The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Month: May 2014

Silica Gel Regeneration

The humidity in the basement safe has been on the rise for the last few months:

Basement Safe Humidity

So I dumped all three bags of spent silica gel onto cookie sheets and baked them at 250 °F for a bit less than 12 hours overnight. As the (gas) oven temperature isn’t all that well regulated, I set it to 230 °F and hoped for the best. I have no way of knowing what the actual temperature was during the night.

The silica gel inside the bag from the safe weighed 583 g and the two bags that had been sitting in the basement air weighed 663 g. After baking, all three trays of beads weighed 496 g, slightly less than the 500 g direct from the factory-sealed cans.

The beads looked undamaged from their ordeal.

Two dozen scattered beads collected from the countertop and floor weighed 0.4 g, for an average weight of 0.017 g each. I definitely didn’t lose 12 g of beads during this adventure!

The translucent white beads vanish against an off-white laminate kitchen floor under ordinary lighting. They’re retroreflective enough that peering along the side of an LED flashlight lights them up; I’m pretty sure I got most of ’em.

Memo to Self: Next time, try 6 hours starting in the morning.

2014-05-17
Subaru Forester Manual: Oddities

Our shiny new Subaru Forester came with a 540 page user manual and, being that type of guy, I’ve been reading through it. I suspect warnings like this come from a lawsuit in the not-too-far-distant past:

Camera Disassembly Warning

They seem to be very, very worried about small animals:

Check for Small Animals

In this situation, I’d hope the engine would fare better than, say, a squirrel:

Trapping Small Animals

Unlike the Toyota Sienna’s enclosed belt, I could actually replace this one, so I suppose a squirrel could take up residence somewhere in there:

Subaru Forester – belt and oil filter

And look at that oil filter: right up top, inside a bowl! The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Toyota engineers mounted the Sienna’s filter horizontally, halfway up the side of the transverse V6 engine, where it slobbers oil down the block and over the front exhaust manifold.

So far, so good…

2014-05-16
Monthly Image: Walkway Maintenance, with Airplane

We planned to ride west on the Walkway and return east on the Mid-Hudson bridge, but encountered an obstruction in mid-span:

Maintenance Crane on Walkway Over the Hudson

Pedestrians and cyclists on diamond-frame (a.k.a., “wedgie”) bikes could sneak past the outrigger legs on the south (left) side of the crane, although that’s surely a Bad Idea for worksite safety. Our big ‘bents wouldn’t fit through, so we just turned around and enjoyed the ride home; a good time was had by all.

While tweaking that picture, I noticed a speck of dirt on the monitor that, upon closer investigation, turned out to be a hidden object:

Maintenance Crane on Walkway Over the Hudson – airplane

Obligatory XKCD…

2014-05-15
Princess House Nouveau Ceramic Pan Handle Locking Button

We bought a replacement for the CorningWare casserole (that a raccoon broke when I put the rice out on the deck to cool) at a tag sale:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – assembled

According to the information on the bottom, it’s “Nouveau A Princess House Exclusive” that’s no longer in their listing. Evidently, they’ve gone to metal stovetop cookware these days. Anyhow, it has a separate handle that latches onto a cleverly shaped tab molded into the pan:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – handle released

Latching the handle in place is simple: put the end of the handle over the tab and squeeze the lever until it snaps into the handle. Well, I managed to latch it quite easily, after which nobody could figure out how to release it. That slotted button cries out to be pushed, but it wasn’t push-able.

That’s a condition I call “being outwitted by inanimate objects”…

After bringing it home, I discovered the secret: the slot must be exactly vertical (equivalently, maximally counter-clockwise) before you can press the button to release the latching handle. Turning the button so the slot is horizontal (maximally clockwise) locks the button out, so that you cannot press it and release the handle:

Nouveau Ceramic Pan – handle locked

The button locks out when the slot is almost imperceptibly clockwise from vertical; if you don’t know what to look for, you’d never notice the difference.

Which makes perfect sense to me. You want the handle to latch securely and require a deliberate action to release, lest the pan fall and release hot stuff all over your front. Any errors should leave the handle securely latched in place.

FWIW, World Kitchen, the current owners of the CorningWare brand, no longer make stovetop-rated ceramic cookware; it’s evidently easier and cheaper to make microwave-only ceramics. World Kitchen also owns the Pyrex kitchenware brand and, true to form, replaced the original borosilicate glass with cheaper tempered soda lime glass. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that…

2014-05-14
Extracting Frames From A Video File
Using avconv (formerly ffmpeg):
```
avconv -ss 00:07:05 -i MAH00016.MP4 -t 2 -f image2 -q 1 Image-%03d.jpeg
```
The options:
- -ss starting time in hh:mm:ss (or seconds)
- -i input file
- -t duration in seconds (or hh:mm:ss)
- -f mux/demux for still images
- -q quality (1 = best)
Use a video player to find the interesting section, then bracket it with the starting time and duration. Putting the -ss starting time before the -i input file lets the decoder skip through the file, rather than grinding through everything preceding the specified frames.

The -q 1 setting wrings the best quality out of the input video file. That’s why the camera captures 1920×1080 video @ 60 fps; I wish I could dial its compression back a bit, but that’s not an option.

So.

Do you think he didn’t quite kill me between bites or is that a K-Mart bag and he was yakking on a phone like everybody else?

Near Miss – Jackson Drive – 2014-05-03 – car interior

Clicky for more dots. I compressed the image from the avconv output file, but it’s good enough.
2014-05-13
New Subaru Forester: Tire Pressure Check

For reasons having to do with our Larval Engineer needing transportation, we just bought a Subaru Forester for us. While chewing through the 540 page Owners Manual, I discovered that, although the tire pressure monitoring system knows all five pressures, it can’t / won’t display them on the dashboard’s fancy LCD panel.

All four road tires had about the same pressure:

Subaru Forester – as-delivered tire pressure

Yes, I cross-checked two other gauges, Just To Make Sure.

That’s 7 or 8 psi over the spec found on the door frame placard: 30 psi front, 29 psi rear. The tire sidewalls implore you to never inflate them over 40 psi while seating the beads, although the absolute max rating of 51 psi at max load says they’re not really overstuffed.

The doughnut spare tire should have 60 psi and carried 64 psi:

Subaru Forester – as-delivered spare tire pressure

Now, I’ve never had a cold tire gain pressure between checks (other than when the weather heats up), so I tend to run ’em on the high side of the recommended range. In this case, I left the spare alone and vented the road tires to 30 psi to see how it rides. If all goes well, then maybe I’ll puff ’em up a bit.

It’s time to check the fluid levels to see what could possibly go wrong under the hood…

2014-05-12
HP Super Glossy Paper vs. Generic Ink: FAIL

When Aitch moved to NC, he unloaded a stack of printer paper on me to avoid paying half a buck a pound to haul it along. One package contained some high-end HP photo paper that, not being a high-end photo kind of guy, I figured I’d use for my 3D printing brag sheets.

Alas, after trying several permutations of image quality / paper type / ink density, it seems that the cheap generic ink I’m using in the Epson R380 simply isn’t compatible with the HP paper. The top image shows that the ink doesn’t wet the paper and forms a weird alligator-skin pattern:

HP vs Staples Glossy Photo Paper

The bottom image looks perfectly fine; it’s on cheap Staples photo paper, printed with the usual Photo quality on Photo paper.

I’ve read vague statements here-and-there that some HP ink uses an entirely different chemistry from the usual inkjet printers and, perhaps, that accounts for the mismatch. Not a problem, but it did blow an hour while proving that it wasn’t the configuration settings doing me in.

2014-05-11