A group of members have now purchased three RC (remote control) One Design Laser sailboats and there are two more to be ordered (this week, hopefully) and a couple of other people considering the purchase. Shortly, we’ll be joining the North American RC Laser Class Association and forming an official fleet on Canandaigua Lake and racing at CYC. The current leading name is the Canandaigua Yacht Club Remote Control Sailing Fleet (if the club will have us).

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On Sunday, July 18, three sailors from Canandaigua Yacht Club competed in a “first of its kind” (for CYC) Remote Control Regatta.

Sailing RC Lasers at Canandaigua Yacht Club

I fixed the blue line problem on my LG Plasma HGTV today after replacing a circuit board, but now Dale Earnhardt Jr’s car is orange!

After removing all of the screws holding on the back cover of the set, It took a while to figure out the easiest way to get the to board I needed to replace and remove the fewest wires and other components as possible. I ended up removing all of the wires on the rear-most panel except for the power connector lines that were located on the bottom right.

The board swung freely so that I could get my tools and hands behind the left side.

Replacing the board wasn’t a big deal except for the little swing connectors on the two wire harnesses at the bottom. After I figured out how they worked, it was easy, but I did break both of the ones on the old board trying to figure out how to get the wires out. Basically, it the locks are on a hinge and swing up and down. When down, they pinch the wires in the correct place.

I put the whole thing together and the sound was great, but no picture. After sitting there a while thinking about all of the wires I unhooked, I remembered one that I forgot to put back in place. After removing the back of the TV again and connecting the wire, everything worked great.

NOTE: Dale Earnhardt Jr. is driving an orange car this weekend.

The mostly persistent thin blue line on my 5-yr-old LG plasma TV.

Well, I’m going to try and repair my LG Plasma HGTV. The model number of my LG Plasma is DU-42PX12X.

Here’s the story…

A few weeks ago, my 42″ LG Plasma HGTV began to occasionally display a thin blue line on the right side of the screen. It would appear for a while, then disappear for a while. We are now going on about 5 weeks and it is always on the screen now. It is about 1 inch wide and is about 6 inches from the right side of the screen.

Of course, the first thing one does these days when something like this happens is to hit Google.

Apparently, after reading only a few blogs, I have been lucky. Many LG TV’s purchased in 2004-2005 had this problem after only a couple of years and most of the blog posts are from a couple of years ago.

I got away without the problem for 5 years.

After checking out only a few Google results, I landed on a blog post that had very detailed instructions on how to fix the problem. The comments on the post were lengthy and most people who followed the instructions sucessfully fixed their TVs.

So, this morning, I ordered a LG Electronics / Zenith “Hand Insert PCB Assembly” – part number 6871QCH038C from partstore.com. The part should be here by next weekend.

I’ll update this post when it arrives and let everyone know the outcome.

UPDATE: Transplant surgery on the 42″ LG Plasma HGTV was a success, fixing the 1″ blue line running down the right side of the screen.

]]> http://www.billblevins.com/2010/02/the-mostly-persistent-thin-blue-line-on-my-5-yr-old-lg-plasma-tv/feed/ 1 http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/windy-weather-in-fairport-ny/ http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/windy-weather-in-fairport-ny/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:57:29 +0000 Bill Blevins http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/windy-weather-in-fairport-ny/

Windy weather in Fairport, NY, originally uploaded by sailorbill.

]]> http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/windy-weather-in-fairport-ny/feed/ 0 http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/weather-in-fairport-ny/ http://www.billblevins.com/2009/10/weather-in-fairport-ny/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:32:54 +0000 Bill Blevins http://www.billblevins.com/?p=254

This morning, I finished the installation of a wireless personal weather station at my house.

I ordered the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus Wireless station from Ambient Weather.

The package that I chose included a WIFI router from Hautespot Networks and it connects wirelessly to my home network and sends data from the weather console in the house to the Web without the need to connect to a computer. Since I use Apple MacBooks (ie: laptops), I didn’t want to run a PC to constantly act as a server and send data to the Internet.

