2005-04-16: Of Cleaning and Car Networking

This network cable has, for many months, snaked its way through my sliding glass door, along the floor of the CA room, and then under the door into the reading room. At first, I was just looking for a way to run it along the ceiling in the California room and then have it come down to the network gear in the reading room. But that was proven impossible, although I did learn that the reading room is much better built and insulated than I've previously given it credit for. At any rate, I then turned my eyes towards the floor, and decided I was going to go ahead with an idea I've been kicking around for quite some time.

Simply put, I have a pretty nice system of heating ducts under my place. They happen to run the entire length of the trailer, and there's one which goes, in a straight line, from my bedroom all the way up to the TV area. One of the most trashy looking things about my living room has been the blue ethernet cable snaking through the missing keyhole on my sliding glass door. If you look between Brian and Craig on this picture, you'll see it. That cable also ran the entire length of the California room, eventually running under the door to the reading room and terminating in a mass of network gear.

I've been toying with the thought of reducing this annoyance for a while, and truthfully all I'd intended to do was string the cable along the roof of the California room so it wasn't on the floor anymore. I was prevented from doing this by the fact that the reading room does indeed have decently secured roofage, thus preventing me from running the cable through any holes in it. It took me a bit of annoyance and frustration before my eyes set on the heating vent, and I resolved to perform the experiment I'd been pondering for some time.

I walked out, and informed Brian I'd be returning with either a remote controlled car or a really nifty dart gun. By now, he's used to hearing me make weird statements like that. When I arrived at Wal-Mart, I determined that the chance of a nerf gun small enough to fit into the vent being able to launch an ethernet cable carrying projectile all the way to the other end of the vent was miniscule. I swear, they just don't make eye-poking-out spring-loaded suction cup dart guns anymore. Maybe California banned them or something.

At any rate, I then was unable to find a hand mirror to put down into the vent. So, a poor retired-looking guy who was on his first day at wally world was given what he noted was one of the strangest requests he ever expected to hear: "Hi, I'm trying to run some cable through a heat vent - I need a mirror and a remote controlled car, but I can't find the mirrors." He managed to find me a mirror with a tilting base, which proved invaluable because I wouldn't have to prop it up with anything or hold it in my hand. Next up, I looked in the RC car section. I've determined that the state of kids' RC cars has gone both up and down from when I was a kid. For one thing, they're almost all capable of steering in either direction, with dual joysticks instead of the click-pulse style driving my first RC car had. Next up, they've gotten cheap - $10 or so, and they've moved to non-proprietary AA batteries rather than vendor specific battery packs. Now, for the bad news - although there are HUGE RC cars and trucks that look really nice, including a decently proportioned Hummer H1, the small to mid sized RC cars are outright horrible. If you can find one with a decent body style, it's been plastered with "Monster Garage" decals and such. And forget about finding one with decent ground clearance. I finally settled on a Mazda RX-8 which had somehow escaped being co-branded by Monster Garage. Back when I was a teenager, I had a Tyco Turbo Hopper - a truly awesome RC car, which I drove quite a bit until the mount for one of the front struts broke. I still miss that turbo hopper. I'd initially hoped that I could find one of its smaller cousins, either the Mini Hopper or Micro Hopper, at Wally World. Unfortunately, this is the wrong decade to go looking for them - but if you look on Yahoo you'll find a number of folks fondly reminiscing about them. The ground clearance would've been ideal on those for dealing with the vents; the only problem with the RX-8 was how low to the ground it is.

At any rate, once I got my RX-8 home, I quickly learned that it was just a little bit too big to fit into the vent, so I wound up taking a screwdriver to it and disassembling it within minutes of having pulled it out of the box. Underneath its body shell, was a low-slung black chassis with a fairly long antenna and nowhere in particular to attach the ethernet cable. I resolved that by slipping one of my plastic ties under its control housing and then securing the ethernet cable and antenna underneath. At first I'd thought I could get away with leaving the antenna up, but I found in this pic that not only did the antenna stick up, it actually caught the car on the vent hole and kept it from travelling down. This could perhaps have been gotten around by charging the batteries fully, but it was simpler just to tie down the antenna.

Once I had Rover down into the vent, I found that driving in reverse was more reliable than trying to drive forward. Front wheel drive proved important in the vents, and when dealing with a rear wheel drive electric vehicle, getting front wheel drive is just as simple as driving it in reverse. There were a few screws in the vents that proved difficult to navigate, but with a proper running start, Rover was able to jump over them and make it down the vent and over to the other end, dragging an ethernet cable the whole way. This provided Brian with no end of amusement, and apparently kept people on his IRC channel alternating between amusement and bewilderment.

Once the ethernet cables had been strung, I put the body cover back onto the RX-8 and officially retired it from hazardous duty. It's now mostly used to drive around on the carpet and give Constantine something to look at.

Now that that's been resolved, the next wiring project is to get the line to Brian's room run through the wall with the power outlet extension in my room. That's the last of the lines running around on the floor. After that, running the wire to my desktop machine through a particularly short run of heat vent so it's not going along my bedroom floor, and also pestering Brian to make some extra-short ethernet cables so that the wireless router, DSL router, and the switch can cease to be a rat's nest of ethernet cables.

Oh, and no discussion of an RX-8 can be complete without a link to my friend Nathan's real, imported Mazda RX-8. While I don't have any daylight pictures of the real one, the RC car was pretty close to the real thing, looks-wise.