• New Laser Cutter! We now have our own 60 Watt Universal Laser. It’s huge and awesome.
• Land Rover Discovery! We live in the mountains now. I wanted a spare 4×4. The prince of darkness is alive and well.
• Moar reloading. Not a traditional geek activity, but oh it can be.

This is my latest hardware project: MotoComp. It’s based on some work by [Bill2009] but I’ve been extending and reworking the code quite a bit. I installed gauges from a 2004ish Honda CBR 600 on my 1993 CBR 600 F2. Typically, this conversion uses a $125 product called “Speedohealer” to adjust the output of a retro-fitted speed pickup to make the speed output accurate.

My goal is to replicate the functionality of a Speedohealer (which is a very mature product, and worth the price if you need it) and add some features while I’m at it.

I’m working on for my F2. As you can see, the display will show MPH, Voltage, Ambient air temp and the current gear. The hardware is an Arduino, protoshield, DS1820 temp sensor, a transistor to handle output to the speedometer, some voltage dividers and a cap or two for filtering signals.

Gear is calculated based on the ratio of the engine RPM to wheel RPM.
MPH is calculated based on tire diameter and wheel RPM.
Temp is measured using a one-wire temperature sensor. I added it because I had the hardware sitting around.
Voltage is directly measured on the bike. Given the history of R/R/Stator issues, I find having the voltage on a display to be really, really handy.

Right now I’ve got the system mostly working, I’m just working on dialing in the speed sensor/healer functions. The cost to build one like this is about $50 for prototype parts, I’ll likely reduce the cost one I have a production design worked up.

I’ve been meaning to get going on some electronics projects for a while, and I’m about to pull the trigger on this one. A while back I posted a note about this project, and now I’ve got a new PCB coming out soon. This was a wired prototype for my bluetooth serial board. It’s damn hard to solder this stuff! Those are single strands from some speaker wire I pulled apart – and they worked.

This is the new board for the Bluetooth serial interface. It should be a handy breakout for various projects. I decided against a shield, simply because it would be excessive for the few pins needed to make this work. I’ll probably be assembling these on demand, but I’ll be happy to sell bare boards to those that want to face surface mount.

More later once the new board is past pre-production testing.

It turns out that it’s actually a XS850 Special – as indicated from the model number on the engine plate. There’s a great write up on those bikes here. The 80 model featured some performance killing carbs, a smaller rear tire and gearing to match. I’m not a fan of the handlebars – they just don’t quite do it for me.

I ran the transmission through its gears using the foot starter and everything meshed rather nicely, so it’s just a matter of getting the head back from the machine shop with the new (unbent) valves. On the EFI front, I’ve decided that the Yamaha throttle bodies will be a pain, so I’m thinking of using a set of bodies off a newer Triumph triple.

With luck, it might be running before winter, otherwise it’ll be ready to rock next spring.

I used to sport a pretty decent Tenma soldering station, but it moved on and I’ve been settling for lesser irons since. I finally upped my game a bit with a new dual purpose soldering station: the Aoyue 968 SMD rework station. Ian put together a pretty decent review of his on Hack-A-Day (one of my successors – who’s doing a fine job by the way) I ordered mine up from Amazon – you can support my work/site/kids by using this link and ordering if you want one.

I gave the rework pencil a workout with some normal solder and a un-cleaned pc board. It worked like a champ. The temperature controller works very nicely, and takes some time to cool things off when you shut it down to prevent damage to the heating element in the pencil.

I managed to slice my finger on the fume collector mounted to the soldering iron – I’ll put a bit of effort into cleaning up the sharp edge but it wasn’t a big deal. It could pose a problem during tip changes.

The station itself is large – I mean pretty big, but it fits nicely on top of my 7633 oscilloscope ( which is pretty huge) so it doesn’t bother me. If you’re short on space, you might consider sticking with a pencil iron that stores in a tool box, this is a workbench size too.

Mad scientist factor: mid to awesome. The blue lit air flow indicator is great. Make sure you pull the pump retention screw on the bottom or you’ll be in for some serious noise. All in all a great tool, but the digital temp indicator is only for the reflow side – not the soldering iron. If you depend on decent temp feedback on your iron, you should consider picking up a dedicated temperature controlled soldering iron.

If you can name the chip, I’ll send you one of my laser cut RGB keypad bezels – free in the US, or for the cost of postage if you live elsewhere on the globe. Comment away!  (only the first correct guess wins it) Oh, if you just want a bezel, you can buy them from SparkFun Electronics.