Inane ramblings of Tim

Making a Cisco SG300 POE switch tolerable to live with.

2020-02-22T11:48:00.001-05:00

I am tired of consumer-grade networking gear. It never actually works well and you have to tinker all the time. Coupled with the fact you cannot get any decent 1Gb consumer switches that support fiber means I have to look at Commercial switches and in specifically used ones.

I settled on Cisco old SG300 switches for my home. I have 1 28 port in the office where all the cat6a cables are terminated to a pair of 12 jack plates and I have a pair of fibers that run the length of the house to the master bedroom closet where I have a Sg300-10 that lives on a shelf next to the alarm panel and lighting panel.

The 10 port is silent and perfect. the 28 port sounds like it wants to take off and hover. my solution was a pair of Notuna 40x40x20mm fans.

I disassembled the switch, installed my fans and repinned the new ones to meet Cisco wiring standards (which do not match anyone else) by using a small screwdriver to pop the pins out. I also used the fan speed adapters to make them silent. The switch even at full load and 80 watts of POE being delivered does not get warm, so slower quieter fans are absolutely acceptable.

Except, the fan warnings were being sent. why? Cisco doesn't use fan speed sensing, it has a hall sensor fan that simply looks if it's spinning. easy to defeat that warning by shorting the center pin to ground on the 3 pin Cisco fan header. by doing this on the resistor lead "silent" adapters that came with my fans it is now silent and still has decent airflow out the back.

Why I am abandoning Sonos: They are ruining the platform

2020-01-05T09:43:00.001-05:00

I have been an avid Sonos fan for decades.... yes from the beginning I was on the Sonos wagon and loved it. even to the point that I abandoned an in house audio multi-zone system for it. and it was great until about 3 years ago when they started changing how Sonos really works.

Before when you had the controller remotes everything worked locally. I could play and command everything locally so if the internet was out it still worked and everything was awesome. It was flawless for years. I kept buying and upgrading until I ended up with 8 rooms of stereo audio, that's 16 speakers! Added Sirius XM to it and it was awesome we could all listen to what we wanted!

And then something changed. I was no longer able to listen to Sirius XM in multiple rooms, pandora stopped connecting reliability and the speakers took forever to start playing music... and then the connection for integration stopped working reliability.... every update to Sonos degraded the platform more and more. To the point this morning I had to yet again reboot everything to get music and I discovered, oh another update, that's why it broke again... and they force updates on you now, you cannot disable them.

I used to be the biggest supporter of their products, but now I will not recommend Sonos to anyone anymore. It's not reliable like it used to be, they have constant nonstop updates that break things or take away features, and each update they get slower and slower to start music playing. It's to the point that I am spending money to have speaker wiring installed in my current home, and have speakers cut in ceilings or added to rooms along with a 16 channel amplifier and audio sources plus control system to get reliable whole-house audio back. I am saddened that Sonos as a company destroyed their product. It's nothing like it used to be and seems to only be getting worse.

And I am not alone, many professional AV companies are no longer recommending Sonos due to integration issues and they refuse to stop changing things without telling their partners about the changes until it's already broken things.

What I thought was the future of home audio sadly seems to be dying and going back to a traditional distributed audio system is the answer once more.

MXL BCD-1 Review : It's not really living up to all the hype and is more of a scam at their price point

2019-12-08T21:08:00.002-05:00

I spent a month researching this mic and review after review said it was awesome. I checked in forums, etc. and everyone raves about it... So I jumped in and ordered 4. they arrived and in my testing, they sound great just like an SM58. With the promise of better side and rear rejection at my small recording table I was ready for this better recording.....

Until real life happened.... People at a recording table don't sit quietly, they do things, type on laptops, bump etc.... They touch the table. and on that table previously with SM58 mics into $5.00 china cheap shock mounts on mid-level priced mic boom arms..... it sounded good. With the BCD-1's it sounds like utter garbage. I hear every table touch and knock clearly in every single mic. and worse there is a vibration ringing that I never knew was there in every single mic.

I was horrified, these mics supposedly amazing mics with built-in high-end shock mounting are picking up every single noise on the tables. It was at this point when I searched with the term, "BCD-1 shock mount noise" that I found out that not a lot of people are actually using these mics. I started asking questions in forums and was told of the amazing suspension inside and what I am describing is not possible..... so I took one apart. Yep voided that warranty and took it apart.... And this is what I found.

That amazing space-age high tech shock mount is foam, just a bunch of foam surrounding an SM58 clone capsule. There is nothing special about these mics. In fact, I found that the reported "better rear and side rejection" is also a lie. These things function exactly like cheap SM58 clones, and just have a "pretty broadcast look". Also they fail to have any real engineering in them as the top of the capsule goes directly into foam. ther eis no dead air headspace to cause air pressure to dissipate any plosives, so it has no engineering at all in it. They are relying on a ton of foam and the thin foam cover to hopefully tame any plosives.   for it's size and apparent design it should eliminate any. sadly it doesn't in any way.

SO in the sea of "ZOMG", these are amazing microphone reviews, I'll be the one to tell you to not buy them. It's not worth the price, buy the $9 to $18 SM58 knockoffs and the cheap shock mounts and get the same if not better audio for your podcast or broadcast or recording. This thing just does not deliver on any of the claims out there. The reviews are not actually people using them, they just plug them in for 15 minutes to record their podcast and back in the box they go.

I'm now stuck with 4 of them that will most likely live in a closet until I can find a sucker... I mean someone interested in some broadcast audio microphones that are awesome from MXL for a really good deal.

I have been asked what price point do I think these are not a scam.   $18.00 is what this mic is worth, I would not pay more than that and understand it does not have any shock mounting or isolation at all, so ignore all the marketing surrounding it.

BMW CIC carplay retrofit adventures

2019-10-06T08:14:00.002-04:00

I decided to buy one of those boxes that retrofits carplay into an older BMW that has never had carplay available.

Most online as kits are priced all over the road, from $700 to $200 and beyond. and if you do any research paying close attention to the ad's you notice that they are all extremely similar. Looks like the same box, or a similar box. Connectors the same, etc... which makes me believe one or two places make these things. but why the disparity in pricing? I think that is if the place actually tests the stuff, or do they simply rebox it and ship it. Now remember, these are honestly hacks. It's injecting it's own video in the LVDS cable to the screen. it will simply switch from passthrough to it's video then back. and carplay on these is completely pirated or a china crack/hack Apple does not license carplay to random companies. You have to meet their requirements, so I knew what I was getting into.

So I chose the latter. Found a Cheap $250 box on ebay and got it shipped, from china. spent the afternoon installing it and.... it doesnt work. CIC only gives me the dreaded red screen. check all kinds of connections, check the box settings.... nope. Red screen.

So now I get to spend $50 to ship it back to china for a refund. I knew this had a big risk to it, I gambled and lost. Sadly I can't tell you brand except for china.

If you are going to try one of these, I do suggest getting one local to you, at least from a seller in your country. Ask them if they actually open each box and test it. can they send you a video of the actual box they sell in operation? Most of these sellers are drop shippers or reshippers. They do not actually have any way of testing the stuff and they hope it was right when they got it.

There is a big reason why there are not many reviews of these things online, the Price point is stupidly high, and the chances of getting something that does not work is also very high with no real assistance.

Ham Radio D-Star... What they dont tell you.

2019-09-06T12:58:00.002-04:00

A lot of hams want to get into the new digital modes and end up frustrated. Having helped people get this working, I needed to share this with everyone.

DStar is more popular with more repeaters but the documentation that comes with the radio will not get you on the air, and Dstar is very convoluted and not very well though out for a user point of view. But it's not too hard once you get the correct information that seems to be hard to come by.

First, the reason nobody ever hears you on the local repeater is because Icom Radios DO NOT setup a dstar connection in any way when you setup a repeater.   you havet o go in and enter a lot of other information first that could be automated by the radios.

To make it easy...   you have 4 fields   MY, RPT1,RPT2,UR    These are as follows

MY = your callsign
RPT1 = the repeater you are connected to 8 characters long (I'll get to that in a second)
RPT2 = where are you connecting to, 99.9% of the time it's the repeater's gateway 8 characters long
UR = Your call which is confusing.   I dont meand YOUR call I mean the other persons call.    it should be named Target

So you just bought a new DStar radio and want to rag chew on the repeater.... you need to set up connecting to the repeater frequency and if you look it's got a UR of CQCQCQ   and nothing in RPT1, and RPT2 which is fine, but will not work as that is only for simplex.   you need to add information into RPT1 and RPT2 which is the repeaters callsign spaces and then the Node B if 440 C if it's 2M, and then the gateway that is usually the callsign of the repeater padded spaces and a G.

Ok still confusing because DStar and it's protocol written 20 years ago.

so for example...
I am on W1AW repeater at 444.4400mhz +5 offset.   It calls its self the W1AW-B repeater... we need to know the B
MY = N8ABC
RPT1 = W1AW[s][s][s]B [s] = a space   the B is what the repeater called it's self. this is almost always the repeater
RPT2 = W1AW[s][s][s]G Always a G because this is the gateway if we are using the gateway.
UR = CQCQCQ

This tells the repeater to take what is received on slot B that is the 440Reciever and send it to the gateway, that is then sent back out the repeater to the call sign CQCQCQ which means broadcast it to everyone that does not have callsign squelch on.

MY ID880H and my ID-51a do not do this... they only slap in the CQCQCQ and ignore the RPT fields and I am never ever able to talk to anyone on any repeater.   It's not clearly spelled out like this in ANY documentation online. Even the Dstar websites assume you are a Dstar expert and do not walk you through all this.

Now the cool part is linking and reflectors.

back at the W1AW C 440 Repeater... I want to link to the REF004C reflector that is the USa rag chew reflector..

I need to add 4 more memories to my radios as follows.

MY, RPT1, RPT2 are all exactly yhe same as above but my UR changes

[8spaces]I = report link status
[8spaces]U = Unlink any current links
[8spaces]E = Do a Echo test and repeat my audio back at me
REF004CL = Link to the REFoo4C reflector   (The L tells it to link)

Once I link I scroll back to the CQCQCQ one and now I am talking on the link to the reflector AND the repeater.

when done I switch to the memory with the U and unlink. (always unlink when done)

Yes that means you need a total of 5 memories for every single DStar Repeater.

