Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
One of the scanners glowed brightly in the rack just inside the Stop and Shop:
Stop-and-Shop Scanner Error
A closer look:
Stop-and-Shop Scanner Error – detail
If I understand this correctly, CCRestart just crashed, so you must restart CCRestart. The entrance of a deep rabbit hole looms behind the Quit button.
The file extension and the overall UI make it reasonable to assume the scanners run Window CE, just like some voting machines.
To the best of my knowledge, the screen isn’t touch-sensitive. I passed up the opportunity to poke the buttons below the screen …
Looking up their NDC number helps translate the bullshit Latinesque nomenclature:
Glandula Suprarenalis Suis = boar adrenal glands
Thyroidinum = cow thyroid glands
Somatropin = human growth hormone
They’re exceedingly proud of that NDC number, touting “SOMADERM Gel is the only transdermal, FDA registered product”. Indeed, it’s registered, about which the FDC has this to say:
Assigned NDC numbers are not in any way an indication of FDA approval of the product.
and
Marketing Category UNAPPROVED HOMEOPATHIC
With that in mind, consider the dilutions:
Glandula Suprarenalis Suis = 1 part per million
Thyroidinum = 10 part per billion
Somatropin = 1×10-30 = there are no words
Homeopathic “drugs” never list the starting concentration or amounts in the product, but diluting something by a factor of ten-to-the-thirty ensures not one single molecule of the original compound will make it into the bottle. This, of course, means the HGH is at “maximum strength”, in the homeopathic way of magical thinking.
You’ll surely find some molecules of pig brain and maybe even a few molecules of cow glands, but I suspect they’re not buying the “active” ingredients in shipping container lots. In round numbers, one pig adrenal, one cow thyroid, and one drop of actual HGH would supply their needs well into the future.
I would like to see how they dilute those ingredients, because I doubt they have legions of trained homeopaths succussing bottles against elastic surfaces.
Of course, such dilution requires careful attention to detail, lest a stray molecule make its way into the final product, which surely justifies the punch line:
The Wyze Cam is a surprisingly inexpensive camera firmly lashed to the Wyze app, with no provision for ordinary IP camera streaming. It seems to be a generic camera with custom firmware and, unsurprisingly, one can commandeer the bootloader with different firmware from a MicroSD card, thereby adding missing functions and suppressing undesired actions.
Oddly, buying a genuine Wyze Cam directly from Wyze isn’t significantly more expensive than a generic from the usual eBay / Amazon sellers. Bonus: the legit camera arrives next week rather than in a month or two.
I found one of my few remaining 2 GB MicroSD cards, formatted it with a 512 MB (!) FAT32 partition (per the suggestions), set up the “custom firmware” bootloader, and installed it with no issues.
Installing the new firmware requires copying a directory tree, configuring the WiFi SSID and password in the usual wpa_supplicant, and rebooting. Works fine and, yeah, the camera now runs Linux.
I told the router to assign a known IP address to the camera’s MAC address, set up port forwarding for port 8554 to that IP address, put the camera against the storm window in the kitchen, and rebooted everything to get it working:
Wyze Cam in kitchen window
Unfortunately, while it works more-or-less well with browsers on the local network, it’s apparently inaccessible from outside. The router manages a DDNS name-to-IP mapping to make itself findable, the port is open, the forwarding seems correct, no image data arrives to browsers outside, and they eventually time out.
Changing to port 8080 doesn’t help, nor does using MJPEG instead of H264 encoding.
Even more unfortunately, the router doesn’t do hairpin connections (inside to outside to inside), so I can’t debug this mess from the Comfy Chair.
This is a placeholder for what I’ve done while I accumulate more knowledge …
One of the handles snapped off a Y valve at the garden and I finally got around to an autopsy:
Garden Y Valve – cross sectioned
That’s using a 24 tpi bandsaw blade, which doesn’t cut nearly as smoothly as a fancy diamond saw, but seems good enough for the purpose. Most of the ripply shading on the cut plane comes from specular reflections; it’s pot metal all the way through and cuts to a high shine.
A closeup shows more detail around the (now hemispheric) ball valve:
Garden Y Valve – thread detail
You can see faint straight lines just inside the hose threads, which gives a hint of what’s to come.
Pry out the sectioned ball and dislodge the O-ring from the now-obvious insert:
Garden Y Valve – O-rings
Gently squish the threads in the bench vise to pop out the insert:
Garden Y Valve – plug removed
If lives depended on it, one could dismantle and repair the valve without recourse to a bandsaw, but …
Although the camera doesn’t hit anything, it seemed entirely too exposed out in front:
MPCNC – relocated camera – front view
So I moved it to the back, where I can’t see it and maybe won’t clobber it:
MPCNC Re-Relocated USB Camera
The camera sensor is now almost exactly aligned with the XY axes, so the goofy rotation is gone and the offsets look better:
bCNC – Rear-mount Camera Probe Config
The size of the “10 mm” inner circle at the crosshair depends on the target distance, so it’ll be smaller for surfaces clamped onto and thus rising above the table. Depending on how much that matters, I can tweak the camera focus and scale factor to make the answer come out right.
The setup at the home position looked like this from a different perspective:
Back then, a 150 µF 450 V cap of the proper size (the 30 mm height being critical) was difficult to find and relatively expensive to purchase in onesies from the usual reliable sources, particularly as the repair advice I could find suggested it probably wasn’t the causing the monitor’s problems. So the monitor sat in pieces in an out-of-the-way corner of the Basement Laboratory while other events transpired.
As part of a long-delayed Great Cleanup of Small Projects, I discovered the caps are now four bucks delivered from halfway around the planet, so I got one, did the swap, reassembled the pieces, and the monitor works just like new. No pix, but you get the general idea.
For another few years, anyway.
For whatever reason, the 3.5 mm audio output seems dead. The monitor has a pair of teeny speakers that don’t do justice to its magnificent HDMI audio, but they’re entirely adequate for my simple needs: pre-SSH Raspberry Pi setup doesn’t call for much.
I managed to snag a cargo pocket on the under-sink drawer knob in the Black Bathroom:
Bathroom knob – bent screw
Did a job on the pocket, too, although after Mary was done with it, you’d never know.
With that much of a bend in the screw, the knob left a nasty divot in the drawer front requiring a layer of wood-filled epoxy:
Bathroom knob – filled divot
I sanded it more-or-less flush with the surface, taking great pains to not scuff the surrounding paint. A similar layer fills the corresponding divot under the screw head inside the front.
Despite appearances, only about 1/8 inch of the epoxy peeked around the knob, so I painted it black with a Sharpie, ran the knob onto the screw, and declared victory:
Bathroom knob – restored
I’ll (try to) (remember to) stand further back from the knob …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 