In this post, we’ll be going over the basics of using an old regular PC-gameport joystick with Parallax’s Basic Stamp powered Boe-Bot.  This howto will have all the information you need to get started including code, schematics and a parts list.  We will be covering how the joystick is wired and how to go about interfacing it with the Boe-Bot for an easy to use and easy to expand analog control method for your Boe-Bot.  Next step, world domination!

Foreword

The joystick is something that has been around quite a long time, even longer than computers.  The idea of being to control something on-screen by using a joystick is one that takes almost no learning curve,  is easy to start and you only end up getting better.  Even today in modern gaming, it is easy to find controllers with at least one analog joystick on it.  My Xbox 360 controllers feature two sticks per controller which give the gamer a very precise method for movement and aiming accuracy, something that buttons can’t quite provide.  As long as I’ve been working on computers, I always remember using PC analog joysticks in my games.

Nowadays, the modern PC joystick has all but gone the way of the dodo, however those few that are around now are USB and have a ton of buttons.  The legacy joystick (or “gameport” joystick) still has a bit of usefulness in it and today we will be covering how to get it to work with a Basic Stamp microcontroller.

Of course someone’s going to ask, “Why use a PC joystick?, Why not (insert control method here)?”.  My answers are:

1:  Cost – The PC joystick used in this tutorial was bought at a Goodwill for $3.

2: Ease of use – Once you have programmed your application, you just grab it and go. There’s no need to go over complex control methods or trying to remember what does what now.

3: Low Parts Count – In this tutorial, I used two capacitors and six resistors to get the joystick working.  Most other control schemes require a lot more parts.

Basic Theory of Operations

The way an analog PC joystick works is not very complex at all.  You have a stick which is capable of moving any position along two axes (X and Y) and with two switches or “buttons” for interaction.  The position of the stick is detected via two variable resistors usually around 10Kohm, one running horizontal (left/right) and one running vertical (towards you/away from you).  The computer would send a pulse out to the joystick and get return values from the variable resistors.  Using the returned pulse it could then decide on what action to take, how far/fast to move your character, etc..

The two buttons (or more) are detected through simple momentary contact switches. If the switch pin was high, then the button was depressed otherwise, the button was released.  These button switches are normally open and while the gameport pinout supports up to four buttons, additional buttons were made by figuring out how to multiplex them as shown in the chart below:

When using the PC gameport joystick, you would need to go through calibration which taught the computer the limits of your axes and the button layout.  Because variable resistors are not terribly accurate across manufacturers this calibration was a requirement as no two joysticks, not even those made by the same manufacturer,  would behave exactly alike. There would always be minute differences between the joystick’s behaviors so the calibration was a way to standardize the measurements and clean up the inaccuracy of the joystick.

In our tutorial, we will be using a two-button model.  This joystick is a very standard stick and has a trigger button and a thumb switch button.  It connects to the computer via a 15 pin D-sub connector usually to the sound card which has a Gameport connector on it.  This connector is usually orange on newer motherboards, if it exists at all.

On the bottom of this joystick, there are two sliders.  These two sliders can be used to “tune” the position of the VRs in order to be able to get the best range of motion for the stick.  You may need to use these during the next step for calibration.  Here is a picture of the bottom of my joystick.  The large circular things are suction cups which help keep the base down on the table while you move the joystick around:

After taking the bottom off, we can  see the setup of the two variable resistors (VRs).  Unlike most joysticks this one uses linear VRs and not the rotary VRs (sometimes called pots) that are commonly found for volume controls. We have oneVR on the left for the Y axis, and the other one along the bottom for the X axis, some support hardware and a small PCB:

The little circuit board at the top of the stick doesn’t conceal any electronics, It’s only a bypass as shown in these next two images:

This picture is of the bottom of the circuit board, As stated before, this only acts as a pass through to make wiring the joystick easier during production.

Here is a picture of one of the two linear variable resistors.  These are 100Kohm but yours might be different:

Now that the joystick has been opened up and we know all it’s secrets, it’s time to start on the interface for the BOE-BOT.

The interface circuit

The interface for your joystick is actually quite simple.  You will need the following items:

• A 15 pin female D-sub connector with ribbon cable – I used the one from an old PC that I had many years ago.  The long ribbon was perfect for this job.
• 4x 220ohm resistors
• 2x 10K resistors
• 2x .1uF capacitors – Note: I used ceramic capacitors in my project as they are easier to work with however in theory electrolytic capacitors should work as well. If you use electrolytics, please pay careful attention to the polarity as electrolytics can explode if hooked in backwards and may risk hurting you and/or damaging your microcontroller.
• Jumper wire as needed

This will provide the basic parts needed to perform our calibration test.  You will need to hook up the parts as shown in this schematic below.  Click on the image for a full size one if you need it.

Here is a full pinout of the PC gameport connector that shows all of the various things that the pins are used for: (Pinouts obtained from pinouts.ru – a good site to have handy)

In my D-Sub connector, pin 4 and pin 5 are shorted together however this may be done either at the joystick end or in your D-sub cable as well. When in doubt, test it with a multimeter.  If you find that during your calibration test, your buttons do not respond at all try examing those two pins to make sure that they are both shorted together.  WARNING! Although the pinouts.ru pinout provided above has some things labeled “Ground” and “+5VDC” use my schematic as the final verdict.   The reason for this is the pinouts.ru site describes the joystick’s gameport connector on a computer.  Since we are not using a computer and this is not a digital joystick, I have changed some of the meanings of the pins as shown in my schematic.  If you hook it up differently, you might damage your microcontroller.

Calibration Software

Now that the interface is built, we need to write the code needed for making the BOE-BOT “read” the joystick and to make it do stuff.  We will be using the RCTIME function of the Basic Stamp to charge and time the two .1uF capacitors.  By timing their discharge rates, we can then mathematically calculate the position of the joystick.

As far as the buttons go, they are just as easy as any other two buttons for your microcontroller.  The BOE-BOT will monitor pin2 and 3 and if they are brought high (by pushing a button) the BS2 will sense it and perform whatever action you have programmed.  For now, we are just getting the calibration information and to make sure everything works properly.  The tags for “Lights” and “Horn” will come in the next section.

You can download the source code called “BS2_joystick_diagnostics.bs2″ from my downloads page, or here is the direct link You might need to right click on the link and go to “Save As”.

After loading it into your BOE-BOT, be sure to leave a debug window open, as this is where you can see the RCTIME counts and the buttons.  You may  notice that the values will be all over the place and will constantly be changing but this is normal.  Play around with it a bit and get a general feel for how your joystick works.

If for some reason, your RCTIME is stuck at 0, this indicates that the Basic Stamp is not seeing the capacitor or is not sensing the capacitor’s discharge.  You will need to check your wiring to make sure everything’s lined up. If need be, you can use a 100Kohm resistor between pins 1 and 3 or between pins 1 and 6  on your 15 pin D-sub connector to test.  If RCTIME shows up there, then use the multimeter on your joystick’s D-sub cable and make sure that you can see the resistance changing on those two sets of pins.  If you get no connection on the joystick, you could have a bad joystick on your hands.