This is just the basics.   I'm going to do a full write up with more details including calling a specific ham at a specific repeater, etc...   but the above at least gets you operating, something your radio and it's manual is incapable of doing

Intel NUC and Ubuntu 16.04

2019-05-16T06:51:00.000-04:00

So there is almost no information out there on this and I finally discovered the answer last night late. If you are using an intel NUC 7th or 8th gen you need to download 16.04.6 installer and on install use the alternate kernel. you need a Linux Kernel revision higher than 4.13 and 16.04.6 has 4.15 as an alternate.

This has the drivers for the NUC hardware. the standard 4.4 does not.

Searching the googles and intertubes does not give you this clear answer. And yes sometimes you do need to run an "out of date" Linux. I have a specific service/software that I need to run that is not ready to support Ubuntu 18LTS yet.

Cisco 2106 and LAP1142 wierdness.

2019-03-29T16:23:00.002-04:00

Setting up a real Wireless network for a charity I decided to leverage the used Cisco gear out there. I got a nice 2106 WLC and a few LAP1142's for cheap that will serve them nicely. Get everything installed and the AP never ever shows up. so I take one down, connect the serial cable and power it on the network. It starts complaining about expired keys. All kinds of searching the Cisco forums and there is no answer except for the default "your time is wrong" comment that is actually useless because LAP's and a WLC don't care what time it is.

So I dig for a few hours and discover that Cisco had a bug in their firmware. The certs they bake in are only 10 years of life and will self explode to encourage people to replace gear. Thanks, cisco. The problem is you can't just set the time back if someone EVER updated the WLC it freaks out about the LAP's certs.

I found an answer.

in the WLC console enter the following command.

config ap lifetime-check mic enable

then blow out the NTP server settings and set the date to 1/1/10 at 01:01:01

now power cycle the LAP's. they will pull the firmware update from the WLC. WLC needs to be at 7.0.252.0 at a minimum becasue that is when Cisco extended the cert to 2020. Gee thanks Cisco.

Honestly, I would set the time at a correct date and time but keep it 10 years out of date to avoid the "make them buy new gear" timebomb they decided to add to the equipment.

Also if you are setting up a simple "guest network" you can make these act like standard consumer wifi by going in the WLAN security and setting it to WPA/WPA2 security is WPA2 then set the auth to psk psk format ascii and then enter the phrase the customer wants. This works great for a WLAN attached to a VLAN that is only allowed internet access or goes to a captive portal like you use for hotels.

Arduino ESP8266 UDP communication that makes sense

2018-07-16T14:13:00.002-04:00

I am working on a way to get 433 door sensors into a real automation system like Crestron without using a RS232 port but instead leveraging the dirt cheap ESP8266.    I decided for simplicity I want to simply do a UDP broadcast on my network of whatever sensor was last tripped that means I dont have to do any configuration to find and configure the device. I just listen for UDP broadcasts on a specific port.

This also can be used to auto configure your ESP devices.   let them listen on a broadcast port and reply with their IP Address.    so I decided to generate some code to do just that.

Sadly I ran into a problem right away.   Arduino libraries are as poorly documented as C# libraries.   By looking up the documentation on the WiFiUdp.h module you get the bare minimum of info that assumes you know the module already inside and out.   In reality this is not the case and extremely far from it.    One of the most important things they miss is what the hell does Udp.write() want? I assumed a string, WRONG. It needs a Char array. that means you have to convert everything to a char array when you are ready to send it.   It would be nice of the author to tell you this, but it's the current trend in library documentation is to hide any and all details like that and you are supposed to just know what they want.

So Below is a example program that sets up a ESP8266 onto a wifi network and listens on One port and responds on the port higher.   You do not have to use separate ports, you can absolutely talk and listen on the same port, just understand that when you go to the broadcast address of the network you are going to be running into everyone else's broadcast traffic.

Is this clean and complete? nope.   but it solved the issues I was running into and all the Google searches out there were cryptic and vague. The answer was the collection of about 10 forum posts and a couple of AHA moments.

https://gist.github.com/timgray/77b0f5d696616420a8722f8fae53a901

#include
#include

const char* ssid = "MySSID";
const char* password = "SecretPassword";

WiFiUDP Udp;
unsigned int localUdpPort = 4210; // local port to listen on
char incomingPacket[255]; // buffer for incoming packets
char replyPacket[] = "Hi there! Got the message :-)          "; // a reply string to send back

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(115200);
Serial.println();

Serial.printf("Connecting to %s ", ssid);
WiFi.mode(WIFI_STA);
WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED)
{
    delay(500);
    Serial.print(".");
}
Serial.println(" connected");

Udp.begin(localUdpPort);
Serial.printf("Now listening at IP %s, UDP port %d\n", WiFi.localIP().toString().c_str(), localUdpPort);
}

void loop()
{
int packetSize = Udp.parsePacket();
if (packetSize)
{
    // receive incoming UDP packets
    Serial.printf("Received %d bytes from %s, port %d\n", packetSize, Udp.remoteIP().toString().c_str(), Udp.remotePort());
    int len = Udp.read(incomingPacket, 255);
    if (len > 0)
    {
      incomingPacket[len] = 0;
    }
    Serial.printf("UDP packet contents: %s\n", incomingPacket);

    // send back a reply, to the IP address and port we got the packet from
    Udp.beginPacket("192.168.41.255", localUdpPort+1);
    Udp.write(replyPacket);
    Udp.endPacket();

    String tmp = incomingPacket;
    if(tmp.indexOf("STATUS") >= 0)
        {
            // lets send back our IP address
            String temp = "ADDR:"+ WiFi.localIP().toString();

            temp.toCharArray(replyPacket,temp.length());
            Udp.beginPacket("255.255.255.255", localUdpPort+1);
            Udp.write(replyPacket);
            Udp.endPacket();
        }
       if(tmp.indexOf("RSSI") >= 0)
        {
            int mysignal = WiFi.RSSI(); // get the signal strength

            String temp = "RSSI:"+ String(mysignal);

            temp.toCharArray(replyPacket,temp.length());
            Udp.beginPacket("255.255.255.255", localUdpPort+1);
            Udp.write(replyPacket);
            Udp.endPacket();
        }
}
}

TLDR: LED headlight bulbs are all garbage.

2018-06-27T12:58:00.001-04:00

So I wanted to upgrade the lighting on my car, I was silly and bought a base model and not the top of the line luxury version so I don't have HID lights or LED lights stock. Plus because it's a hybrid I wanted the headlights and fog lights to use less energy while the car sits with the engine off at stoplights or in stopped traffic. In many places this is a short amount of time, here in Orlando stoplights can last 5 minutes, and stopped in traffic can easily be 25 minutes. So I started to investigate different LED headlight options.

First my car has projector type halogens, they have a very clear and abrupt cutoff to keep light out of the eyes of other drivers, this is the ONLY kind of headlight you can do this in, if your car has reflectors then stop now and live with your halogens. The LED and HID retrofits I used will only blind the hell out of other drivers. Stop . put the bulbs back in the box, take them back to the store or send them back to amazon. Don't be that scumbag blinding everyone on the road.

I have recently tried 3 different sets of LED bulbs, and referenced to the oem halogen bulbs as well as a $25.00 5000K HID kit. The LED bulbs all have claims of lumen outputs that are far far higher than what phillips claims for it's own . halogen bulbs. Typical Halogen headlamp bulbs are 800-1200 lumens my cars H11 bulbs were 1000 lumens rated by phillips, so this was my baseline that must be beat. Now lumens is a very very bullshit measurement. because absolutely nobody give you enough details to make any real sense out of the claims. For the claimed "lumen" output you MUST also state the distance it was measured at and the beam pattern. typically it is a number that is an average over a testing area. without this information claimed lumen output from any bulb maker is 100% bullshit and needs to be assumed a lie. Because a 1000 lumen halogen bulb, when measured with the light meter at 1 inch away shows it's putting out over 10,000 lumens. and this is the secret to how the LED retrofit makers are getting their made up outlandish numbers.

I tried 3 sets, 2 china no name brands as they are the most popular and the one Phillips offering that was $160 for a set of bulbs. the two china offerings claim 8000 lumens, and to someone that does not know better, "OHH 8 time Brighter!" and guess what, in my testing the ONLY time they measured a bit below 8000 lumens was when I held the meter 1 inch away from the bulb, I could already see at this point that the LED bulbs are at least 20% dimmer than a standard oem halogen. So I tried the Philips bulb set. This is the ONLY set that had honest packaging. first it says, "for fog light use only" and does not have any lumen output claims at all on the package, only power consumption numbers. This is a stark difference from all the china made stuff out there that were making all kinds of claims. I tried them anyways and guess what. It actually made close to the 8000 lumens at 1" away, still significantly dimmer than a $9.00 halogen bulb. Now this is just the brightness of the bulb, not what it does in the reflector. Every single bulb has a misalignment compared to a halogen. when you hold them side by side the LED types put their lamp slightly farther forward compared to the halogen. This on it's own isa huge red flag that they will not work as the light source is now not in the focal point, also led's can not create a 360 degree light source using the whole reflector, so now you have a 150 or 140 degree per side light source that is using only 60% of the reflector. these two things couple to create bad lighting out the front of your car. it "looks" brighter because it's 5000-6000K in color temperature. but a REAL test is to go on the road and see how far down they shine. good headlights will light up an object clear enough for you to identify it 150 feet away. every single LED bulb I tried reduced that distance to 100 feet or less. It spread it's light to the left and right a LOT! this causes the sides of the road to be lit as well as the eyes of the oncoming drivers. In the housing the light meter now tells a very different tale. Light output of the halogens measured 1 foot away from the lens is now down to 950 lumens at the bright spot of the beam, the LED bulbs were 450 to 650 but there was no really clearly defined bright spot in the beam, and the lumens dropped off to 100-200 for the rest of the beam. that was now going out to the left and right. It was obvious right away as the light beams were hitting my garage wall that it was not doing as claimed. the phillips was the best performer, but still a larger flood like spot and not a clean bright center like the halogens provide.

