Articles
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Bad switch
August 14, 2026
Read moreI have a good example of a bad design. In the quest to make products cheaper, something has to give – and my recent experience with the control switch for our evaporative (“swamp”) cooler provides an illustrative example.
The cooler started misbehaving, but not in a super obvious way. It’s a simple machine - a water pump and a 2-speed motor to drive the blower and controlled by a six-position switch. Something seemed wrong in the “High Cool” mode, the fan motor didn’t sound right and not enough air was coming out, but otherwise it was working OK. The motor eventually died, and after I replaced it, the symptoms continued, so I started checking out the switch.
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Public service mapping
March 28, 2026
Read moreI’ve been trying to perform semi-regular public service. Lately, that’s been taking the form of updating/fixing the open-source maps on OpenStreetMap (OSM) – they are the underlying source of many of the maps you find on the internet, including the ones used by my motorcycle navigation system.
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Update: motorcycle parts fail
March 23, 2026
Read moreMy hopes were quickly dashed. In a previous post, I described my DIY system to support my navigation tablet on the motorcycle. Yesterday, I took it for a shakedown, and found a fatal flaw in the 3D printed “arms”.
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Motorcycle parts
March 21, 2026
Read moreI really enjoy working with metal! I prototyped a holder for my motorcycle’s navigation system, with a combination of 3D-printed parts and MDF. The 3D prints might someday find their way into aluminum versions, if they don’t hold up, but so far they are doing fine. The MDF, however, was never intended to be more than a temporary part – it would dissolve into mush in the first rainstorm!
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LoRa mesh radios
March 21, 2026
Read moreI’m a long time advocate of LoRa radio technology. It has some very attractive features if you want to move small amounts of data a long way on very little power. After playing with it a bit when it first came on the market, I’ve mostly been watching it since, as I didn’t have my own use-case at hand. But now I do!