Quick neighborhood update before I go on: I've finally gotten the light garden to stay lit after I leave. There seems to have been some sort of power-saving behavior that was poling for KI signals and shutting down the power when nobody was here. I've disabled that feature, so I can now leave the lights on indefinitely.
I've spent the past week cranking away at Negilahn. It's going a bit faster than the neighborhood went, but there's still work to do.
Notably, I've fixed the power issue that was causing the pod to never do anything. Something got into the wires that hook the solar panels to the battery reserve, so the battery was just never charging, and had long ago been depleted. With the battery hooked back up to the solar panels, things seem to be working again to some extent. The battery itself may need replacing entirely, because it charges and drains way too quickly, indicating it's gone past its useable charge cycle. Either that, or I need to fiddle with some wiring to optimize power input and output a bit more. Right now I'm using some spare copper cable that I found in the DRC's field station in the City a couple of years ago. I may need a different gauge or something to get the resistance dialed in, at least on the throughput from the battery to the pod. I should probably work on changing the charge speed too, though, since fast-charging the battery may not be terribly good for it.
I've gone ahead and scraped off the coating on the windows that polarizes them when the pod is off. It wasn't in a very good state of repair in the first place, and turning the power on didn't seem to do much to change the polarization, so I've just gotten rid of it all.
I also need to fix the ladders. They're super rickety, and while I have no problem getting down to the bottom floor by slipping carefully over the edge and hopping down, climbing up them is another story. I may save that for later, but I don't want to forget about it, so I've made a note here to remind myself.
One last note and then I need to get some sleep. I've replaced the Nexus Book in the neighborhood with a link to this instance of Negilahn and put a link to the neighborhood in Negilahn, just to save myself some travel time. It took quite a bit of prying to get the Books out of the Nexus book machine, and I banged my knuckles pretty bad at one point, but I finally managed it. Good thing I brought a fresh first aid kit though. Ow. It's a temporary thing (which makes the pain worse, somehow...), but for now, it speeds things up when I need to get around.
