2003 Toxic Tacoma

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Fred
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

Post by Fred »

Good thing you're not running MAF! ;-)
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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In IRC, I had commented about ripping the CCFL lighting out of an LCD display I ordered as a gauge display and either swapping in an LED strip at the exact same location or placing LED lights in the shell of the Toyota gauge cluster. That was met with these useful comments:
Matthijs309 wrote: 6:27 ToxicGumbo-work: I just read your part about the LED backlight stuff for the 12.4" screen
6:27 I have done the same, removed the ccfl tubes and inserted some led strips
6:27 my current car has ccfl lighting and with cold weather it is hardly readably for the first 10 minutes
6:28 only to settle at a half-readable state within the first 30 minutes
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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This recently arrived:

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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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A few other things arrived in the mail recently:

1. A CANable, which is possibly the cheapest ($25 USD) and tiniest pre-made product I've seen which uses socketCAN. It's based on Eric Everchick's CANtact and is sufficient for bus dumps and monitoring. The following image is linked from capable.io:

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2. A sweet 12.3in LCD display. This would be submerged in the gauge display shell and there's clearance in the dash for the exposed corners. The original Tacoma plastic cover will be chopped in favor of a something custom to frame the display dimensions.

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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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After installing the original Pi3, I never was able to resolve issues with the Anker hub while in the vehicle. Removed it this afternoon and have it at the office for testing. Plugged it into a Mac with a flash drive and that much worked fine, so likely a conflict with Raspian.

A working logger would have allowed substantial logging over the past months, something that would be especially useful right now. I've had two instances in the past year where I shut my truck off in the Burger King drive through lane, then attempted to turn it back on about 2 minutes later only to hear the starter going and see no engine activity. Fred's noticed some possible ignition issues in my logs, so I'll want to test warm starts like this while logging. Would suck if my fuel pump's starting to fail again with all this hot weather.
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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Shortly after the post above, I accidentally destroyed my Pi installation with a failed package update. End result: no modules loading. No USB, no touchscreen, no network, no bluetooth, etc. I was hoping to save it in some manner and still might be able to, but will likely end up rebuilding it was NOOBS lite and transfer over the account and scripts. Not a small amount of time. I really need to be logging right now.

Also not a small amount of time, but requiring less concentration, I bought a Craftsman drill press off Craigslist for $150 with a new belt. Most go for higher and I thought this was a great deal, but it turns out there's some wobble, the ground prong has been knocked off, and the quill won't recoil (and occasionally takes some effort to lower). This unfortunately wasn't so obvious at the time of purchase--seemed like just a little wear at the time. At the very least the drill needs to be cleaned and re-greased, though I plan to replace all the bearings since it's already in pieces. I'll also replace the 1/2in Jacobs chuck with one that goes to 5/8in and hand-tightens.

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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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Throughout the years of driving my truck with FreeEMS, I've only had a few unexpected problems that went beyond normal maintenance issues. I ran the following by Fred first so as not to give the impression that FreeEMS (or my dodgy Jaguar assembly) was the culprit. He provided his thoughts and suggested I ask openly for thoughts, so any and all are welcome.
I meant to send this earlier for your thoughts, but I don't think it's FreeEMS or my ECU at fault. I wasn't logging, unfortunately.

Last Thursday I was leaving work. The temperature outside was 106F and the car had been baking in the sun for hours. After leaving the parking lot and getting out on a main road, probably about 3 minutes from start, I was cruising at ~30mph and noticed the speed reducing despite pressure on the gas pedal being consistent. I couldn't get the vehicle to speed up, so pulled into the road center as if to turn onto a side street.

The engine made chugging noises as if it was struggling to operate and I'm not sure that I've heard it make those specific noises before. That is, it sounded different from just dying from fuel starvation. Plenty of vibration. I was able to restart the vehicle easily enough, but the same clunka-chugga type noises and resulting vibration occurred, I couldn't get the car to move more than a couple feet, and it died again. Instinct suggested something with ignition timing based on sound and perhaps the problem you (Ed: Fred observed in previous logs that I had occasional ignition misses) were noticing suddenly became more of an issue.

I was then able to start again and slowly creep into parking lot, cycled the engine again, and everything was fine.

One thing I've noticed lately is that there's a feint whiff of fuel when I'm home and parked in the garage (it subsides after sitting, so
the leak is most obvious when the vehicle has warmed up). Perhaps the heat from the day led to something odd with fuel pressure that day. I'll recheck all my hoses and seals around the tank when time permits and at least try to avoid any fuel leaks. I might also start
budgeting for new coil-on-plug igniters as a maintenance repair (recall that the plastic shrouding on some has mild cracks) and to rule them out.

