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500 pounds of lumber on a roof rack
Friday, July 12 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I'd drunk a bit too much last night and awoke with a hangover, the kind that left me unable to muster the energy to leave the bed until well after 9:00am. But it didn't matter; there were no dogs to hold me accountable. I returned to the basement to keep puttering with my SolArk Copilot code. I eventually decided I wouldn't be able to figure out what was going on without implementing a serial port to give me live information even after the copilot began monitoring data from the inverter, something that required it to dedicate its one available hardware serial port. So I implemented a software serial port, one that bit-bangs the data out and in through whatever pins you choose. Doing this, I was able to figure out that the problems with my copilot happened the moment the code started trying to set a pin for the purpose of remote control. Eventually it occurred to me: what if the pin I was using for remote control happened to be one of the two pins needed to read serial data from the SolArk? It turned out that was my entire problem, though I'm still not clear why. The pin I was using for remote control was not one of the two serial pins. But then again, the D1 board I am using is very confusing; it actually labels two different pins as GPIO13, and that (whichever one it is) is the one I was using for remote control. It also means that I might only have a wire attached to one of the dongle's two serial data lines (either the transmit or receive; since this functionality switches depending on persective, I can't say which it might be).
To take advantage of the fact that I had the Forester, late this afternoon I drove to the Lowes in Amsterdam and bought a bunch of lumber for a deck I intend to build. The lumber consisted of seven twelve-foot treated two-by-eights, two eight-foot two-by eights, and three twelve foot four-by-fours. Almost all of it was still wet to the touch and almost too heavy to lift up to the roof rack. But I loaded all of it there, split into two groups on either side so as the leave the middle part of the roof rack (where there is no load-bearing support to keep the rack's two crossbeams from bowing. Since the load came to about 500 pounds, it was very important to tie it down tightly, with additional ropes on the ends to keep the wood from being able to move much up and down. I also oriented all the lumber that was taller than it was wide in the manner of joists (narrow edge up) so the boards couldn't flex much up and down. Unfortunately, unlike our old Subaru Outbacks, there are no easy places to hook a rope onto under the carriage in the front or back. It would've been easy to include them, but they didn't, forcing me to hook onto things like the rear suspension. Once on the road, I was careful to avoid sharp turns out driving across any surface irregularity, since any little bump would cause the lumber on the roof to move, often with great leverage. Driving thoughtlessly with so much lumber strapped to the roof could cause the rack to disintegrate. I made it back to the cabin okay, though somewhere along the drive one of the ropes reaching down under the front of the Forester from the front of the passenger-side lumber cluster started rubbing on the side of the right front tire. But nothing much was damaged except a slight fraying of the rope.
The lumber load on the Forester roof rack this evening after hauling it from Amsterdam to the cabin.
Click to enlarge.
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