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Phil23
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Joined: 27/03/2016
Location: Australia
Posts: 1667

Posted: 09:36am 10 Mar 2017

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So good to see real example of what people are doing with MM's.

Photos & an explanation make it even more interesting, and particularly the reference to what previous technology they have replace.

Thanks for sharing that Grog.

Here's to hoping you might get a chance to grab a quick minute of YouTube at some time & give a brief demo of the interface.

Cheers

Phil.

Grogster said

There is a fan that goes on the top of the heatsink, but this is not shown.
The two 3mm bolts secure the three regulator IC's to the bottom of the heatsink, using a bit of 3mm aluminium plate as a load-spreader/clamp thing.....

Grogster said It is a replacement security system. This is the new replacement for the old system that was cooked in the October lightning strike from God, which used the old - now obsolete - uALFAT filesystem module that I had a bit of a mission finding temporary replacements for. That system was PICAXE based(28X2) with the filesystem module and a TellyMate chip for B/W video output on a standard TV screen.

This one uses the MM+ and a colour touch-screen. Much sexier then the PICAXE system.

The old system used a very noisy, big and heavy dot-matrix printer for printing messages. The new one uses a relatively silent thermal printer which is panel-mounted with the LCD to keep things nice and tidy.
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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9745

Posted: 03:42pm 10 Mar 2017

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Here is another photo complete with fan this time.

A YouTube video is a nice idea - I will see what I can do.

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

LouisG
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Joined: 19/03/2016
Location: Australia
Posts: 129

Posted: 02:28am 11 Mar 2017

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Grogster,

Re the aftermath of the lightning strike, did you consider at all rebuilding your systems to be immune to lightning, e.g using fibre or wireless?

You know what they say about lightning ...

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Grogster

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Joined: 31/12/2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 9745

Posted: 03:53am 11 Mar 2017

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Well, the main strike HIT the old nursecall aerial - that was a wireless system!

That aerial was vaporised.

It shot down the mast to the inside of the roof, and arced off from there in to all the surrounding cabling, and from there, jumped to other systems and power distribution boards and cooked anything that was in the way.

99% of the security system using the board above is also wireless, but when you get a strike of that size, it just blasts through everything. We have fitted earthing rods and bars to the comms rooms now, but I doubt they would really offer that much protection when you are talking a "1.21 Gigawatt" discharge.

While the actual transmitter nodes survive OK cos they are battery powered, the nexus of hardware forming the system is still tethered by cables to the power network and as such, is always going to be at risk to some extent if something like this happens.

One hopes I do not have to experience another strike like that one ever again....
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but there is nothing wrong with thinking positively!

Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops!

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