Kitchen Aid mixer leaking oil?

Getting into holiday cookie season can be tough.  Our 8-year old Kitchen Aid decided to start making noises and leaking oil out of the gearbox.  Before my wife could spend $200+ on a new one, I asked her to look on repairing it.  She found this great video:

http://www.ereplacementparts.com/article/5518/How_to_Fix_a_KitchenAid_Stand_Mixer_That_Is_Leaking_Oil.html

This turned into a good learning experience and a small family project for a Saturday morning after breakfast.  It really is easy to get inside the mixer, following the steps in the video.  We took the "divide and conquer" to remove the old grease which had gelled and lost its oil.  I took the main body a step further by removing the mixing shaft up through the center gear to clean the main gear and below it.

Not wanting to wait for special order grease or finding any food-grade grease locally, I substituted a Lucas Marine Grade (blue) from Lowe's, being billed as environmentally safe and a relatively benign MSDS.  http://lucasoil.com/products/grease/marine-grease

We repacked the gear box, put it all back together.  Works great, quieter, and smooth gear box!  All for about $5.

Windows 10 strikes again... BSOD

Just some thoughts I will be catching here as I've struggled through some problems with Windows 10, in hopes that someone else can learn.  This was a Win7 Pro box that was upgraded in place to Windows 10 Pro.  It's a 240GB SSD OS drive (C:) and 1TB RAID-1 data drive (D:, dynamic GPT)

It all started with a failure to launch Adobe PS Elements 11, with a looping activation error, after Adobe support was no help and tried to troubleshoot by enabling the hidden admin account by "net user administrator /active:yes" and I cut him off, I went into some things:
- create a new admin user and launch, no go
- launch with admin privileges, no go
- reinstall from DVD, from HD, re-enter SN or not, no go
- change C: drive permissions, no go
- recurse C: drive permissions/ownership from TrustedInstaller to Administrator account, BAD - Windows 10 would no longer boot (blue screen of roving cirles... and attempt to repair in Windows RE (recovery environment) and repair startup problems, said it couldn't fix then reported a "WDF_DRIVER_VIOLATION" on next boot along with a BSOD
- What I think happened was the Flexnet licensing got corrupted somehow...

So what happened:

• Download Win10 install via Media Creation tool and place on USB drive.
• Boot computer with USB
• Accept locales, at the botttom "Repair this computer"
• Boot Win 10RE Command prompt
• Run DISKPART, LIST VOL to see which drives are which (use the right ones below)
• Image the original Windows drive to a USB attached backup drive, just in case using:

   >DISM.exe /Capture-Image /ImageFile:G:\SSD-whole.wim /CaptureDir:D:\ /Name:"Windows"
100GB on drive went to about 50GB in a .WIM file in <1 hour on USB3.0 backup drive
Manually copy important files, just in case:
   >xcopy /e /c /h d:\users\<username>\ g:\ssd
   >xcopy /e /c /h "d:\Program Files\" g:\ssd

   >xcopy /e /c /h "d:\Program Files (x86)\" g:\ssd

• Once complete, reboot the computer back to the USB, accept locale info
• Custom install
• Delete all partitions on the SSD (including the 10% overprovisioning made for Win7, since Win10 is smarter about SSDs) -- p.s. it wouldn't install anyway since the drive was MBR partitions and not GPT
• Create a new whole-drive partition, let Windows configure Recovery and EFI and GPT partitions
• Install Windows
• Update and reboot as necessary (Windows 10 online activation worked flawlessly to recognize the computer as it was already activated without entering a Product Key)
• Run Disk Management, for the 1TB RAID set, right-click disk and say "Import foreign disk" for both.  Allow them to re-sync (this took several hours, and let it finish keeping the computer awake otherwise it will restart from 0)  If you interrupt it, you may have to right-click and "reactivate disk"
• Once complete, on the DATA DRIVE, take Ownership with the new default admin account and remove old admin account permissions (says Unknown - S-1-5-.... from previous installation)
• Change Settings>System>Storage to DATA DRIVE for all but applications. (didn't work before ownership correction)
• Install Office (had online subscription and original install ISO, log into MS account to activate)
• Add offline PST file to Outlook (Open & Export, Open Outlook Data File from DATA DRIVE)
• Install MBAM, MBAE (have original product keys)
• Install iTunes
• launch once, accept EULA, close
• launch second time holding SHIFT key, point to remote ITL iTunes Library file (all music and stuff still there)
• Sign-in to authorize the computer
• Connect a phone to create the C:\Users\<usernam>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup directory
• close iTunes
• rename Backup to BackupOld
• open command prompt in ..\MobileSync directory and run >mklink /J "Backup" "D:\iTunes Backup"  (this creates a symlink junction to put device backups on a data drive, not the SSD)
• thanks to: http://www.howtogeek.com/164275/how-to-change-the-backup-location-of-itunes-or-any-windows-app/
• Download/Install other software
• Restore Desktop and other files from the XCOPY or DISM image.