I still decided to try one more thing, a dirt cheap HID kit. This kit is a 35W I think as there is no claim to power, the ballasts are tiny and the bulbs looked like they were phillips bulbs, but are probably china copies. I got the kit for less than half the price of "silverstar ultras" so I figured if they last 6 months I got my money's worth as the silverstars only last about 6 months. I ran all the same tests except for the bare bulb test. when I lit the bulb it was unholy bright and I could not see for about 1 minute due to basically looking straight into a camera flash. I knew right off the bat that these things were a LOT brighter, so I finished installing and did the test in front of the lens. First the HID had the same beam pattern as the LED spilling to the sides a lot but the center bright spot was clearly defined like a halogen. This has to be because of the reflector needing the whole reflector to be filled with light, something the LED bulbs just can not do. the meter was reading well over 2400 lumens in the hot spot. with about 800-900 lumens off to the left and right. the road test actually made me readjust the headlights down as the cutoff was still there but I could clearly identify objects over 250 feet down the road, I actually re aimed the headlights a couple of degrees down, and observing the car from the 250 feet out the headlights were not offensive, I was certainly easier on other drivers eyes than all the bruh trucks riding around with their misaligned headlights. This ended my test as I found what I should have started at, the HID retrofit. Now, I need to state once again, YOU MUST have projector headlights, you MUST re-aim to make sure they are not blinding others, and you MUST have low beams that stay on all the time, even when you hit your high beams. Because hot HID bulbs do not come back on quickly. you will be plunged into darkness for 5 seconds if your car swaps between high and low beams. If your car has reflectors and not a projector type headlight, stop and just live with your halogens, don't be that jerk that blinds everyone because of your ego.

Basically, ALL LED retrofits for headlights are garbage. I do think they would work in the Fog lamps as those are not for generating tight beams but more like a floodlight and this is what these LED's do. they are not designed to light up down the road, they light up in front of your car and to the sides, and that is what I am installing in my fog lamps. until LED's become a whole lot brighter and a whole lot smaller . they will never EVER replace a headlight bulb. OEM headlights are also designed very differently and are 120 watts or more per side compared to the 65 watts your halogens use. just look at the giant heat sinks on the OEM headlight assemblies. and last time I checked they end up to be around $1200+ for replacement assemblies alone. you are never going to replicate those with a $50 china bulb.

Creality Ender 3 3d printer: a neat idea with a couple of major flaws.

2018-06-05T07:55:00.003-04:00

I recently got in on the Ender 3 craze. Everyone buying this printer with rave reviews.... until you really start digging deep on it and start to realize it's flawed by one major problem... It's print bed is severely bent or dished to the point that you actually only have a 80X80 print area printer.

Assembly is a breeze, less than an hour you have it put together, and you are initially impressed until you start to try and tram or level the bed to the print head. you keep finding that corners are hitting while the middle is miles away from the head, so you keep trying and finally find a 1 foot long straight edge and discover the bed is severely warped in 3 directions with over a 2mm sag in the middle. This instantly causes grief as you will never be able to print on this printer except for the dead center and a small area. slapping a piece of glass on top is also not easy as you dont have good contact for thermal transfer.

so just buy a new bed..... for the new printer you bought, OK I'm game... so I search . 220X220 beds are all over the place. Well reality is this printer has a 235X235 print bed that has it's mounting screws at 170X170... that means you can not buy a bed for it. Creality refuses to sell the parts to this printer, nobody carries them. Also contacting creality directly only gets you a "put glass on it" and a refusal to send you a replacement part for their defective product.

This means to fix the new printer you just bought, you need to spend about $100 getting a piece of aluminum machined at 235X235 and 170X170 mount holes that is flat.... oh and you lose a heated bed because nobody makes a heated bed element in this really strange size. How about retrofitting it to fix a standard 220X220? that means you have to replace the Y axis plate . you cant drill it because Creality has it cut too small for putting screws at 209X209 which is the standard for a 220X220 bed. at every turn Creality has intentionally made this printer so non standard that you can not repair or upgrade it with standard parts. Even more research turns up in every single 3d printer forum that talks about this printer . People are reporting warped beds to severely warped beds. This means that the chances of getting a defective product out of the box is getting to be significantly high. This puts me on the warn others about the possible flaws path about this printer. Yes you can slap a piece of glass on it, and that will work if all you print is PLA. you will need to even out the bed somehow to get even heat on the glass if you want to do anything else.

But the problems don't stop there. extruder rubs the incoming filament against the Z axis screw and the Y axis carriage mount is extremely wobbly by using 4 V groove wheels in the center and no linear rails to the sides for stability. you can upgrade to a central linear rail to fix this for about $30 to solve this engineering problem. Also the extruder stepper is of very low quality, many people online and I included having noticed that after a short while you hear squealing from the extruder stepper as the bearings wear extremely quickly. so expect to replace the extruder stepper as well in short order. I also recommend replacing the belts as well with something better, these seem to stretch and cause ringing in the prints. I was surprised at how much give the belts have compared to even the belts that come on the monoprice printers.

When it's all said and done, to fix your new Ender 3 printer to be useable will cost you about $300 and there are a LOT of better printers out there that use standard-sized parts and manufacturers that will gladly send you a new print bed to fix their defective warped bed. This printer had potential but the maker's desire to cut as many corners as possible has made it something that I can not recommend to anyone purchase. After my communication with them, I just can not recommend buying any of their products simply because they refuse to send you parts to honor their claimed warranty for a printer that is broken or defective out of the box.

If you do buy one, before doing anything put a straight edge on the print bed. if it's warped immediately return it and ask for a replacement or refund. People need to keep doing this until Creality gets flooded with returns to the point that they have to start paying attention or their sellers stop selling their product that is defective out of the box. Don't bother emailing them they will not help you at all and only repeat the same thing over and over . "we are sorry but we can not send you anything" . I guess sorry makes it all better.

Update: I have 2 spared beds.... both curved. Bought a second-hand Ender3 for $100 its bed is also curved and is why the previous owner could not get anything to print other than very small things in the middle of the bed. the forums are filling up with people reporting this major flaw. so absolutely be aware that you have a significantly high chance of getting a print bed that is not flat. I also replaced the extruder with a titan and that solved a lot of extrusion problems as the stock extruder's spring get's weak over time as it is not hardened spring steel.

Buying and installing an EZABL made a giant difference in the reliability of the printer, it now maps the curvy surface and will make it so you can print a raft and have a flat surface to print on.

Updating firmware on a Tascam DP-32SD or DP-24SD

2018-05-12T08:09:00.001-04:00

It seems that TASCAM manual writers are morons. the update procedure they documented is completely wrong. and filled with dumb omissions or steps.

step 1 format a SD card in your tascam
step 2 unzip the firmware files
step 3 copy the contents of the zip file to the "utility" folder on the sd card
step 4 insert into tascam while off.
step 5 press and hold the mute and undo/redo buttons
step 6 power on unit while holding the buttons.
step 7 dont release the buttons until you see the update prompt.

you do not need to hook up USB. Basically ignore their steps in the manual.

Best Open source home Automation system out there.

2017-12-14T08:44:00.005-05:00

I have been trying EVERY single Home automation system out there. I have tried the commercial, consumer and open sources ones. Commercial hands down Crestron destroys the rest. Savant,C4,AMX are so far behind Crestron it's ridiculous. But the price point is where not a lot of people can afford it because it really is the Lamborghini / Bugatti of the Control world. I have tried ALL The consumer "cloud" systems and have a closet full of their special stuff. Smartthings, Wink, and the rest all are easy to set up but falls on their face hard when there are service outages which happen a lot or if you have internet hiccups, suddenly your whole house fails to function in any way except for extremely basic ways. I then tried several of the open sources ones. OpenHab and the others are so horribly convoluted and utter messes that even experienced HA and Linux people can not even get a system that works well, plus all their documentation is so out of date and scattered getting started is a nightmare.

Except for one, Node-Red.

Node Red is extremely easy to install on a cheap Raspberry pi, it even works well on the Pi zero and older Pi 2 models. and adding functions is as easy as typing a single command in a text window.

Other Open Source HA systems I spent weeks trying to get functioning only to give up in frustration because trying to do a very very simple thing requires hours of hand coding in a wierd esoteric language that someone created to stroke their egos. Node Red uses Javascript and some simple library calls, nothing special, nothing that needs you to learn something new. I had it controlling some WIFI bulbs within minutes and within a day found I can control ZigBee light bulbs and talk to 433mhz cheap sensors reliably. The limitations to Node Red are wide open, if you can find a linux utility to talk to a device, you can wrap it in node red and add it to your Home automation. Nest thermostat, Talking to Alexia, Honeywell thermostat, garage door openers, Belkin Wemo devices, etc.. It's all either already done or easy to add in.

How am I using Node Red? I'm using it as a glue layer to my home automation. I have Crestron at my home now as I got so frustrated with reliability of other brands. But I needed to glue some other devices into my Crestron system. Yes I could have written the modules in the Crestron directly by using C# but I am not a good C# programmer and honestly it takes a LOT longer than doing it in Node Red. I simply open TCP sockets to and from Crestron, and use node red to translate for me. I have real crestron motions sensors in the house but I use cheap-o pet immune 433mhz motion sensors outside where I don't care if I have to replace them every 6 months as they are $8.00 each. This lets me do lighting automation such as the outside landscape and house lights are at 25% normally but if I walk over to the side of the house it detects the motion and brings them up to 100% brightness so I can see better to pick up the dog's toys in the yard when it's dark at 6pm in the winter. I also use it for the patio lights as well as notifications. It also lets me add in Door Sensors that are wireless so light actions happen instantly instead of with a short delay like motion sensors have. Plus Crestron does not have a wireless battery operated Door contact sensor... and adding one to the mailbox also gives us a "we got mail" indication on the touch-panels as well as text notifications, etc...

As to the reliability, I have the raspberry pi on the same UPS that the crestron gear is on, in the last 3 months I have had 100% uptime compared to the SmartThings system I just removed completely last night that had a 80% reliability.

