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.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • A Night Visitor

    One of those midnight “I heard such a clatter” events: somebody or something was kicking a can all over the driveway.

    Turned out that a raccoon found the stack of carefully rinsed salmon cans in the recycling bin and was puzzling over how to get them apart. Evidently he figured there was something really delicious hidden in there somewhere!

    I had time to fiddle with the camera before he gave up and wandered away on his rounds…

    These are in near-IR “Nightshot” mode with my ancient DSC-F717 and the 1.7X teleconverter. They’re automagic crops from larger frames, walloped en masse with ImageMagick:

    
for f in *jpg ; do mogrify -crop 1200x900+700+450 -resize 750x563 $f ; done

    The gritty texture plays hell with JPEG compression, but that’s what the camera delivers. An incandescent spotlight on the driveway contributes the deep shadow, but an ordinary camera (my DSC-H5) produced completely black images, even with the high-power flash setting.

    Memo to self: start keeping the recycling bin inside the garage. But will that just piss off the bears that are moving (back) into the county?

  • CPU Heatsink Fuzz

    My PC makes a seasonal migration: to the basement during the summer, to the living room in the winter. Those moves provide an opportunity to vacuum the fuzz out of the fan grilles and heatsinks.

    You’d think that, given the trouble caused by blocked air inlets, manufacturers would make it easy to get access to the grilles and trivially easy to remove the fuzz. Not so, alas.

    This time, I decided to see what the intake side of the main heatsink looked like. Two screws secure the shell to the circuit board and provide clamping pressure on the CPU heat spreader. The heatsink is a massive affair with liquid-filled heat pipes; I’ve never taken it out before because removing the screws exposes the CPU heat spreader, where you do not want to get fuzz.

    Heatsink fuzz
    Heatsink fuzz

    Oops!

    A bit of work with the vacuum and a brush greatly improved the situation. I think I kept the fuzz out of the heatsink-to-CPU joint, but there’s really no way to know because, as nearly as I can tell, Dell didn’t include any of the CPU temperature readouts on this system board.

    Memo to Self: Gotta do that more often …

  • Capsaspitators

    I had our daughter solder up some circuit boards for me (as part of a clever scheme to get her trained up on circuitry) and we were discussing the projects. I used the term capsaspitator and she gave me a blank look … as well she might, because even Google doesn’t know what they are.

    A long time ago, back on the IBM Video Disc project, Mad Phil and HH were chasing the gremlins out of a particularly tricky bit of RF-oid analog / digital circuitry. This task required a prodigious quantity of bypass caps and, at some point, Mad Phil announced that he’d had it up to there with those [obscene gerund] capsaspitators!

    The term immediately caught on and I use it to this day in reference to any particularly obscure capacitor, particularly  bypass caps that seem useless and are actually vital.

    It’s pronounced caps-ASS-pi-tator, of course, and now everybody can find it on The Web…

  • Sears Kenmore HE3 Washer Teardown: Tub Grounding Connection

    Tub Grounding Connection
    Tub Grounding Connection

    Before you pull the tub out of the washer, you must disconnect the ground wire from the bearing behind the pulley. This isn’t impossible… it just looks that way.

    There’s a notch molded into the pulley that provides access to the ring terminal. IIRC, it’s a Torx T15 screw and there’s just barely enough clearance for a magnetic tip holder in there.

    For some unknown reason, the tapped hole on our washer was filled with steel filings that clogged the threads. I ran the screw in until it stopped, backed it out, cleaned off the filings, and repeated until it came out mostly clean.

    The picture is after a few cleaning passes; the screw came out covered with filings the first time!

    Magnetized Screw
    Magnetized Screw

    The magnetization comes from the holder I used for the Torx bit, but it certainly was handy.

  • You Must Learn

    Spotted this one in a stairwell while trotting upstairs for my annual physical.

    Learn Graffiti
    Learn Graffiti

    The artist’s message would have been far more powerful had he (it’s always a he) not scrawled Learn along all five floors.

    Maybe he never heard of KRS One?

  • Desktop Background From the Deep

    I snagged this gem from the Deep Horizons spillcam site a while back; it’s a screen grab at 1600×1200 with all the extraneous junk cropped off. Scaling it back to fit a 4:3 screen doesn’t do it a bit of damage: it looks just as weird.

    Something from Alien, perhaps?

    Deepwater Horizon capping - manipulator arm
    Deepwater Horizon capping – manipulator arm

    I’m pretty sure that’s Sweet Babby Jeebus™ floating over there in the background…

    [Update: Some “best of” the ROV video feeds, speeded up by a factor of 7, are there.]

  • How to Solve a Parking Problem

    The Walkway Over the Hudson has been a resounding success, at least measured by the number of people using it. The Parker Avenue parking lot has about 80 spaces and, during most days, is jammed full.

    The NYS park system now owns the Walkway and, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the parking facilities should have a fee just like the rest of their lots: $5 / 4 hours.

    Here’s what the Walkway lot looked like on the day the fee went into effect…

    Walkway Parking Lot With Parking Fee In Full Effect
    Walkway Parking Lot With Parking Fee In Full Effect

    To quote from the Poughkeepsie Journal:

    State officials hope there will be no decline in visitors with the new parking fee, said State Parks spokesman Kristen Davidson.

    Basically, there’s enough free on-street parking in the area that most folks park nearby and hike in, which makes sense for a park consisting of about two miles of walking path. The parking fee amounts to a tax on handicapped and elderly visitors who find it difficult to navigate streets and ramps.

    On the bright side, it’ll be a lot easier to bike across the bridge…