More pictures as I promised

This is a beautiful transformation from a rusty trash dumpster into a nice chicken coop.

In weekend the painting will be finished and it will become a decent automobile again. I hope so.

In the mean time - here is how the original dash board looks like:

Gas in the left side, speed in the middle, battery in the right side.

No information about temperature and pressure. Also no back light. At the first hole in the road, the bulb lights break their filaments and no more light. At night it's not cool to drive. And even it is the 21st century, there are still a lot of holes in many of the roads. Everybody wonders where the vignette tax money (around 30...35 euros per year per car) are going to? The police are still discovering jackasses which manage their pockets instead of the roads.

The first thing I learned when I got this car is not to trust the battery gauge when performing adjustments to the battery charging circuit. According to user manual, the charging voltage with all the lights switched on is recommended to be between 13.5 and 14.5 volts. Less than that and the battery will die in a few days. Or the next day if I plan to drive at night. More than that and it will damage the electrolyte, then the brand-new battery will become useless in less than a month.

After I learned this in the hard way - destroyed battery - I installed a soviet-made voltmeter. Two months ago I temporary switched to a digital voltmeter. Until I managed to get a new battery I could start the car using the bare hands and a crank like the first automobiles in the history. Yes - this car was fit with such a mechanism even in the last version made in 2004 under EURO-2 pollution class injection technology. Extremely useful.

This is my first attempt to install a newer model. Still the same problem: no back light. And it looks rather old. There are a lot of compartments that gather dust. No modern look.

This picture was taken after the accident, before I started repairs. I had to re-check all the electrical wiring. Steering wheel removed. Dash board in full view.

Gear shifter repair performed under the car in the middle of the road in the middle of the night. Romanian style. That's the connection between the shifter and the gear box. It broke down after I hit another hole in the road. And I managed to get home. Try to do that with a modern car - it will cost you to call some company to lift the car and drop it to the service. I don't know how many euros per kilometer (for the Imperial system users: 1 mile is 1.6 kilometers). Real engineers do not need to call for technical support.

Service area - gearbox removal. They took it down in around 10 minutes. For me to do this on my own - it would take around one hour and a half. Plate number erased for now.

cog wheels with broken teeth. That's inside the gear box. Need to get another one. I would prefer to get an original, french-made gearbox but they told me that Renault 12 gearbox was fit with 4 gears+reverse only. Romanian technology managed to upgrade it up to 5 gears+reverse. I don't want to adapt another gear box. I heard the last version were made under German design and technology. I have to dig for more information.

Welding performed on the shifting rods??????

Allright, back to electronics.

This is a Control Data Corporation tape drive. It replaced the tape drive inside a IZOT CM5509 Bulgarian-made mainframe tape drive. Unfortunately I recovered it without the electronic board. And it could not read tapes with density higher than 1600 BPI (bytes per inch). The keypad is useful and it was presented in one of the earlier update logs.

The buttons are back lighted with 5 volts bulb lights. Unfortunately they are all broken. Some RGB leds will nicely fit inside.

This is a BMCM USB data acquisition card connected to the sensor adapter. Thank you www.bmcm.de for this wonderful piece of technology. Sensors are simulated with 10kOhm pots. They also made drivers for FreeBSD, unfortunately they are compiled for x86 and x64 only. They say they can't compile them for ARM architecture. I will see what I can do.

Radiation detector is now work in progress.

In the next update log - HM2007 Hardware Neural Network board and theory, practical application plus scientific references. This will take some time to compile into a small scientific article.

Still waiting for the PWM controllers.

There are a lot of pictures in the logs but still no schematics or diagrams. That will change as soon as I have something to start with.

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kernel panic: improbability coefficient below zero