Update: Still running extremely strong. Node Red hands down is the best home automation the Open source community has ever designed. I am using it with Crestron and currently have 433 china door sensors, Zigbee bulbs, Wifi China switches, And crestron all talking together to make an automation system that simply just works. It uses Life360 to detect location for automation rules and pushbullet to send me notifications of doors and other events. Luckily a lot of node red modules are expanding at a rapid rate, weather decisions, IFTTT, heck I even have it pulling in data from a cheap walmart weather station into the system. It really is the "glue" that I use in my hodge podge system.

JOYING double din android 6 Car stereo... is it worth it?

2017-10-16T14:39:00.000-04:00

I finally gave up and bought one. Mostly because commercial mid to high end car stereos from the big guys are starting to get annoying. I have the top of the line JVC and it nags you every time you start the car, it's extremely limited as to what you are allowed to do, and using carplay/android auto is all about being limited severely in what you can and can not do. This bugs me when they shut out the best navigation app out there. Or I cant use my desired music or podcast application.

I commute in a metropolitan area and I live and die by using Waze to get to work on time or get home with my sanity in check. I prefer to not sit for 2 hours on I-4 because a tourist decided to turn into the cement barrier again. But apple and Google have determined that Waze is too dangerous to use (actually dangerous to their data gathering and mining) and is why they refuse to let it become a part of their car infotainment connection system.

There are tons of projects to integrate a tablet into a dashboard, and every single one is half way there. Because tablets are not designed to talk to the car and dim when the lights come on, turn on and off with the ignition, etc... they all suffer massively from this limitation and while some installs look absolutely great, they do not work well due to shoehorning a portable device into a dashboard. I tried to build my own a few years ago by buying a android board and touchscreen, but I was not savvy enough to add in code to android to do the startup and shutdown from the car's power as well as backlight dimming.... partly because the hardware board I bought was designed for portable use and not fixed use with power up and down capabilities. I tried the tricks like pulsing the sleep wake, but it got out of sync as you have only one button input for this, and it's standby power consumption was unacceptable, it actually was drawing enough in sleep to kill the car battery in 3 days. So I shelved the idea for a few years.

Fast forward to 2016/2017, a company called Joying created a double din car stereo running android. This was different from many others as they ran pure android only, and they had a price-point that made the risk low. I decided to jump on it and get one. And as a bonus it did not have the useless CD/DVD slot taking up precious screen real estate. It instantly went on my bench for testing and to play with it, I loaded testing software and right away ran into a possible problem.

After running the unit for a couple of hours it started to get a little sluggish, I notice the CPU temp was above 210 Deg F and thought that was odd for a device that was sitting on a bench in a 75F room. Off the case went and I started poking around inside. The processor has basically no heatsink whatsoever on it. It has instead a thin aluminum cover. I looked inside my junk box and found a old pentium heat sink and just set it on the processor module. Instantly the temps dropped and the processor stopped throttling it's self. Car stereos live in dashboards that when it's summer will get to 140F or higher... this needs active cooling. so I used thermal epoxy to cement the heat sink in place and added the fan to the top of that heat sink. I tapped in to the amp turn on line for the 12V power so the fan would turn on and off with the radio. this dropped temps to ambient almost instantly. Joying engineering mistake was fixed with $4.75 in parts if you bought it new... the thermal epoxy is more expensive but i had some on hand. Some mentioned that I voided the warranty, here is a neat little fact, you dont really have a warranty from these china electronics makers. Are you really going to spend $150 to ship the radio back with full tracking and insurance and then pay for them to ship it back to you on a $209 radio? Nothing from china has a real warranty.

The other problem is that the instructions for install of this thing are non existent. If you are used to car audio and electronics you can figure it out, but everyone else will be lost. there is a config app built in and it's password is 3368 to get in to change settings, would be nice if that information was included.... the GPS is strong, it actually got a lock inside the house in 15 minutes. and wifi is strong although a wire nub for the antenna. I would have preferred a RP-SMA connector to use a higher gain antenna or even a remotely mounted one, this could be fixed by buying one and crimping it on the standard wire they have, sadly they soldered to the board instead of using a standard u.FL connector. All speaker and power connections are normal colors, but the information about the steering wheel remote wires is completely filled with misinformation. IF your car uses standard resistance changes (Like 90% of the cars out there including newer models), you do not need an adapter box, just wire in remote 1 wire to your wheel wire and ground to ground. then the unit can read the resistances and program the buttons directly. remote 2 input is in case your car separates the keys for a separate bluetooth module for calling. If you have a car that uses canbus, there are boxes from Axxess that will convert canbus presses to resistance for this radio.

The advertising for this eludes to having a USB camera for a dash cam. this is a blatant bold faced lie. it will not use a usb camera at all, do not waste your money do not buy their camera, get a separate dash cam. They removed the ability to have usb cameras in Android 6 and they refuse to put it back in. and honestly reports online were that the older 5.1.1 android that did work really sucked and only did 10 FPS anyways. So do not buy their usb dash cam unless you just want to throw it away.

Installation into the dash can be difficult if your dash will not accept a true 2 DIN sized radio. My CRZ has only the metra dash kit and that is not designed for DIN but instead to trim a DIN radio making it very small and for some wierd reason set back almost a full inch. I spent a day with a dremel to cut the opening out cleanly to fit a real din radio, your car if it has a real DIN opening will fit nice and clean. the rest of the wiring is easy if you read the tags and follow the color codes. I put my GPS antenna on the dash, it get's 12 US GPS and 8 GLONASS birds constantly. their magnet in the antenna feels weak but it is a standard gps antenna so you can use anything you want. I also added a ELM USB ODB-II (Whee acronyms!) device so i can read and log the vehicle engine information, this eliminated the extra scanguage II I have had in my cars forever. Nice to clean up the dashboard a bit.

I then turned it on for the first time inside a car environment and was instantly disappointed, the sound out of this thing utterly sucks. It has a super cheap $1.25 10 watt 4 channel amplifier stage. That means 2.75 watts per speaker at less than 1%THD (it is a TDA7388 amp chip notorious for being very heavy on distortion if you get anywhere near even 10% of the rated output).... You absolutely must get an external amplifier for these radios if you want any audio quality. or any real volume levels as you can hear it start to distort as soon as you try and go past 1/4 volume using the internal amp... The JOYING forums complain about this, I assumed people were being whiney... Nope it really does suck that bad. Even a $35.00 BOSS amp is massively better than what this has in it. so get an amp right off the bat and plan on installing it. it also has NO power filtering. so you need to add a choke (just 5-10 turns around a toroid with the power lead or 10 turns of 16ga wire around a 1/2 inch pipe and then slide it off and tie wrap it to stay together) and a 10,000uf cap to both the power input and the 12V accessory trig input to filter out any noise. I would also add a 0.1uf for RFI rejection. once you do this things change for the better right away. None of this reared it's head on a bench supply, even a modern car has crap power so be ready to add power conditioning.

One other thing that has me concerned is the LCD panel, I highly doubt that this has a wide temperature range LCD that would be required for cars that are not in the south. I also wonder how well the LCD will be at temperatures above 120 degrees. It's late fall in Florida right now so I may have to wait for a hot day to see if there is an issue. IT is clear and easy to read in the daytime with the florida sun blasting the dashboard. In fact it's screen is a lot clearer in sunlight than the JVC radio it displaced.

There are only a few baked in applications that you can not remove, the bad browser, the bad video player, the radio application, the setup application and the media player app. the last 3 are required, the radio app is acceptable except the tune back for forward buttons look like a K and an upside down K. very odd icon choice. the media player app is a bit quirky but it does the job playing the pile of mp3 files. I have 2 128gb micro SD cards inserted and they play just fine. One very nice thing is the "NAV" button of the face you can point at whatever app you wish.

On thing that made me buy JOYING over anyone else is there is a strong hacker community around this radio and there is even a alternative android firmware out there if you want to be brave and try it. Joying let's the modders and hackers post their hacks in the joying forums. the Android XDA forums even have a section and following out there for the joying devices. Plus the community out there knows a lot more about this radio and all other of the company's products than the tech support people do.

The number one complaint for ALL Android car stereos before this one has been "takes forever to boot". This is not the case with this Joying stereo. It boots in under 3 seconds, this is dramatically faster than my top of the line JVC that it displaced. It also does not treat you like a 3 year old and makes you accept disclaimers and warning messages like the JVC, this alone is a huge plus for me. I absolutely hate the lawyer driven forced disclaimer world we live in.

The number 2 complaint for most android car stereos is that they do not have the google play market app. This one does. in fact it registers as a legitimate android device so you can even push app installs to it. I did find that some apps will not identify it right unless you install directly from the unit, for example torque would not push install... I had to go to the car and install it from the unit's app store directly. All installed and other apps are pretty snappy, as snappy as a 2 year old quad core android phone. and the display is very clear, no it's not 1080p dont even expect that. it's closer to 1280X800 and I even suspect that as too high it's probably closer to 1280X600 in reality no car stereo has high resolution screens because you are not watching movies on it. It runs waze well, it runs a lot of applications very well, one at a time. do not expect to get multitasking to run on this. Audio sources play in the background and navigation overlays the turn by turn over the audio. When I try to run Waze, Torque and the XM radio app at the same time Waze started to have issues and have very choppy updates. So do not try to run far too much at the same time. If you stay running an audio amp and a second application you will be absolutely fine. If they are not high processing types of apps you can run more. So far I have lived with it in my car for 7 days using it twice a day every single day. I love having Waze on my dashboard where it belongs, And I even have a better XM radio experience as I download the day befores howard stern show in the XM app and listen offline. I can skip the commercials and actually listen to the whole show instead of hoping to catch the afternoon repeat at the right time. Plus it is kind of fun logging all the data in Torque and see exactly how screwed up of a commute I have.

If you are able to go into one of these knowing the limitations and what you need to do to make it a working device, I do recommend getting one. Add the heat sink and fan, add good power conditioning, and get a 4 channel external amplifier. it will give you some real control over your in car entertainment and get past the overly limited and nag screen riddled world of aftermarket audio.

