In late October 2022 I bought a 77 Cadillac from someone in CT via eBay.
It’s in surprisingly good shape, and has yet to break down — made the 100+ mile trip home and dozens of around town drives since — but I don’t have any confidence in it for situations where timing is important.
Brakes
Lines — I assume they’re all ready to blow
Master Cylinder — based on speculation it’s bad
Wheel Components — calipers/cylinders, pads/shoes, rotors/drums, all the bits and pieces, they’re not specifically bad, but have to assume they’re a liability
Suspension
Springs — the car sags in the rear and floats even for a Cadillac, I’m assuming the rusty 45 year old springs are done
Shocks — replaced already, the old ones were absolute toast
Ball Joints / Bushings — nothing feels specifically bad, but all the rubber is shot, and who knows how old the parts are
Tie Rods / Steering — similar to above, nothing feels bad, but it’s all super old and rubber components are disintegrated
Cooling
Hoses — might be fine, but stamped 1992… probably gotta go
Water Pump — I can see a mild wobble in the pulley and I thought it might be weeping some coolant
HVAC
Blower — initially worked on high, now not at all… not safe to drive in any situation with condensation
HVAC Head — has a pretty obvious vacuum leak when in any position except “Off”
Refrigerant — would be nice to be able to get cold / dry air, I remember how lousy driving in rain can be without working air conditioning
Body
Rust Prevention — I want to “do no harm”, so I really want to coat or other protect the underbody before I start regularly driving it
General Mechanical
Oil Leaks — it leaks oil, but it also seems to be leaking something else, unclear what it is, only happens while running but nothing is getting low, the fluid is viscous but has no obvious color or strong odor, it’s vaguely fuel like, but could be anything.
Belts — not specifically bad, but good to baseline
Vacuum leaks / Rubber — have to assume all the vacuum and fuel lines are toast at this age
I’ve got all the parts together, I believe all the tools I need, even have a garage… just need to find the time…
I don’t keep this blog up much, but occasionally it’s entertaining to me go back and look at it. With that in mind I used internet magic to retrieve entries I made in previous iterations of this blog from the past decade and add them all here w/ backdates.
I also decided to go back to the WordPress “Twenty Thirteen” theme because I sort of really like it…
In the recent issue of Make magazine they had a comparison of hobbyist CO2 sensors. The purpose of these meters was to help identify indoor spaces that might be more conducive to Covid spread (higher CO2 levels in a room with people means more shared air).
I decided to build one for my office because I share a small 10×12 room with a coworker. I thought seeing the CO2 might be interesting and informative… I never got that far:
What I didn’t expect was to see that my own home is quite poor when it comes to CO2 levels.
Our house is on a busy road, the traffic noise can be difficult to ignore so we often run the HVAC 24/7 even in moderate temperatures. Our house is a 1989 build, it’s all original — doors, windows, siding, etc — the HVAC is replaced but with “like kind”, meaning there’s no ERV/HRV add on, though the new heating appliances are high efficiency so they have dedicated combustion air ducts (instead of drawing air from the house).
Our house is consistently in the 800-1200ppm CO2 range when the windows have been closed for a few days. I personally haven’t felt that it was stuffy or recycled feeling, but the data doesn’t lie.
The other interesting aspect is just how much our gas range will impact CO2 levels… take a look at this annotated chart:
The oven running spikes the CO2 way up. I’m definitely making it a point to keep windows open as much as we can, even if the HVAC is running, to keep some fresh air in the house.
The Jutai pump failed after just 1 full day… it was a bit overcast so I assumed the lack of pumping was due to lack of sun, but later in the day during strong sun it was still dead. The bird bath I’m using was full of water so it wasn’t a burn out.
I’m now using the pump w/ the rose (2 days and still running); the Juntai pump is headed to that big Amazon warehouse in the sky…
My grandmother always kept a two-piece concrete bird bath in her front yard, I remember moving it in/out of the garage, painting it in spring, cleaning it, and filling it for her many times.
When I bought my first house my dad gave me a one-piece plastic heated bird bath that I kept running for a while, but when I moved to my current house the bath apparently didn’t make it.
I bought a heated bath this past winter, but it didn’t come with a stand, and the dish was very shallow, so it was really a pain to use, I decided it might be OK for winter, but for the warmer months I really wanted a concrete birth bath like I remembered from my grandmother’s house — and after all the unusually hot days we’ve been having I decided to put a solar pump in it to attract birds to it and keep the water moving.
