In this installment, I cover the fourth week of working on my new wheelchair. We will solve one problem and immediately create another one.

Free at Last

Our story is now up to Monday April 18, 2016 exactly 3 weeks since my new wheelchair has arrived and I still haven’t been able to drive it myself yet. It was my own fault because in an attempt to reprogram it, I accidentally disabled the joystick and locked myself out of the programming. Today was the day that the technician was supposed to come and fix it but I didn’t have high hopes. I’ve faced so many disappointments that I try not to get too psyched up.

The technician who arrived was Aaron and he was one of the 2 guys who had delivered the chair weeks ago. I had thought that the guy I had dealing with Patrick also did repairs but according to Aaron, Patrick is really just a salesman and Aaron is the repair man. He had with him a small black box with a cable coming out of it that looks like this one that I found on eBay. They call it a programming dongle. It is supposed to let you get into various programming modes that cannot be reached just by pushing the buttons on the display module.

There is a cable running from the display unit to the controller box on the back of the chair and it has a jack and plug in the middle of the cable. You unplug it and plug this box in line where the cable comes apart. The hope was that simply plugging it in would free things up and allow him to enter programming mode again. Unfortunately that didn’t work. So he got on the phone and called Sunrise Medical technical support. We waited several minutes on hold until we got a live person and then they had to transfer us to the right person to answer the question which meant several more minutes on hold. When we told the guy what the problem was he basically said we were screwed. He said if plugging the dongle in didn’t free it up then he would need the diagnostic tool. There’s apparently another handheld module that dealers have called a diagnostic tool. It has its own little LCD screen and buttons that not only allows you to reprogram a wheelchair perform diagnostics as well. Aaron had already told me that they only had one of those such devices to pass around between 7 different repair technicians and currently it was broken. The guy on the phone said if we could hook the dongle into a PC we might be able to get it to reset the software. So we hung up from him and tried to decide what to do next.

Aaron didn’t have the cable necessary to connect the dongle to a computer. He would have to go back to the office to get one. Of course why he was sent out to reprogram a wheelchair and didn’t have the proper cable is a question we never answered. Anyway I had seen such cables online during my research. They had USB on one end but I didn’t know what they had on the other end. I presumed it was some sort of weird connector like the one you can see in the photo that connects all of the various parts of the R-net wheelchair control system. Then I happen to see the end of the dongle and immediately recognized the jack was a standard USB “A” style jack. These are the full-size square USB jacks that you find on some computer printers and scanners. They were the original USB before they made micro and mini USB jacks. I said “is that where you plug in the computer cable?” And he said yes. I’ve got a whole box of those and every other kind of USB cable you can think of. I also had plenty of computers available and I knew where to find the software we needed online.

As it turned out he did have his own laptop with the proper software already installed. I provided the cable and we hooked it up. The software didn’t see my wheelchair as being connected. When you would plug the USB cable in, windows would make the usual noise that you hear when you plug a USB device into a Windows PC. But the software had a status window that said “no connection”. We made another call to Sunrise Medical Support and went through the same two-step waiting on hold process that we had been through previously. One of the problems was that Aaron wasn’t that familiar with the software and thought perhaps there was something he should have been clicking on to get it to connect. We finally got through to the support guy and explained the problem. We were doing everything right so it had to be a driver problem.

Before the guy on the phone could explain what to do about drivers I said “I’ve got this”. I instructed Aaron how to call up the Windows Device Manager window and sure enough under USB devices was “R-net Dongle” with a little yellow triangle next to it. I told him to right-click on it and it said “this device is not operating properly”. No shit. I had him click on the “Update Driver” button and it asked did we want to specify where to look or have it look online itself. If I had to bet money on it I thought we would have to go to a website to find the proper driver and install it ourselves. For such an obscure device I didn’t think it would do an automatic update but I figured we would give it a try. Meanwhile the guy on the phone was trying to figure out where to tell us to go to download the driver when much to everyone’s surprise the computer said “Installing new driver”. A minute or two later it completed. We went back to the software and sure enough it said “connected”!

Then the guy on the phone walked Aaron through what to click on to reset the factory defaults. That all went very smoothly and when it was done, the joystick worked perfectly. I asked Aaron if we needed to calibrate this joystick and he didn’t think that we needed to. At some point I’m going to get ambitious and go through the joystick calibration procedure in the manual but for now the joystick seemed to be working. We put my newly 3-D printed homemade collar around my neck and at 3:50 PM on Monday April 18 I finally got to drive my wheelchair for the first time. Here is a video I shot a few minutes later after Aaron left.

It was 328 days since the salesman and I first began working on the purchase of a new wheelchair and I finally was able to drive it. As I said in the beginning, it had also been three weeks to the day since the chair had arrived as well.

Happy Birthday to Us

Not only was April 18 the first day I could drive my wheelchair, it also happened to be my dad’s 82nd birthday. It felt like a double birthday to me. Normally we would go out to dinner to celebrate but we weren’t yet ready to have the wheelchair in the van so we decided to get carryout from the Golden Corral Buffet. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet but neither dad nor I have a big enough appetite to make it worth the money. You can however go in and fill up Styrofoam containers with food and then they weigh it and charge you by the ounce. He can fill up a couple of containers with enough food for both of us and the cost turns out to be barely over half of what it would cost if we both went into the restaurant in the all-you-can-eat system.