Lastly understand your expectations, it's a $299 device. Do not expect it to be perfect for this low entry level price point.... If you can manage your expectations and you are willing to do some of your own hardware hacking and modifications it can work out to be a very good addition to your daily driver. Like many things, this radio is not for the electronics and car audio newbie, I would consider it something for the power user that is not afraid to get their hands dirty and make it work the way you want it to. If you look at it as a way to give yourself complete control of your in car infotainment it is a gateway to using what you want and making it work how you want.

Edit: I have already had questions as to why mine does not say JOYING in big white letters. It's because I removed that by using fingernail polish remover pads and paper towels. I taped off the screen with yellow gentle release masking tape, then carefully rubbed the logo until it was removed. I then quickly wiped with a paper towel to get the excess off. the frame is ABS so it will start to soften, so when done let it dry undisturbed it will re harden and look great. I still have a shadow of the joying that some 2000 grit sandpaper would get rid of... Maybe later.

Here are some bits of information to get you hacking it... NOTE, changing backlight bias settings to wrong values will cause damage and you may lose the backlight forever. watch it...

Passwords:
3368 for settings
8086 launchers
5768 menu backlight

Root and debug on
https://forum.xda-developers.com/sho...2&postcount=12

- method 2 still work for root and SU

By default they have an annoying "touch assistant" app that floats on the screen, for some reason people in china like annoying crap so it's included. to disable it you have to launch "touch assistant " and turn off "Show on screen", "start at boot". Now the annoying floating grey button will be gone. Update - I'm now a month into living with it daily. It's annoying to have to start up tethering on the phone every time you get in the car and connect to the radio. Also having a USB ODB device auto launches torque if you want it or not, so you have to close that every single time if you don't want to use it. It does do a full hard off sleep if you let the car sit for a few days. I had to fly out of town for a week and left the car at the airport, when I came back I had to watch the full boot sequence that takes 15 seconds. but every morning and evening it boots in 2 seconds and is ready to go. I am now officially tired of the built in audio player, I need something more advanced that will do compression and auto audio leveling so each song is not at a different volume like most CD's are and the mp3's ripped off them. still searching for something that does not suck, poweramp requires internet access to phone home so it is not an option.

Overall I'm still ok with it, I love that it treats me as an adult and does not warn me for 30 seconds that I WILL DIE A FIERY DEATH if I am distracted by the radio. Overall it's a decent radio and it works better on steering wheel controls do than any big name aftermarket that uses the universal adapter boxes that freak out a lot. I need to add a DSP in between the radio and the amp so I can do some equalization. I will stick with it until Carplay starts to support WAZE and other apps. I absolutely recommend getting a cellular USB stick or one of the in car wifi boxes so it has it's own internet so that you don't have to dink around with your phone every time you get in.

2 Months later Update - Still working but I have had one instance where I had to press the reset button as it got stuck. I am still ok with it but will be removing the ODB-II interface as it forces Torque to open every single time you start the car. This means the startup is slow as 4-5 apps all try to start up at the same time. Also it's annoying that I have to re-attach it to wifi every time I start the car. Honestly it really needs a USB LTE dongle to give it internet all the time.

another update - Joying released an actual update for the radio in November, but being a typical china company they can't communicate to save their life so you have to dig through a ton of crap to find it. I finally found links to the firmware they have on some random google drive under a youtube video. Why the company refuses to get professionals in charge of their customer service, I'll never understand. What does their update fix? Not a clue. they like not telling you anything at all. I'm trying a 3rd party firmware instead. Warning Joying's own firmware update blows out the iGO navigation software and you will NOT get a working copy back. Their "tech support" only gave me a runaround and then sent me a download of a very old version that does not work with Android 6. Once again, the "warranty" from any of these China manufacturers are worthless. So be aware of what you should expect with their own official releases.

The link to it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB9pzg-92iU&t=996s

Update almost a year later... Well the Joying stereo is coming out of the dash. it is starting to give me random problems such as the GPS is sometimes not being discovered until I press the reset button to reset to default again. One of the biggest problems is most apps are written for a portrait phone, this makes things like the Sirius XM app to be extremely clunky, Waze is locking up a lot as well. I really wanted this to work, I even bought a ODB-II wireless hotspot so it had it's own internet connection. but it's still clunky. The GPS ability started to slowly degrade and now when you start the car you have to sit for 5 minutes while it acquires a GPS lock, connects to the wifi hotspot. Audio quality out of the speaker outs is simply not very good, and adding the amplifier while making an improvement did not make enough of an improvement over the old JVC Arsenal that was in there. Subwoofer adjustments are not linear, you need to crank it all the way up on some sources, and way down on others.

With Apple letting WAZE on carplay I am stepping away from Joying and android car stereos. They just do not make these things powerful enough or even for a car environment. The heat sink I added made a giant difference in the stability of the unit on summer days, even with the interior of the car at 160F the stereo operated. but the lack of any power conditioning built in, lack of stability of the android install and extreme lack of any support from Joying after sale leave me wanting. I spent another $50 in apps for this after purchasing to make it even better.

If you can get one for under $200 and just can not afford anything else? I would say go for it if you fully understand it will not be a smooth or reliable experience. if you are ok with sitting there until everything calms down after you start the car as well as some big quirks like not being able to turn off the super loud key beep without going into 4 menus in a precise order.... Take a look.

It was a fun experiment. and if they actually made a decent version I would pay $500 for it with a solid design for in car use with serious processing power and exceptional support.

Review: QRP Ranger 100WH power system from Hardened Power Systems

2017-06-16T14:45:00.001-04:00

Manufacturer's Stock Image from their website

I am a ham radio operator. I have held my license since I was 17 years old when a good friend of mine got interested and started studying his morse code. So I jumped in and took the test and have been hooked ever since. All through college I was very active in ham radio and once I was married and had my first child, the radios went by the wayside. In the past few years I started to get back into it, and decided that going QRP for an HF radio would be the way to go. Easier to deal with as it can be taken anywhere and something that is convenient will be used far more often. Some people say QRP is harder to do, but I say paying thousands to buy a radio and then more thousands to buy and have installed a tower and very large antenna is significantly harder than QRP operation.

The radio I chose is the Yaesu FT-817ND it is self contained with a battery inside that does not last very long and keeps you at around 1-2 watts output. Great if you are a casual operator or like to do really tough attempts at communicating. I personally want as much as possible out of my radio and want a simple setup. I toyed around with a NiMh battery pack and solar charger, building it all myself... then I stumbled across the QRP ranger online... so I did some research and contacted the company, Hardened Power systems, for more information. They were very fast with the response to my questions and answered even technical questions. I was impressed..... but the thing had BLUE led's on the face, and I have an aversion to blue led's. Everything has them and they are piercing... so I mulled it over more and decided that the advantages outweighed the drawback of the Blue LED displays. I ordered the unit.

5 days later it arrives on my doorstep. Instantly I discover that this thing is far more beefy than I expected. the 3d printed parts are very strong, the flip out foot to angle the unit up a little bit is incredibly strong and the rest of it feels solid. The only flaw in mine is that one of the rubber feet mounting screws on the bottom split the plastic a little bit but still feels solid as a rock with no loose or easy to flex feeling. So I grab the unit out of the box and the included charger and plugged it in for a couple of hours to charge up.

Curiosity got the better of me so I turned it on and had a instant surprise. My unit did not have the Blue LED displays as their website shown but instead a nice RED glow.. Instantly overjoyed! The unit is now something I would not have to have a compromise over! It also showed that the unit was freshly built with fresh cells, it was already charged up fully and ready to go!

So far it works great for me, but I am a very moderate user. Others online though have had their QRP ranger fail due to screws puncturing the batteries inside. I dont treat mine as a "rugged" device but as a easily broken delicate device and it is serving me well.

Why open source home automation sucks.

2017-06-16T14:39:00.001-04:00

So I spent the last 2 weeks trying out all the different open source home automation systems out there. What spurred this was my desire to run away from SmartThings as fast as possible. My start with it was rocky, but it stabilized for about 4 months where it worked decent enough for me to not be annoyed with it until the last update.. Then it all went to hell again back to the days of delayed notifications and automations not running until hours later. I was done with anything that was cloud based. Because honestly cloud based home automation is not only a GIANT failure, but it is absolutely a bad idea.

So I tried a few open source home automation systems that used Zwave as I wanted to keep some of the equipment I spent money on. so I started with OpenHAB as it seemed to be the most popular, I then ran instantly into a roadblock, the fact that all the documentation is so horribly out of date. They decided to change completely how everything was done in their 2.0 version but failed to update all their documentation. So I blew 3 days trying to get it to do one simple thing. when a door sensor opened, send a notification to my phone. First it took a day to get the sensor to even show it's state in OpenHAB, I learned I had to add and delete then read it a few times to get it to work.... OK, that's kind of quirky, but it worked. I saw the sensor. then I tried to get a very simple rule written to make it send me a notification, after 2 days on the forums I found out the name you give an item is just there for window dressing and you don't actually use it. And many of the OpenHAB users actually don't use the 2.0 version so they cant help much..... Plus there is a language barrier as most of the developers and users are German and they dont use american sensors and devices so help on specific items is very limited. They try, but they really need to stop with all feature development and rewrite all the documentation and examples for the new 2.0 system.

I tried the "home Genie" next..... backed away from this one instantly as it's configuration was a nightmare and honestly their scripting ideas were some of the most bizarre I have seen. On top of that, it's documentation was just as fragmented with the user required to scour their forums for what is needed, I bailed on this one almost instantly.

Lastly I tried "HomeAssistant" this one seems to be the most mature, but god help you if you are not a linux expert. This one also suffers from the fact that they changed it dramatically but none of the documentation is updated. I am sitting here trying to get the door sensor to send me a notification and I find contradictory information in the documentation as well as the forums and each try results in no notification and errors in the log that notify/iphone notify/ios etc does not exist.....

Finally after doing some searching I found the real way of calling the notification of their app. Holy crap I have a working notification of a door sensor open or closed! This is a LOT more functionality that I was able to achieve with on the other two and that is huge as I only had to mess with it for 6 hours to get to this point. Plus they have a promise of having Zigbee devices working! I might be able to salvage all the money wasted on SmartThings and get a working non cloud based home automation system out of this!

