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.

Category: Electronics Workbench

Electrical & Electronic gadgets

  • APRS Packet Routing

    This might be another personal best in a different category:

    KE4ZNU-9 APRS to KB2KUU-13 - Lafayette NJ
    KE4ZNU-9 APRS to KB2KUU-13 – Lafayette NJ

    The path from KE4ZNU-9 (on my bike in Pleasant Valley) to KB2KUU-13 near Lafayette, NJ, spans a bit over 90 km / 55 miles, which isn’t bad for a 5 W (that’s optimistic) hand-held radio through a dual-band mobile antenna bolted to the seat frame with my head much too close to the base. The topography lay in my favor, though: Pleasant Valley sits near the top of the Wappingers Creek watershed (admittedly, barely 200 feet above sea level) and the valleys run southwest-to-northeast all along this part of the East Coast. The KB2KUU-13 antenna may be only 20 feet above average terrain, but that puts it 600 feet above sea level with a commanding view to the northeast.

    Another packet sent a few minutes later took a much longer path to an APRS iGate:

    KE4ZNU-9 APRS to WA2GUG-15 - Long Island - 2012-02-01
    KE4ZNU-9 APRS to WA2GUG-15 – Long Island – 2012-02-01

    The first hop covered about 80 km / 50 miles to W2VER-15. That antenna is 320 feet above average terrain, but that’s with a 1400 foot base: a ridge near Hamburg Mountain. The next hop is about 20 miles to WB2FTZ-15, then 60 km / 40 miles across the plains and out to WA2GUG-15 near Hempstead on Long Island.

    Normally, of course, a closer digipeater snags packets from my bike; most go through WA2YSM-15 or KC2DAA-2 to K2MHV-6 and probably don’t clog up the entire eastern seaboard. It’s hard to tell, though, because the APRS database records only the first successful capture of a given packet.

    The whole bike ride looked like this:

    KE4ZNU-9 trip - 2012-02-01
    KE4ZNU-9 trip – 2012-02-01

    The APRS spots missed the sprint along West Road into Pleasant Valley, but you get the general idea: 22 miles, 15 mph average speed, temperature around 58 °F, a fine day for a ride!

  • Moderate Lifetime CFL Failure

    Not all CFL bulbs fail after a year. This one seems to have lasted six years, only to burn out a few days after the other one:

    Burned-out CFL bulb
    Burned-out CFL bulb

    I’m sure the date code just over the base means January 2006, not June 2001, simply because I used much larger bulbs a decade ago. Those have long since failed…

    These bulbs all operate in nearly the worst possible condition: base-up inside a ceiling downlight can, although without a cover glass. It’s much cooler in there than with the equivalent incandescent bulb, but they still get pretty toasty. The housing discoloration and the brittle bosses around the tube glass looks a bit less saturated in real life, but this will give you an idea:

    CFL bulb - heat damage
    CFL bulb – heat damage

  • Early Compact Fluorescent Bulb Failure

    Early CFL Bulb Failure
    Early CFL Bulb Failure

    Being that sort of bear, I tend to make notations like this. Sometimes I’m delighted the next time the inscription sees the light of day and sometimes it ticks me right off…

    Much of the energy-saving advantage of CFL bulbs comes from their touted long life. I’d say a year isn’t nearly long enough to reap any benefits…

    There is certainly a warranty on the bulb, if only I’d:

    • saved the empty package and
    • had the original receipt and
    • be willing to call a presumably toll-free number and
    • go through whatever hassle they impose to swap the bulb

    They know none of us will get very far down that checklist…

    FWIW, the box of smaller CFL bulbs on the shelf says they have a two-year warranty “in normal residential service of 3 hours per day”. I’m sure the number of starts factors into it, too.

  • HP 50g Calculator Screen Protector

    A week or so after I got my HP 49GX calculator, I managed to drop a vernier caliper on it. Interior points downward, of course, putting a nice divot on the non-glare plastic over the LCD panel.

    A week or so after I got my HP 50g calculator, I applied a screen protector sheet harvested from the lifetime supply I bought for my original Zire 71, back in the day.

