A Leslie Wong Blog

I just received a bunch of flashlight parts I ordered from Kaidomain.com. Among them, four Cree XLamp XR-E LEDs, Q2 and Q5 bins. I thought I’d mod my Ultrafire C2 flashlight that has a P4 bin Cree with the Q5. I can’t tell the difference between the Q5 and Q2 by looking at the two. I guess I have to do some kind of measurement of current and light output. The Cree XLamp LED Q5 will put out 107 Flux (lumens) when driven at 4 amps – that’s very bright.

One of the four LED’s seems to have a manufacturing defect – see the material in the upper left corner of the chip in the photo?

Two people who offered me help on the Candlepowerforums.com came up with different answers. jtr1962 says it’s the result the dome is starting to detach – he called it internal separation of the silicon filler. WeLight theorized that it was a manufacturing defect and I should return it. I don’t know much about these high power LED’s but I’m learning.

The heater blower in our 1972 BMW Bavaria suddenly decided to stop working. This car doesn’t have air conditioning, so I don’t know if the setup is different on an AC equipped car. It does seem to be the same on non-AC E9 coupes.

I dreaded having to repair it, because I thought I’d have to take the console apart to get to it.

It turned out that the blower is easily accessible, mounted under a flap just in front of the windshield in the engine compartment. Removing the flap gives access to the blower, held in by just 3 screws. The protective grid over the fan is held in by friction – the edge of the grid goes into a groove in the bracket that holds the fan.

I asked the Senior Six mailing list about alternative replacement motors but I found one on eBay that looked like an exact replacement, except for the mounting bracket.

The cutout for the motor on each bracket was exactly the same shape, though the case of the motor itself was different between the original and the replacement. That didn’t make any difference – the new motor and fan fit onto the old bracket, held by four clips. Bosch, the manufacturer of the motor, even went so far as to balance the fan. On the new fan, you can see wire clips on some of the fan blades.

The eBay seller advertised the blower as a VW NOS heater fan with the p/n 90157132032. Usually when I enter something like that in Google, I get a hit – this time, no deal.

The box the replacement fan came in shows a VW/Porsche number. Maybe a professional can figure it out.

When I first read about ClubIT’s $59.99 (USD) gOS Developer Kit, I started thinking about applications where I could use it. How can you pass up a $60 ‘puter?

The Via pc2500 motherboard is relatively small – it conforms to the FlexATX form factor which is 9.0 in. x 7.5 in. (221 mm x 191 mm). I first thought the Via board would be a good starting point for a car computer. With a small touchscreen LCD, I could use it for a GPS and an A/V source for music (and video).

As I started looking for cases, there seemed to be a dearth of cases for the FlexATX motherboard. Most FlexATX cases also fit the larger microATX motherboard. (FlexATX is an addendum to the microATX specification). I may have confused the ATX motherboard sizes with the ITX form factor developed by Via Technology.

The ITX form factors are much smaller than the ATX specs:

I was unable to find a small FlexATX enclosure that might fit under the seat of a car or inconspicuously in the trunk. Instead I found a Silverstone SST-LC11S-300 for $27.51 (USD) on eBay. For a motherboard that has a maximum power draw of 20 watts, this case is a little overkill. But until I find a suitable enclosure, I have another HTPC.

As for the OS, I tried installing the gOS and received an error, /sbin/modprobe “abnormal exit.” I found several reported bugs in Ubuntu that described the same error that required a kernal fix . Instead, I installed an OEM version of Vista, and have the PC headless at the moment.

(3 December 2007) Doing more research on the abnormal exit during the install of gOS and Ubuntu 7.04 led me to add the boot parameter all_generic_ide after hitting F6 on the boot screen. This problem is discussed in the Ubuntu Forums.