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?
Spotted outside a window:
The one on the right stayed in that pose, with eyes getting heavier and heavier, until it nodded off. The other squirrel wasn’t quite that far gone and, after a minute, turned around to see what was(n’t) happening.
Those two squirrels have been chasing each other around the yard for several weeks, so they’re either siblings or a mated pair.
I’ve never seen a squirrel take a nap before and it seemed like a good idea for the afternoon …
Attempting to use the guest WiFi network requires agreeing to their Terms of Use:
While it may be possible to read that, I pretty much gave up.
While one should never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, it’s also true that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Our medical practice has been Borged by Optum, which is, through a number of corporate cutout layers, owned by UnitedHealth Group, so (despite claims to the contrary) our doctors effectively work for a health insurance company. No, they may not be paid by UHG, but following the money in reverse shows the flow of influence.
Apparently this has slightly affected the original practice’s reliance on Phreesia for pre-visit sign-in information collection although, as before, Phreesia still really wants to scatter your precious personal bits to the far corners of the InterWebs:
The wall o’ text is a bit shorter then the earlier version and cannot be scrolled or printed. It still admits:
There is the potential for my health information … to be subject to redisclosure and to no longer be protected by the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
Yes, I understand that’s the whole point of getting me to agree to release my private bits to Phreesia, so they can make money by selling it to the highest bidder(s).
What’s new is the previous page in the sequence, of which I do not have a screenshot, presumably coming from Optum, emphasizing in bold type that I do not have to authorize Phreesia’s data collection.
I infer this means two things:
Yes, I understand that I have no privacy and should get over it, but somehow this sort of behavior rankles …
While setting up to drill holes in the aluminum base for the running light buck converter, I wondered if laser-marking the spots directly from the solid model would work better than my usual fumbling around.
The solid model:
Export projections of the pieces from OpenSCAD as an SVG file:
Import into LightBurn, set up for a very fast, very light cut and Fire The Laser:
That’s in ordinary masking tape on a hard-anodized sheet of aluminum from the pile, which looked better than I expected.
The same aluminum covered with blue tape:
Which looks much better in person than it does in the photo.
On a soft aluminum sheet from the Basement Warehouse Zone:
The dark outline is a comfort mark hand-drawn around a chipboard test piece to verify the layout fit between random holes drilled in the sheet during its previous life.
A closer look at a corner hole:
And the center hole:
The holes appeared in the right places after center-punching by eye, but the fragility of those four little tape leaves around the center point must be experienced to be believed.
And, yes, those are deliberately low-polygon approximations to a circle, because I’m a low-poly kind of guy.
I really need an optical center punch if I do more such silliness. The box with those HP plotter digitizing sights recently came to hand, so I suppose I should make something.
Encountered on the way home with a trailer load of groceries:
It’s about as distinctive as (yet much uglier than) Amazon’s Rivian trucks:
What I do not understand is the lack of a license plate on that front bumper, here in New York State where front license plates are mandatory. I’ve noticed several Tesla vehicles (in their S3XY automotive series, among which I cannot distinguish) without front plates, so it must be a Tesla owner thing.
The WordPress AI image for this post gets the angular aspect right, along with the missing plate:
Cybertruck, fear me!
With the microwave back in operation, I thought I might learn something about the failed gas sensor:
Given that much information, finding the datasheet for a Figaro TGS880 sensor didn’t require much effort. In case you were wondering, the replacement sensor has no trace of branding or identification.
The sensor element has a resistance varying with gas concentration, for a variety of test gases I hope our kitchen never contains in such abundance:
The measurement circuit:
I betcha the microwave waits for an order-of-magnitude resistance drop from whatever the starting value might be, then calls it done.
The belly band holding the steel mesh to the plastic base is no match for a Dremel slitting wheel:
As the saying goes, Sensoria est omnis divisa in partes tres:
A closer look at the sensor element:
The granular surface does not get along well with the 5× digital zoom required to fill the phone’s sensor, but you get the general idea:
The heater measured 30 Ω on the dot and the sensor was an open circuit on the 100 MΩ range. Connecting the heater to a 5 V supply dropped the sensor resistance to 800 kΩ @ 50 %RH and a warm breath punched it to about 2 MΩ. That’s with an ohmmeter because I haven’t yet unpacked the Electronics Bench, but seems far above the spec of 20-70 kΩ in air.
So it’s still a sensor, even if it’s not within spec.
The WordPress AI-generated image for this post is … SFnal:
My pictures apparently aren’t up to contemporary blog standards …
Our new-to-us house included a heavy-duty basement dehumidifier with a blower motor calling for a few drops of SAE 20 oil twice a year. Some searching turned up a specialized flavor of 3-In-One Oil for motors.
It arrived with free inclusions:
Backlighting makes them more obvious:
There’s also a free-floating jellyfish slightly denser than the oil:
As is now the typical case with Amazon purchases, the only choices are to return / exchange the item, as the seller cannot be contacted directly. I tried sending 3-In-One a question through their website, en passant discovering they’ve been Borged by The WD-40 Company, only to be rejected by the site’s Captcha without ever seeing the test images.
AFAICT, it’s oil and the motor will just have to get used to it.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 