Here are the images of my RCTIME output along with a picture showing the position of my joystick.  You will have different numbers, but the format is still the same.

Center or "zero" position

X (horizontal) axis left

X (horizontal) axis right

Y (vertical) axis up

Y (vertical) axis down

Button 0 pressed

Button 1 pressed

Once you have a “feel” for how the joystick responds, let’s actually do something with this. You will need to figure out the zones on where to apply the speed settings.   The BS2_Rover application contains routines that can filter out and adjust pulses sent to the servos however this requires a bit of calibration (hence the calibration application).  All you need to do is to figure out where your joystick should switch between off and low, low and medium and lastly medium and high.    The reason for this is that for precise movements, we don’t want the BOE-BOT to lurch out of control, and while high speed all the time might not be a bad idea, it can be cumbersome trying to get into a small space with it.

Getting it to work

Go ahead and download the file “BS2_joystick_rover.bs2″ from my Downloads page or via this direct link. Load it up in your Basic Stamp Editor  as now we need to make some adjustments to it.  I’m pretty sure that your joystick will behave differently than mine will which is why my code won’t work out of the box.  Well let me rephrase that, the CODE will work, but the joystick calibration will be off.   Using the calibration application above, you can get the RCTIME values needed to make the servo speeds and the directions work properly.  Look at my speed chart below and you will get a better understanding how the BS2 rover works:

With this chart you can see at which points the BOE-BOT will change speeds.  You will need to make a similar chart for your joystick using the calibration program and then you can edit the BS2 Rover file and add those settings in the two GOSUB statements.  The DEADZONE is important as this is the point where your stick’s RCTIMEs will fall when no one is touching the joystick.  It is important to have a deadzone that matches your joystick to prevent your BOE-BOT from running away from you.

Something of note is that my chart starts at “1″ and not “0″.  This is because if the VR is at minimum resistance RCTIME will still return a “1″.   The only time RCTIME will return a 0 is if there is no load for the capacitor to discharge to, for instance when the joystick is disconnected.  In the event that RCTIME does return a 0, then we will send out the same pulses as what we send out in our deadzone so that way our BOE-BOT does not move once the joystick is unplugged.

Here’s how the two subroutines work in a nutshell.  You start off with a pulse value of 200 and depending on where your RCTIME is, you will either add to it which makes the servo rotates one direction at one of three speeds or you will subtract from it which will make the servo rotate the other direction at one of three speeds.  Once the comparisons are done,  you add a constant value of 550 to the pulse value.  This pulse value will then get pulsed out to the servos and the wheel turns.

The reason 550 was selected was because 550+200 = 750 which is the point at which your servos do nothing. In the speed chart below, we can see how the offset affects the servo pulses and how each of the two items correspond with the speed levels:

So now that you understand the two subroutines, go ahead and edit them to match your joystick’s behavior and desired positions.

Extra fun stuff

Now that we have the complex part out of the way, we can also instruct the BOE-BOT to do something when we press the buttons on the joystick.  I have added a buzzer, a 220 ohm resistor and an LED to the last schematic so that now when we press the trigger button, the piezo buzzer will make a beep-beep sound and when you hit the thumb button, you will see the LED turn on and off.   Here is the updated schematic with our new parts. (Click on it for a full size image)

Once you have made the needed changes to your code, there’s one last thing that needs to be done before you upload it to your BOE-BOT.  Check one last time and make sure everything is set properly, otherwise you might have unexpected results.  If all looks well, go ahead and upload then try it out.

Here is a video I made of my BOE-BOT in action.  For this test, I used a white ultrabright LED which produced a lot more light than the standard LEDs that came with the BOE-BOT.

The “chugging” motion is normal.  This is the BOE-BOT, checking the RCTIME of X, pulsing out the X servo, checking RCTIME of Y, pulsing out the Y servo, checking the buttons then repeating itself.  Since the BOE-BOT is a single-process chip, it can only do one thing at a time otherwise the motion would be a lot smoother than it is.   If you are using the Propeller, you will get smoother action out of it by dedicating a COG to monitoring the joystick’s X and Y axes, and another COG to controlling the servos.

Last words

Using an analog joystick for your robotics projects can be an excellent way to bring an easy and intuitive interface for robot control into your project and I hope that this article shows you how easy it is to use.  It doesn’t take any fancy coding, expensive hardware or overkill designs, just some basic knowledge of how RCTIME works and a few bucks for the joystick. With a minimal part count, you can increase the flexibility of your robot’s design quite easily and you might even save yourself some programming headaches later on.

As always, thank you for reading.

FIRESTORM_v1

When I’m not wielding a soldering iron or slinging parts around my workbench, I like to get my frag on just like many other gamers out there.  So imagine my sadness when in the midst of the heated battle to protect the planet from the likes of an invading alien force in the original Half-life, my pursuit of alien destruction came to a screeching halt by way of a serious game glitch. This glitch occurred on the map called “Questionable Ethics” and was readily reproducible.  Read more for details about the game glitch and a video that shows how you can get past the glitch and continue on.

Half-life is one of my most favorite games in all of the games I own.  While the honor of the “First FPS ever played” goes to Quake 2 from my days at Texas A&M, this was the first FPS that brought a compelling story along with it.  Now, even though I know every nook and cranny of the game’s maps and it’s intricate storyline, I still love playing the game even if all I do is run around and flail my crowbar at random baddies that pop up.

My most recent game play however came across a glitch where the scientists that were supposed to help you after you save them ended up sending the scientists all over the map and rendered them unusable.  This is critically game-stopping as the same scientists are supposed to escort you to the front door of the building and open a door controlled by a retinal scanner. Without the scientists to open the door, you’re pretty much hosed.

Thankfully, the people at the Valve support forum had a solution.  I went ahead and tested and was able to continue with my game.  I felt that someone else might be trapped by this same situation so I went ahead and recorded a video on the glitch and how to get past it.

Here is the link to the forums where I found the only solution for this issue:  http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=12208808

In the first post for the new “Hardware PrOn” category, we will be dissecting a common point-of-sale barcode scanner.  This particular victim is the MS700 laser scanner manufactured by Metrologic (now owned by either Honeywell or Gilbarco) which reveals a very nice discovery inside.  So, grab your screwdrivers and let’s take a look.

I got this particular discovery from EPO (see “Places to get stuff”) and since it was untagged and in their “Bargain Corner”,  I was able to get it for the awesome price of $2.   I figured that for that price if I didn’t score something awesome, then at least I’m only out  the $2 dollars.  Since this was a laser based scanner, I figured I could get another laser diode and maybe the beam splitter mirrors for working on my line generator project.

First off, we’ll start off with some pictures. Here is the gallery of photos taken during the disassembly.  You can click on any of them to get a brief description. Clicking on the image again will give you a much larger image.

As indicated in the gallery images for the laser diode mount, don’t remove the focus lens.  I doubt I’ll ever get mine put back to a working order.