My favorite is their rotisserie chicken. I think they must brine it before cooking or something to get the flavor of the spices to soak in. I absolutely love it. I have a lot of trouble eating skin whether it is fried or baked chicken and a lot of the time that’s where all the flavor is. But here the flavor goes all through. Unfortunately this particular day they didn’t have the rotisserie chicken so dad just got me a slice of pizza, some large steak fries and a large brownie.

While dad was going to get the food, I put together the YouTube video of me driving the chair that is embedded above here. While he was gone I also just drove the chair all over the house. I almost felt like dancing so I put on some music. I didn’t exactly drive in time with the music but I just wanted to celebrate a kind of birthday of my own. It was the rebirth of my mobility.

What’s Skew?

We had discovered that when I go into the van it’s too difficult for me to lean forward to duck in the doorway like I previously did in my old chair. I sit about an inch or so higher in this chair than in the old one and I just can’t duck far enough. We had discovered however that if you remove the headrest and I tilt my head backwards, I could just barely make it into the van. I have to be perfectly centered however because on the right side there is a brace on the lift on which I could hit my head. When I lean my head back, my neck hits of the top of the backrest of the wheelchair. If we could lower the backrest slightly, I would be able to tilt my head back further.

I had originally anticipated that to get in the van I would simply recline the wheelchair and not have to worry about ducking. However the process of reclining isn’t quite as straightforward as I hoped it would be. You switch the chair out of driving mode into seat positioning mode and then you have to select which seat function you want to adjust. You have to select whether it is recline, tilt, combination of both, or footrest adjustments. In broad daylight the LCD display screen washes out and you can’t see what you’re doing. Also in order to recline we need to adjust my seatbelts because as I start to lean back, my chest belt tries to tighten up on me. It was just more complicated than we had hoped. Taking out the headrest, laying my head back, driving in, and putting the headrest back in place seemed a lot simpler. But to make it safer we really want to lower the backrest so I could lean my head back further.

One of the things that makes this chair so complicated is that it is so adjustable. It used to be they made wheelchairs in perhaps two sizes and then it was up to you to come up with cushions or padding to make you fit the chair. These days the chairs are insanely adjustable and that along with the tilt and recline mechanisms it makes them insanely complicated.

There is a procedure in the user manual that shows you how to remount the backrest into a lower mounting hole. We had talked to Aaron about the possibility but he said it couldn’t be done in my case because it would mess up the skew mechanism. That left me with a question “What’s skew?” (To which the comedian in me would reply “Nothing… What’s skew with you?”)

The reclining mechanism is quite complicated in that it has 2 actuator motors. One of them does the actual reclining. The other one slides the backrest down slightly as you recline. That keeps the backrest stationary relative to your back as you lean backwards. I would have to create a complicated animated illustration to fully explain why it does that and at this point of the story we really weren’t sure how or why it worked. It is this second sliding mechanism that is known as the skew mechanism. When they delivered the wheelchair it had a backrest cushion that reached all the way down to the seat. We concluded that it was this tall cushion that was the reason he said it could skew properly. We had already replaced it with a shorter backrest cushion that had plenty of room to slide up and down. There was another set of mounting holes that would allow us to lower the seat. It might’ve been just as easy to get out the sawzall and cut an inch off the top but you hate to do that if there is an adjustment that will work. Also we weren’t really sure we needed it. I did fit through the door. It just didn’t have any margin for error. We also still had the option to simply recline the chair. The skew mechanism turned out to be one of the reasons why the safety belt was messing up during reclining. Perhaps reclining was a better solution after all. We later found a way to remount the safety belt so that it didn’t get affected by the skew.

As you have probably seen after reading these blogs or my recent essay on my choking and swallowing difficulties, I have a tendency to tell every single detail of any story. But I’m going to spare you some of gory details of this one. The short version is that dad tried to follow the procedures of the manual to disconnect the actuator, disconnect the seat hinge, reposition the seat hinge, and reconnect the actuator all in a lower position. He started working on it the evening of the 18th after I was in bed. He spent hours trying to do it that night and the next morning. We finally had to give up and put things back the way they were. That is almost…

On paper, the process seems pretty simple but in addition to the hinge and the recline actuator that need to be moved, there is a gas filled cylinder that looks like a shock absorber but is actually a very stiff compression spring. He could not get the spring compressed sufficiently to get it connected the proper hole. When he gave up and put it all back together, the spring was one hole lower than it should’ve been. It simply would not go back in the proper hole. The mechanism still seemed to work smoothly after he put it back together so we just gave up on it.

The Tortoise Beat the Hare

I had a sleepless night that night. Part of it was excitement over the day’s events. Part of it was the noise of dad banging on the bolt trying to get it back in as he was adjusting wheelchair 🙂 Anyway I slept in until 1 PM on Tuesday. We canceled the home health aide and dad got me dressed and I had a small snack about 2:30 rather than eating lunch. As he was stressing me, dad explained everything was back together but a new problem had arisen.

The chair wouldn’t drive except at the lowest speed. A little orange icon in the shape of a tortoise had popped up on the LCD display. The speed control shows icons of either a tortoise on one end or a hare on the other end. Apparently those are the new universal symbols for slow or fast. If you would set the recline angle of the chair up 100% vertical, the tortoise would disappear and you could drive at any speed you wanted to. But if you recline even a couple of degrees, the tortoise would pop up and you would be limited to the lowest speed setting.

