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?

  • Waterless Urinal

    Waterless urinal
    Waterless urinal

    Our travels took us past a mall, in which I discovered another generation of waterless urinals. The general notion is that the cartridge contains a light oil that allows urine through to the drain, while blocking sewer gases just like an ordinary pipe trap.

    These Falcon urinals smell not at all like the Eau de Outhouse I found in Boston’s Hynes Convention Center some years ago; I suppose there was some pushback from the end-user community…

    IIRC, the Hynes restroom retrofit installed waterless drain cartridges in a standard urinal. Unfortunately, with no flush water to rinse the bowl, the urine simply dried in place with exactly the olfactory effect you’d expect.

    This urinal is obviously a custom-designed hunk of ceramic technology and, according to their copious literature, whizz just slides right off and runs through the Sloan cartridges on its way to the drain. I’m not sure how all that works, but things have certainly improved… or, perhaps, the mall does maintenance much more frequently than Hynes.

    Waterless urinal target
    Waterless urinal target

    Anyhow, that small dot a few inches above the cartridge seems like an aiming target. Speaking strictly as an amateur apiarist, the notion of “pee on the bee” isn’t all that attractive, but I suppose they needed some way to direct the stream away from the inlets …

    Urinal target
    Urinal target detail

  • Icicle Formations at Red Oaks Mill Dam

    The dam at Red Oaks mill has accumulated several large trees over the past year that often serve as perches for birds surveying the pool.

    Waterfall icicles
    Waterfall icicles

    We spotted these ice formations on a recent walk.

    Tree trunk icicle toothbrush
    Tree trunk icicle toothbrush

    The bottom edge of the toothbrush is just inches over the roiling water.

  • Tchotchke Repair

    Tchotchke epoxy
    Tchotchke epoxy

    Sometimes I get to do an easy one. This dust collector came with the house and sits on the fireplace; one of the little guys fell off when Mary went on a cleaning frenzy. As nearly as I can tell, he had a bad butt weld (using the exact term) with marginal penetration.

    A dot of JB Weld, an uncomfortable overnight stay on the workbench, and he’s as almost good as new. I briefly thought about resistance-soldering him together, but came to my senses: epoxy to the rescue!

    The balance point is sufficiently delicate that the additional weight of the epoxy pulls his side down a bit. I’ll call it art and leave it at that, although I should build a little circuit with a proximity sensor and an electromagnet to keep the thing in motion.

    See-saw tchotche repaired
    See-saw tchotchke repaired

    Yeah, that’s my Tau Beta Pi Bent in the background… along with the little glass bead I made in the Corning Museum of Glass a few summers ago.

  • What’s Inside This Box?

    Digital Media Player box
    Digital Media Player box

    Got a package from halfway around the world that, I thought, corresponded to a recent eBay order. Opened the envelope and pulled out a box containing … a Digital Media Player?

    That’s odd. I don’t recall ordering one of those.

    At this point, anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s The White Plague should get the chills. Do you or don’t you open a mysterious package from far away that seems to offer something interesting?

    Pandora might have something to say, too.

    Digital Media Player box - contents
    Digital Media Player box – contents

    Well, open it I did, and found exactly what I’d ordered: a stash of female headers pins. Of course, one can’t tell what else might have come in the package, but so it goes.

    Now I can hand Eks half a lifetime supply of the strips to replace the ones I mooched.

    One other mildly surprising part of the package: it seems we’ve gotten to the point where magnetic closures are cheap enough to replace everything else, including intricate origami tucks. There’s a small steel plate pasted under the flap. Who knew?

    Digital Media Player box - magnetic closure
    Digital Media Player box – magnetic closure

