Finished at last

The day started just beautiful. It was sunny all day long and it even got a bit warm. I sat outside on the veranda for a while and read my Ludlum of this moment.

Nicole picked mandarins from the tree and we discovered a great way to use them: Juice! The new blender is a little uneasy to handle still because of the rough edges but it does work very well. It will get better after it's been used a bit more. The mandarin juice was absolutely fantastic.

I decided to drive back to the big shopping mall we went to yesterday. I bought a few loose Warhammer figures. Only loose ones because I thought the starter kit cost $300. This morning I found out that it was actually only $85 so I swapped part of yesterdays purchases and got the starter kit after all.

For the uninitiated: Warhammer is a table-top strategy game played with little figurines that you have to paint yourself. I used to have this in Amsterdam and Nicole and I painted a fair bit but never finished it. I sold it when we moved. Painting the figurines is very calming and relaxing. Eventually I hope to play the game as well but we'll see.

I was set to finish my power supply this weekend. I just needed to fix one more thing for it.

Some wires needed to be connected inside. I made a little semicircle out of plexi-glass to put the contact points on.

After putting it in and inhaling solder smoke for an hour I took it outside to test it for the first time.

It worked well (haven't tested max. current though) and the project is now considered 'closed'. YAY!

The milk

I was concentrating at work.

After work I was concentrating on milk in the super market.

At home I was concentrating on my power supply.

Trains and chocolate

I wanted to check out a "swap meeting" organised by a model railroad club 45 minutes driving away from us on the other side of town. It was at "163 Old South Road". We looked it up on Google maps and it was on the right of a crossing. So we drive there but we can't find nr. 163 at the spot Google maps indicated. Weird shit. We parked and check it out on foot. I recognised a shed from their website. It was NOT in between nr. 161 and 165. It was actually on the OTHER side of the bloody intersection, on the EVEN numbered side too! Backwards shit.

After paying $2 each and listening to a woman speaking in tongues giving me a flyer for their next swap meeting we entered the "swap meet area", woohoo! There were about 12 tables selling crap trains of the wrong scale (it was H0, I have N) and apart from that it was all f*cking ugly American shit. I was done checking out the tables in 3 minutes.

This was the track that the "club" was proudly working on.

I would qualify this as "average". But, it makes these people happy and that's good. Let's not bitch at the whole thing too much.

Outside there was a nice old-timer parked and I wanted to photograph it on the way out. It was gone...

I took this photo for all our clairvoyant readers. I think going here would have been a hell of a lot more interesting. And I'm not even kidding. Actually, I could have my own stand there and do some kick-ass drum healing apparently :-)

I remembered we needed bird seed so we quickly hopped in to the Woolies where we parked. I found the Flake "Dark" that are so hard to find! And pretty soon it will be harder coz they are clearing them. Bastards. I bought six and on the way home we visited Stephen who tipped me off on the existence of this beautiful chocolate bar and gave him three, much to his surprise. I guess this makes us "Flake Dark" brothers now hehe.

Anyway, after the train fiasco and the visit to Woolies we drove in to the hills. The second planned part of the day. We wanted to have coffee and cake in Chocolate @ No. 5 in Hahndorf again. Beautiful place.

I had a wonderful chocolate cake.

A few people have seen a ghost (at work) in this little cottage. The owner told us the story and of the experiences several people had. I reckon they should get a medium in there to say hello.

We drove homewards over the highway. They cut it straight through a hill top. Quite amazing.

This is a little trucky driving down.

At home I mounted two transistors on the heat sink for my power supply.

Word verification the Australian way whilst commenting on Nicole's blog.

Fruit and metal work

Early morning showed some promising weather. It was nice and sunny. Unfortunately, no clouds during winter means quite cold temperatures during the night.

When people in Adelaide go to work on a bicycle, they think they're actually in the Tour de France. If you like seeing lycra filled crack, this is the place to be!

