Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Replacing the drying fan didn’t prevent the Samsung dishwasher from crashing when the drying cycle starts, so I eventually figured out how to run the “Smart Install” test sequence:
Samsung Dishwasher – DW80K7050US – p 37 – Service Test Mode
Which ticked through everything right up to the start of the “Check Drying” step:
Samsung Dishwasher – DW80K7050US – p 39 – Check Drying
Whereupon all the control panel LEDs went dark and a little red status LED on the PCB began blinking what must be an error code: long / pause / long-short-short. Of course, I cannot find any doc for that LED’s code.
The “Auto Door Open Actuator” is a wax motor, a device I had never encountered before. It opens the door through a whippletree pushing two tabs against the door:
Samsung dishwasher – door auto-open mechanism
The meter measures the voltage across the wax motor Auto Door Open Actuator through improvised widowmaker jumpers jammed onto the quick-disconnect fittings. As you might expect, the meter showed 000 VAC before, during, and after the crash, suggesting something is wrong with the relay intended to activate the motor.
Because the test sequence activates the drying fan after opening the door, the fan never even twitched.
For twelve bucks (spend up to $150 if you prefer), I had a generic DD66-00089A actuator in hand before dragging the dishwasher out of its lair and, being me, had to measure what it did:
Samsung Dishwasher – Door Actuator wax motor – test layout
It’s about 1.8 kΩ across the terminals and, not being fussy about its input voltage, will dissipate anywhere from 6 to 32 W in operation. Because the “motor” works by the force generated by expanding liquid wax, the response time obviously goes down as the voltage goes up.
After a few cycles to figure things out, plotting elapsed time against piston displacement is surprisingly linear right out to the 6.5-ish mm maximum stroke:
Wax Motor – time vs. displacement
It take much longer from a cold start, which is how it’s normally used, so the 30 s intercept at 0 mm is definitely on the low side.
Samsung no longer manufactures the DD82-01337A7050 control board, the usual aftermarket suppliers report it’s out of stock, and, given the lack of doc, I am loathe to pull it out of the dishwasher for failure analysis / repair. The one-hour cycle gets the dishes clean and a 46 minute countdown timer reminds me to open the door for drying, so the failure seems survivable for the immediate future.
A three-LED string in the central control panel of the front handlebars has gone dark a year-and-a-half after I replaced all of them. Of course, that’s what I get for using new-old-stock surplus parts, but … the COB LEDs in the nose ring lights are still going strong, so there’s plenty of light where it matters.
The star pattern on the ceiling (lower right) comes from sunlight reflecting off one of the salvaged star quilting rulers. I think the oblong patterns (upper left) come from other rulers.
The upper five-LED string in the middle module failed open-circuit, which left the remaining two strings handling too much current. The five LEDs across the middle look like they’re running at War Emergency Power and the lower five are limping along:
COB LED failure – detail
The dark spots in the middle are overexposed pixels.
I soldered in a replacement from the same bag and it’s all good again, but I expect that won’t last very long.
A friend with declining hearing asked for my experiences with the Nuheara IQbuds² MAX I’ve been re-batterying for quite some years:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 – battery replacement
Given that other folks may have the same issue, herewith a lightly edited version of the email I sent:
Do you use conventional hearing aids?
Nope, because when I was looking around, maybe six years ago, dropping $500 on Nuheara rather than $5000 on real hearing aids seemed like a good first step. Five Benjamins would be lost in the roundoff should I get something seriously exceedingly much more definitely better.
They are now $200 from Amazon. Nuheara had licensed the design to HP and stopped selling them in the US, which is what you’ll find on their website, so maybe the Amazon seller isn’t entirely legit.
My decision was partially based on an audiologist measuring my ears and stating my loss was “not aidable”, which meant it wasn’t severe enough to justify hearing aids. I interpreted that to mean her experience with similar folks showed insufficient return for the sales effort involved.
Before OTC hearing aids were legit, Nuheara was rated very near the top of the “not really hearing a hearing aid” pack. The better ones cost about half the price of real hearing aids, so IMO it was the best cost-performer.
Every time the question has come up since then, the crux is “Would real hearing aids be that much better than the Nuheara buds” and the answer has been “Nope”.
I’ve done occasional test sessions with various “hearing instrument specialists” and the results show I have essentially no hearing above 1 kHz, thus reducing female voices to mumbles. They are unwilling to test my hearing while wearing the Nuheara buds, for obvious reasons.
Do you use Nuheara instead?
Pretty much whenever Mary is around, because that’s the only way I’ll understand what she’s saying unless we’re face-to-face in the same room.
The noise reduction (see below) works wonderfully well in the car, eliminating all the road noise and isolating her voice.
experience and any advice
Unlike simple “personal sound amplifiers”, Nuheara has a six-band equalizer with settings based on an automated “Tap when you hear the tone” test done in the app. It does not, much to my frustration, display a line graph or export the numbers, but the circular diagram shows I don’t have much hearing above the lowest two channels:
Nuheara Ear ID – 2026-0811
I think the lower quarter of each side the rings is cosmetic filler, given the silence I hear when the test is surely presenting the higher frequency tones. If there’s a lower score than what I get, I cannot imagine what it might be for.
The buds have a high/low cut filter to reduce background sounds that works wonderfully on the ubiquitous 120 Hz hum anywhere in North America. I obviously don’t have much use for the high-cut filter setting.
