Akom's Tech Ruminations

I have a Dewalt 18V cordless drill, which was very expensive ($200 back in 2001), came with two batteries (heavy, NiCd packs), and I've used it extensively for just about everything when we bought our house. Now both packs are dead. I do maintain them well, as nearly 7 years is much longer than their expected useful life. So I checked out the prices - and the packs are over $80 each! ... Seems a bit expensive for a bunch of NiCd's in a nice (tough, indestructible, convenient) plastic package. I looked at NiMh cells... but then using the original charger becomes questionable (probably cannot), plus the cost of 12 cells is almost $80 in itself - not to mention soldering 12 cells together, myself??? I don't think so....

Then I thought about LIPO cells... Let's see - 18V, that'd be a 5 cell (18.5V)... Well, for a test, I figured I'd try what I have around, and what I have around are 3 cell packs.

Continue reading "Replacing NiCd power tool batteries with RC LIPO's"

The Motorola HS850 was a very popular bluetooth headset in its day. A lot of people seem to complain that their HS850's gradually develop one of the following symptoms:

• Dials/hangs up, randomly
• Redials on its own, randomly
• Hangs up or dials at the slightest touch or handling of the unit

This is what is most likely causing the problem:

Continue reading "Fixing Sensitive Button on Motorola HS850 bluetooth handsfree headset"

I have a hand-me-down Garmin C330, the el-cheapo, no-text-to-speech teletubby-looking GPS unit that every online store was liquidating a few months ago. Mine also has a dead battery, and while it used to run for 1-2 minutes on it, now it barely runs 5 seconds. I can live with that, after all - you generally use it while plugged in, but it is oh-so-handy to be able to hand it to the passenger for co-pilot... co-piloting.

So, I had to do something...

Continue reading "Replacing Garmin C330 Li-Ion battery on the cheap (with whatever is onhand)"

Last week I hacked up my RC transmitter and added a Dual Rate switch

See here: (How I hacked it up).

I thought I was so cool for adding two wires, one toggle switch and two drops of solder to an RTF transmitter (oh and a nice hole too). Well, everything worked great on the ground, but once I actually flew the plane, not all was well - the control range dropped to about 60 feet!. I didn't connect the dots at first and thought it was a broken antenna wire or something, or a new flying site (coincidence). Nope.

Apparently, adding two thick wires radomly into a complex circuit and placing them along the perimeter of the case can have some unexpected results. I took the wiring and the switch out, and all is well again, control range is longer than sanity permits me to test (plane is a dot in the distant sky, but still seems to be controllable).

Continue reading "Not all that is hackable should be..."