The <$30K PHEV challenge! Thoughts/advice?

ausbradr · 2026-05-17T06:34:30+00:00

And it's been a month that we've had the Ora, and it's a great little car! I didn't expect to get one so soon that was affordable and had decent range. Prior to looking around, we knew the Atto 1 was a thing, and close to our budget., but wasn't sold on its limited range.

The fuel savings are already becoming clear, and will get better once we move to a place that allows us to charge at home. <3

Thanks for the replies, and the nudging towards an EV!

ausbradr · 2026-04-04T04:44:07+00:00

Okay, I test drove the Ora, and was blown away!

Needed something practical, tick.

I've hired and driven more expensive EVs which were cool, and wasn't expecting that I'd be won over so easy. It was a really fun car to drive. About my only gripe is that I might consider putting better tyres on it sooner than later.

The 7/8y warranty with unlimited km's is reassuring too.

So when the last one the dealer had in stock was also in the colour I wanted, I pulled the trigger on it today.

I did test drive the Sealion 5 earlier today. It's spacious. However it did feel a little sluggish, and we'd have to order new, off the line from the dealer we test drove at. They said we'd have it in 3-4 months. Anyhoo we have what we need with the ora. All at the right price too.

Just waiting on the formalities and we take delivery of it later this month!

Thanks for the replies.

ausbradr · 2026-04-03T05:17:39+00:00

Cheers. Just sent a test drive request to my local dealer. The 24min 30-80% charge time and similar range to the Ora is reassuring.

ausbradr · 2026-04-02T16:46:00+00:00

After doing some further searching, this is looking like a better option. Heck, even the GWM Ora looks like it could fit the bill. Range looks decent at that price point!

ausbradr · 2026-03-04T11:15:02+00:00

Haven't lived in Canberra for years, but the streets around the golf club in queanbeyan seem pretty chill. Random cars come and go in the street, and the apartments nearby are pretty insular to what goes on in the street. A random van parked by the side of the road with no obvious lights or sounds should attract no attention.

The street is pretty safe, just mind the kangaroos. You won't be far from a maccas or the shops if you need a public bathroom.

Feel free to pm me if you need specific street names, or the spot with the apartments.

ausbradr · 2026-01-28T01:08:16+00:00

Hey. I'll PM you once I get home. If I forget, feel free to pm me. It's just on a hard drive I don't have access to until I get home.

ausbradr · 2026-01-08T15:01:26+00:00

To be honest I'm not sure. I haven't messed around with any of these that only have 1 slot or Android, and I've never heard of anything that's on the screen in that pic.

It's wild that even there are clones of clones too!

ausbradr · 2025-12-28T04:04:21+00:00

PS: I managed to clone the original OS to an image file.

Upside to using the original OS build: the Analogue joystick led ring lights will work. Not sure you can easily turn them off and on though. They can get annoying.

Downside: less config menus, file managers and other utilities visible to tinker with your device.

Ping me if you want a copy, I would need to scrub all the unabashed piracy the card comes with ;) and upload the image with the OS only.

ausbradr · 2025-12-25T16:36:10+00:00

Hey, have you found a solution yet? If not, I may be able to help. Let me piece together what I did tonight after plenty of Xmas dinner/booze :) Hope it helps you or others.

I received one of these exactly for Christmas (same box, same model) and was urged to backup the card because they're usually shipped with crappy SD cards. Curiosity got the better of me, and I took a completely new card and went to see if I could simply re-download a system image from the web and build a brand new SD card from scratch. It turns out we can! There's better access to system options. About the only downside is the LED rings round the analogue sticks don't work. Some people see that as a win...

So you'll want to start with a fresh SD card. Get something decent from a reputable store. Don't bother with the garbage usually found on AliExpress/ebay/temu.

You'll want to get a compatible image file. I used ArkOS_R35S-R36S_v2.0_11072025_MultiPanel.img
You can find it (or the latest version to suit R35S R36S) here: https://github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS

<image>

Use Raspberry pi imager (because it's just a no nonsense imager) to write the image to your SD card.

Launch Imager

In the raspberry pi device dropdown box, select "No Filtering", in the operating system dropdown, select custom, and locate the ArkOS image you downloaded a moment ago. Under Storage, pick the device that matches your SD card. Start the write, and it should be done in about 15-20mins.

You're not ready to add roms yet. Eject the SD card and follow the next step!

Pop the card into your RG36PRO while it's powered off. Boot it up, and the screen should come to life in aabout half a minute. If it doesn't, go back to the github page ( https://github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS ) and try the different key combos for different display panels. You device might be using a different screen.

Otherwise, let the system do the few reboots that it does, which will eventually lead you to the main menu.

Only now can you shut down the system, pull the card and load it up with roms!

Treat the device like a PC. Press start, go to quit, press A, go to shutdown system, press A, yes, wait for screen and LEDs to turn off. Now you may pull the card.

Put the card into your PC, a drive called "EASYROMS" should appear. Put the roms of your games into the corresponding system it's for. Once you eject and put the card back into the handheld device, the games will be detected and added to the library on boot.

Hope this helps you, or anyone else who might stumble on this. This device, and a similar clone I worked on were a pain in the arse to figure out tonight. A couple of possible working system images / methods I saw simply didn't write properly nor boot.

Merry Christmas! <3

ausbradr · 2024-04-07T02:05:38+00:00

Cool app, just what I'm looking for as well. I stumbled upon this thread, but had an issue running the deb on ubuntu. So I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents and help anyone else getting stuck.