Additional Research

If you want to see if yours works first, you will still need to take it apart.  On the power supply PCB, there is a brown connector with three pins.  The center pin is ground and the bottom (towards the metal box side of the PCB) will be the positive voltage side.  This device ran comfortably on 12 volts DC but can go as high as 30VDC if need be.

According to some research, this is an RS-232 barcode scanner however I have not been able to figure out the pinout of the 15 pin header in order to hook it up.  If you are able to get this information, please let me know in the comments section of this post.

As indicated in the gallery images for the laser diode mount, don’t remove the focus lens.  I doubt I’ll ever get mine put back to a working order.

What you can do with it

I’m sure that there are a lot of things that one could do with an optics setup like this.  Not knowing the optical characteristics of the optical receiver I’d hazard to say that this would be a good base for object detection and avoidance on a robot. You could read the position of the mirror cube using the pulses of the yellow wire and then some math could determine where the object is in relation to the robot.  Failing that, you could always make a line generator for some really nice rock-concert effects.  If you take this approach, I recommend going with a green laser, but you’re probably going to need a heavy duty laser or one that can withstand being on for extended periods.  Most laser diodes in laser pointers are not rated for this kind of work so choose wisely.

The new category is called “Hardware PrOn” and will include pictures of teardowns of various devices that I encounter as well as some ideas on what you could do with one if you happened to find one.

(Ok, innuendo aside…)

Well, the Christmas/Yule break is over with and it’s time to get cracking.   If you were like me this holiday season, you were either placed in the position if needing to do a hard drive upgrade for someone else or you received a new hard drive of your own that warrants upgrading.  The CloneZilla site didn’t contain very clear instructions for what to do so I decided to write this howto documenting the process. In this howto, I will cover using the free application “CloneZilla” to perform a hard drive upgrade on a test installation of Windows XP from 4GB to a 10GB drive.

Foreword:

Of course, it’s Christmastime/Yule and I took pity on my girlfriend’s laptop which had two things going against it.  Firstly, it had vista and secondly it had a 80GB hard drive.  I’m not sure why Toshiba in their infinite wisdom only gave it a 80GB HD, but they did. Thankfully I had just completed an upgrade to another machine and had a 250GB hard drive to spare.  So I set out to upgrade her hard drive and fix at least one of the two reasons that her laptop was evil.

A lot of research turned up various solutions however none of them were very viable or were free.  Most of them required two hard drives in one computer and although her laptop did have the solder traces for the second SATA hard drive connector I’m not about to take a soldering iron to her laptop, she’d kill me.  So with that said and with my head still attached to my body, I kept searching.  I found a Live CD application called CloneZilla which had Cloning abilities much like a certain Symantic product but was free and didn’t require extensive configuration to get to work.  Unfortunately the instructions were not very clear at all and after spending a nailbiting hour trying to start the copy, I finally got it done and decided to document the process in case someone else got stuck in the same need that I did.

In this HOWTO, I will be upgrading a 4GB Virtual Disk in VMware with that of a 10GB Virtual disk.  Aside from the fact that it’s all virtualized, this is indeed a true upgrade and is exactly how you would do an upgrade for a real “physical” computer.

Prerequisites

You will need the following items for a successful transfer:

1. The CloneZilla CD available from http://clonezilla.org/ I’m using Clonezilla Live version 1.2.2-31.
2. A Windows computer that has a hard drive with free space greater than the size of the original disk you are upgrading.  (If you’re upgrading a 40GB HD, then this machine must have at least 40GB free on it.) This will be the WIndows Image Server.
3. The hard drive to upgrade
4. A working network where your machine to upgrade can browse the other windows machine’s file shares. (This is CRITICAL, as the other machine will store your disk image for the upgrade.)
5. A case of beer, rum, vodka, etc…

The “other machine” in #2 will be the image server.  This is where CloneCD will copy the files to that make up the disk image.  I will review how to set up a fileshare in Windows for this however any machine that does SMB filesharing can work.  There are other options available however SMB sharing works the easiest.

Process Overview

In this HOWTO, we will be upgrading a Windows XP Virtual Machine with a 4GB HD to a 10 GB HD.  Although I’m using VMware Server to capture the screenshots, this same method can be used to upgrade almost any home Windows computer.  I’m not sure if Windows 7 or if Windows Server 200* will work but in all theory they should too.  The process for upgrading will go something like this:

1. Examine the existing system to upgrade and get existing disk size
2. Configure Windows Image Server to accomodate images
3. Boot system to upgrade with Clonezilla, configure and start copy process
4. Swap out hard drives, reboot with Clonezilla and configure to start the restore process
5. Take whatever OS steps are needed to take advantage of new space. (OS Dependent)

Step 1:  Examine the existing system

This one’s easy.  Just fire up the existing machine and take a look at the hard drive.  In my example system, there’s only one hard drive.  All I did in this screenshot was open My Computer and Right Click on Local Disk C: then go to “Properties”:

Test system to upgrade

If a machine has more than one partition, you might need to go to Local Disk Managment (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc ) Here’s a screenshot of what our test system looks like through Disk managment:

System To Upgrade (Disk managment view)

Based on this information and according to disk managment, the minimum free space we need on our windows image server will be 4GB.  I would recommend an extra GB just in case. Now that we know how big the disk is and how much space we need, let’s get the image server configured.

Step 2:  Configuration of the Windows image server

This section covers how to set up the Windows Image server for the new image.  We will need to create a new directory for the image files, create a new user on the server and then assign that user with full permissions to that directory over the network.

Step 2a: Add the user

Right click on the My Computer Icon and go to Manage

"Manage" option in Rt Click menu, Easy way to get to users and Groups

This will bring up the Computer Managment Console.  Click on the “+” next to “Users and Groups”, then click on Users.  This will show you all of the currently installed users on the system and should resemble something like below:

Users view in Computer Managment

Right click on the right side of the window and click on “New User…”

Users and Groups Right Click Menu

In the “New User” dialog box that pops up, you want to set the following options:  Username = clone Description = CloneZilla user”, Password = clone  “User Cannot Change Password” and “Password Never Expires” should both be checked. “Account Is Disabled” and “User Must Change password at next login” should be cleared (unchecked).  See below for the reference screenshot:

New User Settings

Click “Create” and then click “Close”.  You can see the new user in the screenshot below highlighted in a red box.

Our new Clone user

Step 2B: Configure the file share and add the user to the share.

Now that we have the user in the system, we need to create the file share. In this case, I’m using a directory inside my “D:” drive to store the images.  MAKE SURE THAT WHERE YOU STORE YOUR IMAGES EXCEEDS THE CAPACITY OF THE DRIVE TO BE COPIED! In our case, we found that the system to upgrade is 4GB, so we need at least a 5GB disk to copy to.

Go ahead and locate a suitable place for your clone files.  In this case “D:” is completely blank except for the system files that Windows generates for partitions.  Right click and create a new folder called “clone”

My clone directory

Right click on the clone folder and go to “Sharing and Security”.  Fill out the form and name the share “Clone” however don’t click OK just yet.

clone directory sharing properties

We need to make sure that the “clone” user we created earlier has full access permissions to this directory.  Click on “Permissions” and add the “clone” user to the directory with full permissions.To do this, click “Add” on the Permissions screen, type in “clone”, type in “Check Names”, then hit OK.  In my case, it added “ZEUS\clone” which is still correct.  ZEUS is the name of the image server.