Is a safety mechanism to keep you from driving the chair rapidly while in a reclined position. If you recline very far, the tortoise turns red and you cannot drive at all. We had seen it before but it usually didn’t kick in until 20-30 degrees or so. However my comfortable seating position is about 5 degrees reclined. Something that we had done along the way had messed up this mechanism.

So in this little fable my dad and I have been the hares. A couple of weeks ago I had rushed like a jack rabbit into changing the programming and messed things up. Dad had rushed into the mechanical adjustments and apparently messed things up as well. And we were now being beaten by a damn little tortoise icon. I guess the Aesop fable was right. The tortoise beat the hares again.

Is an earlier installment I had described my dad and I were like Liam Neeson in the “Taken” movies who were dangerous because we “possessed a particular set of skills”. As it turns out we both should’ve been listening to another deep-voiced badass movie character Clint Eastwood in the second “Dirty Harry” movie when he famously said “A man’s it got to know his limitations.” Or perhaps it was like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” getting chewed out by his commander Stinger when he said “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” Whatever fable or movie was appropriate to the situation, the score was even. Dad and I had both screwed up.

Actually at this point we weren’t completely sure that he had done anything wrong. We had unfortunately violated my mother’s proverb that I spoke of earlier about “don’t feed the baby 2 new foods”. There was a possibility that resetting the software that we had done with Aaron earlier in the day had reset the calibration of the tilt sensor. I was pretty sure that the chair had been driving normal speed when I drove it around that evening but we really weren’t sure whether it was the software reset or the change of the mechanics that was the root of the problem.

I sent an email to Aaron and I also posted messages on the wheelchairdriver.com discussion forum. The people online said that the sensors are pretty flaky and have been known to give out at inappropriate times such as when you are a mile from home and suddenly your wheelchair starts going a tortoise pace because it thinks you are reclined when you are not. The bottom line from them was it could be software or it could be hardware they couldn’t tell for sure.

Rather than tell the remainder of this story chronologically day-by-day as I have been doing, I’m going to finish out this topic because we did not get this resolved until eight days later on Tuesday April 26.

The email reply I got from Aaron basically said what everyone else had said. It could be software… it could be hardware… he didn’t know. So I wrote back and said “So what do I do to resolve this?” I never heard back from him. I spent a lot of time over the next several days trying to research how the sensor works, where it’s located, does the software calibrate it? I tried sending email to Sunrise Medical who manufactures the chair. Experience had shown me that Aaron couldn’t do anything without calling them. Maybe I could get some answers directly. I did get an initial reply. They said they needed to know the serial number on my wheelchair before they can answer any more questions. I sent it to them with more information about the problem. I never got a reply.

On Monday April 25th we finally called National Seating and Mobility to get them to officially send Aaron or some other technician out to look at it. Apparently he wasn’t going to reply to my emails unless I got his office involved. They gave me the same story of either bring it in or wait another week until we can send someone. Rather than wait another week dad took it in the following day. They tried a couple of different things to no avail but eventually went back to work on putting the spring cylinder back into its proper hole. It took two guys to do it which was why my dad had spent so many hours trying to do it himself. For some bizarre reason it fixed the problem. The technicians couldn’t believe that that was the problem and neither could we. There’s nothing electronic connected to that cylinder. There must be some sort of pressure sensor in the actuator motor that could tell that the spring was not set properly and that was messing things up.

During the entire week that the speed control was messed up, I chose not to drive the chair myself. It was too difficult to drive at that speed and I was having some other issues with my joystick mount that I will describe later. So even though I did get to drive the chair for a single day three weeks after its arrival. I did not really have the chair fully operational until exactly 4 weeks and one day after its arrival.

In the end, the seat was back where it was originally and all of that adjustment was for nothing. And for reasons which I will explain later… I’m still going to have to recline the wheelchair to get in the van. All of that adjustment was for nothing. The reasons why I have to recline is a story for an entirely different blog.

Showing Off

Adafruit Show-and-Tell sticker I earned for this presentation.

Despite the fact that the tortoise had sent this hare sadly strolling away with his tail between his legs, I want to celebrate and show off that the chair was working even if it wasn’t completely up to speed. Every Wednesday night my maker supplier Adafruit Industries has a weekly online video chat where people show off their electronics and other maker projects. A few weeks earlier I had shown them a sort of work in progress version of my joystick mount. That was back when we were just making modifications to the mount that had the cloth strap. This was the new completely redesigned built from scratch system. And rather than just show a slideshow of pictures, this time I could actually demonstrate the project myself. I was going to drive my wheelchair live on the Internet for hundreds to see.

I did some tests to see what would be visible on my WebCam. I could park in front of the camera and then back up the chair and do some small maneuvers and then pull up to the computer again. The demonstration went really well and they were impressed. One of the hosts of the show Phil Torrone was very impressed. He said that so many of the 3-D printer projects that they encounter are somewhat trivial trinkets. They are typically little knickknacks or toys or perhaps they are just enclosures for electronics projects. Indeed that’s the majority of what I’ve done with my 3-D printer. However this was a project that really did something useful that would be difficult to do without a 3-D printer. The fact that the commercially made devices would not meet my specific needs but that I could create something with a 3-D printer was a much better illustration of what 3-D printing was all about.

