March 27, 2016

Well, I managed to get some parts yesterday. The plugs I bought don’t quite fit, so I’ll have to buy some different ones. Apparently the ones I got are for a 2.1mm inner pin, the ones I need are a 2.5mm inner pin.

No problems there though, they sort-of jam in there, and I can use them for other projects. Jaycar have changed things around and most of the bits are behind the counter — might as well go through online crowds if I’m not able to inspect the part close up. That’ll be a Tuesday job.

I’ve just put up a photo of the last two nodes being tested and bootstrapped, along with a shot of the partially-wired up wiring loom. I sort-of whacked that together to prevent the wrong parts from coming into contact. There’s a 30A fuse on the battery feed and individual 10A fuses for each machine. I could use 5A fuses too.

So far, I’ve now built kernels on all 5 boxes, and all seem to be performing well, if there were going to be issues with a box, I think they’d have shown up by now.

I also cracked open one of my old 24-port switches (an unmanaged Netcomm 10/100Mbps), and was pleasantly surprised to see the PSU was a separate module, putting out 3.3V 4A. I’ll crack open the Linksys and see if the same is true there, if so, this could be a much better option than trying to convert 12V?240V?some low voltage. If the step to 240V can be avoided, I might as well.