Here is the problem, If you are not a Linux and electronics expert you will be completely doomed trying to get any of these open source HA systems running. The average person will NEVER be able to get this to work, and honestly they have no chance of being happy with anything else. If you are a normal person that is not a Linux and computer expert with a desire to learn Communication protocols and Zigbee and Zwave code triggers, but you want some home automation, call a integrator and pay the money. Yes paying $10,000 to $20,000 for a system to be installed is a lot better than spending $1500 and then the next 4 years pulling your hair out making it work and then constantly fixing it when it breaks until you give up and rip every bit of it out and throw it in the trash vowing to never ever have any lighting automation again.

I am still going to tinker with "HomeAssistant" simply because I rent right now. but I am investigating other options that cost more but will have NO cloud requirement and reported high reliability to not have to tinker all the time.

UPDATE: I have up on HA as it is not reliable. They keep files open all the time so if you happen to lose power you get a corrupt HA config and have to restore it all. This is highly unacceptable to lose all your settings if you have a power outage. Buying used Crestron gear is looking more and more appealing.

The Intel Compute Stick... The little PC that Wasn't.

2017-03-28T13:42:00.001-04:00

Back a couple of years ago Intel rocked the world with their Compute stick. And at it's near $200 price point I wanted one but it was not close enough to my "impulse buy" number to ever get one.

Fast forward to 2017, you can now get these things surplus for $30 on ebay, so I snagged a couple. It seems not a lot of people bought them and after messing with one for a couple of days, I see why. At first look they seem to be capable as hell, quad core, wifi and bluetooth, HDMI 1.2 all ready to go and runs off of 7 watts that most TV sets can put out. I snagged a couple for a very light duty idea. These will be AWESOME for digital signage devices. And with a tiny bit of configuration I had MPLAYER playing a loop of videos in a playlist full screen on boot. This is awesome! So I let it run.... 20 minutes later screen froze. Hmm, odd. reboot and now it will not reboot, so I use the restore partition and restore it.

Repeat all the above and it freezes again. So I decided to start researching and discovered deep on the internet bowels a few postings on some obscure website forums that others were experiencing this as well. It seems that Intel on their cool technology demo device forgot to make them stable to use.

So if you think you want to get a couple of these as digital signage players or as something that is at least marginally stable, think again. There is a reason the surplus market is currently flooded with the things. they are unstable due to some kind of engineering flaw. A lot of people tried hard in software to solve the issue but it seems that they just will not stay running and lock up randomly.

Zwave and how it's a Mess - Leviton and not following standards.

2017-03-22T12:45:00.000-04:00

So there is currently only 1 Zwave RS232 module on the market, it's made by Leviton and it's a steaming mess of things.

I have smartthings at home, and I want to move away from a cloud based home automation to something more robust and programmable, so I decided that Zwave via an RS232 Controller connected to Crestron would be an answer. Zwave is supposed to be a standard, a better standard than Zigbee.. so I went down that path and bought a Leviton Rs232 Zwave plus controller.... Only to discover that Leviton decided that this cant be a Master but only a slave controller to ensure selling more product. so now you have to buy a Zwave master controller. So $250 so far and now I can start working with the devices.

A GE light switch works great. On and off and I can ask it the level. It's when you get to sensors like door sensors and motion sensors that Leviton decided that you dont need those. so while it can see the traffic on the network, it ignores it and will not display the alarm events or on/off events from those devices.

So back to square one. Looking for a decent home automation system with wireless battery operated door sensors that is not cloud based.... I may be stuck with having to design my own wireless door switches as nobody makes any that have an open protocol that is easy to detect open/close/tamper.

So if you are thinking you can get the LEviton RS232 Zigbee device and use that. Dont. It's a useless device as it can not listen to the network for events, it can send on and off commands and ask for levels. but it will never hear unsolicited and reported levels.

Moving for a Job, Facts that nobody actually tells you....

2016-11-16T18:43:00.001-05:00

Recently I accepted a job in a different city for a higher pay and a better opportunity. I read all the articles on line and did it all the way everyone says you should do it. And ended up discovering that most of these people out there have never actually did the actual task of moving for a new job. Because they sugar coated the whole thing, or they did do the move but moved from an expensive city to a cheaper one, or did it 10 years ago.... My move was from a cheap city to live in to a moderate cost of living but the expenses are far FAR more than anyone tells you. I am not an executive, I lived in a modest $110,000 midwest home in a decent neighborhood. What I wanted to do was replace what I had but smaller. go from 1800 sq ft to 1300 to 1200... and not live in a sketchy neighborhood.

First I expected my move to cost me $5000 I ended up with a 25% income increase so I figured it would be easy to do... I was wrong. Reality the cost of moving has topped $10,000 the $5000 was just to drive myself 1200 miles and find a place to rent and get all utilities started while living on a friends couch. First and Last months rent plus security deposit, plus deposits for every single utility. $5000 gone. Now to move the family, A mover will cost me easily $6500 to pack up and move a 3 bedroom home. I checked on pods, those were $4000 and may arrive sometime in the week I specify, so that means living in an empty house and hoping the stuff arrives some day. Or moving yourself with Uhaul. the 26foot van is $2200 alone and I needed a $800 trailer for the motorcycle , a flight back at a super cheap $120 (Orlando to Grand Rapids, MI is cheap) and then pack and drive that truck back down over the course of 2 days. Lets add all the expenses to get a house ready to sell on top of it.... My expenses toppled the $10,000 mark easily.

So the reality is, if a company wants you make them pay relocation expenses and at LEAST a 20% increase in pay. If you are moving across the country and they really want you they should gladly pay you $15,000 to $20,000 in relocating expenses so you don't have to pack a single thing and you can have a rental ready for you when you arrive. If a company will not do this, then honestly you really need to look long and hard at the job offer and see if it is worth it. it will take you a YEAR to recover from your move expenses, and if a Company pays for it they are more likely to stick with you and keep you around instead of the risk of a company at 90 days using the "you are not a good fit" excuse and now you are stuck with a mountain of debt and no job far away from where you called home.

My decision was made and I am making it work, I am still convinced it was the right move. But if I knew what I know now about the move costs, I would have asked for it at the negotiation stage. So if you are planning on thinking about doing a long distance move for a job, figure out your costs and double them to be safe.

Another problem is that if you move far enough away the culture changes. No matter what anyone says the United States is a collection of small countries. Michigan is different from Ohio and Florida is dramatically different from New York. The cultures are different, the people are different, the customers are different. So what you think you know is how you interact with others is not the same elsewhere. Nobody in the south has a clue as to what you want when you ask for a "bottle of pop" It's a soda, and in some places it's a Coke no matter what it really is. For me the Midwest sketchy neighborhoods were easy to identify.... In florida it's dramatically different. unless a place is really REALLY sketchy you cant tell. and you certainly can not tell by the rent. I looked at places for $1500 a month rent that are sketchy as hell with roaming pitbulls, cars on blocks in the front yard, and crap houses next to really nice houses. You have to stalk neighborhoods and do research. any rental I liked I would go back and see how the neighborhood was at 8pm on a friday, and the weekends. I also started looking up crime information. It took a while to find a standard safe blue collar neighborhood like I had in the midwest. And then you deal with the rental problem. Rentals even nice $3000 a month ones are in poor shape compared to an owned home of the same type. and in florida that means the possibility of bugs being a problem. I learned quickly to do a scorched earth policy and to hire an exterminator right off the bat to treat the rental before I moved in. Do not even mess with hoping the rental company did the job, they will not unless the place is crawling with roaches.

Update: Two years later my savings account has finally recovered from the move. We still rent but are looking for a home. Homes to replace what I had in Michigan are $300,000 here so we have to look at downgrading to a lesser home to be able to buy something. Overall it was a positive move, we love it here. The culture shock we have here is mostly that I though I knew what old people looked like, in the south they are absolutely ancient. I swear there are crypt keepers driving on the highways.

Ham Radio: DMR versus D-Star and why I am going to D-star and hoping DMR becomes cracked wide open by ham operators.

2016-06-30T07:49:00.002-04:00

Ok I dipped my toes in the digital ham radio world for local repeaters. I bought a TYT MD-380 DMR radio for $95 and programmed it in my home town where even the analog 440 repeaters are dead and turned off. But one town over has a couple of DMR repeaters and I was headed to Chicago that also promised some operation. So I checked carefully and spend a couple of days reading to make sure it was programmed right, and set off towards Chicago 350 miles away.

I arrived and was surprised at the range I was getting from DMR on 440 and had a blast talking on the North America group to other hams all over the USA and Canada. until it started to blank out for some reason in the middle of a QSO. I though it was my radio until I got to the hotel and started to read up on causes.

It seems that DMR has 2 timeslots and repeaters that have multiple call groups on a single timeslot will get other hams cutting them off without knowing it. This is what was happening to me, another ham was kicking me off of the north america talk group and I was knocking him off. no warning just audio gone, and if you did not specifically go looking for this information, you would never ever know it. So to support the entire talk group spread you really need 5 DMR repeaters.

Well also come to find out a radio to radio conversation ALSO takes up a timeslot so now you can unknowingly knock others off the repeater or tie it up. This makes DMR not very good for ham radio the way everyone is using them.

mototrbo DMR repeaters should be set up with only 2 groups available. timeslot 1 is local chat, timeslot 2 is the NA channel. and you do not do long QSO's on the NA channel. This really limits the usefulness that is promised but did not completely make me write it off. I think it's a great mode with dirt cheap great quality radios.... and was going to look at buying gear to put a DMR repeater on the air in my home town... Then my enthusiasim drained.....

a mototrbo repeater is about $3000 if you want to program it that is another $300 in software and another $150 in the cable. You also need a set of cans, cheaper cans can do a 7.5mhz spread so your repeater will be "wierd" for $500 then you have tower, antenna and broadband and router//software to join the worldwide DMR network. Suddenly that free repeater location you know of becomes a $70 a month rent repeater location for broadband directly to it. Overall if you have a tower and location with antenna already set up you need $6000 to spend to get a Motorola DMR repeater on the air. That means only the rich ham clubs.