The guy who presented after me also had an inspiring project to show. He was getting treatment for a brain tumor and he has some sort of electronic device wired into a cap that he had to wear on his head. The electronics were stored in a backpack. For various reasons from time to time he would shut the device off but he would occasionally forget to turn it back on again. There was a little blue light that would be on anytime that the device was operational. He built an electronic gadget with a color light sensor that would detect whether or not the light was on. If it was off for too long of a time period, it would ring an alarm. Here was an electronic medical device probably worth thousands of dollars and it didn’t have an alarm function. This guy build one himself out of parts purchased from Adafruit.

Here is the video on YouTube. My section starts at 5 minutes 10 seconds into the show. The guy with the alarm on his cancer equipment is immediately after me.

After the group show-and-tell, they also present an hour-long live streaming program called “Ask an Engineer” which includes maker news, tips, and a Q&A section where you can ask engineer and Adafruit founder Limor “Ladyada” Fried your engineering questions. But part of the “Ask an Engineer” show begins with a recap of the previous “Show-and-Tell” program. In that program they also reiterated their appreciation for my use of 3-D printing to solve a real problem. You can see the “Ask an Engineer” program here. That link takes you to the 11 minute mark where she described my project but if you bother to watch it you might want to skip ahead to about 14 minutes where they comment further. I’m writing this blog on May 3rd and as of this point the Show-and-Tell has been seen over 1000 views and the engineer show has been seen on YouTube over 2000 times. The show also streams live on periscope, twitch, u-stream and other platforms. Of course I always tell people they can visit this blog for more information.

Promoting my work on the Adafruit programs has led a number of people to contact me about my projects. I know of three or four people who were building specialized infrared remote controls for their aged or disabled friends and family. They have contacted me for advice and I’ve really enjoyed helping them with their projects. Perhaps sharing my wheelchair stories will also help other disabled people who are makers or firms of makers

I was going to continue telling the story of some design modifications that I’ve made on the joystick mount while I was waiting on the reclining problem to be fixed however I think this is a good place to wrap up this edition. In the next installment I will talk about some modifications to the joystick mount that were made during the fourth and fifth weeks of having the new wheelchair.

In this installment we will cover the remainder of the first week of working on the new wheelchair. We work on getting the more comfortable and trying to diagnose what went wrong with the programming that has disabled my new joystick.

Are You Comfortable?

There is an old vaudeville joke where a nurse is working with a patient and she says “Are you comfortable?” The patient replies “Ehhh… I earn a living… But not really comfortable”. I’ve used that joke in my life more times than I can count. I guess it’s an indication that friends and family often look at me and are concerned about my comfort. I probably look uncomfortable 99% of the time. My scoliosis has left me with two 90 degree bends in my spine. My joints all have severe contractures. My normal driving position in my wheelchair leaves my head tilted sideways a good 45 degrees. My arm was always propped up in an awkward position. Most of all I’m fortunate enough to have a lot of people who care whether or not I am comfortable. So when these kind people inquire about my comfort, I always pull the joke and say “I earn a living”.

Somewhere along the way I quit using the joke. Either it just got old, or I got tired of it, or perhaps subconsciously the inaccuracy of it began to bother me. My only income is from Social Security Disability payments. So the statement “I earn a living” isn’t particularly accurate. The sentiment of the joke that “I get by okay even though I’m not plush financially” is accurate. The real question is “Why can’t I answer the question directly?” Why can’t I respond yes or no to “Are you comfortable?” I was blessed to have my friend Rick Ruiz as my home health aide for three years. Somewhere along the way I started answering his “Are you comfortable?” inquiries honestly by saying “I’m not comfortable… But I’m okay”. This wasn’t a financial joke. I explained to Rick on a number of occasions that I never really am comfortable regardless of what position I am currently sitting. When he asks if I’m comfortable and I am as comfortable as I get I can say “I’m okay” but I can’t honestly say “I’m comfortable”. It was a stark realization and admission that I never really was physically comfortable in my normal position. But my comfort really didn’t matter because it was the only position in which I could sit and still be able to operate my wheelchair.

Ever since my arms finally gave out some time last summer and I could no longer drive my wheelchair, I began to adjust my normal sitting position. Rather than prop my right elbow on top of the control box, I begin tucking it in behind the box. My wrist would hang off to the right side against the armrest and it left my fingers free to hold my little pushbuttons for my ultimate remote. That left my body in a much more upright position. I began putting my head against the headrest which I normally did not do. The headrest was mostly used while riding in my van. In fact that was the original reason for adding a headrest to my wheelchair many, many years ago. Eventually I began leaving the headrest in given what I was not riding in the van because I did occasionally lean back against it. The problem was that the headrest was not in the proper “sitting around the house position”. It was only useful when I was sitting with my chest strap extremely tight in my “riding in the van” sitting position. I eventually found a way to sort of balance my head on the corner of my headrest for my normal sitting position. The discomfort of the corner of the headrest digging into the back of my skull was considerably less than the discomfort of having my head tilted sideways at a 45 degree angle all of the time. So with the elbow tucked in, and my head balanced on the corner of the headrest, for the first time in a very, very long time I was (choking on the words more comfortable) less uncomfortable.

Unfortunately there were consequences to sitting in this new position. My wrist began getting sore where it leaned against the armrest. We compensated by getting a little piece of curved cardboard that fit my forearm perfectly. We tried gluing it on to the armrest but my arm would change pay position from time to time and the glue would not stick anyway. We finally just got to the point where we would stuff it underneath my arm as needed. That worked well for several months. Then I started having problems with my armpit and chest area right above my nipple. With my elbow always tucked in instead of high up atop the control box, my back brace was digging into my chest differently than it had for God knows how many years. I’ve made minor adjustments in the way I put the brace on and I’ve taken to applying some analgesic cream to the area each morning. I am managing that situation reasonably well but there have been many days where I’ve had to put my arm up and down sometimes every 15 or 20 minutes. I tried putting a pillow under the elbow but that threw everything off and made my wrist go numb.

