Went through some ups and downs on the purchase in the past month. Turns out the building no longer had it's own legal lot description, and had been rolled into another lot and address that the owners have. No legal description, no sale. At the least, I'm not getting into a private contract sale without getting a deed to the property. In the long run, it would be difficult to prove ownership or sell it.
But, we have made some headway on how we can re-plat the property within the bounds of the city regs. It won't be easy, and it won't be cheap. And the city council has to get it on the schedule and approve it. It won't be too difficult compared to most hurdles I deal with, but since the lot and building is non conforming it will at least raise some eyebrows and get full scrutiny from the city and zoning committee.
In the mean time, I'm plugging away in programming classes. I'm twice the age of my classmates. It's funny to be asked what my major is and respond with "nothing, this is for fun". I'm riding an 88% in C programming, which isn't too shabby considering I've been out of school for 1/4 of my life. Not to mention learning a completely new language in my mid 30s, I didn't have much expectation of "getting it". But, I am getting it, and am almost ready to start developing my own devices. This has been the missing link for years, I just didn't know how to attack the learning on my own.
Motor controllers of 100% fresh design are many years away, but simpler items like a real motor dyno or switchmode BEC are at arms length now. I have a slew of hobby motor dynos, and while they are good at comparing tweaks to one motor, they all have very limited usefulness and are almost all just inertial machines without load cells. What is the point of using a dyno when I can't throw on an outrunner or bigger brushless motor? What is the use of the output when differing motor inertias screw up the validity? Comparing ALL of my motor catalog on one machine has been a goal for a decade, but I never quite had the skill to pull off the last mile of work. stitching together the data and device control into a program has always been the hurdle I never understood, but now I'm knocking on the door. Maybe not in the next few months, but damn soon on the timescale of life. Exciting times!
Still haven't figured out what to do with the next bay of space.... I'm thinking I should just build myself an office and move all my electric engineering work into there. My biggest problem lately has been metal dust contamination on my equipment. My metal shop and personal work stations occupy the same room, so any time there is grinding and welding my electronics gets a nice dusting. That needs to change.
For today, I'm stuck at home with a sick kid. So I'll just do some programming at home