I generally like to avoid Amazon as my first stop for shopping, so I hit Home Depot’s iOS app where I found a nice “light weight concrete” two piece bird bath, it looked OK and was well reviewed, so I went with that… I searched for solar pumps and found that they really only had one, and it seemed a bit expensive, but I ordered it anyway for sake of convenience.
The pump arrived first and I decided to try it out in a flower pot overflow dish… I filled the dish, dropped in the all-in-one solar pump and……nothing.
At first I though it was DOA, but then after a brief moment of direct sun appeared I realized it does work, but only when the sun is really blasting directly on it…
I quickly realized that something better for my local birds was needed, so I went to Amazon’s app and was surprised to see a huge range of similar looking all-in-one pumps under $15…
At this point I knew I wanted to do a comparison of a few versions from Amazon vs. the Home Depot pump…
All GIFs below were taken back-to-back to avoid any unfairness as a result of shifting sunlight. It was a fairly bright day at about 4PM so the sun was a slight angle vs. the location.
First up is the one from Home Depot, “AquaNura LP Solar Birdbath Kit” — At $42.98 it is by far the most expensive in this group, in fact it cost more than the three other pumps combined:
Does that AquaNura look dead? That’s because it essentially is… it needed absolutely full, direct, fade-your-fabrics-in-an-hour, sunlight to start pumping… any sort of angles between the sun and panels, or cloudy haze, and it would just go inert, or dribble. It does have suction cups on the bottom which will help hold it in place (assuming your bath has a smooth & flat surface… if it’s a dish or rough then the suction cups won’t do anything)
I absolutely do not recommend this thing, and it will be going back to Home Depot for a refund.
Next we have the three semi-random choices from Amazon… I say semi-random because it’s incredibly easy to get overwhelmed by choices at Amazon, so these three represent some of the lowest cost versions that were available w/ Prime shipping and didn’t have a very off putting title or name.
First up in the Amazon group is the “Solar Water Fountain for Bird Bath” — $7.99 with a 10% off coupon so it was $7.19 or so… it’s the least expensive of the bunch:
Wow, yeah, so that’s a pretty huge difference vs the AquaNura in the same basic light… and it’s got that weird rose in the middle which really classes up the joint and attracts more upscale birds. It doesn’t have anything to hold it in place, and in fact it’s on a foam block so that it will float — I guess people put these in their pools and ponds — that’s less ideal in a bird bath where you want the thing to stay stationary in the center.
Next up is the “Jutai Solar Bird Bath Fountain” — $22.99 it seemed expensive, but Amazon had a 50% “coupon” so it was $11.50:
I’ll say here that all of these pumps come with a variety of nozzles, but I think the spray nozzle option on this one produced a nicer spray and it seemed to have double the number of solar cells as well (at least visually, who knows if they are just fakes). This also has a foam bottom so that it will float around.
Last in the Amazon line up is the “Sunlitec Solar Fountain with Panel” — $9.99 with no “coupon”, it’s also the only model that had an external solar panel…
I thought the squirting was sort of interesting, it went on for a while so I assumed it was by design, but after a few minutes it became a steady stream, so I guess maybe air in the pump at first…
I like several things about the external panel —
External panel can be oriented much more ideally vs. the built in panels, and allows the bath to even potentially be in the shade a bit
This panel has more solar cells than any of the built-in versions, so it will likely work in less ideal light conditions
The entire contraption displaces the least amount of water in the bird bath which leaves more water
The pump has suction cups so it will stay in place on a smooth surface, but even in concrete it will likely stay in place as there is no foam to float it around.
On the negative side —
External panel means wiring is kicking around…
Panel has no mounting features or stand, so it just sort of sits on the ground
The bare pump sitting in the bird bath isn’t aesthetically appealing at all
Overall conclusion:
“AquaNura” from Home Depot is an absolute rip off at nearly $43 even before you consider the fact that it’s the worst performing pump in this group.
You can’t really go wrong w/ any of the $8-12 pumps I got from Amazon:
“Solar Water Fountain” is the cheapest in the group at under $8 and performed very well
“Jutai” is my choice for an all-in-one because it seemed to have more panels and the nozzles had nicer spray pattern
“Sunlitec” is a good choice if you want to remote mount your panel or you’re using a very small dish for the bath and need to avoid displacing water.
