4 Down, 10 to Go

Another day dusted, literally, there is dust everywhere out here. I found a brand new pair of leather boots in the container today, (we have 4 large shipping containers, one is fitted out as our main "office" with computers, aircon etc, all powered by solar and a generator as they didn't run lines in, the other 3 are parts storage), they were nice Bloodstone ones that are steelcap, but water proof. Instead of laces etc it has a velcro flap you undo which opens the shoe wide enough to get your foot in, but its all sealed. Anyway, after claiming them as they were my size, I wore them. A lot more comfy then the gum boots, let me tell you. Back to my point, this afternoon, they weren't new anymore. Absolutely filthy and dirty from all the dust and mud around. And I didn't even go underground today!

Still slowly finding my feet. Assisted Michael yesterday and today (Michael is ex Aviation like myself, however he is a 7yr Uni Engineer, as opposed to my 4yr Trade, he designs it, I curse him when nothing fits) with building a unit that could remotely control two barricade setups with warning lamps to be used when we have Remote Loaders side loading Trucks in certain areas. This is meant to stop people going in and getting killed. Sure enough there will be people stupid enough to do it anyway, but hey, apparently that's normal out here. Michael wanted to the program (which he coded himself) to also be able to show if a light was busted. After wiring it up initially, and finding it didn't work, I sat down and went through the schematics and re-engineered it do what he needed. Pretty basic stuff, but as I don't know the equipment etc I was pretty happy with myself once we got it sorted and it worked well. A few of the guys were pretty impressed with my wiring style as well, due to it being a lot more "presentable" (and I believe function-able) than the standard normally used around here. Hopefully down the track I can introduce them to some more Aviation techniques that will hopefully make things last a bit longer in this environment. Although as I saw this afternoon, when a loader runs over a steel electrical cabinet, it doesn't matter how its wired. It's still a pancake!

After we got that sorted I spent the day troubleshooting and repairing some MineGem systems, learning more about there web interface and diagnostic tools, and then we wrote a program to use data supplied from some serial 232 G-sensors we had picked up. We fitted these to a spare 232 port in one of the MineGem units and have now got it installed on two loaders. Pretty impressive stuff really, these things are extremely sensitive and we had to turn them right down, but now we have a nice visual representation of the forces on the loader. The cards are about half the size of a credit card, and the program only took a few hours to write and nut out. I think I am going to have to learn some coding as a couple of these guys are very switched on with this sort of stuff and I was struggling in some places to keep up. The whole idea behind this by the way was about 2 weeks ago a loader got stuck. After everyone looking at it for about an hour and not being able to figure out how to move it etc, someone went to check on it. It was upside down. It had rolled and apparently "no-one" had noticed.

Other than that, we saw a pretty impressive dust devil, I finally got my own uniforms, and tonight was Seafood night which was quite tasty. Not bad for a Saturday really.

• On average the loader can carry between 13-15 tonnes of rock/ore in a single scoop.
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Found this video of a Mucker loading a Truck