In this video, I’ll be headed to Vintage Computer Festival, which is near Chicago. And this year,
my wife wanted to drive her Chevrolet Bolt EUV. We’ve done a few roadtrips in it already,
but this will be the longest one yet. And the goal here is to answer two questions. The first, is,
can you road trip in an EV? And the second, more specific question is can you road trip in a Bolt.
What’s the difference you might ask? Well, the Bolt has a few things going against it for road
trips, starting with the range. At 247 miles of range, it’s considered entry-level these days
compared to most other EVs, with some high end models now going as far as 500 miles per charge.
The second issue is the Bolt’s charge rate, which probably the slowest rate of all currently
manufactured EVs, coming in a 55 Kilowatts. Some vehicles are literally 7 times as fast. Well,
sort of. It’s kind of complicated. That rating is a peak rating. And so even one
of those ultra-fast charging cars, will slow down considerably by the time the battery is
half full. A typical EV looks more like this. And the Bolt, unfortunately, looks like this.
So, on our trip to VCF, we’ll find out exactly how much of a hinderance this
is. But I think it’s safe to say, if we can make the trip in a Bolt,
then you can certainly make the trip in any other EV.
My wife did most of the driving, and our first planned stop was Durant Oklahoma.
It was about a 2 hour drive from our home near Fort Worth. Unfortunately,
this location at Durant City hall only has a single fast charger, which is operated by
Francis. And when we arrived, I thought a big van was blocking the location, only to realize
it was actually an electric transit. I’ve never actually seen one of these before. Fortunately,
he was just finishing up as we arrived, so we moved over and plugged in. The car was estimating
45 minutes to reach our target of 80%. However, I’ve found it often over-estimates the time. But,
since we were right in the middle of downtown Durant, we took a little walk down the street
to see if we could find some lunch. We found a little place called Bee’s Kitchen just
right around the corner. And by the time we returned to the car, we were actually at 85%,
which is more than we planned for. So, we just unplugged and headed back out onto the road.
Another 2 hours later, we were ready for our next stop in Muskogee, Oklahoma. This was another
Francis charger, and it was located across the street from a QT. There wasn’t much to do here
other than use the restroom and get a snack. We were here for about 15 minutes. And. I wanted to
explain our strategy. You might think we would hit every single charger along the way. But we really
didn’t need to. So, we skipped over quite a few. But, I always tried to make sure we had enough
range to make it to the next nearest charger just in case we encountered one that was broken.
Our next stop was only an hour drive away in Vinita,
which was at a Walmart. We were also here for about 20 minutes while we actually
did a little shopping for some things we forgot to bring with us, like toothpaste.
Soon we were back on the road, and crossed over into Missouri.
Our next stop, Joplin. We pulled into a truck stop called “Big Apple Travel Center,” They had two
chargers and we pulled in right next to another Bolt EUV, although a slightly different color.
It was timer for dinner at this point, and you might not think of a truck stop having good food,
but my wife and I both agreed that these gigantic chicken tenders were the best we’d ever eaten!
After eating the car was charged and we were back on the road, to our last
fast charging stop of the day, Springfield. I guess this is the home of the Simpsons, right?
We pulled into a Kum & Go, where they had two Chargepoint fast chargers. We
were there for about 15 minutes, and then again back on the road.
After driving another two hours, we stopped in St.James and plugged into a level-2 charger.
These are not fast chargers, they are for over-night, which is fine because this is the
hotel we were staying at for the night. We were slightly over half way to Chicago at this point.
So, the next morning, we came out to the car, and saw that it was charged all the way to 100%,
which means we can drive quite a ways before stopping again. So back on the road,
and you can see the St. James water tower there.
We drove for another 2 hours through the middle of nowhere,
until we arrived in St.Louis. And while there were some charging stations here,
we just passed right on through. Our next stop was actually in Troy, Illinois,
at a holiday inn. Which is a weird place to find a fast charger. And there wasn’t much to do here,
so we had to wait around for about 15 minutes. And I could admire all of the bug guts on our car.
Our next stop was in Springfield… Home of the Simpsons.. Wait a minute.. didn’t we already
stop there? Haha.. We actually stopped to charge in two different cities named Springfield. One
in Missouri and one in one in Illinois. This one was located at a Wal-Mart. And in the same
parking lot there was a place called Pizza Ranch, so we at lunch there while the car
was charging. It was buffet style pizza, and it actually wasn’t bad. They had chicken too.
