Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Sat down for some tech reading in the Comfy Chair one morning and spotted a lump near the road, at the foot of the deer crossing warning sign.
While I don’t know if this deer was one of that group, it’s a fair bet.
There was no freshly smashed glass or broken plastic in the area, which indicates a relatively low-speed collision, the kind where the deer’s legs snap against the bumper and the body rolls over the hood, crushing sheet metal and deforming plastic frippery along the way.
Many cars display that kind of damage around here. They look as though somebody walloped them with a huge sandbag, which is pretty much the case.
The animal huggers seem strangely silent about such events. If they had the courage of their convictions, they’d subsidize drivers (and gardeners) affected by the deer overpopulating the area. But, no, they never offer to do that.
I did find this in the driveway across the street…
Deer Whistle
Before equipping your car with such gimcrackery, read that.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBay vendor responsible for those curves sent three replacement NP-FS11 batteries, commenting:
We’ve sent all your comments to the factory and ask them for a total quality inspection in this batch of batteries.
Here are the capacity curves for an initial charge, a test, recharge, and another test on each pack. The curves match up reasonably well (the top & bottom traces are nearly exact overlays), so I believe the results are accurate.
MaxPower NP-FS11 – Packs JKL
One pack is the best I’ve seen yet. The other two are junk, pure and simple.
So, to summarize:
One of three batteries DOA in first batch, others weak
Two of three batteries DOA in replacement
Overall, that’s a 50% failure rate even if you have relaxed standards…
I decided that, despite their “customer service”, this level of quality deserves the dreaded Negative Feedback checkbox.
Now, to saw the cases open and replace the cells. I cannot imagine any way to justify this on an economic basis, but we’ll certainly have enough batteries for that camera when I’m done.
If I had any confidence that spending more on the batteries would get a higher quality product, I’d do it. The question is, would another order of magnitude make any difference?
So I bought 530 bucks worth of new tires for the van; it’s ten years old with 66k on the clock. Picked the most suitable ones:
Near the top of the Consumer Reports list
Best constellation of features for our use
Available at the local tire shop
CR is essentially the only place that does actual across-the-board tests; you can disagree with their methodology, but it’s pretty much the only game in town.
I wound up at the local tire shop after bouncing off one of the online sources. In this case, tire + shipping + installation costs more online; the local shop was one of the online source’s installers.
So I went direct. They’re aboveboard: the balance + installation charge is the same no matter where the tires come from.
Had a 10:00 appointment and it took 90 minutes to get out of the shop. Not impressed.
The tire pressure monitor light came on halfway home. Well, OK, maybe it’s noticed the tires are bigger? But it’s a differential rotation counter, sooo… that’s not the problem.
Checked the pressure after letting the tires cool off for a few hours.
37 – Left rear
32 – Right rear
40 – Left front
34 – Right front
The pressure monitor was definitely doing its job!
Adjusted them all to 36 psi (hard, but we’ll see how it rides), reset the monitor, and it’s all good.
Factory trained and certified mechanics, my obscene-gerund deleted-noun.
Oh, and the lug nuts were evidently tightened by Andre the Giant… gotta break those suckers free before we do much more driving!
Saw this mountain at Marist College. I wonder how many will go directly to the recycling bin?
I can’t recall the last time I used a phone book; it’s faster and easier to type the name & location into that little search field, whack Enter, and click the obvious hit.
If you look hard enough, somewhere in the first few pages you’ll find the instructions to turn off next year’s phone book. We’ll see how that works out…
I tote around an ancient Palm Zire 71, which suffices for my simple calendar & to-do lists. This is my second, as the first failed when the flexible cable connecting the guts to the charging / USB connector crapped out; turns out that the slide-to-open feature that reveals the crappy camera also stresses the flexy cable to the breaking point. Now I don’t do that any more.
The battery (well, it’s actually a single Li-Ion cell, but let’s not be pedantic) finally stopped taking a charge, so I did a full backup, tore the thing apart, and popped in a new battery. This being my second Zire 71, things went smoothly…
I got a stack of surplus Palm batteries some years ago, but they’re readily available from the usual suspects for prices ranging from $5 to $50. We’ll see how well mine survived their time in isolation.
The connectors don’t match, which means you just chop off them in mid-wire, then solder the old connector onto the new battery. A few dabs of Liquid Electrical Tape and it’s all good.
Some teardown instructions are there, with fairly small pix.
General reminders:
Stick the teeny little screws on a strip of tape
Watch out for the tiny plastic switch fin on the side
Torx T06 screws on either side of the camera
The silver shield around the shutter button snaps under the sides with more force than you expect
There’s a metal strip over the connector that can be taped back in place after the plastic posts snap off
Gently pry the flexy cable up off the base, using the tabs on either side
The speaker seems to be held in with snot
The battery shield is not soldered in place!
The battery adhesive comes off with a sloooowww pull
Screws under label
Components around shutter button
Back side
Although it may not be obvious, I replaced the crappy plastic window over the camera with a watch crystal. Much better picture quality, although much worse than my pocket camera.
Backup and restore with various pilot-link utilities:
The latch closing my tea ball consists of a nice stainless steel dingus held on by a grotty rivet of unknown provenance that I’ve repeatedly staked over the years. It finally came undone this morning, so I had a few minutes of Quality Shop Time right after breakfast.
My tiny-screw box (left over from the long-gone Leichtung Workshops) has some stainless 0-80 screws that I found somewhere, but only brass nuts. Ah, well, we used to use brass water fixtures and lead pipe, so an 0-80 nut in hot water isn’t going to kill me.
The ball rim has a recess for the rivet head, but the screw head was slightly larger. I braced the rim of the ball across the vise jaws and give the recess a few shots with a fat punch to enlarge it.
Stainless screw and brass nut
Then…
A dot of Loctite on the threads
Assemble everything
Take it apart to put the latch on the correct side of the rim
Reassemble
Attempt to close
Gently bend the rim to flatten it out
Close
Attempt to latch
Brace closed rim on vise opening with screw head up
A few shots with a drift punch to settle recess around screw head
Success!
It seems I ain’t worth a damn in the morning without a hot cuppa. The rituals must be preserved.
I tossed the ball in the dishwasher and opted for a tea bag today…
Heat pumps behave like bidirectional refrigerators: they cool the building by heating the outside air or heat the building by cooling the outside air. In relatively mild, dry weather, this works perfectly.
Here in the Northeast US, it’s not such a bright idea. For about half the year, the ambient temperature is low enough and the humidity high enough that pumping heat out of the exchanger drops its temperature below the dew point, whereupon ambient moisture condenses on the fins and, given the temperature differential between ambient and coil, freezes solid.
In that situation, the efficiency of the heat exchanger drops well below zero: it turns on electric resistance heating bars to warm the inside air and runs a defrost cycle on the exterior heat exchanger.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 