a rooftop tent for her 4Runner!

The world changes..

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

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