Where does this wire go?

*WARNING* *WARNING* *WARNING* *WARNING* Before reading this post see the link at the bottom of this post and watch some videos of the dangers of Lithium Polymer batteries when warnings aren’t followed.*WARNING* *WARNING* *WARNING* *WARNING*

Okay. I’m a VERY STUPID. It says on the battery “Do not disassemble or mistreat battery.” Well, I’ve never mistreated the battery, in fact I’ve never forgot its birthday and never raised my voice to it once since I’ve owned it. All kidding aside though, I should have listened to the do not disassemble part. The battery apparently overheated and bulged out popping the cover off my wireless broadband card.

So, what do I stupidly do? I take the battery out and remove the protective wrapping. Maybe they should use titanium wrapping to prevent stupid people like myself from tampering with the battery and ignoring their clearly marked warnings. Next I took a small flat bladed screwdriver and poked a hole in the inner wrapper. Then POP a cloud of white powder erupted from from the small package and I got a lung full.

I’m hoping I’m not going to suffer any major damage. I don’t know the real complications of inhaling this stuff but I’m sure it isn’t something beneficial to my health.

Well, anyway. DON’T MESS WITH BATTERIES OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT SAYS DON’T OPEN. You never know what surprise you will get.

Edit: After watching some videos and reading more about li-polymer batteries I will be disposing of the battery as soon as possible.

Kids, do not try this at home. Here is what can happen. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=lipo+explosions&aq=f

I have a homelite cordless electric lawn mower similar to the Earthwise 60120 20-Inch 24-Volt Cordless Electric Bag/Mulch/Side Discharge Lawn Mower
I don’t know if it is true with the earthwise, but my lawnmower deck is a tad to thin. Last year I ruined a chassis because a bolt holding down the motor tore out a chunk (about an inch square) of the deck. It wasn’t dangerous but required that I buy a new deck. Well, this summer the chassis cracked. Fortunately it was a crack and no missing pieces.

What I did was to go to home depot and buy a few washers to kind of reinforce the chassis at the cracks. I tried out the mower and it seems to be holding so far. But I’m sure over time the nuts are going to loosen up (I replaced the screws and nuts with new ones since the old ones were stripped) The bolts if anyone else is having this problem and is interested are 6mm.

One thing to know is that I am merciless with this homelite mower. I think I posted about it earlier, but as a reminder, I use it to cut down small saplings to size (trunk size of the saplings are about 2″.)

There are only 2 things that are not great about the mower, one is the thin metal of the chassis, If you abuse your mower like I do, then I highly recommend putting washers behind the nuts on the undercarriage that connected the motor to the chassis. Note, I don’t know how safe this is, so do this at your own risk.

The other is that the other is the fact mine doesn’t have a removable battery. The irony is that the charger isn’t made for outdoor use!?! Since it is recommended that you charge the mower once a month when not in use (i.e. over the winter) you either have to park it somewhere sheltered outside with a 110 outlet, or bring it inside to charge it. I put mine in my basement for the winter and charged it as recommended. The battery seems to have made it through winter fine.

So, despite my minor surgery on the Homelite, I’m very happy with the mower. I hope I can find a permanent solution to the cracking chassis.

If anyone has any ideas I’d appreciate hearing them.

I’ve been playing with this program for about a week now. I came across it looking for something to build openstreetmap routes and while it doesn’t do that, it does allow you to keep logs of your trip and use the data from your odb-II port and gps any way you see fit. The author mentions exporting the log to a google earth kml file (which he includes a utility to do.) Also, another utility lets you export to CSV which you can load in your favorite spreadsheet.

What I really wanted was a set of gauges. Wouldn’t you know it, the author has included an application for that. I use it for throttle position, oil temp, and a few other things. I’m limited to what the obd-II port of my car will report, but I’m sure I’ll find other interesting stuff to add as well.

I was working with the developer on adding a compass as a gauge, and by tweaking his code I got a basic compass done. Using the gps for this is a nice addition to the gauges displaying the obd-II data, and fits in nicely with the whole idea of obd gps logging.

While his code still in its early stages I’m sure with enough people encouraging him he will continue to flesh out his code which I think would benefit many of us using linux for a carpc.

You can find more information about the obdgpslogger program at the authors website http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/