So far, so good.

NIR with Raspberry Pi

Pictures from a NoIR 5MP Raspberry Pi camera, not just for seeing in the dark...  You can do EL with a $100 camera/computer, power supply, and some image editing software.

Don't see anything in the raw image???

Change to greyscale and look really closely...

OK, digital time... auto-contrast with Photoshop Elements.  Same picture, I swear.  Do it yourself!
Probably should have covered the red LED on the front of the Pi NoIR camera.

Treasured memories safe on CD/DVD? Think again...

Not along my normal lines of fixing, but I get into a little of everything.   In my quest to digitize our media library I've stumbled across a few scary things with CDs and DVDs that may change the way you think about these as a 20-50 year "archival" media.

If any of you know my work history of making solar panels, I've always been the "bricks and mortar" type.  Use thick sections of silicon instead of thin films because there's not much there, that's what I always say.  Apparently that transfers across technologies, as the thin films used to produce CDs and DVDs are subject to environmental factors that degrade them faster than you would believe, sometimes less than 10 years.

In digitizing probably over 300 CDs and 200 DVDs, I've found maybe 2% so far that have become unreadable by a modern computer/data grade drive.  There seems to be two primary failure mechanisms, either the lacquer coating to protect the data surface was damaged (and I'm not talking scratches) or the data layer itself has corroded.

On CDs, the data is pressed into a polycarbonate disc blank and then flashed with aluminum in a vacuum chamber before being spin-coated with a lacquer and made ready for silk-screening of the design.  The final disc is read through the bottom polycarbonate blank.  If that lacquer top coat does not seal the edges well or the aluminum is not masked or removed from the edge before lacquering, the aluminum is exposed and will oxidize and react with moisture causing the reflective layer in the CD to wrinkle.  Picture aluminum foil after you've crumpled it...

DVDs are a little different, and particularly 2-sided ones.  2-sided discs are pressed or laser cut both sides and a final lacquer applied.  In this case, the laser reads the disc through the lacquer coat, so if the coating is not applied properly, the disc not cleaned properly, or a sub-standard or contaminated lacquer is used, over time the layer can be permeable to moisture/oxygen and corroded the data layer, or the lacquer itself absorbs moisture and begins to take on an "orange-peel" texture.  Obviously not good for reading or focusing lasers to spot size ~0.8 microns.

So what to do??  Some brilliant people created an open source program for Linux called "ddrescue". Unlike "dd", which is a command line tool to write raw data to and from discs/files/whatever in sequential order, "ddrescue" works around a read error from the source and it skips ahead and keeps going, and flags that area for another attempt at some point.  It is exclusive of "dd", and uses it's own algorithm to attempt to retrieve as much data as possible.  It can even reconstruct a file/drive from two partials, say two drives of mirrored RAID setup that failed in different areas.  It has its limitations, but it's pretty darn good.

How to do it??  Understand what your doing, but essentially, within Linux you treat the CD/DVD as a data disc and recover it to the system hard drive sector by sector.  In my case, I had a side of DVD that was unreadable and truncated a 43 minutes program to 23 minutes and the following on from 43 minutes to 5 minutes.  After letting ddrescue chew on the disc for about an hour, it had recovered all but 69kB and 173kB from two source files, or less than a second of video.  The transcoding reader to digitize the files easily skipped over the error sections and there was hardly a minor blip.

NOTE:  All of my work for digitizing is for private/personal use only.  Whatever you do, understand copyright laws before you do your own work.

Is the A/C ready for summer?

It's been a while, my chances to get into things has dropped off recently with life intervening, but hey, it happens...

I had a useful one that's an easy fix (if that's the only thing that wrong!).   As things are heating up outside, I happened to be in the basement when our ground-source heat pump unit kicked on.  Instead of the familiar click and hum of the compressor starting, I heard a click and wub, no hum.  Thinking, "hmm that's not good" I  went over to the unit, which didn't show any errors, and shut it off on the control panel then turned off the local disconnect.  After waiting about 5 minutes for any energy to dissipate (capacitors), I removed the lid.

I wasn't familiar with the symptom, but knew enough about the motor and compressor setup to understand there was a problem someplace.  A quick online search brought up some similar issues in a WaterFurnace chat forum that the compressor motor run capacitor could be bad.  If you don't know what that is, it looks sort of like a V-8 juice can, right circular cylinder, that is connected with large wires into the motor/compressor circuit.  Here's the control panel side view of it (with tan and blue wires attached).

