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.
Electrical & Electronic gadgets
Why you shouldn’t use antistatic foam for long-term storage:
The lump emerged from Mad Phil’s parts stash, now residing under a bench at Squidwrench. The 952 date code on the HEP802 JFET suggests he tucked it in around 1980; you’re looking at nigh onto four decades of corrosion.
Memo to Self: use it or lose it!
I bought my Bose Hearphones in late August 2017, so they’re just shy of two years old, and have used them more-or-less daily since then. Although the innards still improve my hearing, the exterior is falling apart:
The conspicuous blue tips come from silicone tape holding the “soft touch” silicone shell together:
The white line seems to be silicone glue holding the hard cover plate to the equally hard base. So far, it’s working, but the two-piece soft cover is peeling away from the very thin adhesive (?) holding it to the hard parts.
The silicone glue under the flexy cover on the control pod along the right earbud cable hasn’t fared as well:
I blobbed ordinary RTV silicone under the cover, ignoring the caveats about acetic acid corrosion, because I don’t have any platinum-cure silicone on the shelf.
When the blue tape wears out / falls off, I’ll replace it with black silicone tape going further up the ring to hold the rest of the soft cover in place:
The ear buds have soft silicone strain relief tubes around the cables. The friction holding them in place failed long ago and, because no adhesive will work with silicone, I wrapped enough double-sided tape around the cables to produce a sticky lump jamming them in place:
A bit of the muck sticks out on both ends and I expect to replace the tape every now and again:
I also expect to replace the non-replaceable lithium battery / cell in about a year, as they’re now barely adequate for a day’s use.
Fortunately, I can’t see any of this hackery while I’m wearing the things:
my face I don’t mind it,
Because I’m behind it —
‘Tis the folks in the front that I jar.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1243103
[Update: Bose apparently had a QC failure on the silicone covering and, much to my surprise, swapped me entirely new Hearphones. The new covering feels slightly different, the USB cable hatch is a distinct piece of plastic, and maybe it’ll survive until the battery gives out. Color me satisfied! ]
I bought a pair of third-party 3800 mA·h batteries for the Baofeng UV-5RE Plus (whatever that means) radios on our bikes. Oddly, the packs carry the same “Model BL-5” identification as 1800 mA·h batteries shipped with the radio:
The obviously mislabeled “Baofeng” battery eliminator also sported a 3800 mA·h label:
I conjured a “test fixture” from a clamp, copper sheet, and copper tape snippets:
Which produced interesting results:
The 250 mA load = 15 hour rate seemed reasonable to simulate radios spending most of their time in power-save mode, but the packs still delivered only 2.8 A·h.
The packs also claim an unnaturally precise 28.12 W·h, but they’re still underperformers at 20 W·h:
Anyhow, I can run the radios for a week without (worrying about) running out of juice during a ride.
A reader asked how the M20 camera mount on my bike works with respect to the camera’s clock; this description explains a few things missing from the original writeup.
Do you have to set the time & date at start of every ride?
The internal clock shuts down about ten seconds after you pull the battery. If-and-only-if you swap batteries fast enough, it’ll keep time forever. Screw up once and it snaps back to Epoch Zero.
“Car mode” automagically begins recording when USB power goes on, but the manual advises:
TIP: When using your camera as a dashcam, use a car charger cable and remove the internal battery to make sure it does not die out while you travel.
That’s because the M20 continues to run from its internal battery when USB power drops. After recording an hour of a parking lot or your garage wall, the battery dies and so does the clock.
Of course, without the internal battery, the clock dies ten seconds after you turn off the car.
The internal battery has many days of capacity with the camera turned off (whew!), so I conjured the case & PowerCore battery tray to handle our normal rides. The internal battery keeps the clock alive overnight and during the rain we’ve had for the last week, the PowerCore supplies juice during the ride, and I recharge the PowerCore every few weeks.
The M20 doesn’t draw charging current when I turn it on, but poking the PowerCore’s status button also turns on its outputs, whereupon the M20 decides it should begin charging and, bonus, draw power from the PowerCore during the entire ride. The M20 finishes charging while we ride, but the PowerCore continues supplying power and, when I turn the M20 off, the PowerCore sees no current draw and shuts itself off.
Only a geek could love a lashup like that, but it works around the M20’s broken clock and removes its battery maintenance hassle.
I volunteered to take a look inside a small LED nightlight base to see how well it might work as a power supply for other circuitry:
Note: the AC plug is not polarized. Either blade can contact the hot side of the AC line.
The cadmium-selenide photocell in front turns the white LED on when it sees darkness and off when it sees lightness, with a more-or-less proportional response during dimness. The LED has an obvious 60 Hz flicker, particularly during its partially on phase, so I didn’t expect much inside.
The component side of the PCB faces toward the blades, which you’re looking along the lengths of:
The solder side faces away from the outlet:
Flipping the solder side left-to-right and overlaying the two images produces an X-ray-ish view useful for tracing the circuitry:
Some doodling extracts an LTSpice schematic:
None of the component values seem particularly critical; the diodes and transistor are close approximations to what’s really inside. I think the 100 Ω resistor also serves as a fuse, should anything else go wrong.
Setting the CdS cell to 1 MΩ = “dark” turns the LED on:
Although I don’t trust the numbers very far, the LED current waveform definitely suggests the flicker isn’t all in my head.
Setting the cell to 10 Ω = “light” turns the LED off, by the simple expedient of clamping the filter capacitor voltage well below the LED’s forward drop:
When the LED is off, the transistor current is slightly higher than the LED’s on-state current, because saturation voltage:
The current runs right through the 820 nF capacitor, which serves as a more-or-less 3.2 kΩ ballast resistor:
It’s a nice film cap and should have a low ESR, but this seems a bit sketchy to me.
So, basically, the nightlight doesn’t really have a power supply in the usual meaning of the term and isn’t suited for driving anything other than the white LED inside the case. Relocating the LED outside the case is an Extremely Bad Idea™, because the anode is one diode away from what might well be the hot AC line; one little oopsie and you’ve got a lethal shock hazard.
I described how to take advantage of Living in the Golden Age of Electronic Making for HVOpen:
Although you don’t get my patter, perhaps the linkies will make up for the silence:
I filled a table with Show-n-Tell widgets and a good time was had by all: hardly anybody fell asleep.
[Update: The talk addressed folks interested in starting out with electronic projects who have no test equipment at all. The choices would be different for other audiences, but … boat anchors aren’t appropriate here.]
The ANENG AN8008 / AN8009 multimeters have 3.6×10 mm ceramic fuses on their inputs:
Based on past experience, at some point over the next year or five, I’ll forget to plug the hot probe back in the voltage hole before measuring a power supply:
Whereupon the fuse will blow.
So, for about five bucks, a bag of 10 A and 0.5 A axial lead fast-blow glass fuses just arrived from halfway around the planet:
They have the right body size and, in this application, fine points concerning current ratings and cartridge composition don’t make much difference. If I actually need one, I’ll snip off the leads, jam it in the holder, and move on.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 