T-Minus 5 and Holding

Well, I've decided to put the TinyTrak project on hold. I have the case cut out and some wire leads soldered in place but I just don't have the time to get it finished before my trip. There's no way in Hades it'll happen. So I'll just make do with the first kit I built and hope to get back to version 2.0 sometime in December.

It was a valiant effort but there's just too much going on right now. :-(

Latest Goodies

Today I picked up the makings of my future battery bank. I got four CS3 HRL12390 batteries rated at about 108AH. These batteries retail for about $250 and I scored an excellent deal and paid a fraction of that. My initial calculations show that I should be able to get about 5 days out of these operating 24 hours a day. I know I won't be operating anywhere near that so I'm willing to bet I could last about 2 weeks.



I'll say one thing, too. These puppies are heavy! They weigh in at just under 73 lbs ea. Here's the manufacturer's description:

HRL 12390W is specially designed for high efficient discharge application. Its characteristics are high energy density, small footprint and high discharge efficiency. It can be used for more than 260 cycles at 100% discharge in cycle service, up to 10 years in standby service.

I probably won't be able to get started on the bank project until after Thanksgiving but I'm at least happy to have the batteries sitting in the garage.

Stalled

Well, progress on the new TinyTrak has pretty much stalled out. I'm having to re-work the case design and I've been busy working on other things. We'll see what happens this weekend.

Tomorrow kicks of tower weekend. We have a member in our club that's not doing well health-wise and he's asked for help getting his two towers down. We've got a small party getting together to take care of that for him this weekend and I figure we'll do a tower each day. Shouldn't be too bad but you never know.