1969 Datsun 521 Pick-up

wow!

I love the subtle message at the end LOL

I have absolutely no idea what your on about re. (the HT16K33 has 16 +ve pins and 8 -ve pins) or any of the other technical stuff but it all looks VERY impressive i must say .
I rewind armatures , stators and electric motors by hand for work but this is way over my head .
Your very clever in a mindboggling kind of way

Awesome awesome awesome. Can you make me some for my T25!😁

Thank you all for the comments!




OK so you didnt actually ask me to explain... but I'm going to because I find it interesting lol!

So first things first LED arrays are wired as such:




If its not clear what its showing is all the positive legs are wired vertically together and all the negatives are horizontal. This means if you put a positive (+ve) connection on a vertical line and a ground/negative (-ve) connection on a horizontal one LED, the cross-section, would light.



    0 1 2 3 4
  0 O O O O O
  1 O O O O O
  2 O O O O O
  3 O O O O O
  4 O O O O O

Where 'O' is an LED in the OFF state. The numbers would be the pin reference, simply vertical line 0, vertical line 1, etc. Always start at 0.

       2.2v
        +
    0 1 2 3 4
  0 O O O O O
  1 O O O O O
  2 O O O O O
0v-3 O O X O O
  4 O O O O O

Where 'O' is an LED in the OFF state.
     'X' is an LED in the ON state.


       2.2v
      + + +
    0 1 2 3 4
  0 O O O O O
  1 O O O O O
  2 O O O O O
0v-3 O X X X O
  4 O O O O O

       2.2v
      + + +
    0 1 2 3 4
  0 O O O O O
 -1 O X X X O
0v-2 O X X X O
 -3 O X X X O
  4 O O O O O





So you could do this by hand, manually and physically plugging in and unplugging each axis. But thats boring, and I'm lazy.

I use an Arduino as my controller. Its basically one chip (ATMEGA) that does a very simple thing. Turn things on and off. So you have a number of pins that can either read in coming signals or send outgoing signals. It has a limited inbound voltage and a fixed digital (on/off) outbound voltage, however it can do some pulse width modulation (PWM) to imitate anlogue signal.

Long story short if I plugged the array into the arduino I would have to use 24 pins, wiping out every available pin so you now have a very useful controller that can only turn some lights on and off.

In steps the H16K33! don't ask me what the letters and numbers mean, Ive no idea. But what it does do is provide 16 positive pins and 8 negative. So rather than manually connecting each row and column, or using every available pin on the Arduino, they are now all plugged into one chip. This chip will turn the rows and columns on and off for you.

But how do you tell it which ones? First step, physical communication. You need wires. The Hblahblahblah... chip uses I2C, its a serial communication (I'm acting like I know these things, in reality I googled some stuff and am now regurgitating it). It needs power and ground, then data (the information youre sending) and clock (makes sure both devices are aligned and sets the data speed to ensure nothing is lost).

This is perfect because its four leads (possibly 2 because you would run power and ground off of whatever the Arduino was using). If you connect more I2C items they use no more pins, they simply run parallel off the ones youve already plugged in. All the data travels down the same line and it magically finds the right device to talk to (sidenote: not magic (you tell it), but might as well be).

Now your Arduino has legs free for logic. So I could say if you see 12v come in on pin0 turn the indicate function on. If you see voltage on pin1 turn the sidelight on, if you see pin2 turn on brakes, etc.

Moving data from the Arduino to the chip is the modern age computer voodoo bit. Ultimately its fairly simple code made even more simple by the lovely people at Adafruit (SERIOUSLY GIVE ME FREE THINGS PLEASE). They made a lovely package with useful tools that draw pixels, lines, hollow boxes, full boxes, circles and text. You tell it what shape or word you want, tell it where to start with the co-ordinates and where to finish (or how large it is in some cases).

Then its good to go. It will either cycle through set actions or as said above will wait for logic in to turn on certain functions.

I hope this explains at least something? I know you didnt ask me to! But if you would like to know more do ask.

Just read the whole thing - your truck is great! Keep it up - it's brilliant.

I don't understand anything you've written about the electrics, but my idea of electrics is Red to Red, Green to Green, Blue to Bits. 

Thank you very much, honestly my knowledge is much the same. if there's positive and negative it must work right?! But I muddle on!

Ah the Datsun/RX7 thread of glory. Will be following from now on to see how this progresses!

It has been a long time since I've posted anything significant. Unfortunately I really lost any drive to carry on, I was hoping the Rex would be a quicker fix than its turning out to be, but I ended up with two projects still unfinished and not running.

I decided that the only thing to do was dive into again, because as soon as you start doing something it’s easy to continue. I didn’t want to touch the sill, it’s been a pain in my for so long that I hate looking at it.

This is the cab reinforcement, it runs from the sill to floor to keep everything straight.





Unfortunately due to the terrible design of the floor dirt gets stuck between the top of this reinforcement and the bottom of the floor. As you can see this rusts everything in the area and it why the sills are rotten. This is what I cut out of the area showing the state it gets in. I assume the hole was designed to drain the trapped dirt but it clearly didn’t achieve this!





Good old bit of CAD.





Fresh metal folded up and test fit.





Then time to pick up the MIG for the first time in a while, probably should’ve practiced first or prepped in any way. Instead I jumped straight in.





Some of it is far too proud but honestly considering I hadn’t done this in anger for about 6 months I was happy with the results. But as always I'm more of a grinder than a welder.









The main issue I had was the backside, probably would’ve helped if I had spent more than 5 seconds prepping the metal.







I need to think of a new design for the floor. I won’t put the lump back in and cause another dirt cavity but I do need to consider some drainage as the new plate is now 1-2mm below the floor line so it will create an issue.

I then manned up and went back to the sills to tidy up the horrible welds. Unfortunately welding upside down is just not something I'm capable of doing well.







Tacked on the end cap.





Unfortunately when I tried to make it a more permanent fixture the truck refused.





I finally had a chance to use this…





…When I set my kneeling towel on fire.