Adding clone to sharing permissions

Now, I have “clone” added to the permissions window and set the proper access permissions for that username as shown below.  Go ahead and click OK to the Permissions window and to the sharing properties window.

Permissions are set

If all works well, you should see a “waiter’s hand” appear below the directory icon.  This hand icon shows that this directory is shared across the network and is available for access be it read-only or read/write.  At this point, we are done with configuring the server.  We’ve added the “clone” user to the server, added a suitable “clone” directory for Clonezilla to store and retrieve the disk image’s files from and we have added proper permissions to the directory for the clone user.

Step 2c:  Test it out!

Go back to our initial machine to upgrade.  You should be able to find your image server by browsing “My Network Places”.  In my case, the image server was named “zeus” and showed up only after I clicked on “View Workgroup Computers” as shown in this screenshot.  You should get a similar password prompt when you try to access your image server:

Clone share testing

Login with the user credentials we created in 2A, (username and password of “clone”) and you should be presented with a directory listing like the one shown below:

directory listing

We have proven that our clone user works, but let’s test to make sure that we can write to it.  Double click on the clone share and try to create a text file.  (Right Click -> New -> Text File)  If it creates a “New Text File.txt” like shown below, this means that your permissions are correct and you’re good to go.  If you get any kind of read/write error, check your permissions on the image server.

Write test for clone user

If you’ve gotten this far, then congratulations, you’re ready to do the copy.  Go ahead and shut down the system you’re upgrading and get ready for the next step:

Step 3:  Boot system to upgrade with Clonezilla, configure and start copy process

Go ahead and boot the upgrade system with the CloneZilla CD. You will be presented with a boot menu like the one below. Go ahead and select the first menu option “Clonezilla live (Default Settings, VGA 1024×768)”:

Clonezilla Boot Menu

It will then take a bit and flash a lot of linux based stuff at you.  Finally you should be directed to choose a language.  The prompt should look like this now:

Choose a language menu

You will then get a prompt about keymaps.  When in doubt, just leave it alone.

Keymap prompt

More console stuff will flash past and then you’ll get the prompt you’ve been waiting for.  Unless you’re very very advanced, you will only use the “Start Clonezilla” menu option:

Start Clonezilla

Now we’re at a screen that is really confusing.  We want to work with the disks but we also want to work with images to create partitions.  In this instance, we’re going from the disk to an image file on our windows image server then back to disk again.  In our instance, we will need to use option 1, Device-Image.

Image/Disk option menu

In this screen, it’s asking where are we storing the image.  The answer is “samba/Network Neighborhood server” however if we needed to, we could use a local SSH server as well.

Image Server Type dialog

Now it’s asking how we connect to our network.  99% of the time this will be “dhcp” as you will know if you’re using static for anything.  If you have a Linksys router or similar router/firewall device, select DHCP.

network type dialog

After you get a successful IP address, CloneZilla needs to know what IP address your windows image server is.  In my example, the windows image server (zeus) is 192.168.0.5.

IP address dialog

Next, Clonezilla needs to ask for the Domain.  If you are not using a domain, then tab to “Cancel” and hit Enter.  I’m not using a domain here, so I just hit Cancel.  This is reserved for corporate networks that use a special server called a Domain Controller.

Domain prompt

Now Clonezilla needs to know the username of the account to connect to the server.  This will be the username and password you created in Step 2 above.  For our test, we put clone as the username

user prompt

Clonezilla prompts us for the location (the share name) of where to put the images.  In the steps above, we used “clone” as the share name.  This is the location we give to Clonezilla so it can store its images. Be sure to leave the leading / at the beginning of the directory name.

directory name for images

Next, it’s time for the password.  When prompted, type in the password.  Although this prompt looks different than the others, this is not a sign that something has gone wrong so relax.

password dialog

If all of the information you entered was correct, you will get a filesystem mount listing similar to what is shown here.  If something went wrong, you’ll get an error message outlining the possible error and a chance to re-enter the information.  If it doesn’t give you the option to reenter or something isn’t right, just hit the power switch..  In this screenshot, you can see that the last line starting with //192.168.0.5……  is our image server and that it is mounted correctly!

mount listing

Since we have successfully mounted our image storage as part of the liveCD’s filesystem, it’s time to start the copy.  You will be prompted for which mode to run Clonezilla in.  I recommend the “Beginner” method as it makes the entire copy easy.

Mode select dialog

Now we are prompted on what to do.  We will start off by selecting the first option “savedisk” as we want to save the existing disk to the image server.  We will use “restoredisk”  later.

Function Select

If you are wanting to manage multiple images, you have the option to name them with something more descriptive .  For now, I selected the default name which is in YYYY-MM-DD-HH format.

Image Name Select prompt

Now we tell CloneCD which hard drive to copy.  In most systems, there will only be one hard drive, however make sure you have the right one if not.  You can select and deselect by using the space bar to toggle the asterisk.  An asterisk in the brackets “[*]” means that the item is selected however the brackets alone “[ ]” means the item is deselected.

Drive Select prompt

One last word from Clonezilla before it starts copying.  If we wanted to run in console mode (which I will never do. ) we could do it all with one command.  Just hit enter to get past this prompt and start the copying.   This also tells us that it has successfully found and identified the drive we selected to copy and shut down Linux’s logical volume manager to allow direct access to the disk to copy.

Pre-copy ready

One last final confirmation that the information we have entered is correct.  Remember that making this image does NOT make any filesystem changes to the original hard drive and in fact, no changes to the original hard drive are ever made.  This is especially good in case you need to revert your upgrade, you can just swap out hard drives and you’re back where you started from.  If everything is correct in the yellow text, go ahead and type “Y” and hit enter.  This will start the copy process.

confirmation prompt

Finally, the copy begins.  Go ahead and grab a soda, watch a movie or something as this will take a considerable amount of time depending on the size of your hard drive.  In my test example transferring a 4GB hard drive, it took roughly 16 minutes to complete.  My girlfriend’s 80GB hard drive took several hours to copy.

Copy Started

At last, the file copy is complete and we are ready to exit Clonezilla:

Copy complete.

Hit “Enter” then hit 0 for power off.  After a few seconds, you will get the message “Please remove the disc, close the tray (if any) and press Enter to continue. Hit enter and your computer should now turn off.  Go ahead and perform the drive swap now. We’re halfway there!

Step 4:  Swap out hard drives, reboot with Clonezilla and configure to start the restore process

Before continuing, you want to make sure that your hard drive is recognized by the BIOS.  In my test setup, I have swapped out the original 4GB VMware disk with a 10GB Vmware disk and it is displayed in the BIOS here:

BIOS showing new hard drive

Just like before, we will use the same options to create the disk image to restore the disk image.    Use all of the instructions in step 2 all the way until you get to the Mode screen shown below.  Instead of selecting “savedisk” like we did at the last screen, we want to use “restoredisk” instead.

