More electrical failures.

I started off the morning working on the trailer lights again.  I went and put nice splices in with proper heatshrinking to connect the connector that I found in the truck. 


I even had a few clips in my electrical box, so I installed those as well. 




Went to plug it in and realized that I made a mistake.  The one on the right is the plug I removed.  You may notice the plugs are opposite genders.  D'oh!


Thankfully I hadn't returned the new connector I bought yet, so I just wire-nutted it in.  It is technically usable this way, but I don't have enough splices and I am out of heat shrink, so I will have to do it right after acquiring some more parts.


The good news is that the plug was the whole problem.  The light that died last year came right up after I got the new plug on.  This means that I didn't need to buy a new light, but spare parts always come in handy since the new light is past its return date.


After that, I moved on to the solar setup.  I added a couple more Big Ass Resistors to the setup.


I did get a reading the first time I hooked it up.  My output was only 5W though, so something was amiss.


Looking at the IV chart and getting an electronics refresher from Matt, I figured out that I should have removed resistance, not added more. 


So I pulled out my highly OSHA approved electronic repair station and rearranged everything (without burning the house down).  I changed all the resistors from series to parallel. 


That should drop the resistance to about 4.3Ω (the resistors are a 10, 10, 50, and a 75Ω)  I went to measure it with the multimeter and it measured 4.2Ω.  Not sure how much I trust the meter though, given that it is a Harbor Freight special and a dead short is 3Ω.


I brought it back out to try it and got absolutely nothing.


So I started checking continuity and since I had the soldering iron out I soldered the wire connections to the kit wiring.  I did find out that one of the cables that came in the kit has an abnormally high resistance. 


Even taking my wire addition out of the loop, it was still high, so it is the cable I received with the panel at fault.  I will have to investigate when I bring home my nice Fluke meter from work.  I am not sure if I would return the whole kit for a bad wire though.  It might cost me more to ship everything back than it would to buy a new wire.


The other one was normal. 


I used the new phone to take all these pictures.  The camera is better than my old phone, but not the kind of upgrade I had hoped for.  There is no noise in the pictures, but based on how soft they are blown up to full size, it is more a feat of postprocessing than the camera hardware itself.  The camera still stinks zoomed in.  The video is a bit crisper than my old phone.  Despite not being the amazing camera that the reviews on the phone made it sound like it had though, it is a notable improvement over the old phone.  And to be fair, the old phone's camera is the only digital camera I have had for a couple of years now, it has been sufficient.  I would still probably get a new digital if I take any vacations this year though.

Here are some photos from a walk that I took today.  Unfortunately I don't have enough bandwidth to upload them at original size, but they are still nice.  This phone tends to run a little higher on the exposure.