The Summer of Testing!

Put me in coach, I'm ready to play...

Testing, Testing, 1… 2… 3…

Yes, this is indeed the summer of testing and discovery for me. Since the start of my “soft” retirement a few years ago, I’ve been backing out of my regular day jobs that I don’t want to do anymore, and ramping up the projects that I really like to work on. And two of my favorite projects are building new electrical gadgets and testing things.

That ‘70s Show 😁

This is full circle back to my early engineering days in the ’70s when I was doing industrial power and robotics design for a large packaging plant, and the ’80s when I was building and testing components for nuclear missile guidance systems. At first blush neither of those jobs seem related to the RV industry and electrical safety, but they actually are exactly on point. For starters, campgrounds have electrical distribution systems on the same scale as an industrial building, with many similar issues.

Part of my job back then was training the plant electricians about electrical safety and best practices. That’s also when I was schooled by the then-new Occupational Safety and Health Administration agency (OSHA) on topics such as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), Arc Flash dangers, and regular testing of safety equipment such as eye wash stations, lock-out/tag-out, etc… I also learned a lot of shortcuts that electricians would sometimes try to take which could be dangerous. Sound familiar?

That ‘80s Show…😁

On the other hand, RV electrical systems have some of the same issues as the nuclear missile guidance components I built and tested in the ’80s, where calibration is critical to operation, poor connections can lead to product failure (as in missiles blowing up mid-launch), and learning how to measure things down to 6-decimal accuracy helps explain what’s going on under the hood.

Present Day…

You’ve probably already read about HRDL (High Rate Data Logger) – rhymes with “turtle” – which I designed and built a few years ago out of extra parts laying around in my lab. With a few tricks I learned in the ’80 from calibrating the Digital to Analog converters in missile guidance systems, I can now see exactly how various electrical devices in an RV work and interact with other components, logging this data at a rate up to 192,000 times a second with an accuracy of 1 ppm (Part Per Million) and displaying it in easy-to-understand graphs.

This level of data gathering was nearly impossible 40 years ago when I was doing it for military components, and even now would cost around $100,000 in test gear. But I built HRDL for a few hundred dollars worth of spare parts I already had laying around and a week or so of prototype time in my FunkWorks Lab.

I do feel pretty good that the things I learned in the ’80s as a way to launch nuclear missiles, which could have destroyed the earth, I can now use in my peacetime efforts to help build things like better RV battery management systems, or learn how to start an RV air conditioner more easily, or evaluate voltage boosting transformers for National Electrical Code compliance.

Take It To The Limit…

So when I say I’ve tested something, you can rest assured that I’ve done this to the current state of the art, and sometimes a little better. Some of the RV manufacturers are now beginning to ask for my suggestions on wiring issues, which is great. And I’m still looking for a grant that would allow me to begin teaching campground technicians better ways to safely test, maintain and repair campground pedestals and their local power distribution.

So please stand by for even more RV electrical information this year and in 2025. I’m just getting started….

Let’s play safe out there…  Mike