So, back on the road, our final fast charge stop would be in Bloomington Illinois. This was
also located at a Wal-Mart, where we charged next to a polestar. After 20 minutes or so,
we were back on the road. We had another 2 hours to drive, but we were done with the fast
chargers. Our next stop would be the hotel itself where VCF actually takes place. And
here we are just a couple of miles from the hotel. We knew the hotel itself had charging,
but all they had were 2 Tesla destination chargers. Fortunately, we have a solution for
that. It’s a Tesla adapter, which worked out great and we were able to get a full charge here. We’d
be at this hotel for the next 3 days. And that wraps up the final leg of our two day journey.
Ok, so it’s time for a reality check. I definitely proved YES you can do a
roadtrip in a Bolt. But the question is, how much more convenient would it have been had we
had a more capable electric car? I think one of the faster charging and longer range cars would
have probably cut at least an hour off of each day of travel, so that would have saved 2 hours total.
But what about a gas car? Last year I actually drove a gas car on the
exact same route so I think I have a pretty good point of comparison.
First of all, It did take a lot of planning to determine which
route I wanted to take. I spent some time reading reviews on plugshare,
making sure I knew which chargers were reliable and which weren’t. I wouldn’t have needed to do
that for a gas car. Second of all, we wouldn’t have needed to stop as often or for as long.
Overall, I think we could have saved about 2 hours each day driving the gas car for a
total of 4 hours saved on the whole trip. Now keep in mind, even in the gas car,
it was still going to be a two day trip. You know, that being said,
we actually found ourselves looking forward to the stops. You know, after you’ve driven for a
couple of hours, it’s kind of nice to get out, go to the bathroom, get a snack or something to eat,
and you know, walk around and stretch your legs a little bit. And we rarely ever found
ourselves actually waiting on the car to charge. I think there were only a couple of times where we
actually had to wait on it. In the vast majority of cases, the car was done before we were.
So, enough about the trip. Let’s talk about VCF!
Vintage Computer Festival is one of the biggest gatherings of computer nerds.
This is the area where my booth was located, but this view represents about a third of the
overall floorspace. When I go to these events I get to talk to fans, sell some merchandise,
and show off some of my equipment. This year I brought my Commodore 64c with an REU
to show off Petscii Robots. And Texelec was in the booth next to me, and he had,
among other things, the Commander X16 on display. You can see it here running Super
Mario Brothers. We also had another X16 which was designed by Wavicle,
which is a slightly small footprint, and super cute design! This one is playing Petscii Robots.
Remember that moon base restoration I was working on,
but the monitor board was having so much trouble? I brought it back
with me and tried to give it back to Adrian Black, but he didn’t want it.
I don’t want that! That thing is cursed!
In all seriousness, A guy by the name of Sark asked me to bring it with me because he was
pretty sure he could fix it. So I left it with him on Saturday and would check on it later.
I always try to get video of some of the more interesting objects people
bring me to sign. Starting with this laserdisc.
Here’s newton message pad, only I’m signing it on screen. Here’s a C64 Mini.
A blueberry iMac keyboard, An Atari XEGS, A VHS cassette, and also an old IBM keyboard.
Of course, I wasn’t the only YouTuber there. Here’s Ken from Computer Clan,
Ben Heck, Robin from 8-Bit Show and Tell. Although you might not recognize his face,
so instead let’s look at his hands by a keyboard. Adrian Black was here, as well as LGR with some
of his woodgrain stuff. And even Alec from Technology Connections stopped by for a bit.
In fact, on Saturday we all did a panel together, which is probably the most
Vintage Tech YouTubers we’ve ever had in a single panel before. There was also quite
a turn out as the room was packed and there was nowhere left to sit or stand.
This panel is also available to watch and I’ll put a link down in the description.
Later that day I went by to check on the moon base board and Sark was still
working on it. He had determined that one of the voltage regulators was bad,
which is what he’s holding here. And so he was going to try to get a replacement.
Once it calmed down that evening, I finally had a chance to walk around
the place myself and see some of the things people brought for display. The
convention is loosely divided into different categories. Over here as you can see are lots
of terminals and stuff from the 1970s. This guy here made his own custom Gigatron board.
It’s unfortunate the original designer has passed away so he can’t see this.
Over here we have some Amiga stuff, and they are showing how the weather
channel used to work back in the day on these older systems. And more unix stuff over here.
This booth was I guess what we’d call the phone booth, pun intended.
Ben Heck was over here typing on an ancient teletype.
Here’s some Andro-Bots, and Atari stuff. Here’s an old Odyssey playing Pong.
This section was mostly CoCo stuff.