Another consequence of the loss of the use of my arms has a potential effect on my normal attire. For over 30 years I’ve not worn long sleeve shirts. Even if they were lightweight, the sleeve would impact my arm sufficiently enough that I could not drive. I’m not been able to drive with a coat or jacket on for many, many years. But a few months ago I was visiting my sister’s house and they tend to keep the place considerably cooler than I normally like. Dad knows to wear a sweatshirt whenever we go there. So one day I was sitting there freezing my ass off and it occurred to me there was nothing to keep me from wearing long sleeves anymore. And the way that I intended to drive the new wheelchair was not going to be impeded by long sleeves. I need to go shopping for sweaters, sweatshirts, and perhaps a long sleeve dress shirt. I don’t own any and haven’t for years. Even my good shirt that I wear on the rare occasions I dressed in a suit and tie is a short sleeve shirt.

That was the state-of-the-art from sometime in late summer last year up until the new wheelchair arrived. One of the things that had made me reluctant to get a new chair for many years was the idea that I was going to have trouble adjusting to it and getting at least as comfortable as I was in the old chair. All of the constraints to my comfort such as needing to be able to drive were now gone. In the months waiting for the new chair, there were things I might have done to the old one to make it more comfortable such as redesigning the headrest. However that would’ve been wasted effort on a chair that I was destined to put in mothballs sometime soon. Dad and I often talked about the fact that once the wheelchair came, it might be a very long time until we got me “comfortable” or at least “okay”. I’ve been sitting in the same position in the same chair for so many years that any changes that have consequences. This was proven by the fact that sitting in my old chair in a different position had had consequences. But at least with the new chair we could start to address the problems and not have them wasted effort.

Mushy Butt

A key element of my comfort is something called a Roho seat cushion seen on the right. It is an inflatable seat cushion with rows and columns of blob shaped chambers. When you sit on it, the air flows from one chamber to another until the pressure equalizes. Over the years I had tried a variety of foam cushions, gel-filled cushions and I forget what other options but the Roho was the only thing that really worked consistently. I use of problems with them springing a leak every few months but when we replaced the cushion completely one time, we ordered it with a nylon cover. Either they started making the cushions more durable or the cover really protected it well because the last cushion I had lasted for more years that I can remember.

When I did my test drives in the other wheelchairs we put my old Roho into the new chair. It wasn’t very comfortable at all. I normally keep the cushion barely inflated. I found that if I fill it up too much that it was too mushy. I felt sort of round bottomed as if I was going to tip over. But sitting in the demo wheelchair I was definitely not mushy enough. Because my existing Roho cushion is very old, we told them to order a new one. When the new chair arrived, what was supposed to be a “low-profile” version of the cushion looks a lot taller than the one that I was using. Even given the fact that I normally underinflated mine, it definitely is taller. The new model is called a Quadro version. The various cells are divided into four groups and there is a valve that you can close internally so that pressure cannot go from one group to the other. That was a feature I really didn’t need but it didn’t hurt anything. Well no that’s not exactly true. I later discovered that the valve which closes the four chambers from one another was poking me in the back of the leg. We just turned the cushion around so it’s at the back and there was no problem.

Theoretically my normal underinflated cushion should have felt the same between my old chair and the demo chair. In the old chair there is a piece of Masonite pegboard under the cushion. That all sits on the curved Naugahyde seat of the wheelchair. Over the years the pegboard has warped considerably as you can see in the photo below. Both sides of the pegboard are about an inch and a half higher than the center. But in the new chairs, the seat is a solid piece of aluminum which is completely flat. Dad and I had already made plans that we might have to put some sort of curved surface between the flat metal seat and the new Roho. When the chair arrived we tried using the new Roho directly on the metal seat. It felt really good because we had it inflated much more than usual. I always start out with the seat overinflated and then gradually let air out until it’s where I want it. The first time I sat in the wheelchair the day they delivered it, it was surprisingly comfortable. I still felt very round bottomed and mushy butt but again the way I sit these days with my head in a fixed position and my chest strap and lap belt very tight, having a mushy butt sort of felt good.

After a day and a half of sitting in the new chair I decided that the seat was going to need a bit of adjustment to compensate for that curve that I was used to. When sitting in the old chair, I did not sit in the middle of the seat. I would sit far off to the right side. That puts my right hip on the high part of the curve in my left hip in the middle of the dip. I concluded that I needed that little boost on the right side to compensate for the strange twist in my pelvis and lower spine. Dad cut a piece of plywood and made a wedge just for the right side. Here are some photos of the wedge and the new Roho sitting on top of it.

I mentioned that my Uncle Keith came by on Thursday and brought a bunch of parts from my cousin Nancy’s old wheelchairs. Dad installed one of the headrest that he brought and added a couple of extra pieces of foam to it in strategic places. He installed the wedge under the Roho cushion. Friday which was the fifth day of the new wheelchair was my first day of sitting in the new chair with the wedge under the cushion. It worked exactly as I had hoped. The new headrest was a keeper as well. On Saturday I sat in the old chair because I was planning on going to church Saturday night. We do not yet have the proper tiedown equipment for the new chair in the van. As it turned out the weather was nasty Saturday and I did not go to mass after all. But sitting in the old chair gave me quite a surprise. I can actually say that I was more comfortable in the new chair that in the old one.

