Digital Gray Card and Car Stuff

Edge of a Robin Myers DGC-100 Digital Gray Card
(Click for more…)

Well, today I finally received my DGC-100 Digital Gray Card from Robin Myers Imaging. I had read about this just before acquiring my 20D (photo gallery retired), and I finally got around to picking one up.

At US$9.95 (plus $1.10 postage) it’s fairly expensive for a grey card, but it’s also really well made. As it is a solid slab of appropriately colored plastic, should it become scratched or too damaged, one can sand it with 100 grit sand paper and then rinse it off, and it’s good as new. It’s also not vulnerable to things like finger oils and water and such as the cardboard ones are. Also, it seems to be quite a bit more evenly colored than the cardboard one I picked up for around US$3 back at the end of December.

I have to say, after seeing one of these in person, I have to strongly recommend that anyone who needs a grey card get one of these. I like it because it can easily be stuck in a backpack or something, and one doesn’t have to worry about the color rubbing off, corners bending, etc.

Tonight I also did a good bit of work on my car, pulling the dashboard off, Navigation Unit out, and figuring out where to get power and such from for the vehicle. I did screw one thing up, though. And I feel pretty bad about that. See, the Navigation Unit is held down (probably for security reasons) with two bolts up through the bottom of it. Well, when replacing everything at the end of the night, I dropped one of the bolts somewhere in the center console. I spent about 10 minutes looking for it, and I just simply can’t find it. I can only assume that it fell to the side and is now somewhere under the carpet or something. Blah. Well, at least the Navigation Unit is still held down fairly well… I do feel stupid, though.

I grabbed a few pictures of the torn open dash and some scans of my notes of pinouts, but I’ll post them here tomorrow or something.

Also, I think I’ve got the physical mounting of the iPod figured out, and I’ve now got the electrical worked out. The only things I still have to figure out are what connectors to use for the iPod dock cable and the audio out on the box which will couple everything together and where to get a .100″ spacing header with 3/8″ long leads. I’d use a standard IDE connector cut down, but those are only 1/4″ leads. I can work around this if I can find the same connector Honda uses if I look hard enough. (This is for the auxiliary audio input connector.

Now I just need to get all the parts, assemble it all, and install it all. Yay!

Oh, and a HUGE thank you to who is getting some of the parts I need made exactly as I need them. Sure, they are just some metal discs in the iPod stand, but without them I don’t think it could possibly be as stable or as elegant as I hope it will be. I’m really, really excited about this. :)