Select Mode dialog, revisited

Now we select the image to restore to disk. Since we only have one image listed, this is the one we use.

Select Image dialog

Once we have selected a viable image, now we are prompted to select the target device.  Again, it’s the only hard drive, so it’s the device we want:

Select Target dialog

Just like before, it will tell us that we can rerun this restore using a single command from command mode:

clone command line

This time, the warning needs to be read.  This is just prior to performing any filesystem changes to the new hard drive.   If you are absolutely sure, go ahead and answer “y” to start the restore process:

restore confirmation text

One last time, it asks to make sure you are sure about your restore decision.  If everything is correct, answer “Y”.

Final restore prompt

A good bit of text will go across the screen and you will ultimately end up at a partclone screen like the one below.  The text that you saw earlier is the partition application creating the destination partition for the image.  Once created, partclone takes over and starts restoring the data from the image. Again, grab another drink, (I’ve got a margarita) and wait a few hours for the image to restore.

Partition restore in progress

Once the restore process completes, you will be prompted to power off.  Hit Enter, select option 1 and remove the CD from the CDROM tray when prompted.

restore completed

Once the system reboots, it should automatically start Windows.  If it does, you’re ready to go to the last step!

Step 5: Take whatever OS steps are needed to take advantage of new space. (OS Dependent)

Now these steps depend on which OS you’re using. At this point, we have made an image of the old drive, saved that image to another server and restored it to a new blank drive that is larger than the original image.  As shown earlier, we have a 10GB disk in our machine to upgrade and we have just restored our 4GB image to it. We have successfully booted windows however our disk properties show that the disk image is still 4GB.  (Ignore the disk space used, as I was shutting down the disk image it decided to install 50 windows updates…)

Disk space still the same?

Here is the same shot of the disk managment window after the upgrade/restore.  You can see that it is a 10GB drive, but is still a 4GB partition.

disk managment

Attention Vista Users!!: If you are running Windows Vista, you can use Disk Managment to expand the disk size.  All you have to do is right click on the C: partition shown above then go to “Expand Disk”.  This will walk you through the process for expanding the disk to take up the entire space of your new drive.  I’ll add new instructions to this as soon as my girlfriend lets me use her laptop again.

For those of you not running Vista, keep reading. At this point, we have validated that our restored image works properly.  Now all we need to do is resize the partition to take up the entire disk.  Thankfully clonezilla has a solution for that.  Reboot using the CloneZilla CD. Answer the same questions regarding keymap like you did before except instead of starting clonezilla, we want to enter the Clonezilla shell.

Go to Clonezilla shell

You will get dropped to a text prompt that presents you with several options.  You will want to select option 2, “Enter Command Line Prompt”.  Once done, you will be at a user@debian prompt as shown here:

command prompt

We are going to use the utility “ntfsresize” in order to increase the size of the partition that we restored to the new disk but first we need more information.  Before we get started, run the command “su -” to get to the “root” user. This will allow us to modify the drive’s layout.  Then we will use “fdisk” to get the disk’s full size.  I ran the command “fdisk -l /dev/hda” to get the drive size:

fdisk disk size

This is important as we are going to delete the partition, then recreate the partition.  First off let’s run “fdisk /dev/hda” and use “p” to get the partition size.  In this screen, we see that the partition starts at 1 and ends at 521.  We want it to extend to the rest of the disk.  We’ll start off by using “d” to delete the partition, (FDISK will assume partition 1) and then create a New partition using the defaults as shown below (Use the commands “N” for New partition, “P” for primary partition, and give it partition number 1).  Once we have created the new partition, we will need to set the “System” back to HPFS/NTFS otherwise NTFSresize won’t work properly.  Below is the FDISK responses to these commands we’ve used so far.

FDISK resizing

Now that we’ve create the new partition, we have to reset it’s type.  Use the “t” command and set it to ID of 7 (HPFS/NTFS) and then use “a” to toggle it’s bootable state.  We want to be able to boot into Windows after all.  Use the “w” command to write the partition data to the hard drive and exit.  Now that we have reset the partition size, we can use NTFSResize to expand the NTFS data.  Cross your fingers and run “ntfsresize /dev/hda” and it should produce output like what is shown here.  When run with no additional parameters, NTFSResize should automatically find the beginning and the end of the partition and expand the existing NTFS data to take the entire drive as shown:

NTFSResize

With our newly resized partition we should be able to reboot and get into our Windows environment.  To do that, just type “reboot” and remove the CD when prompted.  Note: The above screenshot missed me using the “a” and “w” commands to toggle bootable status.  Here’s what it looks like:

Bootable flag now set, sorry guys.

Ok, so now that I have fixed my grievous error, it’s time to reboot.  With any luck, your computer will boot Windows and go staight into a chkdsk environment.  THIS IS OK!, this means that Windows sees the new partition size and that it needs to run a consistency check.  DO NOT PANIC!!!  Let the consistency check run, then it will reboot your computer again.  After it boots for the second time, it might prompt to restart because it found new hardware (the new HD).  This is OK as well.  Let the windows installation reboot.  Once it has completed rebooting for the third time,  get your disk properties by right clicking on C: drive and going to Properties.  As shown below, we have successfully resized our partition to take up the entire drive and are now sitting at 10GB (well 9.99GB according to windows.):

Windows XP's new filesize

Here is a screenshot from Windows XP’s Disk managment to show that we used the entire drive:

Disk managment with new partition sizes

At this point, we have successfully finished the migration!  Here’s a rundown of what all we did in this step:

1. We restored the partition to the new drive
2. We verified that the restore worked properly when booted into, e.g windows booted properly and without errors.
3. We then deleted the existing partition, recreated a new partition and then set the partition type and bootable flag using Linux’s FDISK on the Clonezilla CD.
4. We used NTFSResize to expand the NTFS data to take up the entire new resized partition.
5. We then booted into Windows and let it do a filesystem check
6. When Windows was restarted again, we validated through Properties and “Disk Management” that the new disk was used fully.

This was the most complex part of the migration as CloneZilla only goes about 90% of the way to migrating to a new, larger hard drive.  I hope that this howto provides the last 10% that you are looking for.  With this howto and a copy of CloneZilla, you can then upgrade almost ANY hard drive that Linux supports and can even go from IDE to SATA or SATA to IDE if need be.

Afterword:

I sincerely hope that this helps someone out there trying to make sense of a hard drive upgrade.  I know that I learned a lot about partitions and filesystem structures by attempting an upgrade of my girlfriend’s laptop and this Windows XP installation.  I know that working with partitions is a scary thing as you could potentially lose data but keep in mind that your “original” hard drive still has all the original data on it, as does the image that was stored on the windows image server.

The items in this howto can potentially be a life saver especially if you have a family member that keeps messing their computer up.  You could create an image after you have performed all needed windows updates and software installations and then retain it for if something goes wrong.  Rather than having to manually do an OS reload, you can run though this HOWTO in an hour and have their system up and running again, fully patched and ready to go.