In order to separate the wind unit and the main weather station, I added an extra wireless transmitter to the package so that I could separate the two and locate both of them in different places. I also added a heater unit so that the rain collection unit won’t freeze in the winter time.

The anemometer is on a mouting pole on the apex of the roof and captures wind speed and direction. The wind data is send via a solar powered unit that sends a 2.4GHz wireless signal to a console in the house every second.

The main collection unit, the main part of the weather station, is mounted on a fence post in my back yard . It collects information on humidity, temperature, rainfall, rainfall rate, UV, Solar radiation and barometric pressure. These data points are sent from another solar powered 2.4GHz transmitter every second to the house where it then meets up with the anemometer data in the display console for display in the den.

The display console hooks to the wireless router and that sends information through my broadband connection to the Web.

The sites receiving and displaying the data are WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, HamWeather and the CWOP network.

CWOP stands for Citizen Weather Observer Program and certain weather stations can feed that network data to be used to help with weather research by private, public and government institutions. I was assigned a station ID of DW3513.

Data sent to the CWOP program is analyzed and compared with nearby stations and the expected predictions for the area where a PWS is stores. Here is the page that shows the results of station DW3515.

Finally, there is a cool map called the WunderMap and also a full-screen real-time page from WeatherUnderground that is pretty cool too.

Flickr photos of the mounting locations and devices are posted as well.

RadarScope from Base Velocity

I paid $10 for RadarScope from Base Velocity for my iPhone via the Apple Store.

It is a very cool application, though I don’t understand all of the radars it accesses, but the basic radars are very useful. It has multiple detailed radar choices and the information is nearly real-time as far as I can tell when using it sailing and we see serious storm clouds brewing!

I’d say, “Yes”, RadarScope was worth the price and worthy of the “most expensive app I own” award.

What is the most expensive smartphone application you’ve purchased? What does it do? Do you think it was worth the price you paid?

Video review of the Velocitek SpeedPuck posted to YouTube by Stern Scoop.

I managed to get the Velocitek SC-1 working on my MacBook Pro running OS X version 10.5.2 after a whole lot of effort!

Parallels 3.0 running Windows XP wouldn’t work. I tried for several hours.

I did get the Windows OS to see the units via the USB ports using Parallels and the Velocitek Control Panel software did see each of them too but the firmware update only ran to about 85% before throwing an error. Many attempts either didn’t start because of an error or it only made it to 5% before quitting. Most didn’t even attempt to start without the error message popping up.

Here’s what worked.

Today I installed VMWare Fusion for OS X and reinstalled Windows XP.

Everything went smoothly until I got to the point of doing the firmware updates. The control panel software started throwing errors and that was if it could even get started (again)!

I tried and tried everything I could think of and here is what worked:

• Turn off the Velocitek Control Panel software
• Unplug the SC-1 from the computer
• Remove the batteries
• Put the batteries back in
• Plug the SC-1 back up to the computer
• Start the control panel software
• Run the firmware update

I did this twice with two units. Only in this specific order would the firmware upgrade work but I finally got it.

I was determined to make VMWare play nice with the SC-1′s and now I’m wondering if I just didn’t give Parallels enough trial and error effort.

Anyway… tonight, I used it to map my trip home from work (max speed was 32 knots).

Again though, when plugging in the unit, I had to remove the batteries, then put them back in before plugging in to the computer and starting the control panel software to download the track.

I’ll post again after the first use on the boat, possibly Saturday afternoon. I can’t wait!

On Saturday, Tracy and I took out our 2.4 Meters and I chased her boat around Canandaigua Lake trying to line up at least one interesting shot with a new Oregon Scientific ATC2K waterproof video camera strapped to the boom. After an hour of shooting video, I came up with three minutes that might be worth watching.