Bright Lights and Grey Skies

The electronic flasher came today from Amazon. To install it, I just needed to make three jumpers with male and female spade lugs at each end. These were inserted into the plug on the wiring harness and matched up with the appropriate terminals on the flasher unit. It works great. I then installed the LED bulbs in the front turn signals. I like this one particularly since it has the projector lens on the front making for a very bright turn indicator. After installing them, I figured that I may as well order them for the rear turn signals as well. The flasher works as advertised and maintained the same flashing rate even with the lower amperage LED bulbs.

Since they are LED, I now have the option of connecting them to the Skene Design Photon Blaster electronic module. One cut wire and a splice later, I had the left turn signal connected and tested. The left signal now has that distinctive flicker and really is pretty visible. The right turn signal is a bit more challenging as there is a single wire from the headlight shell, where all of the wiring is located, to the sidecar and is for the front and rear right turn signals. amber parking lights on the rear are not permitted so I will need to run a new wire for just the right-front turn signal. I have not started this task yet.

Update - I ran the wire from the sidecar front turn signal and connected it up to the Skene module. It is a lot brighter than the parking light on the sidecar and the flicker really makes it easy to see.

And, the solar is working. I set the charge controller to do an equalization charge so anytime the array voltage (red line on the first graph) is high enough, the controller will push the battery up to whatever is needed according to the battery temperature. Since the batteries are on the cold side, the equalization voltage is around 15 volts. The current is low as the batteries are fully charged. The only thing drawing power is the CO/propane detector and the Raspberry Pi monitoring the charge controller.

The weather was very dreary today. Not cold (50°F) but overcast. Everything is gloomy and grey. The following video is just a short loop around town and is sped up 8x like the previous couple of videos. I keep thinking of simply adding voice over to the sped up video and make it a vlog. But that seems like a lot more work...