Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The knockoff Arduino Pro Mini I used for the strobe photography controller ran the default Blink sketch perfectly, but didn’t respond to its own Reset pushbutton. Probing the Reset line at pin 29 on the microcontroller showed that the pushbutton didn’t pull the +5 V line to ground, so the switch was broken, a trace was broken, or …
Touching the soldering iron to a switch pin caused the whole thing to pop loose. One glance at the pads tells you something’s badly wrong:
Arduino Pro Mini Knockoff – cold solder joints
A closeup, rotated a quarter-turn clockwise:
Arduino Pro Mini Knockoff – cold solder joint – detail
That’s the nicest picture of cold solder joints you’ve seen in a while, isn’t it?
Resoldering the switch solved the problem and, while the iron was hot, I touched all the microcontroller pins, too, just in case…
I took that picture back in mid-1969, near the Hummelstown, PA water treatment and pumping plant.
The overhead view now shows a small tank behind the water plant, with that house just across the access road at the bottom of the image:
Hummelstown PA water plant – overhead – ca 2013
Judging from the perspective and the row of bushes, the old tank probably stood across the (now abandoned) tailrace, near that little dot in the mowed area. The dam (in the lower right corner) washed away during a flood some decades ago; I have no idea where Hummelstown gets its water.
That once-spiffy limestone house, built with stone from a local quarry, has fallen on hard times:
Hummelstown PA water plant – ca 2013
The pump house features Hummelstown Brownstone, which also appears in the finest old buildings all along the East Coast. If you poke around the area, you’ll find traces of the Hummelstown Brownstone Company, including several of their quarries. If I recall the story correctly, my father was Mr. Walton’s chauffeur.
The other house may have vanished when the Graystone Farms development ate the surrounding area. Unlike most housing development names, where the name indicates something obliterated to make way for the houses, that area still has plenty of gray limestone:
Hummelstown PA water plant – Pennsy Supply Quarry – ca 2013
That’s an active limestone quarry, even if they’re not excavating the main pit these days. The orange marker in the lower left marks the water plant; Graystone Farms in the corner. Yeah, that’s a big pit.
I digitized my slide collection somewhere around the turn of the current millennium. This slide faded to a distinct magenta tint that I’ve removed with crude color correction, plenty of dust mars the image, and so forth and so on, but I (still) sympathize with that poor guy faced with a daunting task.
Imagine a kid with a camera poking around an active water treatment station in this day and age…
The Sony HDR-AS30V camera lens has a view angle of 120° or 170°, achieved by internal image processing rather than mechanical lens adjustments. For most action-camera purposes you don’t care about fisheye distortion, but sometimes a more rectilinear picture will look better, in which case the GIMP’s Lens Distortion filter comes in handy.
A still image at 120°, which doesn’t look all that bad, really:
Sony HDR-AS30V 120 angle – as captured
Applying Main=-25 gives this:
Sony HDR-AS30V 120 angle – corrected
A frame captured from video at 170°, with the overhead wires hanging upward:
Sony HDR-AS30V 170 angle – as captured
Applying Main=-25, Edge=-12.5, Zoom=+8 flattens them enough to be acceptable:
Sony HDR-AS30V 170 angle – corrected
The main effect of the Zoom parameter seems to be discarding the severely distorted remnants around the edges of the corrected 170° view. Sometimes, those pixels around the edges can be very, very important, so I’d rather make that decision after the fact.
Recent rains and snowmelt raised the level of the Mighty Wappingers Creek a bit:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2014-04-06
It’s not flood stage, but there’s plenty of water flowing over the dam:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – crumbled top – 2014-04-06
The crumbled rubble fill hardly disturbs the flow until the bottom falls out at the downstream edge:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – crumbled top detail – 2014-04-06
I once spotted a job offer for a live-in dam tender over in Wallkill, but it turned out to be Internet debris; they automated the process and no longer need a human. I want to live in the powerhouse next to a dam, but it’s not to be…
Three envelopes arrived in the same mailing, all bearing the same return address across the back:
PublishersPayment – Three Return Addresses
By now, I know what’s inside the envelopes and simply toss them in the recycling, but getting three at once seemed worth investigating. Inside, they’re not quite identical:
PublishersPayment – Three Renewal Scams
So SBS, PDS, and PBC are all snuggly in White City, Oregon, with LBS somewhere just offstage…
Apparently enough people miss the warning on the back to justify the expense of the junk mailings.
It’s nice work for someone with absolutely no ethics whatsoever. At least they’re not phoning us, so maybe they’re not complete asshats…
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you wanted to report a defective traffic signal near Poughkeepsie, NY. You know, from previous experience, that it’s on a New York State Road, so you should contact the New York State Department of Transportation; you also know that you’re in DOT Region 8 and that you’re in the Poughkeepsie Residency, so you can find the right DOT branch.
In this day and age, you might think the NYSDOT website would have a conspicuous link to a form that would let you report a problem. But, no.
Failing that, you might think the website would have a link to the number you should call. But, no.
Failing that, you might think that the search box would turn up useful results when fed the obvious keywords. But, no.
Failing that, you might think calling various likely numbers in the Region 8 offices would produce the proper number. I won’t list the half-dozen numbers I’ve uncovered using that method, as none of them actually go to the right place.
It is common for such numbers within NYSDOT to ring forever, regardless of the time of day or day of week. I am told that one number isn’t actually within DOT any more, so some poor schlub gets all their repair calls; it’s probably worse than having Rachael call you every day or two.
My favorite dead end: an answering machine message telling you it’s not monitored and calls will not be returned, then giving an incomprehensible number-to-call and the usual “Leave your name and number after the beep” message, then beeping.
To make a very long story very short, the Galactic Number that you call to report traffic signal problems on NYS DOT roads is:
914-742-6100
It’s not toll-free (not a big deal in this day and age, but, still) and, of course, you’ll get a contractor, so be polite & patient. Your call should generate a work order that will, in due time, dispatch a crew to repair the offending signal.
It will be exceedingly helpful if you can report the number on the side of the signal control box, for which Google Streetview may reveal what you can’t see from any legal or safe position:
Signal Control Box ID by Google Streetview
If you want to report a pothole, on the other hand, they’ve got a hotline for that:
The PLA positive, after removing the silicone negative, showing the silicone below the surface:
Tux Gradient – PLA positive detail
The corresponding silicone negative cavity, flipped top-to-bottom:
Tux Gradient – silicone negative detail
The milk chocolate result, although probably not from the same cavity:
Tux Gradient – milk chocolate detail
The radial gradient on the tummy comes through clearly and, I think, pleasingly, even though it’s only a few layers tall. The threads defining the flipper just above (to the left, in these images) of the foot show where the flipper crosses the tummy and foot level. I didn’t expect the foot webbing grooves to get that ladder-like texture, but I suppose having non-slip foot treads would be an advantage.
If you don’t mind the hand-knitted texture, which I don’t, this process seems perfectly workable.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 