Disaster Recovery

When I left off my previous installment of the blog we had just accidentally disabled the joystick and left the chair permanently stuck in attendant drive mode. Dad could drive me around the house using the joystick on the back of the chair which you can see below. But I couldn’t do anything with the chair myself. Furthermore it was stuck in such a condition that I could no longer get into the programming menus.

My mother was a great troubleshooter. She like to take a multi prong approach to problems. For example in an emergency she would call 911 and then would call our parish prayer chain. Learning from her example I tried multiple approaches as well. I sent an email to both Patrick and Aaron who were the wheelchair technicians who delivered the chair. I explained that we had been getting joystick error messages. I had tried to correct it by going into programming mode. Somehow we got locked out of programming mode and the joystick no longer works at all. We are stuck in attendant drive mode. I could’ve called them but I wanted to weigh out all the issues in writing so I was sure they would understand everything that was going on. I then started doing Google searches to see if I can find out something on my own.

I came across a wonderful website called wheelchairdriver.com. It is run by a guy in England who seems to know what awful lot about power wheelchairs. He has built several of his own and he has an online forum full of other people just like me. I posted a message describing my problem. They also have a section of the discussion forum for introductions so I wrote a brief bio of myself and posted links to my blog. They said literally “you’ll find this place full of people a lot like you”. As far as my technical question, it only took a couple of hours and I had several replies. They didn’t know what was causing the joystick error although they had some ideas. But they definitely knew what was wrong that I could no longer get into programming mode. They reassured me that I should not feel like an idiot. I was not the first nor would I be the last user to enter that forum having accidentally locked up their programming. That made me feel a little better.

It turns out that there are different levels and methods of programming a PG Drive Technology R-Net Onni wheelchair control system. I had been using the least capable (and one would think safest) level which is called onboard programming or OBP for short. The second level is called “dealer programming”. It uses a gadget called a “dongle” that dealers have which authorizes them to get into more things. Dealers also have a handheld device called a programmer that allows them to do various programming tasks. I think that may be for wheelchairs that did not have the LCD display that mine has but still needs some sort of programming or calibration. I’m not really clear on what the dongle does as opposed to the handheld programmer. The third level of programming is called OEM programming. It is for the people such as Sunrise Medical who manufacturer the Quickie wheelchairs but purchase the controller equipment from PG Drive Technology. The people in the forum weren’t exactly certain whether or not a dealer programmer would be sufficient to get me unstuck or whether I would need OEM programming.

One of the ways that you could reprogram the device is using a special USB cable and connecting it to a PC and using special software. So I began investigating the possibility. Naturally anything I could do by plugging something into a computer and doing it with software was going to appeal to me. I’m not capable of pushing the menu buttons on the LCD display but if we could plug my chair into my PC then I can use my voice control to operate any software. Google searches for such devices led me to a pricelist from some dealer saying that the devices cost about $400 or more. There were also a couple of units on sale on eBay for similar prices but one of them was up for bids at $180 with three days to go in the auction. Over the weekend I continued to bid against someone up to $225 but when it reached $250 and I wasn’t really sure if it would fix my problem I decide to drop out. It ended up going for about $300.

Also on that Friday my foam tubing arrived from Amazon. There were two pieces each of red, yellow, and blue foam of different diameters. Each piece was about a foot long. It turned out that the red foam was the proper diameter and a 1 foot piece was a little bit short. We plan to put two of them end to end perhaps gluing them together and then trimming the extra long piece to the proper length. We spent some time bending the bars and trying on the foam padded device. It looks as though it was going to work as well is the one we had use on the successful test drive. I didn’t really like using the bright red piece. I was hoping the blue one would work since TARDIS blue is my chair’s color scheme.

I spent the rest of the day working on the blog and catching up on TV. The week had gone by so quickly I have forgotten that I had tentative plans for the weekend to go see Batman vs. Superman with my friends Rich and Kathy. We had never finalized plans and there was some miscommunication about which weekend we were going. But I was so preoccupied dealing with the new wheelchair that I had totally forgotten about the movie. I sent an email to Rich and we made firm plans for the following weekend.

“Evening came and morning followed — the fifth day” Genesis 1:23

“It’s Good to Be King” – Not!!!

You might presume that I would tell you what happened on the sixth day and then I would quote Genesis 1:31 which is followed up by the explanation that on the seventh day God rested. Much to my disappointment I’m not God so I rested on the sixth and seventh day both. I monitored my losing eBay bids, swapped some more messages at the wheelchair support forum but mostly I just goofed off watching racing on TV and playing an online computer game.

For about nine years I’ve been playing a browser on the game called Travian. It is a strategy and tactics simulation where you build little villages, produce resources, train troops, form alliances, and attack your enemies. It takes about four months to play an entire round of the game. You log into the website several times a day and tell it what to build, who to attack etc. I first started playing the game when my mom had cancer. It was a little bit of fantasy escape to get my mind off of worrying about her. I made some good online friends and have lots of fun over the years. I haven’t played it continuously but I play it quite a bit. The new version called Travian Kingdoms is organized a bit differently in that you have some players who are called Kings and the remaining players are their governors. An alliance can have up to three Kings and an unlimited number of governors under them. I’ve always played an ordinary governor but in the current round we’ve had three Kings who have given up and left the game. Because I’m such an experienced player I had built more villages with larger population than anyone left in our group. Despite my best efforts to get someone else to volunteer, I got appointed to be the new King.