The “Speech in Noise Control” applies DSP magic to reduce general background sound and emphasize speech, which is more complex than a simple frequency filter: SINC is astonishingly effective. What comes through the DSP magic isn’t audiophile quality, but it’s comprehensible and that’s what counts.
The downside: I hear nothing other than speech while it’s engaged. When we have supper on the screened porch, there is no background sound other than occasional traffic until I disable the filter and SINC, whereupon I can hear the breeze rustle the leaves / birds chirping / Vassar carillon chimes / stuff like that. Fair tradeoff, IMO.
The DSP monitors ambient sound and adjusts the overall gain to reduce the in-ear volume. My normal settings turn the water stream from the kitchen faucet into deafening white noise, but the gain drops after a few seconds and I’m effectively deaf. This also applies when we’re walking outdoors, with any wind noise in the microphones turning the gain down enough that I hear just as poorly with the buds as I do without them.
The buds can stream audio from the phone and the equalizer applies to phone calls / music / whatever. Real hearing aids tend to not stream audio, because Bluetooth requires bigger batteries. Getting phone calls with adjusted audio in both ears is wonderful.
The buds also have “tap” controls to start / stop streaming, raise / lower volume, and (most importantly) enable / disable “world audio” = I can mute the sound before I start doing something noisy. The “world off” = active noise cancellation isn’t perfect, but it’s Good Enough for most purposes.
I wear them under Peltor 28 dB hearing protectors (which cost 25 bucks two years ago sold by Amazon, so beware scalpers) while mowing: the muffs knock down all sounds and the buds remove what’s left. I can then stream music at reasonable volume to make mowing easier.
Those big batteries make the buds heavy in the ear, but it seems the same batteries appear in audio-only buds, so they may be the smallest ones that get the job done.
A good ear canal seal is essential and I’ve gone through several different “brands” on Amazon before finding effective foam tips.
Bottom line: I have no experience with their competition, but the Nuheara buds do everything I have ever read other buds / real hearing aids can do. Color me satisfied.
The OEM lithium batteries in my Nuheara IQbuds² MAX not-really-hearing-aids lasted for about 2-½ years before needing replacement. Two more years pretty well did those in and I replaced them again without fanfare about a year ago.
The workbench stash also disgorged the old Varta LIR1654 batteries, but not the OEM ones, so a test session seemed in order:
Lithium LIR1654
The Varta batteries (red and blue traces) are in sad shape, after two years of regular use and another three years idling in a small bag. The EEMB batteries (pink and cyan traces) are in better shape, despite their year of use, with the lower pair of traces showing their as-extracted charge and the upper three traces their just-charged capacity.
They’re still doing better than their 0.4 W·hr nominal capacity, which is not to be sniffed at, particularly as the tester’s minimum 150 mA current presents a rather stiff load for a 100-ish mA·hr cell.
This being a quick-n-dirty set of tests, a simple discharging “fixture” sufficed:
LIR1654 battery discharge clamp
The charging “fixture” wasn’t much fancier:
LIR1654 battery charge clamp
The EEMB batteries are in the bag and may remain in good shape after two more years, ready for another tour in the earbuds when their relatives wear out.
Having verified the brake sensors work and with some idea of their actuation distances, installing them on Mary’s Tour Easy involved no more than:
Remove the fairing
Unwrap three spiral looms from All The Cables
Wrestle the Julet connectors apart
Plug in the new sensors
Stick the sensors in the proper locations
Verify proper brake operation
Rewrap the looms
Install the fairing
The “proper location” put the actuation point about halfway between the brake lever’s released and pulled positions. Given that the previous sensors lacked indicators, I don’t know where their actuation point might have been, other than likely too close to their released position.
A slideshow of the front brake lever positions:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – front released
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – front activated
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – front pulled
Similarly for the rear brake lever positions:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – rear released
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – rear activated
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – rear pulled
Obviously, the rear brake lever sensor has the “dim” LEDs.
There’s not much to go wrong and the first ride was uneventful, so we’ll declare victory until the sensors or magnets shift their position, despite the wraps holding their wires to the brake cables.
The magnets come from power toothbrush heads, encased in urethane adhesive in 3D printed mounts.
Stipulated: I sometimes over-do things.
However, I am absolutely not going to back down from saying the lashup shown in this screen grab from the sensor installation video is utterly and completely wrong:
You’ll note the sensor’s signal wire is blue, not white, but red = 5 VDC and black = common on both sides of the splice. This is not to be sniffed at.
With the disk magnet (supplied with the sensors) oriented edgewise to the sensor, so the magnetic field is largely cancelled, the maximum separation allowing the sensor to remain On is about 7 mm:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – edge – max ON
The minimum distance allowing it to be Off is 8 mm:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – edge – min OFF
Orienting the disk face-on to the sensor increases the distances, because the magnetic field is not cancelled out in that direction. Similarly, positioning the magnet either above or below the plane of the sensor changes the results.
The maximum On distance is now 20 mm:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – side – max ON
The minimum Off distance is 22 mm:
Tour Easy LED brake sensor – side – min OFF
The other magnet has a similar field strength and the other sensor responds at nearly the same distances, so they’re reasonably matched.
The LEDs are, however, not well matched: one sensor is much brighter than the other. I only have one connector, so I cannot show both in the same picture. These pictures have the same exposure (1/120 s and f/1.7), with the top sensor appearing in the previous pictures:
E-bike Brake Sensors – LED Brightness comparison
The red LEDs show a similar difference. I’m certain this doesn’t rise to the level of a warranty claim, because, hey, maybe the brighter one should be dimmer.
