Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
I don’t know what the bump in the middle of the new battery discharge curve means. Something weird in the chemistry, I suppose. Getting good batteries from Amazon surely remains a crapshoot and I now have four chargers.
Recharging all six batteries required 5488 mA·hr, just over 900 mA·hr apiece. Running the camera on a one-hour bike ride burns 600-ish mA·hr, so that’s comforting.
Comparing the new results with the 2022 batteries tested last month:
NP-BX1 – Newmowa 2022 in 2025-06
The upper traces appear in red in the first plot, the lower curves come from three years of use.
The seal was firmly affixed inside the cap, just like all the seals on all the other cartons we’ve ever bought, so this wasn’t a “broken seal”.
The bottom of the seal looked about the same:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – interior 1
The cream inside the carton looked & smelled fine, so it went into the morning omelette with no ill effect. Yes, I’m aware some bacterial contamination has no particular smell or taste.
Scraping off the pure-white cream showed the crud had been molded inside the plastic:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – interior 2
A closer look at the exterior surface of the seal:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – exterior detail
And the interior surface:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – interior detail
Both of those are focused on the top surface; the blurred areas are inside the plastic.
The date & production codes sprayed onto the carton were somewhat illegible:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – illegible codes
Getting a better angle helped:
Hood Heavy Cream seal – date prod codes
I sent in a report, but I’m sure I’ll never know the rest of the story …
Those of you running Windows should have undone whatever setting removes file extensions from the usual views, because by default Windows won’t bother you with such trivia.
But, hey, maybe an SVG file can contain an audio recording. I mean, there’s an online file converter for that, so it must be a thing.
Having been around this block a couple of times, though, let’s peek inside the SVG file with a text editor:
Spam SVG Audio – attachment
Huh. Not an audio recording, but a Javascript one-liner with a URL/URI/IRI/whatever aiming Your Default Browser at a presumably compromised server.
I didn’t go further, but surely the payload would wrestle Your Default Browser into a position allowing insertion of a remote compromise.
Well played, spammer!
Just another entry in the “Why friends don’t let friends run Windows” category, despite knowing whenever security and convenience come into conflict, convenience always wins.
A week after installing 25 g of fresh silica gel, without any outside influence other than using some of the filaments to build things, I recorded the humidity meter reading, the indicator card colors, and the weight gain.
Click on any picture for more dots and to get rid of the captions and their stylin’ photo-blur.
White PETG, gain 0.6 g:
Polydryer – 14 pctRH – meter – white PETGPolydryer – 14 pctRH – card – white PETG
Black PETG, gain 0.8 g:
Polydryer – 21 pctRH – meter – black PETGPolydryer – 21 pctRH – card – black PETG
The (newer) indicator cards with the smaller dots / larger black borders seem less acute than the (older) large-dot cards. The two 28 %RH cards look about right, but the 20 and 21 %RH cards seem more different than the similar humidity would suggest.
Under 20 %RH, all the spots look pretty much the same, but AFAICT any humidity below 20 %RH is Good Enough for 3D printing.
The Blue PETG-CF went directly from its sealed bag into the PolyDryer box, unlike the Black and Gray PETG-CF spools that sat in the 50% RH basement long enough to soak up the ambience. The Blue has outgassed enough water to suggest spools do not arrive “bone dry” from the factory, although the Black and Gray prove the Basement Shop is wetter than the factory.
All of the silica gel together weighed 184.2 on the same scale I originally measured the 25 g quantities that should have totalled 175 g, but the individual measurements total 183.3 g. I don’t trust the scale to be better than ±0.1 g on any measurement, so half a percent is likely as good as it gets.
The silica gel weighed 187 g on the kitchen scale, sweated down to 179 g after 7 minutes in the microwave being defrosted like 1.5 pounds of fish, and, depending on which numbers you believe, released 8 to 10 g of water in the process.
Microwaving something containing so little water means the silica gel absorbs very little of the energy: the dish, glass turntable, and metal walls got absurdly hot. I think using the induction cooktop and cast iron pan makes more sense, even if it takes longer.
With fresh silica gel in place, perhaps waiting two weeks will produce interesting numbers.
A recent quilt photo shoot degenerated into me chasing several bright orange clamp jaws across the deck as they popped off their clamps hanging from the photo backdrop scaffold. Most clamps have jaws snapping onto actual rods, but these clamps have molded-in-place “rods” much smaller than the 2 mm expected by the jaws and much more irregular than seems reasonable.
Trace and scan the nose of a clamp:
Large spring clamp nose outline
Curiously, the molded rod is not centered in the nose:
Large spring clamp nose – pin locatIon
Use LightBurn to coerce a scan of the first sketch into a suitable path, laser-cut some MDF, and glue up a drill fixture:
Spring clamp jaw pins – fixture gluing
Align the drill to the center of the off-center hole marked on the bottom layer:
Spring clamp jaw pins – drill alignment
The drilling setup looks casual, but hand-holding the clamps against the rear wall and into the form-fitting nose recess sufficed:
Spring clamp jaw pins – fixture overview
I snipped the plastic “rods” out before drilling the holes, then rammed 2 mm steel rods in place:
Spring clamp jaw pins – steel
They’re really 5/64 inch = 1.98 mm rods from the oil-hardening drill rod stash, but entirely sufficient for the purpose.
With one clamp in hand, though, there was obviously no reason for the rods to be off-center. So I centered the drill in the nose, punctured the rest of the clamps, and pressed 2 mm carbon fiber rods in place:
Spring clamp jaw pins – steel vs carbon fiber
The rods were cut to 20 mm by rolling them across a pad with firm pressure from a utility knife. That was mostly to get some experience cutting carbon fiber, which is obviously overqualified for the job.
Snap the orange jaws in place and I shall never suffer the embarrassment of chasing them again …
A confluence of unrelated events led me to unboxing and setting up the CNC-3018XL most recently used to plot Homage Tek Circuit Computer decks, but the table slid along its rods entirely too easily. A peek at the leadscrew revealed an assortment of parts last seen when I extended the frame:
3018CNC – table drive – as found
The featureless cylinder is the leadscrew follower nut, which evidently popped out of its proper place in the table drive block:
3018CNC – table drive parts
The crude chamfer suggests that end went into the block first, so that’s what I did:
3018CNC – table drive – follower nut installed
It seems snug enough in there, at least for a machine used solely for plotting and maybe drag knife cuttery, so I’ll assume the box received some rough handling during our move.
It’s now back in place and seems to work well enough:
3018CNC – table drive – installed
I briefly considered adding some setscrews to hold it in place, but came to my senses. If it pops out again, maybe it’ll be time to rebuild that block with proper retention.
The software side of the thing surely needs TLC, too.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 