accessofevil

The situation:

I bought a bad ass looking, fancy dc, pwm controlled ceiling fan.

I have fancy, designer dimmers and fan controllers I've just wired with 14-3 and installed.

The problem: the fan/light assembly is made to basically only be controlled with a shitty remote control.

The solution: replace the shitty 415mhz remote control unit with something else that will take a standard fan controller made for an ac motor as a signal input to adjust the pwm on the power side using the rectified dc.

Nobody makes something like this that I can find, so I'll just build it. (Inb4 "you're going to burn down your house". It's not my first rodeo... More like my third.)

My question is: what's

Hi AE!

I am having trouble, uh, troubleshooting a new guitar and headphone amp I recently purchased.

I know the standard procedure would be to replace suspect components with known good working components, but I can't at the moment. A minor mid-air-jet-engine-explosion-and-subsequent-emergency-landing has left me somewhat disabled, so my options are limited at the moment.

Here is a picture of what I'm dealing with: http://imgur.com/3TwMNbB

The guitar has a single humbucker. Wires out of the body are a large ground, and a smaller three conductor wire with red, white, black(ground), and a sheath(presumably also ground.)

Originally the guitar seemed OK, but was exhibiting symptoms of w

Working hard. No BM, GG every game (even a couple of frustrating losses). Great, insightful commentary.

So likable and down to earth.

Dat creep spread. Dat muta control. Dem noodles. What did the fox say?

Thanks Scarlett!!

Edit: also thanks Acer for such an awesome team!

So I'm considering buying off of Taobao (chinese ebay, but chinese-to-chinese only) via Yoybuy.

The way it works is you put money in your yoybuy account. They scrape taobao for listings, do some engrishing, and present the listings.

When you buy from yoybuy, they purchase the items from taobao for you. Once the yoybuy agent receives the item, they re-ship it to you. For a modest fee.

I'm not really sure there's a pricing advantage vs. alibaba, for example.

Just looking for other people that have some actual experience.

Hi AE,

I am troubleshooting a basement dehumidifier. I'm 99.8% sure the problem is the motor that runs the fan, but I'm not 100% sure how to independently test the motor independently to be completely sure it is fried. If it were a DC motor it would be easy, but it's AC and has a lot of wires. I have about 0 experience working on AC circuits.

The schematic can be seen here: http://i.imgur.com/I5gRHNf.jpg

So yellow and org go to a cap, which goes to "Line". It looks like Blk is the high speed and red is the low speed.

So, to test the motor, I plugged it into an AC circuit (with breaker and fuse) directly to the blk/yellow lines. The motor didn't do anything. So I'm guessing it's bad

I'm the technical lead on a start-up project and decided to use Django because it seemed far and away better than the alternatives (still love it.)

But since it's been my first Django run, I'm having trouble keeping up with project timelines.

I'm looking for someone more experienced with Django to help me iron out a few things.

It's a Django 1.5 site with a custom user model.

End-users will have web interfaces for creating accounts, verifying email, reset password, etc. This is already (mostly) working. Mostly.

Then the apps on their respective phones will do some messaging via a RESTful API for sending messages to other users, searching for users, etc. Some of this is already workin

Building against mono nightlies, which technically should have all the support they need, I've never quite gotten MVC4 to run on it.

That and getting Visual Studio to play nice with non SQL Server databases is hell.

I love MVC4 and the dev tools (and the default templates are pretty) but just can't justify running a windows server for any reason.

Edit: General consensus is that we're not quite there yet. Thanks for all the feedback.

Hola Ticos...

So I bought the SIM in the airport for $24. The service has been... pretty awesome. I was in a super remote place in Limon and had to climb a mountain to get service one time, but otherwise it's been pretty spot on and mostly connects at HDSPA or HSDPA+, which is rad. You see the towers everywhere and the signal is always great. But the backhaul is always oversaturated so real world performance is up and down. (It's more than just about the bars you see)

Anyway, on to my question. My wife and I both got SIM's when we arrived in December. I haven't recharged mine at all, but she has hers a few times. I've got a little over 5k colones on my balance.

Today, right about