Harley garage door opener

Tonight's update was a week or so in the making. HD (the moco as they like to call them) has a garage door opener. It's $120, involves splicing your harness and work ok at best and doesn't always work on all garage door openers for everybody at worst. So I knew there was a way to get a normal remote wired in. Well, HD triggers there's off the high beam switch so that was a pretty good idea I figured. If I could get a normal remote to work then I'd be in good shape. After searching the internet some I came acorss this little handy diagram. So now all I had to do was find a remote (freebie from boB) and some cheap parts from radio shack. OK, now it's all done I've got total out of pocket less than $5 in this thing. HD wanted $120. The score: the man 0, us 1.


Below is how I mounted all the components. I used 3M double sided tape and put it under my "dash" on the bike. It fits well and doesn't interfere.



Here's everything soldered together. A small relay that fires off the high beam indicator LED. A capacitor that charges and allow the relay to drop out. Then when the relay closes it's the same as pushing the button on the remote for 1/2 second.

Here's where I got into the bike signal at. I skinned back the wires just about 1/2" on the instrument panel. This way I'm not damaging the main harness. If it ever fails, much easier and cheaper to replace.



This is post solder and heat shrink. I pulled the wire out of the mini DT connector then put the heat shrink on. Then I doped the end of it with silicon so it's sealed all around. Just plugged it back into the bike and all is well.


It took longer to keep it neat then it did actually get it wired up. One unexpected event it fires during any movement of the switch where as the it was only supposed to fire when going to high beams, not changing back to low.

The Blue Man Group

Me and Mandy and some friends from work went and saw The Blue Man Group on Friday Feb 29th. Me and Mandy had seen them in Las Vegas and it was pretty awesome so we couldn't pass up a chance to see them in our backyard.

The opening act was Mike Relm. He is a DJ and while the whole DJ club thing is not really something we're into, he was pretty freakin' cool and funny. He had control of the audio but also had everything rigged to video so he could mix it too. The clip below is part of the movie Office Space. This is where Drew walks in a proclaims, "If all goes well I might be showing her my 'O' face!".


OK, not the best pictures in the world but it's shot from a Canon PowerShot A70 at ISO400 at 1/30th of a second, zoomed in from 150 yards, so give me a break. Below is a fairly colorful picture. 2 of the guys drumming away. One had the lights and colors in his drums lighting up. The huge drum in the background shakes the place when he drums it. Sweet.


2 of the guys hijacked the sound and light controls and we were 2 seats away. Sometimes it pays to sit in the back.


The end of the show. Streamers in the air, The Blue Man Group logo in the back ground and in the foreground, Rock Concert movement #37, "Flashing the Floppie the Banjo Clown hand puppet". How much better could it get?!