Saturday, January 26, 2008

Wind Power

The bus is back in front of Rubulad again - there is a party tonight, hopefully no one will puke on bus. I think I might get some free decorations though! We'll see tomorrow.

The wind turbine is back up. I've getting a lot of comments on it - all positive. Well, except a group of guys who asked me if the bus flew backwards because the wind was blowing from behind the bus.

I like that the bus offers such a wide variety of subjects for teaching - not only biology, but physics and chemistry of solar and wind power collection into a battery bank. Then there is the whole automotive side of things, the house electricity setup, the veggie oil system... lots of different things for different interests.

This is a picture of one new and one old limit switch for the transmission air shifter system. These switches tell the electrical system that the transmission has fully engaged into either the forward or the reverse gear before shifting the engine out of neutral. The old one was not working right - when the little button is pressed in by the transmission shifter piston when you shift into reverse, the two terminals you see on the left (new) switch should be electrically connected - this wasn't happening. The transmission is now happy with a new switch in place.

In the process of diagnosing the problem with the limit switches, I got very familiar with the engine electrical junction box. This box has close to 100 terminals, with wires coming from the driver's controls at the front of the bus and from the various engine electrical systems, including the air piston controls and the air piston limit switches. If you have the diagram of what all these terminals are for, you can systematically go through the terminals that you suspect and check them for short circuits and other unruly behavior. While it can be tedious, it is also really fun to be in the 'brain' of the bus. My buses brain is not too big or complicated - new buses have microcircuits that control all of this stuff, and you need to plugin with a computer to do these types of diagnostics.

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