A few weeks ago I told my manager about putting a fruit bowl in the office. He thought it was a good idea and today I was pleasantly surprised when I came in. I am very pleased. Easy reachable fruit. No need to go out and buy a Snickers bar anymore :-)

Of course it doesn't really help if someone puts left over cup cakes with 1 packet of sugar on each one next to it...

While in the bus on my way home I for some reason took this photo. There is something about it that I like a lot, even though it's an ugly part of the city.

Speaking of ugly, check out this building (not the car in front!).

I got off at Northpark shopping mall to do some groceries. I went to Coles instead of Woolies for a change.

When I came out it was still light. The days are getting longer again, thank god. The setting sun turned the clouds nice and pinkish.

This is the road I have to cross by foot. You can only do it when the cars get a red light. And even then you're not sure of your life...

As I walked home I passed this block of land. Someone took down the house that was on there, split the block in two and is now selling the two halves. The size of one half must be 8x20 metres at most. It's nothing! One half was already sold.

I noticed Mr. Clarke's shop. There's little doubt as to what he sells...

At home my crazy DIY personality took over.

It made me drill holes in an alumiNIUM heat sink that is required for my power supply.

While Nicole was filling in forms for our health insurance...

I was smoothening the edges of the holes and putting screw thread in some of them.

Mushrooms and transformers

I hadn't been to Woolies for a while because Nicole has been doing all the shopping while I work. But because we both had a reasonably busy week we went together again for the first time in 7 weeks I think. Anyway, Nicole likes mushrooms.

The apples were displayed nicely.

After doing our shopping I bought a new pair of pants and after that I drove us to Henley. We wanted 2 things:
1) See the beach and smell the ocean
2) Get coffee and cake

This is the Henley beach jetty. I don't think I've ever photographed it from this angle before... Exciting!

There was also bit or sunset going on. Gets a bit boring after a while ;-)

Imagine living in one of these houses. You have to see the sunset every day! What a life...

This is the place we had coffee and cake. A quite nice little discovery.

Remember the power supply I started building? I ran into a small issue: HEAT. The end transistor can handle 200°C max. but not without cooling. I was using one 2N3055 which would have had to handle 34 volts x 3 amps = 102 Watt, in pure heat. That's a small heater... To cool this I would need a very BIG heat sink (cooling element) and also forced cooling using a fan. I no like.

The problem is this: The power supply's end stage is basically the external load in series with the internal transistor. The total voltage over these two is always the same in my old design: 34 Volts. If the voltage over the external load is only 1 Volt(this can be regulated), there is 33 Volts over the transistor. When the external load is also sucking 3 Amps through that transistor, the transistor is consuming 3 x 33 = 99 Watt of power.

So I bought the above toroidal (ring) transformer which turns 220V into 2x 12V. Rectified this is 2 x 17 Volts. So I can make the total voltage over transistor plus external load 17 Volts or 34 Volts. I'm going to make a switch that sets the output to two seperate ranges: 1-15 Volt and 14-30 Volt. This way the voltage over the transistor can never be more than 16 Volts. I'm also reducing the max. output current to 2 Amps AND I'm going to use 2 transistors. So now the max. power dissipation of one transistor will be 16 Volts x 1 Amp = 16 Watts! Easy to cool down :-)

Oh, by the way, if you have read all the above, you're a hero! And if you understand it as well, you're also a geek! :-)

Madame Tussauds

This morning/afternoon I made good progress working on my power supply. The circuit works alright (it performs in 2 scales: 0.6-7V and 3-30V) but I do have to check out the heat situation. The end transistor (not in the picture) is going to need a lot of cooling and possibly the bridge rectifier too.

In the evening we had a very nice BBQ at Karin and Gavin's place. We stopped at the new park nearby first. They've been working on it for very long and it's now finished and al the animals are back.

Mason was happy as always and he couldn't keep his hands off of me.

Here we see Amy and Ash posing with a wax statue of Gavin that we borrowed from Madame Tussauds ;-)