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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
A praying mantis appeared along the top of the living room windows:
They’re ferocious hunters and we’re in favor of them… but having them on the outside of the window works better for all of us.
Those old Anderson windows seem to attract big critters…
The rules for disposing of latex paint around here require that it be “dried with sawdust”, whatever that means. Over the years we’ve accumulated quite a lot of latex paint, in addition to a rich stockpile that Came With The House™, and I simply don’t have that much sawdust.
Since they don’t seem to object to dried latex paint, I made a drying tub by stapling aluminum flashing around a stand that used to hold a water heater off the basement floor, lined it with heavy plastic, and started pouring latex paint into it:
After a year of intermittently dumping paint, that solid latex cookie must be two inches thick and I suppose it’s time to toss the first batch.
For what it’s worth, I discovered that storing paint cans upside down doesn’t guarantee that the paint remains fresh. This can had a solid latex cookie against the lid, with plenty of corrosion to go around:
The coagulated paint above the latex cookie was as horrible as you might expect.
Memo to Self: just throw it out, OK?
The soil temperature near the base of the bird box, under a few inches of chipped leaf mulch, shows the expected trend for the growing season, but there’s a weird bump in mid-October:
The NWS temperature summary confirms the anomaly, with the DEP column giving the departure from the historic average:
DY MAX MIN AVG DEP ================== 1 65 58 62 5 2 72 58 65 9 3 73 49 61 5 4 65 51 58 2 5 62 40 51 -4 6 70 38 54 -1 7 76 52 64 10 8 74 52 63 9 9 70 44 57 4 10 63 37 50 -3 11 56 44 50 -3 12 63 35 49 -3 13 63 37 50 -2 14 78 59 69 17 15 79 69 74 23 16 72 53 63 12 17 73 52 63 13 18 68 50 59 9 19 56 33 45 -5 20 61 30 46 -4 21 57 48 53 4 22 53 50 52 3 23 52 48 50 2 24 59 41 50 2 25 66 34 50 2 26 58 43 51 3 27 64 38 51 4 28 73 38 56 9 29 68 42 55 8
The precipitation record shows over an inch of rain in those four days, so that weather probably blew in from the south.
I hauled the Kenmore 158 sewing machine and controller to a Squidwrench meeting for some current measurements (and, admittedly, showing it off) while schmoozing. After hauling it home and setting it up on my bench again, it didn’t work: the motor didn’t run at all.
While doing the usual poking around under the cover, I spotted this horrifying sight:
The brown insulation tells you that’s a hot wire from the AC line and, in fact, it’s coming directly from the line fuse; it’s live whenever the plug is in.
It’s a stranded wire to allow flexing without breaking, but that same flexibility allows it to squeeze its way out of a tightly fastened screw terminal. In principle, one should crimp a pin on the wire, but the only pins in my heap don’t quite fit along the screw terminal block.
This sort of thing is why I’m being rather relentless about building a grounded, steel-lined box with all the pieces firmly mounted on plastic sheets and all the loose ends tucked in. If that wire had gone much further to the side or top, it would have blown the fuse when it tapped the steel frame. The non-isolated components on that board are facing you, with those connections as far from the terminal block as they can be.
Engineers tend to be difficult to live with, because we have certain fixed ways of doing things that are not amenable to debate. There’s probably a genetic trait involved, but we also realize that being sloppy can kill you rather quickly; the universe is not all about pink unicorns and rainbows.
In fact, the universe wants you dead.
Now, go play with those goblins and zombies tonight…
Memo to Self: Tighten those terminals every now and again. A wire will come loose shortly after you forget to do that, of course.
Just to show all those precisely machined enclosures and tidy hand-wired boards don’t count for much:
The schematic again:
It started with that idea and evolved slightly.
So the good folks in the wordpress.com support infrastructure have been manually exporting my blog and sending me a link to the ZIP file, pursuant to the still unresolved failure-while-exporting issue. A bit of back-and-forth around the latest backup / export produced an interesting data point:
The message about the export file not being found is simply an indicator that the huge export could not finish compiling before a more general time limit was reached — in this case because your site is easily in the top .1% for size. I will pass your suggestion for improved exporting along.
I’m sure that’s among the freebie blogs on wordpress.com, but I never thought of myself as a member of the 0.1% club.
Huh. Snuck up on me while I wasn’t paying attention. If I could do that with money, I’d be on to something.
I’ve never participated in their post-a-day challenges, because that’s what I do around here. Should you find something interesting, every now and again, that’s a bonus.
Back to the workbench…
This airship drifted by just north of the house, aimed toward one of the nearby back yards on the hillside:
It was not at all clear they intended to land, just that it was happening anyway. Burners roaring, the bag just cleared the ridge and vanished into the west…
Further, we know not.
Back in 2006, I spotted a balloon making a water landing:
They managed enough lift to cross the driveway, then deflate it on the yard in front of the house, to the delight of passersby…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 