One of my favorite lines from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World Part 1” is when he says “It’s good to be King” with a cheesy grin on his face as his servants are waiting on him. Apparently Mr. Brooks never played Travian Kingdoms. Being King is a pain in the ass. You have got all of the responsibility of managing everything and it makes you a bigger target for people to attack. The guys and gals who were playing with me all told me I was doing a great job but I think they were more interested in the fact that they didn’t have to do it themselves. I had never played the King position before in the game and really didn’t know how to work the controls or what the requirements were. So I was learning by doing in a hurry. I would like to try being a King at the beginning of the game where I could plan for the strategy from the beginning. Taking over in the late stages of the game was a lot of work. But it did what Travian has always done for me. It took my mind off my troubles. In this case the trouble was I’m sitting in a $40,000 brand-new wheelchair that I had waited 10 months to get and somehow I managed to break the damn thing and the quickest I might get a solution would be Monday. So I blew the weekend being a King.

In this installment we will cover the third and fourth days of working on the new wheelchair. We start to work on the new bib mount and continue to make other adjustments.

If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit…

We are now up to Wednesday which was the third day of the new wheelchair. We started out the day by sitting me in the new chair. Dad had previously shortened the foot rests so we were anxious to see how they fit. Somewhere along the way we miscalculated because both of the rest were still too low. For the time being we would put a pillow under my feet and dad would have to go back and get out the sawzall and shorten them even further.

The headrest wasn’t exactly like I wanted it but it was good enough to get me through the day. We would do more tinkering with that later. When the wheelchair technicians were here they had raised my left arm rest as high as it would go. It still wasn’t high enough but as a temporary measure we put a pillow under my left arm.

Getting In the Mode

There is an LCD display mounted on the right arm rest. The chair has various modes that you can put it in for driving indoors or outdoors or for using the attendant controls. It also displays an image of the seat when you are in seat adjustment mode so you know which part of the seat you’re adjusting. For example when you push the mode button it would say one of the following “recline”, “tilt”, “recline and foot rest”, “both foot rests”, “left foot rest”, “right foot rest”. If you moves the joystick forwards or backwards it moves that item. If you tap the joystick left or right it moves to the next seat item such as going from recline to tilt and so on. Of course until I get a mode change button, I wasn’t going to be able to operate any of this.

The LCD display was mounted pretty far forward sticking out in front of the armrest. It actually made the chair a little bit difficult to drive it through a narrow passage because it was sticking outside and so far forward. We would later adjust it so that it was not sticking outside or the front so far. When we got that adjusted, the little bar where the display is mounted actually is in a very good position where I can rest my right arm and still be able to hold the micro switches for my ultimate remote control.

I forgot to mention in an earlier post that I solved the mystery from the first day. When Patrick and tried to plug in the user control button for changing modes, it would turn the power off and on but would not change modes. That first night after I was in bed I got on my laptop and did some Google searches and found a PDF downloadable version of the technical manual. It turns out there are 3 places that you can plug in such a pushbutton. One of them is the user button for joystick port 1, the other is user button for joystick port 2, and the third one is for an extra power switch. He had been plugging the button into the wrong hole. That call to technical support was really unnecessary. I sent him an email the next day to tell him I had solved our mystery.

Anyway with a little adjustment we had managed to get me really comfortable. This would be my first full day sitting in the new chair and it turned out pretty good.

“For my yoke is easy”–Matt 11:30

According to Matthew, Jesus says his yoke is easy but building a yoke around my neck to hold my new joystick was going to be quite a challenge. I had done a test drive using a bib mount from a company called “Switch It”. We are still using their joystick. However the bib was too tight around my neck and that’s why Patrick had replaced it with a different model that used straps instead of a solid bar. Unfortunately the straps would not hold the device steady enough. We could’ve told the wheelchair people to go ahead and order the original device from Switch It and we could’ve possibly bent it to fit. I had already thought about the possibility of building one from scratch after I saw the original test unit. Given the delays we had faced in getting any equipment at all the obvious choice was to build one ourselves. On the right is a photo of the gadget we were trying to re-create from scratch.

The main structure of the original one was a 1/4 inch or perhaps 3/8 inch aluminum rod bent in a U-shape. Dad found some one quarter inch stainless steel rod in the garage. It was left over from when he made some stainless steel weenie roast and marshmallow roast sticks that we used to use at the lake. He had no trouble bending it into the appropriate shape. The next job was to find some sort of foam tubing to slide over the bar to pad the device so that would not hurt my neck. I did lots of Google searches for foam rubber tubing and I found a place that would sell us exactly what we wanted and the cost was only $2 per foot. Unfortunately the minimum order was a 60 foot roll.

One of the great things about being a “maker” these days is that there are lots of makers out there was a wide variety of experience. There is a local maker space called “Club Cyberia” on the east side of Indianapolis that has a great bunch of people building all sorts of amazing projects. I visited their facility early last year to get some insight before buying my 3-D printer. I continue to follow all their activity on Facebook and I contribute to their discussions whenever I can. I asked them on Facebook if they knew of a place to buy foam tubing. They suggested the local industrial supply place called Grangers. We have had a Grangers catalog in this house for as long as I can remember. Dad buys all sorts of stuff from them for work or for his own projects. I felt kind of silly not thinking of them. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything small enough to meet my needs.

