Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • There’s really not much to it. The ebike battery just sits in an empty space in the housing and is the same voltage (36v-40v) as the original packs (just bigger). I padded it with some upcycled packing styrofoam to keep it in place and cushioned.

    I’d have to take it apart to get pictures, but in a nutshell:

    I cut the positive lead off of the original battery socket and spliced it to a XT-90 connector. I left the original ground connected to the socket and also spliced it to the XT-90. That left the ground and the yellow “data” wire going to the original socket. I drilled a hole in the mower housing to bring out the barrel socket for the charging input.

    I only disconnected the positive from the original battery socket for 3 reasons:

    1. The mower will only stay running if it detects an OEM pack, and the data wire and ground are needed to trick the motor controller. I have to leave my old/dead OEM pack in the battery bay. I was going to pull the board out of the dead pack, but this works well enough so haven’t bothered.
    2. I don’t want to parallel the OEM pack and the ebike battery for safety reasons. In theory, I could have extra capacity that way but the batteries aren’t the same chemistry, capacity, or charge level.
    3. If I ever want to return it to a stock config, I just have to solder one wire back.

    And this is the mower itself (stock photo). The batteries are interchangeable with other tools, and are far too small for the mower. They draw about 2C (twice the capacity) so that’s 10 amps from a 5 amp-hour pack and that’s pretty rough on them. With the 10 amp-hour ebike battery, that’s only 1C so I get both better runtime and less wear and tear.




  • Technically speaking, I invented vaping.

    In high school economics class, we had to invent a fake product, fill out patent applications, do focus groups, make a commercial and print ads, and do all the other stuff you’d normally do if you were a real company (except we submitted paperwork to the teacher, obviously, and not the USPTO).

    My group’s product was a weight-loss product called “FlavorAir” (“Anorexia Fast” didn’t test well with our focus groups). It was a spray device that misted flavored air into your mouth to satiate cravings (our product prop was just breath spray). We advertised flavors like gravy, turkey dinner, mint chocolate ice cream, banana mint, and several others.

    This was in the early 00’s and predates vaping by many years. I should be rich.
















  • I had the '96 Chevy S-10 version of that but basically same truck and same shade of green. That truck hated me. Fix one thing, another thing broke. After replacing the cylinder head, fuel pump, fuel line, slave cylinder, hood and windshield*, alternator, and a random electrical gremlin or ten, it ran like a dream for like two weeks. Then the brake line burst and I finally just sold the thing. The guy who bought it from me fixed the brake line and drove it for like 6 or 7 years with no problems.

    Called it the POS-10.

    *Hood latch broke driving down the highway and slammed the hood back into the windshield at 55 mph. Fun!