So I look at D-star. Radios are $400 instead of $95 but repeaters can be built easily AND I can put a mini gateway in my home on my own internet to get to the global D-star network for only around $200 spent! You also do not have the kick other hams off the repeater without warning problem. But you alienate the poor hams over the rich ones. Yes I can easily afford a $400 handheld, but most cant. Many cant afford that $95 china DMR radio but it is a lot easier reach than the only icom offerings out there. So it is only price? Nope.

D-Star was made for ham radio use, you do not have to register your radio number like you have to with DMR, you can program your dStar radio and just go on the air. It operates more closely to what a ham radio operator is used to and new users will not cause communication problems like they do on DMR simply because they dont know they need to check ALL The talk groups before they start using the repeater.

I like DMR and what it can do, and the range is insane compared to traditional FM 440. I am all the way out in Shaumberg, IL and still talking to the downtown Chicago repeater with my handi talkie. the sound quality blows away all analog modes hard. But sadly until someone cracks the Motorola DMR code to get other china repeaters ont he DMR-MARC network its a closed system where only the rich can get a new repeated added to it. which is sad because I know that DMR with cheap radios and the North America talk group would get new hams excited about ham radio. Cracking the motorola DMR network protocol so that hams can set up local home gateways will really make the whole DMR network explode. and if someone finds a way to translate from the Hytera chinese DMR repeater networks to bridge the Motorola DMR-MARC network It will really make the whole network so much more versatile overnight. I want it to succeed, and Motorola could do this incredibly fast for ham radio operators by opening up their protocols completely and give us hams the keys to the workings of the network packets... Otherwise it will take hacking the protocols by hams that are far better at it than I am to make that change.

I know I felt like I did back in the 80's when I was a 17 year old with a fresh tech ticket in my hand and talking on the local repeaters that were teeming with other hams to talk to. Today the FM repeaters are dead, but the Digital modes on national talk groups are like our local repeaters were back in the 80's... exciting, friendly, and makes you want to be a ham radio operator again....

I try yet again to want to get back into ham radio, and walk away sad.

2016-06-21T17:57:00.003-04:00

I am having fun with HF QRP portable. The technical challenges are most of the fun and PSK31 makes it entertaining.. But once again this weekend and I turn on my tri band FM rig in the car and listen to the repeaters while I drive.... and it's silent.

Nobody talking, not even on the state wide linked repeater. And this is Good-Old FM 2 meter. I have never had a spontaneous conversation on a 220 or 440 repeater, except for the 440 repeater my friend and I had in college set up in the apartment building. And that was only because friends used it, Nobody else every stumbled on the repeater even though it was in the callbook. I look at the siren song of D-star and other digital modes of nation wide and world wide QSO's but then read that many D-star owners gave up as even those are dead.

Honestly people, get off your phones and turn on your radio. when someone is on the repeater calling ANSWER THEM! Otherwise all you are doing is being one of those hams that is trying to kill the hobby.

Every time you do not turn on the radio and answer a call on your local repeater you are actively killing the hobby for someone else. I have met many new hams that gave up because "there is nobody to talk to"... and they are right.

I keep thinking of putting a radio on my motorcycle, almost pull the trigger and then stop.... I won't use it, I will ride 600 miles and never hear a peep break it's squelch but maybe a birdie or a random kerchunk. I keep thinking of getting a Icom Dstar handy, but that $400 would be better spent elsewhere instead of a radio that just sits on my desk next to the other icom triband handheld that has never had a conversation on 6 meter or 440 ever in it's existence, Only on 2 meter. So why spend the money? The only place that is slightly active is the HF bands and sadly none of the techs can get there. and most can't afford the $600 minimum to play the HF game, for an HF station active.

There is no excuse for not having a thriving ham community still out there, and there are more and more callsigns added to the database every year.... so where are they?

Installing Ubuntu Server 14.04 On a Sun X4100 server

2016-04-21T11:29:00.001-04:00

IF you try to install Ubuntu server on a Sun X4100 M2 server you will get greeted with a blank screen and a "out of range" error after your first reboot after an install. This is because of the RageXL video chipset on the motherboard and that linux for some wierd reason no longer supports these chipsets well. There is a fix...

Do the install as normal, when it kicks out the Install DVD/CD at the end let it start the reboot and kick that disk back in. restart the install but in a "recover mode" and go through until it asks what drive partition you want to boot from. this drops you into single user mode on your fresh install.

go into /etc/default/grub and disable the graphical console.
then run the update-grub command and exit then reboot.

you now have a system you can actually get into.... now on to fix that damned network connection that for some reason did not work during install.

The adventures of getting a cablecard to work with comcast....

2016-04-06T10:40:00.001-04:00

I bought a HdHomerun Prime so I could get at least some unification of video in my home. the bedroom has a Nexus Player that has the ability to use the HDhomerun app to integrate live TV, and the apple TV plus XboxONE can also view the channels.. Awesome. I na also add a MythTV backend recorder to the home server so I can get a free DVR as well.

So I head to the comcast office and get a cablecard. The lady smiles and hands me a card and says, "It's all ready to go, just call this number when you get home" and that is where it all falls to pieces.

I call the number and the person at the other end tells me, "that is not a cablecard, that is a cable box." I assure her that I inserted a card in the slot and not a whole cable box. she then tells me that it will not work and I need to go back to the local office to get another card. I do this for another 3 times to discover ALL the cablecards are flagged as cable boxes in comcasts system, and the cablecard people you call do not know what to do and want me to pay $50 to have a tech come out.

I finally in frustration start searching and find that comcast has a online forum on the Xfinity website and people complaining there get resolution for cablecard issues. and my issue is a very very common issue.

With in minutes of complaining I had a response that someone will help me, then I got 3 calls. each asking for all my information, then finally transferred to the only person in the United states that can actually activate a Cablecard in the system. so 36 hours later and tons of frustration I have a working setup.

The problem is that Comcast has only a tiny handfull of people that actually know what they are doing. all the rest are told that if there is any problem at all, tell the customer to go back to the store or pay for a service call. If you complain loud enough you will get help and you MUST do it on their customer forum on the xfinity website.

What I was told was impossible to fix by 6 different Comcast employees was fixed within minutes once I was transferred to the right person. They really need to train their people better because they all want to give up right away instead of trying to help find a solution and find that one person in the company that actually knows what they are doing.

Lastly, It's mind blowing that I had to go to my local office. they should have mailed me a card that was already set up. yes, let me click on "give me a Cablecard" that then tells James in Philadelphia that he needs to grab a cablecard and do his magic to it to make sure it's right, then mail it out to me.

It's sad because the utter mess that customer service is was the #1 complaint when I worked there 10 years ago.... today it's the same. And I am sure it is completely the fault of management as that was what we all knew 10 years ago... Management refuse to let many of us do our jobs. we had to work under their strict requirements and they all were micro managers from hell. It seems it is the same way.

So if you try to get a cablecard activated and they tell you it is coming back as a cable box... Get ready for your pain, it will take about 36 hours and you need to go straight to the Xfinity forums and start the process that will work. because nobody at the local office or on normal phone tech support will help you.

The Oneplus X cellphone review: It's $250, is the low price worthoverlooking the glaring flaws?

2015-11-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

I just got my OnePlus X cellphone in the mail, I had an interest and honestly I can easily sell it for what I paid for it if I really don't like it in the next 20 days, so no big loss.

First the box and packaging are apple level presentation. It's awesome, they even include a thin rubber case for it in the box. It feels great, it looks great, and that is where it is at it's best. Once you turn it on, things go sideways. First you have to wait out the failure of connections on first start so you can skip them. OnePlus shipped it with a gigantic flaw in the operating system and the update will fix that problem, but you cant update it until you get past the flaw. so skip setting up the wifi and do everything on your cellular data for setup.

The phone has hardware buttons.... except they are not lighted so they look invisible in all but direct sunlight. if they would have silk screened them in a bright white this would not be an issue... Glaring design flaw #1.

The phone is amazingly thin and light, but is losing an additional 1mm of thickness worth it at the expense of battery life? I am starting to think no. After a week of living with this phone as my daily at the end of the day I am at 25% battery on the OnePlus X while my iphone 6S is still at 75% I actually would like the phone to be 2mm thicker and give me great battery life. Yes batter is more important than style to me. Some others may feel differently.

Audio is great, the phone will get crazy loud, almost as loud as an HTC ONE, the OS is fantastic, but the huge flaw of not supporting all LTE bands are starting to show. I am in 3G more more than anything else because OnePlus did the really stupid move of excluding the 700mhz LTE band that is in use for most of the united states. So for most USA users your One Plus will NOT get LTE speeds but will be a 3G phone for most of the time you are using it, unless you are lucky to live in an area that AT&T has not upgraded yet. But the clock is ticking the 700mhz LTE band will be the standard in the next 2 years and the OnePlus X will end up as a unuseable phone for the US market for people that want high speed data. Lastly it's sensitivity to receive signals is not really good. In a building that I get 1 bar of signal on AT&T. The one X reports no service. I am betting they did not hire an antenna designer and are using the reference design from the cellular radio chip manufacturer.

Do I recommend anyone buying the phone? Are you a tinkering type? love the idea of a completely unlocked phone? And will gladly live with the flaws? then get the OnePlus X. It's fast, it's nice, it is unlocked and a lot of people are already working on leveraging the possibilities the phone offers. but for a general user you need to stay very far away from this phone. the bugs will get you, the flaws will annoy you, the battery life is just not there, and finally lack of 700mhz LTE means you are stuck using low speed 3G or relying on open wifi.

If you have an invite for this phone and you are not a developer or high end tinkering type, pass your invite along to someone who is.

Make a Solar Power supply

2015-08-23T20:09:00.000-04:00

Solar power is a finicky animal. Yes It's just DC power but it's wildly fluctuating DC power. Depending on the day, clouds, shadows, etc.. a solar panel can output 20Volts to 5 Volts and everything in between in the matter of seconds. Plus solar panels are kind of wierd. you have two voltages and two amperages to think about. Open circuit and max power. Max power is where you want to calculate things as I assume with solar power you want as much power you can generate. But if your load drops off, things will change. So treating a solar panel like a battery just does not work.