Usually when they go bad, they short and the can overheats and puffs out on the ends.  This one was very slightly domed, but when I disconnected the spade terminals and took it out, it tested open with an Ohm meter, and no reading on a capacitance meter (the can said 370VAC and 80uF or microFarad).

The chat forum had also mentioned the manufacturer went from a 440VAC rated capacitor down to a 370VAC for home units, which is normally fine since they run 240VAC.  We had recently had a power surge that took out a bunch of stuff in the house (that the power company paid to have fixed!) and could have damaged this too.  I was able to find this capacitor (440VAC, 80uF) at my local Grainger for $53, in stock.  I drove down to get it and the tech there also verified with their capacitor tester that the old one was open.

Came home, popped in the new one after removing the adapter plate which had a 2" opening instead of 2.5" for the larger 440VAC rated cap, closed it up, turned it on....  and the compressor started!

While I was in there however, I also noticed that there was quite a bit of dust underneath the compressor start contactor, and that the control board looked a little cooked under a  transistor and power resistor.  Rather than get that far into it, I called my local service guys that installed the unit (HEY, EVEN I HAVE LIMITS), and they came out and replaced the control board and contactor FOR FREE UNDER WARRANTY.  I was 8 years into a 10 year warranty.  Nice.  The contactor was severely pitted from cycling for 8 years, plus cycling for at least several days with a locked-rotor compressor.  They also checked out the unit and topped up the outside loop pressure, and verified it was delivering about 63,000BTU for a 5 ton (60,000BTU) rating.  All good.

Technical note:  For those of you not familiar with large single-phase motors, they typically have capacitor in series with one motor winding to create a "fake" second phase that makes the motor run much more efficiently.  With that capacitor open, the compressor was trying to turn two windings with only one connected, and that no worky.  See the compressor and cap in the schematic below:

Helping out (and a free cup of coffee)

My local favorite coffee hang out, Dublin Roasters, had a problem... I thought they had closed when I didn't see their OPEN sign lit.  I stopped in and they were open, and asked about it (along with a cup of Volt Blend and a kitchen sink brownie).  Apparently the yoga class had crushed the plug.  They had replaced it but still wouldn't work.  I offered to take a look at it for them.

There were two problems, the new transformer they had found was the wrong voltage (6V) and way under-powered (like 300mA).  Getting it home, I opened the back and hooked a bench supply to the power contacts.  With a 1A current limit set, I slowly took the voltage from 6V up, the sign turned on at about 10V, at 12V it was going good, and pulling about 600mA for an LED sign.

As luck would have it, I had a leftover power supply with 12VDC and 3.15A laying around which worked perfectly.  I also happened to notice part of the second "e" in coffee was out.  I found that the PCB trace had broken on that small substring of lights, the LEDs were 5-6 in series for the 12V with a 150 Ohm current limiting resistor in the string.  A small scrape of the conformal coating and touch with the soldering iron, and it was back to full "e" status.

Thanks Dublin Roasters for the free cup of coffee and oatmeal bar on return!

2004 Toyota Prius DTC codes P0A40, P0A41, U0100, U0111

After a short trip, returning home is usually a welcome and pleasant time.  However on getting home and finding my Prius dash lit up like a Christmas tree with master warning and hybrid system warning lights, my enthusiasm quickly faded...

The last time this happened a rambunctious squirrel had its way with a the motor generator position sensor (generator resolver), as evidenced by some bare copper strands swaying in the breeze when looking straight down the front of the engine behind the radiator.  I suspected something similar, but this was a little harder to find.

After getting the car up on ramps, and crawling underneath, I finally found the offending connector, the motor position sensor (motor resolver), conveniently located halfway up the engine behind the drivers side wheel well.  I already had the Toyota part number and the tool I needed from the last time (made from a precision hex driver and a grinding wheel), so I ordered another 10 pack for about $7 each.

After removing the driver's side splash pan (have extra plastic body fasteners on hand!), I was able to get one hand in through the wheel well and another up underneath to wiggle both the motor temperature sensor and resolver plugs free.  The little rascals had chewed clean through two wires and nicked a third, but for the life of me couldn't remember how to get those darn terminals out.  After nearly an hour of unpleasant language, I conceded to cut the entire plug off (I had six new terminals and splices, well 10 actually).  After working at the kitchen table for almost another hour (dinner anyone?), here's the trick for my ailing short term memory and all you others that need to do it....

    

...remove the white plastic locking ring FIRST!!!  With a gentle pry up on both short edges of the white locking ring (exposed at the edge of the central plug), it pulls up and completely off the plug, exposing the plastic catches that you need to move away from the terminal to pull them out the back.

I'm waiting for the rain to subside so I can put it back on and DRIVE my Prius off the ramps.

End note, the U codes from the scan tool have to do with CAN bus communication to the battery, I think these are incidental to the furry friend incident, as they could be cleared from scan tool.