Friday, October 19, 2007

Serial Port and Hood Pin

Today was a bit slow. I received some AMP pins in the mail that fit the special connectors on the DMOC445 controller. To make the serial port more robust, I crimped the pins onto the ends of the 16-gauge wires and inserted them into the 8-position connector that came with the DMOC.


Here's the finished connector. It's far more reliable than the simple sockets I had soldered to the end of the cable. See this post for the prior implementation.


I also took a little time to install the hood pin that I got from Schucks yesterday. Drilling a rectangular hold through the engine compartment lid was very tricky. I covered up most of the rough edges with the plate that comes with the hood pin. At least it's a lot nicer than the block of wood I was using before.

Just for grins, I fitted one of the hair dryers to the passenger side heating duct and plugged into the wall outlet to see how well it would heat the car. It's rather loud, but produces a light stream of warm air. I wouldn't use this to fully heat the car, but it'll probably make a decent defroster.

5 comments:

Ross Cunniff said...

Interesting that you chose to mount it 90 degrees from how the instructions suggest. What considerations prompted this?

And, it sounds like you only installed one pin?

TimK said...

Hi Ross, I guess I didn't bother to look at the instructions when I installed the pin. I only installed one pin because the small block of wood on one side worked fine and I typically have to open the compartment many times to show the rear battery box to people. Having two pins just takes longer. I suppose I'll install the second pin if the lid starts bouncing around a bunch.

As far as the orientation, I find it easier to push and pull the pin towards and away from me instead of left to right. Also, the hood pin with the eye in it has much less interference with the ABS plastic gutter that I installed previously.

In reality, I didn't read the instructions and just installed it using my gut feel at the time and it ended up that way. :)

Cheers, Tim

Ross Cunniff said...

Oh, yes your gutter - I like that by the way - makes sense.

Ross Cunniff said...

Tim, where did you source your female AMP pins? I'd like to get a few to tap into some more of the I/Os for the controller...

TimK said...

Hi Ross,

I got my female pins from Mouser Electronics. The AMPSEAL part number is 770854-3. The mouser.com part number is: 571-7708543

Cheers,
Tim