You can buy solar chargers, But they are designed to charge a battery, some times you just want a power supply that is somewhat stable, and in my case that is exactly what I want. a 13.5 volt power supply that replicates a car's electrical system (no your car is not 12 volts, when it's running it's 13.5 or higher. Go ahead and grab your voltmeter and check.) for a QRP Ham radio portable station that I like to bring camping. I dont want to carry a battery with me as the radio has a built in battery pack, but I do want to run off of free solar power during the day as well as charge that internal battery pack. So I decided to build a very simple regulator power supply to stick to the back of a small solar panel I have.

I bought off of ebay a couple of years ago, several 10 watt small solar panels for $20 each, I was going to set them up to run a couple of LED lamps in a shed but instead decided this project will be more fun and useful. They were sold as 12 volt 10 watt panels, but solar panels dont work that way. These panels are actually 18 volt 10 Watt peak power panels that have an open circuit voltage of 24 volts. so depending on the power draw the voltage will change. These numbers are also under perfect conditions on a clear day. Reality is that you never ever get perfect conditions. Add to the whole mix that I want to power a portable HF radio and I need to be careful as to what kind of voltage regulation I want to use. A switching supply is highly efficient but will generate a TON of RF noise, so I need to use something that is quiet and lives in the DC world. Linear Regulators are where I needed to go, specifically the good old 7812 regulator from the 78xx series of linear regulators. These regulators have been around for ever and are available in a 5V 9V 12V and 15V flavors. But what if I want a different voltage? well you can do some tricks to make them adjustable, but I like to simply put a couple of diodes on the ground leg to "lift" the ground voltage and fool the regulator. Diodes do not conduct electricity perfectly, they have some loss, and typically you get from 0.3 to 0.7 volts lost. I want high power diodes so I am looking at 0.7 volts lost. Putting two on the ground leg will give me 1.4 volts. This will lift the 7812 regulator up to 13.4 volts or 13.5 after all losses and rounding.

But, the 7812 regulator NEEDS 2.5Volts of power higher than the output. so a 7812 needs 14.5V at a minimum to work properly, adding another 1.5 with the diodes that brings us up to 16V needed at a minimum from the solar panel to work. Luckily the panel I have runs at 18V at peak power draw so I have 2 volts of safety margin. I can already hear everyone out there screaming about my choice in voltage regulator, Yes they waste power. These old 78XX regulators can waste up to 50% of the power IF the supply voltage is too high. I am going to be 2 volts higher than what the regulator wants so this should work just fine and only lose about 25% of the power to heat. I could get away with 1Amp diodes, but I like to over design for safety. I will never really see 1 amp of power through them unless things go sideways, but it can get close to a half amp if I do not have a load connected to the regulated side.

Each 7812 an handle about 1.3 amps, I have two so I can handle more than the 2Amps needed by my radio when it is transmitting at full power. Again I like a safety margin in my designs. I might want to add a second device, or even use it to charge a couple of cellphones when not used for my radio. building in some extra capacity means you can use your projects for more tasks in the future without a redesign. For example, staying at 13.5 volts I can actually use this to charge a lead acid battery, because it's voltage is less than the 13.8/14.0 Volts that a typical lead acid wants for full charge it can not overcharge the battery if left connected. Granted it will not have the ability to charge a dead car battery, but a very small 12V sealed gel battery will work just fine to even out a partly cloudy day for my radio. So I do have the option of upgrading the system with a small lead acid or even a LiFePo4 battery that is very tolerant to charging in this way. Battery charging is it's own animal, I will not be covering it with this circuit.

Newbie to used BMW ownership: Realities and falsehoods of buying and owning a used BMW.

2015-08-23T20:08:00.000-04:00

I did it, I took the plunge and jumped from domestics and "economy brands" to full on BMW ownership. I don't make brand new BMW kind of income, so I am one of those icky dirty plebs that buy used, and not even "Certified Preowned" used, but Under $12 Grand high mileage used. That's right I bought a 8 year old over 100,000 mile AS-IS BMW. I can already hear people screaming out there in the internet as to the error of my ways, and all of them are completely wrong.

First let's get some facts about buying a used BMW. First, Carfax is 100% worthless for anything in a premium brand. BMW does not report anything to Carfax, and from what I learned, neither does Audi, Mercedes, VW, etc.. In fact it seems that Carfax is pretty darn useless outside of showing if the car was completely totaled. So do not waste your time with a carfax.... the BMW dealerships do have a full service history on the car, but they do not want to give it to you. Used car buyers are the bane of BMW and they will use some BS like "protecting the security of the previous owner" for the reason to not tell you what was done to the car. You have a better chance of getting the information after you buy it, but no way in hell is any BMW dealer going to give you any of that information before you buy a car. BMW dealers hate used car buyers, so get used to being treated like a 3rd class citizen when you go to one. If you are very lucky you live near an honest dealer and you will find someone to work with.

So you need to do one of two things. either pay to have the car fully inspected at a BMW dealer, About $450.00 or if you are actually skilled at vehicle maintenance and repair look it over yourself or with a friend that is very good at cars. BMW cars are not magical unicorns, they are 100% identical in the important parts to a ford, toyota, honda. The engine has pistons that go up and down, they have a transmission that is pretty much the same as all other car's transmissions, and they have electrical systems with undersized wires compared to american cars. But are identical to Japanese cars. when you look at the different systems they are not special, just a little different and need some different tools. Even the computer system can be managed by a home shade-tree mechanic if you are willing to learn. Lastly BMW makes service interval claims that are outlandish. 15,000 miles for oil changes are fine for a 3 year old car coming off lease. 7500 miles are more realistic. BMW service intervals are set to lower costs for dealerships as the first 4 years all service is "free".

Your next stop is edmunds and kelly blue book. Look up the car's year and mileage with condition. THAT is what you should pay, any cars listed higher than that price should be showroom new condition or ultra rare like a 1982 M1. Sadly a lot of sellers do not want to admit do the depreciation BMW has, walk away from those people with their car listed with a high selling price.

So listen to the car, when started cold what does it do? is there any engine ticks that go away after it warms up? a high mileage engine may have those noises and the ticks that disappear are fine. Ticks that do NOT go away are a worry. how does the exhaust smell? gas? oil? get an ODB-II code reader and read the codes, both stored and pending. is there any? etc... Brake fluid, does it look clean and new? this one is highly important. Coolant is it a clean clear blue or is it grey? Oil color and condition is harder as there is no dipstick anymore on BMW engines. you can open the filter housing on top but you might cause a leak if you do as the o-ring should be replaced every time it's opened. Be wary if they don't have proof of recent service like oil changes. But also look at the rest of the car how was it maintained? s it full of dents as if the owner did not care and let it get knocked around? this is a red flag that the previous owners did not care about the car so may have missed service. does the interior look new or is it ragged and dirty? again a red flag that the car was not cared about. The car is going to have some wear, the leather in the drivers seat will not be perfect, dirty carpet, etc. BMW Steering wheel plastic pieces are coated with a very low grade rubberized plastic that shows wear fast. So those are normal to see a lot of wear on. Are all the tools in the tool slots or tool kit? is the spare still there (if the car has a spare) Look for the jack is it the real jack? Don't go looking for the BMW first aid kit or safety kit. Those are removed before importing due to US regulations. Do not be afraid to ask the seller to lower the price for anything wrong. BMW's lose value rapidly. My 2007 X3 sold new for $49,900 It's now worth $11,500 and anything wrong like AC not working you need to instantly remove $2500-$3000 from the selling price as that is how much it will take to have it fixed. Also do not be afraid of walking away from it. there are 10,000 more just like it out there. Dont fall in love with a specific car as that will be your doom. If anything just does not feel right to you, walk away from that car there are many many more out there in better shape, everything working, or with full service proof in hand. One last thing I check that is a tell tale that the frontend had some major work. Check the headlight alignment. if they are aiming very low, someone had the frontend completely disassembled or had to replace the headlamps, this is a HUGE red flag if they don't admit it was in a major accident and had the front end repaired. Also a 120,000 mile car with no stone chips in the hood is a telltale of front end repairs unless the owner has proof they had a shop do paint repair, some shops are really good and can fix stone chips to nearly invisible.

You also need to hit the forums and learn what the common failures are. My BMW X3 the water pump will fail by 100,000 miles. It's so guaranteed of a failure that BMW even has it as a item on the suggested replacement schedule. For example all BMW 4WD/AWD vehicles will have the plastic gear strip out on the Transfer case that selects power transfer. BMW does not sell this tiny $30.00 gear, instead they will sell you a $1200 transfer case selector assembly, this is another guaranteed failure. Panoramic sunroofs fail a lot due to another plastic gear and nobody actually cleaning and lubricating the sunroof mechanisms yearly. Learn what to expect as common failures on the BMW you are looking at, look at the solutions as well. Also remember that only the people that complain will post, the people that have perfect running cars that ran trouble free for 500,000 miles will not post on the forums about problems. BMW actually has a reputation for being very reliable, their inline 6cyl engines are known to be indestructible if they are taken care of. Little things like the power seats, heated steering wheels, auto dim mirrors, radios and navigation fail all the time, those are no big deal as a dead radio will not leave you stranded.

Lastly do not believe that you have to use special BMW fluids for your car. BMW simply relabeled common products that meet the standards they were looking for. Castrol 0W30 synthetic is the BMW special 5W30 needed for many of their cars, places like rock auto can get you BMW filters for significantly less than the dealership, so if you want to change your oil yourself, you can do it in your driveway for $45.00 instead of the $165.00 the dealership charges. And that is where BMW get's its reputation for being expensive. The dealerships charge close to $300 an hour for labor because most BMW owners will not bat an eye at anything under $2000 for service on their cars. As a Poor BMW enthusiast you have to do most of your own work. By learning skills, getting the manuals and getting the tools needed you can save tens of thousands of dollars and actually afford to drive a car that really is the "ultimate driving machine".