Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
If that isn’t a smug smile, I don’t know what one might look like.
When she related this tale at a Master Gardener meeting, one of her cronies said a similar frog commandeered a shoe and refused all offers of a new home, so apparently tree frogs and shoes just go together.
Anybody that persistent deserves whatever it wants; Mary will get a new pair of shoes and keep them indoors.
Being a guy of a certain age with a diagnosis of Low Bone Density, I must increase my calcium intake. Rather than add a few hundred calories a day of calcium-rich food that my waistline does not need, I’ll see what adding 600 mg of calcium citrate can do.
Being a guy of a certain type, I prefer to fill my own capsules, which of course involves Quality Shop Time:
Gelatin 000 Capsule Fill Plate – cutting
Quite some years ago, for reasons not relevant here, I acquired several of what were called “manual capsule filling machines” from the usual online sources. During the ensuing years, such devices have fallen under the purview of the DEA and vanished from the import market, leaving (AFAICT) one USA-ian supplier.
The key difference between “machines” for different capsule sizes is the plate holding the capsule bodies:
Gelatin 000 Capsule Fill Plate – installed
A complete machine includes three other capsule-size-related parts:
A plate holding the caps
A plate with conical holes used to shake caps & bodies into their respective plates
A guide plate helping mate caps with bodies
In normal use, you put the “shake plate” on the body or cap plate, dump a pile into it, and shake until most of the caps / bodies fall into the holes. Then you manually insert the rest, invert any that fell in backwards, and generally mess around until they’re all properly oriented in their sockets. After filling the capsules, you put the cap + guide plates atop the bodies, press down firmly, and (ideally) produce 100 filled and sealed capsules.
It turns out Size 000 capsules are sufficiently chonky that I have no trouble capping the bodies by hand without those other parts, so making just the body plate seemed Good Enough™. The story might be different for Size 1 capsules.
The external dimensions and screw holes match the original plate, so this one fits the same base:
Gelatin 000 capsule plate – LB layout
Make one plate and four spacing clips from 6 (-ish) mm acrylic.
If you can think of anything to do with 100 3/8 inch cylinders of 1/4 inch acrylic, clue me in.
Size 000 bodies are close enough to 3/8 inch that I cleaned up the holes with a step drill for a nicer fit. Perhaps making the plate from 3 mm acrylic would produce better results.
Four springs around the screws in the corners support the plate to allow pressing the caps in place. I adjusted the screws to put the top of the plate at exactly the height of the bodies above the blue base place, producing a smooth surface for scraping suspicious white powder into the bodies:
Gelatin 000 Capsule Fill Plate – filled
Iterate filling and tamping until the capsule contents are firm-but-not-overstuffed, then press the plate downward and secure it with the spacer clips:
Gelatin 000 Capsule Fill Plate – capped
The clips hold the plate at the proper distance to let the caps slip over the bodies and lock in place. This is tedious, but much faster than doing the entire process on individual capsules one-by-one.
With the caps locked in place, flip the whole thing above a bowl, remove the clips, press the plate against the base, and 100 finished capsules shower into the bowl.
You could build a complete filler without having the blue base plate & springs, but I’ll leave that project to your imagination.
That’s after an inadvertent drop edgewise onto the concrete patio.
Stipulated: given what I’ve already done to / for the thing, the usual warranties do not apply.
The frame around the NP-BX1 lithium batteries held the glass fragments together surprisingly well:
Kitchen scale – shattered glass – detail
Of course, harvesting the good stuff resulted in a pile of fragments, but the carcass cleaned up nicely and, after grafting a temporary top made from scrap acrylic it still worked:
Kitchen scale – temporary surface
I expected to just cut a slab of 6 mm acrylic to match the original 5 mm glass, but for reasons probably related to dielectric constants, the touch controls do not work through that much acrylic. In fact, they don’t work through anything other than the 1.5 mm acrylic shown above, which seems a bit too flimsy for normal use.
The original glass had a design screened on the back surface and covered with paint, which I can certainly mimic, but right now I’m unsure how much effort to put into the thing.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it:
Gray Tree Frog on concrete
In point of fact, I almost didn’t see it.
This was the fourth time Mary deported the critter from her gardening shoe, whereupon it hopped out of her hands onto the concrete patio. She hauled it to the far end of our lot and wished it well; so far it has not returned.
We are reliably informed it’s a gray tree frog, not a toad as we originally thought.
A garter snake has taken up residence under our garbage can and is startled when I wheel it away:
Garter snake on the alert
This week it was curled into a compact bundle:
Garter snake in compact mode
The blue eyes indicate it’s in the process of shedding its skin, so next week we’ll have an even bigger and shinier guardian.
Shedding one’s skin apparently requires a great deal of thought, as it remained in that pose while I fetched Mary, then moved deliberately off into the leaf litter behind the can.
The small rodent population around here has definitely declined: garter snakes are murder on field mice and the hawks are taking out the chipmunks.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