  • A Christmas Season Poem

    Twas the Night…
    By Mary Nisley

    ‘Twas the night before September, when outside the house
    Many creatures were stirring, not just a mouse;
    The garden was fenced all ‘round with care,
    In hopes that deer would never come there;
    My daughter was nestled all snug in her bed,
    While replays of band practice ran through her head;
    My husband was sleeping, and hoped for much more,
    As I settled down for a short summer snore.
    When out in the yard there arose such a clatter,
    I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
    Away to the window I flew like a flash,
    But saw nothing on the deck; what was that crash?
    Then off to the kitchen to flip on the lights,
    To better reveal the outermost sights.
    When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
    But an eight pointed buck: a powerful male deer!
    His head, it was lowered; his mouth, it was red,
    He looked mean and angry, a monster to dread.
    When he moved I saw a most terrible sight,
    His antler was tangled in the fence very tight.
    I ran for my husband, to wake him from sleep,
    He groggily blinked, then from the bed he did leap.
    We dashed to the doorway, but the buck, he was gone,
    One glimpse of my motion made him quite strong.
    We surveyed the garden with the help of a light,
    What destruction was done before the buck’s flight?
    Alas! My poor garden, damage lay all around,
    Two heavy steel fence posts he’d bent to the ground.
    The ruin was total in two veggie beds:
    Stalks twisted and broken, big leaves lay in shreds.
    We pushed the posts upright, unsnarled all the net,
    As we patched the fence up, we felt it was wet.
    Shining flashlight on hands revealed blood on our fingers,
    But it was not ours: could deer blood still linger?
    Sunshine the next morning revealed all of the damage,
    Plus an antler tip broken in the buck’s desperate rampage.
    The rabbits and woodchuck say “Thanks Mr. Buck!
    You’ve opened the garden, it’s our great luck!
    We’re feasting on beet greens, parsley and chard,
    To fatten for winter is no longer hard.”
    We wish you happy holidays, filled with warmth and good cheer,
    And may your next growing season have gardens without deer.

    Folks: I couldn’t make this one up; that is exactly what happened. I believe the buck was grazing on fallen apples from my neighbor’s tree when, in the dark, his antlers tangled in my fence netting. They were velvety, still soft and growing, so when he broke a tip trying to escape, there was blood all over. At 2:00AM I was outside, stringing up twine and drenching it with deer repellent, hoping to keep the rest of his herd from testing my jury-rigged fence.

    Acknowledgments: Thanks to Clement Clarke Moore and his “The Night Before Christmas” for the shape of this poem and for my lines 9-11. His words fit the situation so well that I couldn’t resist using them.

    Ed says: It’s Christmas: we can take the day off from tech, right?

  • Failed LED

    Dead LED
    Dead LED

    Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s an ordinary blue LED that I used for the upper colon dot in a clock. Worked fine for a few dozen power-on hours, then it turned off a bit after 6:00 pm one day. Back on an hour later, more or less, then off again by the next morning, back on again, off again.

    Might be a software error, as each colon LED is a separate TLC5916 display driver output. Might be a soldering problem, as my board doesn’t have plated-through holes. Might be (shudder) a burned-out transistor inside the TLC5916.

    When it’s off, VCC appears on both sides, within a few tens of millivolts.

    Resoldered the joints, after which it worked for a while. When it’s on, voltage measurements look normal: about 3.5 V drop across the diode and 1.5 V across the driver transistor.

    No obvious code problems, but, then, code problems are never obvious.

    Finally the thing stopped working for a few hours. I unsoldered it and there’s no continuity: it failed open. Peering deeply inside with a microscope shows nothing unusual: the flying gold wires look OK, the bonds look flat, and the chip has no burn marks.

    Just a bad LED, I suppose. It’s surplus, of course, but that doesn’t mean much these days; there’s a lot of surplus going around.

    Soldered in a replacement from the same batch and it’s all good.

    So far, anyway.

  • Stainless Steel Rule vs Ferric Chloride: Oops

    This is truly embarassing: I managed to leave a steel rule (not a ruler in the shop) atop a sploosh of ferric chloride for far too long. I eventually noticed the corrosion creeping around the edges.

    Top corrosion
    Top corrosion

    The bottom was hideous.

    Bottom corrosion
    Bottom corrosion

    So I sprayed it down with TopSaver, applied fine sandpaper, applied a Scotchbrite pad, and it came out surprisingly well.

    After treatment
    After treatment

    The ferric chloride, of course, came from a circuit board etching project. How you’re supposed to prevent that is to cover everything for about six feet around the spot marked X, but I don’t do that nearly as often as I should.

    Mostly I lay a sheet of packing paper atop the workbench and whisk it into the trash when I’m done, but this time I’d left it in place because my resistance soldering gizmo wound up anchoring the far end. Soooo, a drop or two soaked into the paper and of course the ruler wound up exactly atop that spot.

    The stuff is murder on stainless steel sinks, too…