Meanwhile further Google searches found the following item on Amazon.com. It is a package of for long pieces of foam padding of various sizes and colors made by a company called “Ableware”. It is specifically intended for people who have physical disabilities and have trouble grasping ordinary objects like spoons, forks, toothbrushes etc. as you can see in the photo below. I immediately ordered a package on Amazon prime and it would arrive by Friday.

Now we turn to the mechanical portions of the mount. The two halves of the U-shaped bar are joined by a plastic bar that goes across them. I would have no trouble 3-D printing that. It’s just a straight bar with a hole on each end for the rod to go through. On the original Switch It bib mount they had a complicated set of ball and socket joints that allowed you to twist, bend, or pose the position of the joystick. I wasn’t sure that 3-D printer plastic was sturdy enough to create ball and socket joints with set screws to hold them in position. Also I wanted it to be as small and lightweight as possible but it is very difficult to print extremely small parts on a 3-D printer.

I did know where I could get parts that might do the trick. It was another instance of what I previously described as “just-in-time technology”. That is my term for the rather creepy experience I have had that whenever I need new technology to solve a particular adaptive equipment need, either by amazing luck or more likely divine providence that technology suddenly becomes available. Shortly after I did the first test drive with the bib mount and was thinking about what it would take to re-create one from scratch, my favorite electronics supplier Adafruit.com started selling some camera mounting hardware. I was especially interested in this ball and socket tilt and swivel camera mountshown on the right. It may seem strange that electronics company is selling camera mount equipment but they have all sorts of maker products. The camera mounts are featured that product in a tutorial on how to build your own computer controlled, motorized sliding camera mount useful for nice professional looking videos and time-lapse photos. Here’s a link to the tutorial. Here is a YouTube video showing how they created the mount.

They also added a couple of other camera mounting products like 1/4 inch screw adapters and set screws as used on camera mounts. So I went to the Adafruit store online and ordered a variety of parts which would arrive on Monday.

Each Wednesday night Adafruit hosts a live video chat using Google hangouts. If you have a WebCam you can join the discussion and show off your maker projects. I’ve done it a number of times before. Most people hold up their projects to the WebCam to demonstrate what they built but that’s a little bit difficult for me. I got in the habit of just having dad take photos of my gadgets. I use the same photos here on the blog or for showing off at the weekly Show-and-Tell. I spent the rest of the day on Wednesday preparing some photos of the 3-D printing parts I had already made for the joystick mount and to preview the fact that I was going to be using Adafruit parts and the rest of the design. Here is the video of my presentation on that particular evening. My section of the program starts at the 18 minute mark. The guy who presented just before me was so long-winded they couldn’t get him to shut up.

“Evening came and morning followed — the third day” — Genesis 1:13

A Minor Disaster

On Thursday, the fourth day of the new wheelchair, I decided not to sit in it so that dad could do more adjustment on the foot rest. That morning we got a phone call from my uncle Keith who said he wanted to stop by and visit that afternoon. His daughter, my cousin Nancy, recently passed away. She had spent her life in a wheelchair because she was born with spina bifida. Keith brought us a big box of leftover parts from some of her old wheelchairs. They were mostly headrests, brackets, and foam padding pieces. We figured there was something in there that we might be able to use. As it turned out they headrest that I ended up using was one that he brought us. Other pieces of foam padding also turned out useful for placing between my right side ribs in the armrest of the wheelchair and is a temporary pillow for the left arm rest until we can come up with something. We spent the entire afternoon visiting with him and talking about all of the troubles that Nancy had been through fighting her illness. I also had the opportunity to show him my 3-D printer. I made a souvenir for him. A 3-D printed thing to hang on your keychain. It had his name on it in raised letters.

That evening we did some tinkering with the new chair. Dad had noticed that when he tried to operate it using the mouse controlled joystick that the display unit would show “joystick error”. I had him push the buttons to get it into programming mode to see if I could figure out what was configured improperly. The process for pulling up the programming mode is to hold down the “Profile” button which is used to switch the chair from different driving profiles such as indoor, outdoor, attendant. While holding that button down, press and hold the power button. Then you release the profile button and wait for a beep. Then you release the power button. An icon of an hourglass appears on the LCD screen briefly and then you get into a series of menus. I had been studying the technical manuals and was pretty familiar with what was available in these menus. We tried swapping the joystick between port 1 and part 2 and doing other adjustments but we kept getting the joystick error message. I later learned that one of the things that can cause this problem is that the joystick was not properly calibrated in the programming menu. I began to speculate that this particular setup step had not been done given my discovery that the wheelchair technicians seemed unfamiliar with the contents of the technical manuals.

At some point something went wrong. The joystick stopped working altogether. You could still operate the attendant joystick in the back of the chair but nothing else seem to work. It was stuck in the attendant profile. I figured that was no problem. I would just go back in and undo whatever setting I had previously done. Unfortunately pushing the buttons in the proper sequence as I described above would no longer get me into the programming menus. We tried using 2 different joysticks plugged in either port. We tried pushing the buttons slower or quicker. Nothing that we did could get us back into the programming menus.

It was only the fourth day that I owned the new wheelchair and I had broken it already.

“Evening came and morning followed — the fourth day” Genesis 1:19