I hope that you had a great Christmas/Yule  with your family and look forward to keep going strong in 2010.  As always, thank you for your continued patronage, you are always welcome here at YourWarrantyIsVoid.com!

FIRESTORM_v1

Look for a new post within the next few days that might help with any yuletide hard drive upgrades.

A review of my stats shows that I’ve been getting increasing traffic to my site from mobile users with iPhones and Android based phones at the top of the list.  I know the site’s a bit slow on mobile devices so I went ahead and uploaded a new theme called WPTouch for those of you on the go that still like to drop by.  All major functions of the site are available through WPTouch so you can still comment and view all the information here, it’s just now in a considerably faster mobile-friendly format.  If you have any issues, please let me know in the comments so I can address them.

Well here’s the seccond post as promised.  These posts should also proves that you don’t have to know sick computer skills or mad hardware to be able to pull off some bad ass hacks. In this post, we will address the Nerf Nitefinder and it’s so-called light sight.  While the verbage does get around the expected/anticipated lack of a good lasersight, this post will walk you through adding a real laser sight to your Nitefinder.  Read on for more details along with lots of pictures.

Foreword:

During Xmas/Yule/whatever, I was given the lovely gift of a Nerf Nitefinder handgun with a touted light sight. Upon final inspection however I was dismayed as was the person that bought it that the device did not contain a real laser sight as evidenced by all the commercials on TV. Not to be let down by a mere exaggeration on Nerf’s part, I set out to create a lasersight for this not so lasersighted weapon of nerf destruction.

While I was researching this topic, I came across many many websites about Nerf modding, but everyone’s solution seemed to be more of writing off the nerf sight and duct taping a keychain laser pen to it. If I was going to do something, I was going to do it right damnit, and Duct tape wasn’t going to be the solution. After a few Nerf wars, I also had become weary of having to recalibrate the optics because a frenzied firefight resulted in a slight bump to one of the pieces of plastic that jutted from the sides of the optics package at the end of the gun.

So here it is, the fruits of my hard labor, and my beer, the instructions necessary to install a lasersight in the Nerf Nitefinder.

Required Tools and Parts:

• Nerf Nitefinder
• Some common 2 battery laser pen
• Note: The 2 battery part is CRUCIAL, a 3 battery pointer won’t work as well.
• A sacrifical NERF dart.
• A soldering iron with solder
• Small tip Philips screwdriver (+)
• Knife

Total Cost: ~$20.00, depending on cost of laser pointer.

Note: The reason why a 2 battery laser is important is because the Nitefinder itself only has two batteries, equalling about 3.0vDC. Most laser pens take 3 or more batteries which is 4.5vDC or more (each cell is typically 1.5v). Since I didn’t feel like carving out a battery holder, the 2 battery laser just made sense.

Pre-Analysis:

For those of you considering, this is what the light sight looked like before the hack was completed.

This image was taken with all the lights in the room off, the gun about 2 feet away from the wall and the camera set to nite mode. The camera didn’t capture the “halo effect” that made the dot rather distracting. The dot wasn’t really a dot either, it was more of a funky “U” shape, which is explained later. There’s definately room for improvement here.

Phase 1: Prep the gun.

Start off by removing all the screws, the battery cover and the batteries from the gun. It will look something like this:
Of particular note is the circuit board attached to the red and black leads. This is the source of the “light”. The picture below shows us that it is nothing special, just a high intensity red LED and a resistor.

Go ahead and unscrew the two black screws holding the black tube down. This is where we will be doing most of our work.

The entire sight module comes out. It consists of the aforementioned light board, the black tube and the housing that protects the optics package. Remove the light board from the end of the black tube.

This picture shows one of the two screws necessary for attaching the optics package to the sight. Remove both screws and carefully use your knife to scrape away the glue holding the two parts together. Set aside the tube, optics package and the gun for now.

Phase 2: Rip the pointer apart.

A special note: Not all laser pointers are created equal. Some modules like this one were press-formed together, while others might have a retaining nut or some other screw-in device. It is especially important to pay attention to detail as there is a piece on most laser diodes that you do not want to unscrew and that’s the focusing element of the laser itself. This particular pointer was press-formed together, which made it an easy harvest. I would avoid using the lasers that multiple tips, as this is an almost sure fire screw-on situation that might just leave you screwed in a bad way.

Start by removing the batteries, Take special note of which end is positive, typically it’s the end that you unscrew to get to the batteries. Polarity matters later on.

With the knife, locate the seam between the head of the laser pointer and the body. and press hard to start seperating the two pieces.

After you get it scored enough, or if you feel the head loosening, gently pry up using the knife blade or a screwdriver. You will end up with something like this.

The brass cylinder is the actual laser diode we came for. This particular model is press-formed together and is held together by a star shaped collar. This collar was easily moved by a very fine screwdriver.

Before you attempt to extract the laser, look inside the tube and see what you might need to do about getting that switch out of the way. This laser had a rubberized switch so I didn’t have an issue but you might. If necessary you can destroy the switch as we will not use it, but MAKE SURE IT’S THE SWITCH AND NOT A CAPACITOR. In the picture below, the switch is the little white boxin the lower right hand quadrant. The other white pieces are parts of a plastic sabot made to hold the board in place.

After successful extraction, you will have something like this.

Now that we have the circuit out, it’s time to find out where we’re going to solder. Remember earlier when I said pay attention to the batteries? This is why: In most device, the chassis is ground and the switched power is hot or positive. If the batteries plus sides were all pointed to the spring, then the pointer has a cold chassis, meaning that it is always connected to negative. If the batteries plus sides were all facing the unscrew cap for the battery compartment, then it has a hot chassis. This is one of those your mileage may vary things. Mine had a hot chassis, which means that the switch was controlling the negative or ground side of the batteries. An examination of my circuit board showed me the pads for the ground quite easily. Remember, that the white box is a switch and we will remove it soon.

This is the critical part. Since my laser pointer is hot chassis, that means that the circuit is getting its power from another contact. The only contact that is evident is the brass casing of the laser diode itself! Since this laser diode has three contacts, it is extremely important to locate the contact that does not have a ring around it and that you can see solid metal all around. This is the casing lead and where we will be attaching our positive lead. Alternatively, if you see a lead labled Vdd like this circuit board does, that is the location of the positive connection. Vdd=power, GND=negative or ground.

Now it’s time to fire up that soldering iron. Detach the red and black leads from the light board on the gun, set aside the circuit board. On the laser pointer, remove the switch and the spring end.

Looking at the solder traces (the bright green lines) you can tell where the switch was. You will want to attach the black lead to the pad that does not go to the spring. This bypasses the switch and leaves it always on. (Remember: the trigger switch will control the power to the laser.)

If you still have the shroud and the star shaped retainer, remove them now. They are not needed and can be discarded. After soldering, it is a good idea to check that the diode still works and that we haven’t shorted something. Carefully connect the two AA batteries and press the trigger button. The Laser should light.

