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.
All four nestlings emerged on schedule:
The oldest nestling was ready for feeding almost immediately, even with unopened eyes:
As any infant will tell you, holding your head up is hard work:
But doing only half the job won’t get you fed:
They’re just starting to make little chirps, so this isn’t nearly as raucous as you might think:
The adults seem to have no trouble bringing an endless stream of worms, insects, and unidentifiable organisms from the yard and garden.
Go, birds, go!
Five years later, the digits I painted with Rust-Oleum Rusty Metal Primer have weathered pretty well, while the original ink has fallen off the retroreflective sticker:
As before, I wiped off the crud with denatured alcohol and painted neatly inside the lines. The other digits on both sides still look as good as the day I painted them, with only a few bubbles and nicks.
Memo to self: Next time, buy a big sheet of 3M retroreflective film, make a stencil by vinyl cutting, paint the entire number in one shot, and be done with it.
I built a small plywood work table for the drill press:
Obviously, that was a long time ago. It’s a plywood scrap with a small cleat screwed to its bottom, upon which one can position / clamp / hold / finagle smallish workpieces without worrying about drilling into the surface.
The most recent batch of aluminum backing plates prompted me to finally replace that relic:
The mill vise under the plywood grips the cleat and the whole affair rides on a Sears “Drill Press Milling Attachment Stock No 27585” which is basically a simple XY table with hand dials. It’s not rigid enough for actual milling (which you should never do on a drill press, anyway, because the end mill will pull itself out of the Jacobs chuck), but it’s good for tweaking the position before you drill something.
One should never hand-hold workpieces while drilling.
Don’t do as I do, do as I say. OK?
Having figured out the geometry for two- and three-channel soaker hoses, I cranked out more clamps:
Actually, those are the remainder of two production runs devoted to reducing the amount of water sprinkling the garden paths. A 50 foot hose runs along both sides of one 14 foot bed, crosses the path, then continues along the adjacent bed. The hoses have (deliberate!) sprinkler holes along their porous rubber body and sometimes the layout puts a hole where it waters the path.
The blue silicone rubber strips provide a bit of sealing to prevent the absurdly high pressure water from streaming through the orange PETG clamps. It’s OK if the clamp leaks, but less flow is better!
I’m getting really good at making those aluminum backing plates and, in fact, I think it’s faster to run the blanks past the disk sander, then drill the holes, than to CNC-machine them. Could be wrong, but Quality Shop Time is not to be sniffed at.
Despite knowing the wire colors inside USB cables need not follow any particular convention, this still came as a surprise:
Yes, that’s a negative indicator on the meter: it reads -5.020 V.
No, I didn’t swap the test probe banana plugs on the other end.
A bit of continuity testing shows the green and white data wires are also reversed, so whoever assembled the cable simply soldered the proper wire color sequence backwards onto both connectors. As long as you don’t cut the cable to reuse the connectors, it’s all good.
Memo to Self: Stop trusting, always verify!
Having gotten two answers from two USB meters, I figured it was time to get primal:
That’s a pair of USB breakout connectors and lengths of nice silicone wire (24 AWG power & 28 AWG data), with just enough slack for a Tek A6302 current probe:
So I can see the actual current waveform of a Glass Tile box running from a bench power supply:
The top trace is the firmware heartbeat from the Arduino Nano, the middle trace is the SK6812 LED data stream, and the bottom trace is the USB current at 50 mA/div. The current steps downward by about 10 mA (just after the data burst) when one of the tiles changes color and and LED shuts off.
The current probe reveals some mysteries, such as this waveform from a dirt-cheap USB charger:
I wonder why it’s ramming 100 mA current spikes into the circuit, too. At least now I can see what’s going on.
NYS DOT cleared the Japanese Knotweed from the shoulder along Rt 376 north of Maloney last year:
The last image in that gallery is from the end of April; you can see the weeds just starting to grow under the guide rail.
Japanese Knotweed, being basically a weed on crystal meth, becomes a lush hedge from a standing start in five weeks:
Knowing how NYS DOT’s Region 8 Dutchess South Residency’s brush trimming has(n’t) worked in previous years, this took us by surprise:
Because chopping Japanese Knotweed to the ground doesn’t actually discourage it, we hope they’re scheduled to return every couple of months …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 