Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The sturdy metal enclosure ought to be good for something, I thought, so I rescued it from the trash.
One of the ten button-head screws galled in place and resisted a few days of penetrating oil, so I drilled it out:
Drilled-out button screw head
The PCB has no ICs! It simply routes all the LED and button pins through the pillar into the sewing machine controller:
Brother BAS-311 Control Head – interior
The ribbon cable alternates the usual flat strip with sections of split conductors:
Segmented ribbon cable
The split segments let it roll up into the pillar, with enough flexibility to allow rotating the head. I’ve seen segmented twisted-pair ribbon cable, but never just flat conductors.
Maybe the control head can become Art in its next life?
The black gunk smells more like plastic and less like old-school tar. It’s definitely not a peel-able conformal coating.
One the other paw, the two magnetic ballasts in another lamp sported actual metal-film capacitors, which I harvested and tossed into the Big Box o’ Film Caps:
Shoplight choke ballast – film cap
If a dying ballast didn’t also kill its fluorescent tube(s), I’d be less annoyed. I’m running the remaining tubes through the surviving fixtures, but the end is nigh for both.
The new LED tubes produce more light than the old fluorescents, although I still don’t like their 6500 K “daylight glow” color.
This 2 GB flash drive arrived with datasheets & sample files for a (computerized) sewing machine Mary eventually decided she wasn’t going to get (because computerized):
Fake Flash drive
Being of sound mind, we reformatted it and dropped it in the bag o’ random drives. She eventually used it for one of her gardening presentations, whereupon the library’s (Windows) laptop said it needed formatting; she pulled out a backup drive and continued the mission.
Lather, rinse, verify a good format, verify presentation files on the Token Windows Box, and repeat, right down to having another library’s laptop kvetch about the drive.
Soooo, I did what I should have done in the first place:
sudo f3probe -t /dev/sdc
F3 probe 6.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
WARNING: Probing normally takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes, but
it can take longer. Please be patient.
Probe finished, recovering blocks... Done
Bad news: The device `/dev/sdc' is a counterfeit of type limbo
You can "fix" this device using the following command:
f3fix --last-sec=25154 /dev/sdc
Device geometry:
*Usable* size: 12.28 MB (25155 blocks)
Announced size: 1.86 GB (3893248 blocks)
Module: 2.00 GB (2^31 Bytes)
Approximate cache size: 511.00 MB (1046528 blocks), need-reset=no
Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)
Probe time: 55'18"
Operation: total time / count = avg time
Read: 8'35" / 3145715 = 163us
Write: 46'37" / 18838872 = 148us
Reset: 350.7ms / 2 = 175.3ms
Huh.
As long as you don’t write more than a few megabytes, it’s all good, which was apparently enough for its original use.
The front of the PCB looks normal:
Fake Flash – controller
But it seems they really didn’t want you to see the flash chip:
Fake Flash – covered chip
Given the two rows of unused pads, it must be a really small chip!
Memo to Self: Always examine the dentition of any Equus ferus received as a gift.
A friend now owns my trusty Canon SX230HS camera, but, given the restrictions on shipping lithium batteries, we agreed there was no point in transferring ownership of my nearly dead batteries.
For completeness, their final state:
Canon NB-5L – 2018-03-25
The original Canon OEM battery (orange curve) looms above all the offerings from various Amazon sellers.
Spotted behind a small strip mall during one of our walks:
Rotted power cable
Perhaps the cable wasn’t rated for outdoor use?
The earth ground conductor isn’t insulated and the nonconductive filler strands look scary, but neither should kill you outright.
As far as I can tell, the insulation around the individual conductors remains intact, but it’s surely brittle and ready to fall off at the slightest touch.
The breaker box and cable are out of reach and, I suppose, out of mind.
Being the kind of guy who lives under a rock, I thought this thing lying at the end of the driveway might be a USB widget:
Vape cartridge – side
But the contacts are all wrong:
Vape cartridge – contacts
It has an opening on the other end:
Vape cartridge – exhaust port
An easy teardown produces a yard sale of parts:
Vape cartridge – components
The fiber snippet inside the coil carries the same sickly sweet scent as exhaled by passing vapers.
Some casual searching suggests it’s a Juul Vape Pod. The Juul site insists on lower browser armor than I’m willing to grant it; you’re on your own.
The heating coil press-fits into slots cut in the contacts:
Vape cartridge – heater and contacts
It’s about 1 Ω cold, so I foolishly assume there’s a current limiter somewhere in the circuitry.
The little steel tube goes into the Tray o’ Cutoffs, where it might come in handy some day, the debris hits the trash, and I washed my hands up to the elbows.
Ya learn something new every day around here and, obviously, I must get out more …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 