Ed
By turns: tinker, engineer, husband, author, amateur raconteur, recumbent cyclist, father, ham radio geek. So many projects, so little time!
Homepage: http://softsolder.com
M20 Camera Operation
Posted in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-05-22
A reader asked how the M20 camera mount on my bike works with respect to the camera’s clock; this description explains a few things missing from the original writeup.
Do you have to set the time & date at start of every ride?
The internal clock shuts down about ten seconds after you pull the battery. If-and-only-if you swap batteries fast enough, it’ll keep time forever. Screw up once and it snaps back to Epoch Zero.
“Car mode” automagically begins recording when USB power goes on, but the manual advises:
TIP: When using your camera as a dashcam, use a car charger cable and remove the internal battery to make sure it does not die out while you travel.
That’s because the M20 continues to run from its internal battery when USB power drops. After recording an hour of a parking lot or your garage wall, the battery dies and so does the clock.
Of course, without the internal battery, the clock dies ten seconds after you turn off the car.
The internal battery has many days of capacity with the camera turned off (whew!), so I conjured the case & PowerCore battery tray to handle our normal rides. The internal battery keeps the clock alive overnight and during the rain we’ve had for the last week, the PowerCore supplies juice during the ride, and I recharge the PowerCore every few weeks.
The M20 doesn’t draw charging current when I turn it on, but poking the PowerCore’s status button also turns on its outputs, whereupon the M20 decides it should begin charging and, bonus, draw power from the PowerCore during the entire ride. The M20 finishes charging while we ride, but the PowerCore continues supplying power and, when I turn the M20 off, the PowerCore sees no current draw and shuts itself off.
Only a geek could love a lashup like that, but it works around the M20’s broken clock and removes its battery maintenance hassle.
LED Nightlight Base Teardown & Simulation
Posted in Electronics Workbench on 2019-05-20
I volunteered to take a look inside a small LED nightlight base to see how well it might work as a power supply for other circuitry:
Note: the AC plug is not polarized. Either blade can contact the hot side of the AC line.
The cadmium-selenide photocell in front turns the white LED on when it sees darkness and off when it sees lightness, with a more-or-less proportional response during dimness. The LED has an obvious 60 Hz flicker, particularly during its partially on phase, so I didn’t expect much inside.
The component side of the PCB faces toward the blades, which you’re looking along the lengths of:
The solder side faces away from the outlet:
Flipping the solder side left-to-right and overlaying the two images produces an X-ray-ish view useful for tracing the circuitry:
Some doodling extracts an LTSpice schematic:
None of the component values seem particularly critical; the diodes and transistor are close approximations to what’s really inside. I think the 100 Ω resistor also serves as a fuse, should anything else go wrong.
Setting the CdS cell to 1 MΩ = “dark” turns the LED on:
Although I don’t trust the numbers very far, the LED current waveform definitely suggests the flicker isn’t all in my head.
Setting the cell to 10 Ω = “light” turns the LED off, by the simple expedient of clamping the filter capacitor voltage well below the LED’s forward drop:
When the LED is off, the transistor current is slightly higher than the LED’s on-state current, because saturation voltage:
The current runs right through the 820 nF capacitor, which serves as a more-or-less 3.2 kΩ ballast resistor:
It’s a nice film cap and should have a low ESR, but this seems a bit sketchy to me.
So, basically, the nightlight doesn’t really have a power supply in the usual meaning of the term and isn’t suited for driving anything other than the white LED inside the case. Relocating the LED outside the case is an Extremely Bad Idea™, because the anode is one diode away from what might well be the hot AC line; one little oopsie and you’ve got a lethal shock hazard.
Reversible Belt Buckle Re-staking
Posted in Machine Shop on 2019-05-19
It’s a shorter belt with the same failure mode:
I clamped the whole affair on a block to align all the parts:
Drop the pin and spring in place, whack it with a punch, and it’s all good:
That was easy …
Pedal Spindle Wrench Flat Tweakage
Posted in Machine Shop, Recumbent Bicycling on 2019-05-18
A new-old-stock pair of pedals for Mary’s bike had wrench flats just slightly too narrow for my 15 mm wrench:
Well, that’s easy to fix:
For reasons lost in the mists of time, those are titanium spindles. They file just like steel; I’m not fussy.
Epson R380 Printer: Waste Ink Counter Reset
Posted in Machine Shop, Software on 2019-05-07
Following the same drill as before, the Epson R380 printer once again thinks I’ve changed its diaper before resetting its waste ink counter. Instead, I’ve poured what would be a moderate fortune of waste ink down the drain from the external tank, had I not grafted a continuous flow ink supply onto the thing.
To judge from how often I must reset the counters, I’m expected to buy a new printer every three years. For sure, it’s uneconomical to have anybody else (the nearest Epson Authorized Customer Care Centers is 68 miles away on Long Island) do the deed. As Epson delicately puts it “replacement of ink pads may not be a good investment for lower-cost printers”.
Epson now provides a utility allowing you to reset the counters exactly one time. Having a scrap Windows PC ready to go, I didn’t bother capturing the partition before firing off the previous Sketchy Utility™, nor did I restore it, so the whole process took about half an hour.
The hard drive platters will eventually become nightlights.
Equipping an Electronics Lab on the Cheap
Posted in Electronics Workbench on 2019-05-03
I described how to take advantage of Living in the Golden Age of Electronic Making for HVOpen:
Although you don’t get my patter, perhaps the linkies will make up for the silence:
I filled a table with Show-n-Tell widgets and a good time was had by all: hardly anybody fell asleep.
[Update: The talk addressed folks interested in starting out with electronic projects who have no test equipment at all. The choices would be different for other audiences, but … boat anchors aren’t appropriate here.]
Monthly Science: Weight
Posted in Home Ec, Recumbent Bicycling, Science on 2019-05-01
Progress is our most important product:
Now that we’ve begun bicycling more regularly, Winter Bloat is transmogrifying into thigh muscle.
The hills around here become noticeably steeper during winter; we attribute the additional elevation to frost heaves …
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