    HP 50g calculator screen protector
    HP 50g calculator screen protector

    The fact that it’s an almost perfect fit and that the calculator sports a monochrome LCD with lower resolution is a sad commentary on the state of the calculator art.

    Taking that picture in low-angle full sunlight makes the protector sheet look awful. In actual use, it’s nearly invisible. Haven’t dropped anything on it yet, either.

    And, yes, I did cut it out around the HP logo button in the upper right corner.

  • EAGLE 6.x Manual: Printing the Whole Thing

    Although reading PDF documents on the shining screen works fine for some topics, I’d much rather curl up with a printed version for the first read-through. Adobe Reader’s print-as-booklet option does all the heavy lifting required to print a PDF document four pages to a single Letter-size sheet of paper, after which I do a little slicing & binding to get a nice comb-bound book.

    So I printed out the entire EAGLE 6 manual (found in /wherever/eagle-6.1.0/doc/), which led to the discovery that page 86 is missing (at least in the 1st edition version). That screws up the pagination from page 87 onward: odd-numbered pages move to the left side of the binding, even-numbered pages to the right, and the blank space reserved for the gutter / binding appears on the outside margins. Fortunately, it’s still readable.

    To avoid that problem, do this:

    Print Range → Pages → [1-85,301,86-334]

    That selects the first set of contiguous pages, jams a copy of a “This page has been left free intentionally” page from the back of the manual in place of the missing page 86, and then selects the rest of the book.

    Print the front sides, flip the stack over, print the back sides (with the same page range), and bind as usual.

    FWIW, this is much better than having the printer mis-feed about 3/4 of the way through the back sides, which it has done in the past while printing a big book. I now run off about 20 sheets at a time, with only that many pieces of paper in the feeder, just to make sure it doesn’t ruin the entire job.

    One could, I suppose, use pdftk to shuffle the PDF into a complete file which would Just Work, but that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Ditto for expecting CadSoft to re-create the PDF.

    Memo to Self: Check the last page. If the logical page doesn’t match what’s shown on the PDF page, then something’s wrong.

  • Thing-O-Matic: Dummy Load Fan Replacement

    Dummy load fan replacement
    Dummy load fan replacement

    The fan on the dummy load that consumes the required minimum current to keep the ATX power supply happy wasn’t starting up reliably. That’s not surprising: I connected it to 5 V rather than the rated 12 V, because the load heatsink needs just a whisper of air flow to stay barely above room temperature, so it’s barely turning over and has no spare torque at all.

    It turns out the heatsink really doesn’t need any forced air flow, despite having the fins oriented crosswise. Without the fan, it stabilizes just above comfortable-to-the-touch, a bit hotter than I’d prefer.

    While I had the hood up for the HBP rebuild, though, I swapped in another fan and the heatsink is now cool to the touch. I did clean that dust off the fins, too.

    If this one also fails at +5 V, I’ll fiddle the wiring to put it across the +12 V and +5 V supplies, where it’ll see 7 V. That should improve its disposition…

  • Waber UPS Batteries

    If you pick up consumer-grade UPS units during closeout sales, they cost little more than replacing the batteries in older units… so we now have a new UPS replacing an old Waber box.

    Just for completeness, I pulled the 25 A internal fuses:

    Waber UPS battery fuses
    Waber UPS battery fuses

    And then measured the remaining battery capacity:

    Waber UPS
    Waber UPS

    The pair of sealed lead-acid batteries claim 5 Ah each, so the 6 A load far exceeds the usual C/20 SLA test current. The fact that the better one hit 1.6 Ah under that load says it’s in surprisingly good shape.

    In fact, the label I put on that battery in January 2008 says it hit 1.4 Ah at 2.5 A, so it’s doing much better than you’d expect.

    However, the UPS claims to support 650 VA = 450 W at 0.7 power factor. The batteries must supply the real power while the inverter drives the reactive load; giving Waber the benefit of the doubt at 90% efficiency says the batteries must provide 500 W = 21 A at 24 V under full load.

    Soooo, a 6 A test load doesn’t actually put the screws to them.