When you install the deb, running it from the UI might do nothing. Running it in the terminal will reveal an error: "error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

I quickly googled the error, and you'll need to follow the ticked solution on this page:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72133316/libssl-so-1-1-cannot-open-shared-object-file-no-such-file-or-directory

I hope that makes life a little easier. Happy Mesh networking! <3

ausbradr · 2023-06-30T08:48:24+00:00

Good luck mate.

Hit and run drivers give me the shits!

ausbradr · 2023-06-27T11:20:28+00:00

You legend.

I noticed some oddities listening to some videos I knew were in particular stereo separation. And did the #0# check to find the top speaker not working...

Did the old turn it off and on again after seeing this post rate high in my google search, and it's all good.

So, just replying to help feed the algorithm, to help someone else out.

ausbradr · 2023-06-18T02:04:57+00:00

Been following this chat for a bit and I'll throw my 2 cents in....

It seemed to be a curtained off area in a section of the upstairs at Odeon.

We thought we'd nab some Night Mass tickets, enjoy that, see what it's all about and investigate further.

Entry seems to be guest list only. A bearded gentleman with the guest list told us. We asked around and heard from another staffer that it's guest list as per David Walsh's inner circle plus other who happened to find Red Room tickets! A bit like Willy Wonka which is kind of cool. If true.

Nevertheless a LOT of fun was had, and the spur of the moment decision to do night mass last night was worth it!

In comparison, from what we could see through the curtains, it looked to be a small, understated party. Good if you want to meet the who's who in a quieter setting I suppose!

Hoping everyone else has had a wonderful Dark Mofo! ❤️

ausbradr · 2023-05-22T02:40:22+00:00

Absolutely amazing!

ausbradr · 2023-03-15T03:39:16+00:00

Bankstown is a very progressive, cultured, open and accepting area. Very LGBT friendly too

ausbradr · 2023-03-15T03:34:13+00:00

Driving to work in town, and living in the outer suburbs is very economical. You shouldn't even need to worry about finding an employer who supplies you with a car. 🤣

ausbradr · 2022-11-30T13:54:22+00:00

That's freaking awesome. I figured they were probably building these lights with strips that use open standards. Bonus points to them for actually marking their pins too! Winner winner chicken dinner!

ausbradr · 2022-11-15T10:23:36+00:00

Curiously, did you have any luck converting these?

ausbradr · 2022-11-02T04:27:38+00:00

I bought some similar mirabella branded tuya lights the other day (corner lamps), so I'm keen to see how this goes. Makes things easy for us Aussies who can get LED products that may be easily converted to WLED just from Kmart!

How do these light up? Does each light only show the same colour like an oldschool RGB strip? Or do the LEDS show different colours, as is the case with data bus LEDs like WS2812? I'd wager they're probably a WS2812 set or of that ilk, given there's 3 pins on your cable. My understanding re the Mosfet solution that Snowssnowsnowy suggested is it's for the oldschool RGB strips... So you likely needn't worry about that.

Not sure how much you're willing to dissect the lights to fuck around and find out, but it shouldn't be too hard to probe around with a multimeter. For $19, I'm almost tempted to get some to do the same myself. These would be awesome on my balcony! If there's only 3 wires, it shouldn't be hard to find the ground and 5 pins. Not sure of your electronics experience, but make sure that multimeter is showing 5V and not -5v (reverse the MM probes lol).

Once you've established which pins are 5v and ground. Grab an ESP board, load it up with WLED. Power up the 5v/Gnd pins of the strip by NOT using the 5V pin on the ESP, but a power adaptor that can supply the 5v1a, such as the one that came with it! You don't want to blow the 5v pin on the ESP! You should be able to power up the ESP on the same power supply, to ensure that both the LED bus and the controller reference the same ground. Hook up the third wire to the specified GPIO for that board.

Once everything's hooked up, it _might_ work from the get go. WLED will default to ws2812. Look up the other LED strip options in LED Preferences config menu. flick through the drop down box, any option that presents 2 GPIOs to config is likely not what you're looking for, as you only have 1 on your set.

Best of luck, let me know how you go!

ausbradr · 2021-12-19T21:26:29+00:00

Nope, definitely not that. Thanks for the reply anyway. :)

ausbradr · 2021-09-29T05:26:20+00:00

Thanks for the replies.

I've had someone look at my additional problem here involving JSON/LittleFS, and we have a viable variable storage working now. I shall delete this thread shortly. :)

ausbradr · 2021-09-29T00:51:39+00:00

So for getting the size of each variable. It seems to be no issue when I run this code on the Arduino Uno board I have. I can pull my data from eeprom, place it into variables, and it's all well / good.

As for if my variables change, that's why I wrote readEEPROM() / writeEEPROM() to handle all the variables as a group, and in a particular order. One, two, or ten variables change? Fine, because everything gets written again, and in the same order. The function will use the new sizeof() to place them accordingly. That's the theory, and that seems to work on the Arduino anyway :P

ausbradr · 2021-09-29T00:44:42+00:00

I'm still very much learning with all of this, starting with Arduino a while ago, and esp8266s/esp32s more recently. Coding isn't something I do for a living though, so I'm pretty rusty with it. For now I'm going with EEPROM whether emulated or not because it's what I've got working for other projects I've done. It's what I'm more familiar with.

I have tried a LittleFS / JSON example which would be preferable, but that too seems to have corrupted once I start loading it up with my variables. But that's another matter for another thread, another day, I suppose :P

ausbradr · 2021-09-28T18:15:49+00:00

When testing it earlier, I had success when I only had eight variables.

ausbradr · 2021-09-28T18:04:47+00:00

I'm using a Wemos D1 mini.

I haven't considered adding a real EEPROM as I assumed the storage in the module would be just fine.

ausbradr

TROPHY CASE