Final Thought:
In all cases you want to consider your bath diameter because these things will empty your bath in short order if the sprayed water isn’t landing completely back in the dish… and in general they will greatly accelerate evaporation anyway, so plan to refill the bath every morning, or potentially even more frequently.
subjunctive — A guilty pleasure of mine is that I like the show “Big Bang Theory”, a couple of weeks ago a scene popped into my head where Sheldon was saying “…because apparently I’m ridiculous” and rather than just try to search scripts I started rewatching the entire show… well, technically I’m not always watching it, usually I listen to it while I put my son or myself to bed. FYI, that scene is when they’re using the Cheesecake Factory freezer to prepare for the trip to Arkansas the Arctic.
inculcate — Sadly this one is lost… I think I was looking up something about MySQL?
assiduous — I decided to finally come up with an alternative to my last 32-bit MacOS app, which allowed me to update to BigSur… Post-update I saw the Terminal warning that zsh was the default shell so I swapped over which of course meant all my bash aliases stopped working. I found a post at stackexchange discussing how to convert aliases and the top answer used this term.
Listerine… I have a Mid-2014 MacBook Pro with a delaminating screen — at one point Apple was going to replace the screen for no-cost to me, but they required it be returned to them for 3-4 days I never followed up. The delamination doesn’t bother me much except that it occurred over the webcam which has lead me a few issues:
Blurry webcams look “gross”, essentially the view of me looked like a photo being taken through a grease smeared lens
External webcams — even really expensive “4K” versions — don’t come close to capturing as well as the built-in versions on Mac/iPhone, I think everything looks oddly pale and washed out.
I hadn’t recently searched for how to address the delamination issue, but it turns out that Listerine is said to remove the coating which causes the issue… A few YT videos claimed it doesn’t work, but I was able to use a q-tip inside the opening of my sliding webcam cover to clear just that area and it worked very well! It may sound silly but the lack of a non-greasy-looking webcam was my #1 driver to replace this machine, so with that settled (plus the 1TB SSD upgrade I did in early 2020) I don’t see any reason to upgrade quite yet (which is nice because I don’t want an early generation M1).
I’ve had these things over the years and they’ve all ended up not used often or trashed. I suspect it’s generally because I don’t have a theme or plan for regular content which leads is to being a random list of thoughts or things I want to keep track of it.
For this iteration that’s the theme: Things I Want To Keep Track Of
July 19th 2023 Edit: Hey, I decided to go back and get trashed stuff and put up all up on display again.
I started writing this as notes on the network activity, but realized it sort of sounds like a review, so I wanted to make clear that I’m just a customer, I have no other relationship with this company, nor have I received anything from them for free. That said, I think that Litter Robot’s are the best automated litter handler on the market in the last 10 years, I bought my first one in 2009. They’re robust, easy to use, and work well.
Automated Pet Care Products (APCP) released an upgrade called ‘Connect’ for their latest Litter Robot model (the LRIII) which connects your litter box to the internet to let you monitor it in real-time, and receive pushed notifications of status changes or errors.
Why would you want this? Many reasons, but a few are–
Tracking litter box usage can give insights into your cat’s health–yes you can examine the ‘output’, but that doesn’t tell you if your cat is spending time in the box and not ‘producing’, but this app will
Reminds you when it’s full, or nearly full, which is especially useful if you keep it out of sight
Gives you peace of mind that the device is functioning correctly (in my experience, once the device is setup having it malfunction is extremely rare, basically non-existent, but now you can know for sure that it is or isn’t working and exactly how long it has been like that)
You enjoy keeping tabs on the mundane things in life, like watching your refrigerator temperatures or your cat’s bowel habits…
The upgrade to existing LRIII’s consists of:
New mainboard (physically looks the same, but probably has newer firmware and maybe a multi-colored power LED, it still uses a PICF18)
Communication board that attaches via a 4 conductor cable and has an ESP32 on it as well as a second PICF18
New control-face sticker (adds a WiFi logo and is black instead of blue)
A serial number sticker w/ QR code (the QR code is necessary to set up the app)
I’m wary of anything “IoT” being added to my network, you hear about too many devices become spies or part of a botnet. With an ESP32 and PIC’s I think the risk is low, I also think that APCP has a unique product with custom written firmware, but I was interested to see what data is being sent around.
To capture that data I used a Raspberry Pi 3 which I have setup as an access point on my network. Any device that uses its WiFi signal must route packets through the RPi3 which I can grab using a tool like tcpdump.
It looks like the LRIII Connect makes connections to an AWS instance every minute or so. The LRIII and AWS pass messages in the clear using UDP.
