After digging out my old high-end-at-the-time Sony DV camcorder, I took some film of yesterdays track event; then last night I installed a video editing program, and “played” for an hour or so to put together a short (3 minute) clip.
And thanks to MINI for the music 🙂
Today I headed out (late!) to meet a group of MINIs for breakfast at IHOP, followed by a rather interesting drive through Boston and down to F1 Boston, a karting facility. Unfortunately the day started badly, with someone breaking in to Dave’s truck during breakfast; we also saw a major accident just inches from us, with an SUV pulling across traffic in front of a car! but thankfully the various incidents on the karting track were much less serious …
I chose not to ride the karts (they look quite small ;)) so I did video & photography instead, but it turns out the lighting is not great and the kart speeds are quite fast, so I’ve got a lot of photos of colored streaks!
The Alpine I recently installed in GPMINI works very well but it’s bright blue buttons look somewhat out of place, so today I disassembled the Alpine display head to see what can be done …
So we can see a couple of small bright blue LEDs, and loads of tiny green LEDs – the green ones are tiny (1.6mm x 0.8mm) and I have nothing that small, but I do have some amber LEDs on spare toggle switch panel PCBs that are small enough to fit in the blue LED position (they are size PLCC-2, like these at Digikey) … let’s try one …Â it works! So do the other one and see what the buttons look like:
It’s not perfect (because the buttons themselves are colored blue too) but I think it’s better … now I need to buy some tiny LEDs to replace all the green ones – that’s going to be a nightmare job because they’re so small 😦
UPDATE:Â Here’s “the story so far” at night:
M&I / GBMINI 