Folding Camper Build I

I started the build of my folding camper last weekend. Starting with the base. The base is 4X8 feet using 5mm plywood and 1X6's around the perimeter with 2x2's in the corner. All joints are glued and screwed.

Here is the initial fit check and clamp up.

Here after the 4X8 rectangle was built, I glued the 5 mm plywood on the bottom. I screwed it every 6 inches or so but needed addition clamping force from various other weights. 

The bottom being only 5mm (<1/4 inch) thick is not strong enough to support any significant weight and will provide little insulation. The bottom will be further built up to form a sandwich of  two 5mm panels, foam and thin wood strips forming a Structural Insulated Panel (SIP).  Below I am constructing a 1 foot square test panel. I needed all my clamps for this glue up. This panel has a 6"X6" grid formed with 1/4" X 3/4" wood strips and 3/4" thick foam insulation. This insulation is the type with a plastic moisture barrier on each side with one sided silvered. I got mine at Home Depot HERE.

Below is the cross section of the test panel. The arrows are showing the 3/4" thick foam insulation from the corner that I cut off. I used this panel to validate the strength. It was tested with a load of over 150 pounds spanning 12" and had minimal deflection. There will also be runners on the bottom of the base to protect it and add more strength.

Now that I know the panel will be strong, I need to build this out on the base panel. The wood grid will have 128 squares in the foam matrix since the wood strips are spaced every 6 inches. This will take some time to do but seems to be worth it in term if the strength and light weight properties. The walls and roof will not need this grid and will be lightly framed.

Aerial Photography using a Pole

I was looking for a low cost way to create a Aerial Map of my backyard since the resolution on Google Maps was not high enough. I thought about using a balloon as outlined in this article --> HERE. Then I though maybe I could use one of my telescoping antenna supports to get a small camera in the air and use the same methods. I think I could have gotten Mapknitter to work for me but I stumbled on  Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). I made the below image by putting my old iPhone 4 on the end of a 20 foot pole and turning it while capturing video. This software can do many other things and is worth a look. The best thing is that the application is free!

I am using a cheap wide angle lens on the iPhone (clip on type), this helps since it is not very high in the air and allows it to "see" more of the ground. I simply just twisted the pole while capturing video.

Once you bring the video into ICE, you can select the start and stop time of the video to do the processing on. The video segment I used was only about 8 seconds long. The application takes all the images in the video (e.g. >15 frames per second) and matches them up and stitches them together to form the larger composite image... magic!

VMWare 6 Home Lab II

I have now successfully cloned VMs and trouble shot my vMotion issue. I have vMotioned a running WinXP VM from one ESX host and back. The WinXP VM is running with minimal performance but does run. HA tests are next. I really would like a system with 32 GB and a Solid State Disk (SSD).

VMWare 6 Home Lab

I am working on a VMWare Home Lab running on a old Dell Studio XPS 8100. This is an i5 processor and I have increased the memory to 16 GB.

The approach is nested visualization.I have Win7 installed as the base OS, with VMWare Workstation.
Under Workstation I have created the following virtual machines (VM):

1.) Windows 2008 R2 Active Directory Services and DNS
2.) FreeNAS [Linux]
3.) VMware vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (vCSA) [Linux]
4.) ESXi Host 1
5.) ESXi Host 2

Now with in the nested lab environment I have built a couple of VM's on ESXi host 1:

1.) Damn Small Linux (DSL)
2.) Windows XP

I hope to be able to successfully perform vMotions between the ESXi hosts and then configure and test High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

I took several days to build the lab and today I finally got the Windows XP VM setup with VMWare Tools.

I am up against the memory limits of my hardware but it is pretty amazing. We will see how far I can go with this configuration.

Folding Camper Build

I did a wood joint test using Gorilla glue. These joints will be glued an screwed. I will be using some light weight materials so the design is dependent on glue bonds on the wood skin. The test article is made with 1X4's jointed with a 2X2 and skinned on one side using 1/4" luan plywood.

After it is fully cured I will do some load test on it but it appears very  strong.

ManyThing

I stumbled over a cool app (manything) that allows you to turn you old smart phone (iOS)  into a security camera. Seems like a good service but costs if you want storage.

I captured the following based on motion in the frame.

If you couple this app with IFTTT you could use it to alert you of activity and set off an alert or send you an EMAIL or both, etc.

DIY Tacoma Bed Rack

Since I will be needing a bed rack system for my folding camper I came up with a low cost DIY method using mostly Home Depot parts.

The key piece to the system are the T-slot nuts that you can get from Amazon HERE.

The rest of the parts are the following:

• 1 inch long 3/8 inch bolts for the T-slot nuts
• 3/8 inch washers
• 3/8 inch lock washers
• 1 1/2 inch U-Bolt
• 3/4 inch conduit
• Superstrut 2-Hole 90 degree Angle Bracket - In Electrical section

That is two of the 90 degree bracket next to each other. So  each side needs two brackets, two t-slot nuts, two bolts and a U-bolt.

Here is another view with the bracket in position on the rail from below. Once everything is tightened up it becomes very strong, of course I provide no guarantee of safety, etc. use of this information is at your own risk. This system could also be used for mobile antennas :-) - 73