A typical set of messages looks like this:
04:51:29.171485 IP ESP_xxxxxx.cisco-sccp > ec2-54-83-xxx–xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com.2001: UDP, length 74 E..f……P…*.6S…….Rv.>LR3,xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,H,AC,Rdy,W7,NL1,SM122:06:26,PL0,CS0113,110D,2F23538F
04:51:29.470242 IP ec2-54-83-xxx–xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com.2001 > ESP_xxxxxx.cisco-sccp: UDP, length 20 E .0.{..-..96S….*………AOK,xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Note, the italicized x’s were other decimal or hex values, but I removed them to attempt to anonymize myself for this public post. I’m sure that though APCP would have no issue identifying me if they wanted to though.
The first line above is a typical message from my LRIII to AWS, and the second is an “AOK” return from AWS.
There may be shorter versions of the LRIII message, but I haven’t seen them regularly enough to comment yet.
These are ‘heartbeat’ type messages that are sent very regularly, by doing this the LRIII effectively maintains a bidirectional communication link so that you can push commands to it via their app (like start a cycle, turn the night light on, etc) without any special network setup to allow incoming communication, because the LRIII is always reporting its status which gives the server a chance to issue it commands.
Breaking down the message from my LRIII to AWS it’s fairly clear what is being sent. I appreciate that APCP is sending their messages in the clear and that they are relatively easy to decipher:
LR3
Model
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ID of my LR3 (removed from this post, it has a 14 digit hex number)
H
???
AC
AC Power Present? I have a the backup battery, but disconnected it during upgrade to Connect and haven’t yet reconnected it
Rdy
Appears to be the status, I’ve seen Rdy,CST,CCP,CCC which I assume translatea roughtly to “Ready”, “Cat Sensor Timing” (waiting w/ Red Light), “Clean Cycle P” (Cycling), “Clean Cycle C” (Cycling Complete). This doesn’t appear to change when in sleep mode, so I don’t think it’s a straight translation of the LED pattern to a state.
W7
Wait Time? (To wait after cat exits the box defaults to 7 minutes)
NL1
Nightlight On/Off (mine is on, this goes to NL0 when I turn it off)
SM122:06:26
I think this has to do with Sleep Mode. It changed to SM100:00:00 at the time when I have sleep mode set, prior to that it was counting up to 24:00:00. So I assume this is a 24 hour counter.
PL0
Panel Lock On/Off
CS0113
Cat Sensor (weight) (This was 0x0110 when my cat was out, and 0x014F when in… dec “63” difference, so maybe it is 6.3lbs? I assume this is a post-calibration value and that calibration is done with the known weight of the empty machine to handle variation between load cells)
110D
Sequence number? Consecutively increases each time.
2F23538F
Hash? Other configuration bits? Seems to change each message
Anyway, that’s what I’ve seen so far. In ~12 hours of observation I haven’t seen any other noteworthy communication or anything that looks nefarious. The TLDR of this is that I won’t worry much about keeping it on my network–except for the fact that it’s yet another WPA2 client.
One thing I was happy about is that there is no local network communication. Some devices, like TP-Link plugs and Philips Hue, want to communicate between the mobile app and device on your local network. This makes using client isolation and guest networks problematic. The LRIII Connect doesn’t use this–both the LRIII and the mobile app appear to talk to remote servers as intermediaries for all communication.
I’ll try to take a look at the data passed by the mobile apps later, but I assume that will be encrypted because in my experience HTTPS is now required for API calls by Android and iOS.
The ultimate in function (mostly) over form.Humidity is rising…
It’s a mix of devices providing the data…
For the inside/outside/fridge temperatures and humidities I’m using 433MHz “Acurite” brand probes. They’re received using a Raspberry Pi with a USB SDR and RTL_433 package. I’m using a Python script to parse the JSON output from RTL_433 and then write that to a PHP script on my web server which stores the data in a MySQL database. The Acurite’s transmit every 16s, I only write data if the change is greater than 0.5 from the last value.
For the “Storage” info, it’s a 3G cellular connected Particle Electron with an AM2302 and a 4400mAh battery set in my tin-can storage unit where I store all my tools and stuff that doesn’t fit or belong in the apartment–This is a new storage unit, my old one was indoors and somewhat climate controlled. I’m a bit worried about how some of my stuff will do in this one which is a drive-up and seems to get very hot and very humid. The Electron will measure and transmit every hour, to preserve the battery it goes into deep sleep between readings.
For the “Soil” info, it’s a WiFi connected Particle Photon using an SH-10 stuffed into the spider plant’s pot and a YL-69 which measures resistance between two copper traces. I take readings every 10 minutes and transmit regardless of changes. This device is powered by an 18Ah 12V SLA battery so I do sleep the Photon between readings, but the SLA is kept float charged by mains.