Now that’s all said and done, we have a functioning laser diode, now it’s time to mount it in the tube. Grab your sacrifical nerf dart and set it alongside the black tube with the laser diode circut. You will want at least a 1/2 inch.

Cut the dart enough so that there is no foam over the end of the brass laser diode and so that there is enough foam to cover the circuit board.

Next, slit the cut piece lengthwise and place the laser assembly inside.

Grab the optics package and set it on the table, screws side up.

Remove all three screws, and open up the optics package.

Remove the lens, and the two orange clips. Discard these, we don’t need them and they distort the laser light. Reassemble the optics package and go to the next section.

Phase 3: Reassembling the sight

This is going to be almost as challenging as getting the laser diode out. You will need to take the foam wrapped laser assembly and squeeze, shove and stick it in the small end of the tube. Make especially sure that there the foam stays covering the brass diode and that you don’t destroy the circuit board. The end result will be something like this.

Looking down the tube, we will see the laser diode still there with nothing protruding over the little hole in the brass. This is actually the laser’s aperture and any blockage will cause the dot that the laser projects to look weird.

Reattach the optics package to the barrel and screw the barrel to the gun. You may need to trim the foam in order to get the gun halves to get back together.

Phase 4: Now, about the firing distance

The following image is an exploded view of the assembly at the top of the gun. This is held in place by two screws and is easily removed. The parts in order from left to right are:pressure chamber, spring, regulator, stabilizer tip, barrel. For max effectiveness, remove the spring and the regulator. (items 2,3)

Reassemble the barrel like shown and reattach to the gun. Make sure that all springs are in their proper place, less the regulator spring.

Phase 5: Calibration

Now that both mods are in their final stages of being complete, you need to calibrate the gun. Put the other half of the gun on, but do not use any screws just yet. This will be a process of fire and adjust over and over again until you are satisfied. There are no pictures for this phase, just remember that if your gun shoots to the right of the laser dot,wiggle the laser to the left. If it shoots low, wiggle it down. After a few shots, you’ll have it zeroed in and working fairly well.

The reason why I didn’t calibrate right after we put the sight back on was because of the firing distance mod. If you had calibrated and then performed the mod, the calibration would be no good because of the considerable difference between the air pressure hitting the bullet pre and post calibration.

Phase 6: Give the cats a new reason to hate you.

If all is well, the gun is sighted in and working, go ahead and close it up! You’re done.

See, now that’s a real lasersight!  Happy Nerfing!!

FIRESTORM_v1

Well, I will admit that I’ve been slacking a lot.  There are posts that need to be posted, and I’ve been extremely busy at work.  So, to make up for it, today’s going to be a two-post day!.    In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to modify the Nerf Maverick chamber to work properly like a real revolver.  Read on for a complete step-by-step guide to this basic Nerf mod.

Foreword:

I recently got my hands on the new Maverick which is Nerf’s response to the demand for a revolver-type handgun for nerf fanatics. The drawback is while they could have gone all the way with their design they did not pay enough attention to one critical issue: loading time. The Nerf Maverick is a pain to load because you have to pop out the chambers as with a standard revolver but  the Maverick’s chambers only come out about an inch, giving you visibility to put in about 2 darts without needing to rotate the chamber.   My hack will give you visibility to 4 of the 6 chambers in the gun.

This gun shoots remarkably well given the really short pneumatic piston in comparison to the other guns I have.  This leads me to wonder why the other ones suck as far as range is concerned, but that will have to wait for another day and another hack.

Required Tools and Parts:

Total Cost: ~$8.99 (there are no parts required.)

Pre-Analysis

The Nerf Maverick’s chambers only come about an inch as shown below. I think we could do better.

Disassembly

The disassembly starts off with removal of the grey slide at the top of the gun. Lay the gun on the table with the chambers pointing to the right, remove the three screws and gently remove the half of the slide facing you. Set it aside.

Now you are safe to remove the rest of the screws. When I came across this step, I had to use the knife to gently seperate the two halves. You will want to keep that other half of the slide against the other half of the plastic frame as there is a small spring that is connected to the silver pin that makes up the slide. This is not the end of the world if you manage to seperate it, but you will need to use the paper clip to re-string it if it flies off. Thankfully the other end is attached to the frame by a screw.

Now that you have the gun opened, you will need to carefully remove the chambers. This can be done, but it will take a bit of finesse. Below is the front of the chamber assembly.

This is the back of the revolver. The hexagonal shape matches with the orange hexagon advancer in the body of the gun.

This is the mating orange advancer and the pneumatic piston for firing the darts.

This picture shows the chamber in the gun, with the chamber in place for firing. By messing around with it a bit, we can see the plastic that needs to be removed.

With the chamber seperated, take the red sharpie and highlight the rounded plastic edge to remove.

Take the sharpie and highlight the little square next to the advancer and the piston.

Take your knife and remove the two pieces of plastic. Be warned that the plastic is tough, so don’t cut yourself. You want to get it as smooth as possible so that way it doesn’t foul up the chamber’s movements. This is a shot of the chamber with the plastic removed.

And another shot of the plastic removed next to the advancer.

Reassemble the gun, and revel in the fact that your Nerf revolver now works closer to a real revolver!

Conclusion

While I’m not quite sure why Nerf didn’t implement this in their original design, it wasn’t exactly rocket surgery to make it happen.  I think that this makes the Maverick this much more useful as when you’re in a firefight with the rest of the members of the household, the last thing you have time to do is reload.

Happy Nerfing, everyone!

FIRESTORM_v1

BIG MONSTEROUS LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This information is provided as anecdotal as-is information. It is recommended when working with electronic components to replace the defective component with a component of the same type, model and rating.  Battery backups are no exception to this rule and as such we recommend that you follow the exact ratings as specified on your UPS, even if they differ from the information on this site.  When in doubt, go with a 1-to-1 replacement, or better yet, purchase a replacement battery pack from APC directly.  By following the steps in this guide, you indicate that you can not sue firestorm_v1 or those of us at YourWarrantyIsVoid.Com if you burn your eyebrows off or cause damage to loved ones or property, etc..

Now that the legalese is done with, let’s talk about this a bit.

Foreward:

Ever since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the computer age, mankind has been faced with one monsterous problem:  How to keep the computer running when the power goes out.  Even in the 21st century, we are still not immune to the power failures, surges and brownout/blackouts that plague our planet’s power grid.  The solution was to use uninterruptable power supplies (UPSes) also commonly called “battery backups” to keep the juice flowing, even though the power from the electric company had ceased.  The idea was that power would be stored in batteries and would be used through specialized circuitry to recreate the line voltage that our beloved machines needed to operate.  The idea was a grand saviour to the information age  and since then have saved countless months of uptime loss, unavailability and other such lack of availability.

However, with every great solution is a thorn in its side.  In our case with the batttery backups, the thorn is the batteries.  Every now and then, through regular use and standby charging, it becomes necessary to change them out.  Usually this cost is a lot less than just buying another battery backup and is a preferred method to keeping old but still usable UPSes out of the trash can. In my specific case, I have an APC Battery Back-UPS XS 1500 and it has served me extremely well through the years.  Unfortunately an extended power failure had knocked it and the addon battery pack, BR24BP out of comission and had rendered the UPS useless.

