The 24 Hours of Equipment Failures
Tonight I’m in Lenoir City, TN – a bit short of where I’d planned to be tonight.
Last night, when I was copying the car camera videos to my notebook PC, the hard drive in the PC apparently had some sort of failure. I can’t save new videos to it and many of the older videos can’t be accessed. Fortunately, I had also been backing up the videos to an external USB hard drive, so hopefully those copies are Ok. I’m now copying directly from the CF card reader to the external drive, bypassing the notebook PC’s drive entirely.
Somewhere along the line, the car video recorders got out of sync as well – each time the car is started, they create a new video file. Except that one recorder thinks the next video should be number 151 and the other thinks it should be 150. That’s not a big problem – I just need to power up the one that’s running behind by itself, and they’ll be back in sync. It is, however, just one more thing on the day of all things…
This morning the weather was sunny and warm as I left my hotel, but that was apparently just a defective area of a major storm system that’s been blanketing the southeast. Light rain fell intermittently until around 60 miles west of Nashville, at which time it really started pouring down.
Fortunately, I was able to see a wall of rain a few miles ahead, but it wasn’t that bad where I was, so I pulled over to the shoulder and got my jacket out of the all-weather bag and put it on. However, that soon resulted in a very wet all-weather jacket. It was so bad that I put my rear safety light on so people could hopefully see my car in the rain.
Here’s a few still captures from the video cameras in the Atom. These were from around 3 PM:
A single still image doesn’t really show the magnitude of the rain. Since this is one frame of video, the raindrops you see on the road are those that fell in 1/60th of a second:
The Atom’s engine shut down 4 times during this rainstorm (for those who aren’t familiar, due to the experimental nature of the Atom’s engine control program from GM Racing, just about anything that would put the engine into “reduced power” mode when in a regular car, will cause the engine to not change from idle, no matter what you do with the accelerator pedal). I assume that this is the same “APP Correlation Error” from the accelerator pedal that I’d seen in the past. I’ll read the codes from the engine later on to make sure. I guess I’m going to have to build a waterproof enclosure for the sensor at the top of the pedal.
Somewhere during the middle of this, all of the minor gauges in my instrument cluster (fuel level, temperatures, etc.) went out. This was apparently from something getting wet and shorting out as they came back later in the day.
The rain continued with intermittent showers, but the car and I were mostly dried out by the time I hit the next batch of heavy rain. It was chilly enough that I pulled into a rest area and put on my driving gloves. However, even with those, after another 40 miles or so I gave up for the day and pulled into a hotel. The rain ended between when I checked in and when I was putting the cover on the Atom, and I got to see a beautiful orange sunset as the sun moved from behind clouds to the west.
While I was in the rest area getting my gloves out, 2 people on a motorcycle were putting on their rain gear as well. A little while after I left the rest area, they passed me on the highway:
Hopefully tomorrow will be a better (and drier) day.