There were lots of booths with buy/sell/trade doing on,
like this old Apple Lisa out here with twiggy drives, which is pretty rare and
in great condition! And 3 boxed 1581 disk drives. That’s nerd heaven right there.
Dave’s Retro Video Lab was here showing off some vintage camcorders.
Of course, Commodore systems were well represented at the event.
I even ran across a Max running BASIC.
I don’t know who’s booth this was, but I saw a Mega Retron playing the
Sega Genesis version of Petscii Robots, which I thought was cool!
This was also pretty cool. An original black and white TV
playing the Three Stooges called the stooge-o-matic.
There was also an entire section of British computers,
like the Sinclair and Memotech. And you can see the one that is
connected to a CRT won’t sync with my camera because it is running at 50 hz.
And don’t worry, Atari computers were also well represented at the event!
Including an original store display, which for some reason has Sun Sparcstations in it.
The next day, I went back to Sark’s booth and he had the moon base board working,
as you can see here. I asked him to tell me what he did.
So, I got it working. The problem was a voltage regulator circuit wasn’t working It was
putting out about 6 volts instead of 12. This transistor was bad. I’ve installed a
new voltage regulator, a little bit better part and wired it up. Now it works great!
So that is great news, I’ll be able to get my
moon base up and running when I get home! Big thanks goes out to Sark!
Later that day, even though it was pouring rain, we decided to go visit the Galloping Ghost,
which is supposed to be the worlds biggest retro arcade or something like that. So what did I think
of the place? Well, I have to admit, with 885 arcade games, they have just about everything.
And the isles just go on and on and on. The even had some really really old arcades that I haven’t
even heard of before, like these that actually use monochrome CRTs and extremely primitive graphics.
And while they aren’t that fun to play, they were really interesting from a historical aspect. I was
wondering if they had a moon base here. I kept looking. They had Moon Shuttle, and Moon Patrol,
and of course the original Space Invaders. But no Moon Base. So I guess they don’t have everything!
But one thing I was disappointed about is how many machines were broken. Some were completely
unplayable and others were perhaps partially working but the screens were missing one of
the primary colors, or were really blurry or had other problems. I understand these machines
are old and the break down, but I would have thought they’d pull them off the floor if they
were needing repair. Also it cost $25 a person to get in the door, which is double what any
other arcade I’ve been to costs. Anyway, that wraps it up for VCF and the Galloping Ghost.
So, back home now I wanted to re-install the repaired board
back into my moon base and see it working. So here’s where the board
goes. And I guess this machine really is cursed because then this happened.
Oh no! Did you just break the tube? I sure did.
What did you do? I was going to put it in and I guess it was just too low.
You can’t see my face but it looks something like this. This machine must really be cursed
because I’ve put this tube back in this machine 50 times and never hit the neck like that. Only
now when it’s about to be fixed does it happen. I really do wonder if Adrian was right when he said
this machine is cursed. So, now that means I have to find a new tube. For the moment, I guess I’ll
have to pull the tube out of this other moon base. So, what I didn’t mention before is that
these came in a pair. Both machines were broken with different problems. I had planned to restore
one as an official video for my channel, and then restore or sell the other one later. That’s why,
if you watched Adrian’s video, I had sent him both boards so he had points of comparison.
So, yeah, I guess for the moment I’ll just take this one and at least I can
make one working machine. I’ll have to find a replacement for the other machine later.
After a good cleaning I installed it in the machine, VERY carefully this time.
And here goes.
Well, it’s sort of working. Let’s try some adjustments. I think that’s going to work!
Of course, I’ve seen this machine working before for about 10 minutes. So I actually tested it for
about 30 minutes and played through a few games. It’s actually hard to play with the tripod in the
way, so I am not doing a great job at the moment. And the other problem I have is glare. I just
can’t seem to get rid of it on camera. In person, it actually looks really good. And with the lights
off, you can barely see those color filters and it really could just about fool you into
thinking this was a color screen, even though it isn’t. Anyway, I’m happy to have this one working,
while also sad that repairing the other one is going to be even more difficult without a tube.
By the way, one last thing I noticed when looking at the old tube is the phosphor
missing from the center of the screen. I guess the air rushing in just blew it away. I would
have thought that would be stuck on the inside of the screen a bit more securely. But I guess not.
That about wraps it up for VCF. So what’s coming up next? Well, I’ll be taking a
deep dive into the state of the Commander X16 project? I’m also doing some solar upgrades,
can’t wait to show you those. And, I’m planning an episode on the ISEPIC cartridge for the C64.
So stick around for those episodes and as always thanks for watching!