Initial examination:

Pior to just ripping the face place off of anything, even if it pisses me off, I perform a good bit of research using Google and Yahoo to attempt to find disassembly instructions for something.  In the case of the battery backup’s battery pack, I had nothing but a bunch of forum posts with people looking for the same details.  Unfortunately no solution was to be had so I started investigating on my own and was ultimately successful.  This writeup is a testament to those findings and a howto for anyone that was as lost as I was with trying to find a way in.

BR24BP side vew

This is a shot of the BR24BP in all it’s glory.  Despite it’s innocent looking exterior, it’s a mofo to get into.  With no visible way of getting in, I set out with my metal screwdrivers and started prying like a madman.  Eventually, I was able to get the white front cover off and the secret to this beast was unlocked.

Front cover finally off

(The grey piece on the back was held together much in the same fashion, pardon editor’s fault for the back showing ajar. )  In this shot, we learn something important.  The front is not held on by any fancy method, locking mechanism or other trickery.  It is held to the front of the battery backup by means of a pair of snaps.  One at the top of the cover pointing down, and one at the bottom cover pointing up.  It would be almost trivial to modify the case so that you could get into the battery box at some point again to do a second swap out fo the batteries.

Back of front cover

Here is a shot of the front cover.  The back cover is identical to this except it is grey and has a hole for the power cable to go through.  It could be theorized that the ends of the snaps are sliced to prevent from someone gaining access to the innards of the battery box.  It could also be theorized that a quick session with a Dremel could prodice a hole with which to pry up on the snaps to gain access in the future without having to pry the case open like your life depended on it.

Back cover pried off

This is a shot of the rear cover after being pried off.  The thin holes at the top and the bottom are the holes for the snaps.  Once finally freed of both the front and the rear faceplates, we are left with the battery box and six phillips screws from victory.

battery pack sans front/back covers

In this shot, we can finally remove the only screws in this battery pack’s setup and pull off the cover to reveal the batteries inside.  One special note about the covers.  They are omni-directional (Editor’s note: omni-sidal seemed to not be a word. ) meaning that the “left” side could easily be the “right side”.  The only thing that determined direction was that the indentation for the pedestal foot was at the bottom (pointed towards you if on a table) and that the cord came out of the “back”.  Aside from that, it was anyone’s game.

Finally unboxed

(I apologize for the blurriness of the full-size picture, just use the thumbnail for general positioning data.)  Behold, here is the batteries in all its glory.  Keep in mind that my top two batteries are “poofy” and need to be replaced.  The bottom ones, are not poofy so will get taken to a battery place to get charged and tested.

Battery type and model #

Before we get into wiring diagrams and all that nonsense, please make sure you use the right battery.  These are 12 volt,  3.4A batteries.  CSB# HR-1234W-F2 and are the Sealed Lead Acid (SLA) type.  IT IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU USE THE SAME TYPE AND RATINGS OF BATTERIES IN YOUR UPS.  EXTENDING YOUR UPS MAY GIVE YOU ADDITIONAL UPTIME BUT WILL CAUSE YOUR ADDITIONAL UPTIME TO FAIL AS THE CHARGER CIRCUIT CAN NOT HANDLE THE EXTENDED CAPACITY! (Can I say this enough?) If you are in doubt about whether or not you have the right battery, take one from the pack to an Interstate Batteries or a Batteries Plus and get four just like it.  Bring them home and wire up as covered below.

Wiring it all up:

The interesting thing about this pack is that despite the link that I found for APC, this is actually a 24VDC system, not a 12VDC system as advertised. Granted, the batteries themselves are 12VDC, but they are hooked into a 12×2x2 array meaning that the batteries are connected in series (to make 24VDC) and then are connected in parallel to another pair connected in series.  The entire thing ends up being a 2x 24v array as shown in our next picture:

Battery Hookup

Ok, so let’s review this hookup.  The umbilical cord that goes to the main BackUPS is in my hand.  For now, ignore the little yellow wire.  It has nothing to do with our hookup at the moment.  Clockwise from top left, we have the UL (upper left) battery, UR (Upper Right) battery, LR (Lower Right) and LL (Lower Left) batteries.  The umbilical has two positives and two negative leads on it. WHEN HOOKING UP BATTERIES, YOU MUST OBEY THIS IMPORTANT RULE: AT NO TIME WILL THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE OF THE UMBILICAL BE ON THE SAME BATTERY!!! THIS WILL CAUSE AN EXPLOSION AS THE 24V BATTERIES TRY TO (AND SUCCEED) OVER CHARGE THE SINGLE 12V BATTERY! That being said, connect one of the RED wires to the positive terminal on two batteries and connect the BLACK wires to the other two batteries’ negative terminals.  At this point, all four batteries should be connected with one connection from the umbilical.  Connect the BLUE wires from the positive battery’s NEGATIVE terminal to the negative battery’s POSITIVE terminal.   In essence, you have created two 24 volt battery packs made of UL and UR, and LL and LR respectively.

Little Yellow Wire

Now, back to this little yellow wire (and the 80A fuze)  This wire acts as a “Sense” for the battery backup to determine the battery pack’s overall health. The wire has a resistor shrinkwrapped inline with it and should not be tampered with.  Doing so may adversely affect the UPS’s operation.

Afterthoughts:

It’s been fun dissecting this battery pack however it was hard as hell initially.  APC does not make it easy to pry open the front/back of their UPS battery packs.  I’m hoping that someone aside from myself finds this information useful as it was not easy obtaining it.  If you have any information on where to get good replacement batteries, or you wish to share your experience, feel free to fire back at me in the comments section.

Until the next post, happy hacking!

FIRESTORM_v1

UPDATE!!! 11/10/09

Reader “Steevo” wrote in to catch me on a critical error in regards to this resistor.  M initial calculations were incorrect, the value of this resistor is not 20K ohm, but rather 20 ohm, Please make sure you use the correct resistor if you ever need to replace it.

The secret is revealed!

UPDATE: More details about the power connector from the BBU power pack to the UPS

After requests for information in regards to the power pack’s connector, I realized that I had made a serious oversight.  I had not documented the power connector that connects the battery pack to the UPS body.  With this in mind, I took some more pictures of the connector:

Power connector

The power connector has four pins holding the strain relief on.  After getting the pieces pried apart, the end connector slides off and you can then see the wiring on the inside.  Barring that, I went ahead and was able to extract the outside case off of the three spade connectors as shown here. In order to extract the three spade connectors, you will need to take a long sharp screwdriver and pry the plastic clips holding the spade connectors down.

connector endcap

Here’s the connector with the spades having been successfully extracted:

successful extraction

Keep in mind that the plug orientation is not certain as I’ve reinstalled the UPS and it’s buried under the desk.  The red mark on the connector jacket is there for orientation purposes, but interfacing with the UPS may require that the black wire is on the left, and the yellow wire is on the right.

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