There's one other issue I ran across twice, both times at the Burger King drive-through and I believe in vastly different temps (very
cold/very hot). I stopped the car after about 10 minutes of driving, then tried to restart and only the starter would sound. No audible
attempt from the engine to do anything. In both cases I had repeatedly pounded the gas pedal and turned the key multiple times and
eventually it would restart normally as if nothing was wrong. Both times I'd say it took about 30 seconds max to go from no-start to
start. I'll test this one out in a similar manner and see if it's easy to reproduce.

I'm going to approach the former as a fuel issue right now and try to get that resolved.
As mentioned above, I'm going to work on the fuel issue and attempt to log a no-start situation if that can be repeated. As for what happened on the road, that might remain a mystery until I get dependable logging going.
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

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Last night I was able to get the Pi working again. It turned out that USB wasn't entirely disabled, that the graphical environment was the issue and that the boot process masked the issue. I had mounted the SD card partitions on my EeePC and checked out /var/cache/apt as well as the dpkg log only to see that libusb completed its install, but a ton of packages were in a pending config state. After disabling lightdm and its greeter, the Pi booted to a command line, I dpkg configured, rebooted, had network, bluetooth, etc. again, apt-get upgraded, and re-enabled lightdm. Now all is well again. I also discovered that the hub appears to be working okay, but that the cheap TTL-USB cable used for GPS must have died. Going to test that tonight elsewhere and possibly order a new one tomorrow. Very close to re-installing and actually using this little bastard, though with a manually switched DC line for now. (I'll set up a relay and decaying capacitor or some such at a later time to switch off from battery. The Mausberry will still be useful to detect ACC loss and trigger a shutdown on the Pi)

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The Craftsman drill project is coming along. Most surfaces cleaned as is the drill interior, at least well enough that I can use a different lube and not be concerned about mixing unknowns. I'm a bit pissed that the "Craftsman" replacement bearings are from China. Two were sourced from one location which used the OEM image with that claim, but provided aftermarket...the third was from a company I knew was Chinese after the fact. It's hard to find these exact bearings, so it's easier to buy these, measure them, and then know what to buy from a US/Japanese supplier should they fail. I'm seeing some wobble that I don't recall before and am concerned that they didn't go on straight.

I know this looks ghetto, but I've never had problems with Japanese bearings going on straight using oddball practices. These pliers were flat at the point of contact. Note also that ONLY the bearing center is in contact with them--the bearings and outer ring spin freely. That aside, I'm not convince that the two bearings I pressed are sitting perfectly.

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(On second view, this was a bearing removal, but similar to the process used to put one of the two bearings on. The first was via an impact socket which matched the inner ring. Even that one seems to be slightly off and has no excuse.)

Two Chinese bearings in place on a 30+ year old, precision, US Craftsman drill. Sacrilege. :cry:
At the same time, based on Craftsman's shift in attitude, the modern replacement parts are also likely sourced from China. Pulley bottom and top:

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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

Post by Fred »

Pretty hard for a bearing to be on crooked, they naturally align.

Either there is an imbalance in the rotating parts, or there is some lack of concentric shape in the bearings? Or the bearing seats are loose on the outer race and it's moving a bit? Or some combo?

Good to hear you're getting the pi working again :-) Mmmmmmmm, pie.
DIYEFI.org - where Open Source means Open Source, and Free means Freedom
FreeEMS.org - the open source engine management system
FreeEMS dev diary and its comments thread and my turbo truck!
n00bs, do NOT PM or email tech questions! Use the forum!
The ever growing list of FreeEMS success stories!
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Re: 2003 Toxic Tacoma

Post by ToxicGumbo »

Exactly, re: self-alignment. They visibly even seemed to look a bit off on the unmarred steel barrel that fits into the pulley. The vibration might have simply been from the rotating mass without the weight of the spindle and additional parts. These bearings are pressed on, sure, by they sit in the drill itself by friction and can be removed fairly easily. Might not have been too happy without the weight keeping everything well-seated.

The biggest pain is that the chuck won't come off. It's on a tapered arbor, but there's a locking collar that refuses to turn to the extend that I'm stretching the steel holes on it used to loosen it. You can imagine what that's doing to my hands using the tool they provide if quality grade steel isn't holding up. I don't want to be so aggressive that the spindle gets abused in the process.

Regarding the Pi, it looks like the Prolific TTL-to-USB adapter used with the GPS isn't happy when plugged into he Anker hub, but works fine directly plugged into the Pi. This is an annoyance, but I'll swap it with the place I intended to plug the flash drive cable into (which would preferably be directly to the Pi).

Major stuff left to do:
  • Set up automatic logging
  • Swap the GPS software
  • Get the SDR radio software working better
  • Re-asembly and hot glue the IR sensors (with some drilled holes to keep them in place)
Once that's logging beautifully, I can start thinking about the LCD gauge cluster and CAN support.
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