Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Each air conditioning unit has a pair of lightning rods atop it, with their aluminum grounding cables securely clamped to the steel frame underneath.
The rod reclining on its side caught my eye. Perhaps its fat cable wasn’t relaxed enough during installation, although I thought those wide bases would be firmly screwed to the unit’s steel top. Of course, that could be the only one without screws.
The building extends another three stories upward from that roof, but our experience suggests lightning strikes where it will.
The bathroom ceiling fixture has a nightlight position that we use occasionally, but eventually the little 7 W Christmas Tree bulb failed and I installed this hulk from a box of CFL bulbs a friend scrapped out after switching to LED bulbs:
MaxLite CFL – overview
I never tested whether it actually drew 3 W, but, hey I could feel good. Right? Right?
Anyhow, this one failed after a few years, too. The “bulb” envelope looked like it might make an attractive blinkie or glowie, so I decided to harvest it.
The candelabra screw base felt loose and popped off with a push:
MaxLite CFL – overflow cap
Perhaps they chose the envelope before finalizing the circuitry?
This is why you need a lathe in your shop:
MaxLite CFL – lathe cutting
It wasn’t particularly well centered, so that was done dead slow and finished with a few hand turns of the chuck. Obviously, I need a crank for the spindle.
The rest of the circuitry is pretty well packed under that tall cap:
MaxLite CFL – circuitry
Pulling the PCB out revealed the tube wiring:
MaxLite CFL – tube wires
Cut the wires and chuck it up again:
MaxLite CFL – envelope turning setup
Turn dead slow again until it breaks through:
MaxLite CFL – envelope breakthrough
Then finish by hand:
MaxLite CFL – tube and envelope
It’s too cute to throw out, but … sheesh you can see why recycling this stuff is so difficult.
For whatever it’s worth, I replaced it with a 3 W LED candelabra bulb that is way too bright.
I read these reassuring instructions in the elevator of a different building:
Elevator power failure instructions
I’d be mildly unsurprised to discover the elevator controls also handle the interior lighting, invariably putting me in the dark while the thing reboots. At least the paper would remain readable, because phones can become flashlights under duress.
My OMTech 60 W laser cutter has a stepper motor Z axis drive that has worked flawlessly since it arrived. However, it recently developed a periodic klonk during autofocusing and manual jogging, loud enough to shake the platform and rattle the cabinet’s bottom plate.
A few minutes of poking around revealed the klonk happened on each turn of the Z axis leadscrews, which quickly led to finding the cause:
Craft Stick – swarf in belt drive
It’s a rectangular wood chip, perfectly sized to jam into the Z axis motor pulley driving the belt: a belt tooth lifts up on the chip as the pulley turns, then klonks as it slips off the other side. The motor pulley and all four leadscrew pinons have the same number of teeth, so they’re all at the same point in their rotation when the belt slams down onto the pulley.
Where might such a thing come from? Well, I recently finished a batch of plant markers and hadn’t yet cleaned out the “chip tray” which is also just the bottom plate of the cabinet:
Craft Stick – swarf
I briefly considered building a guard for the motor pulley, but the belt most likely carried it from elsewhere. The leadscrews have an ample coating of grease that was also smeared elsewhere on the cabinet, making the belt sticky enough to catch such things.
The chip tray is once again pretty clean and the platform behaves normally again.
You know how we’re constantly reminded not to click on links in emails from “people we don’t know” and never provide personal information?
I’m certain this email came from a physician I’m about to see, but, with a concealed URL like that, somehow I just can’t bring myself to Get started like this:
Provide Drivers License
Remember, I’m in the US and *.co links are typically “foreign”, so they are going out of their way to look sketchy. I replaced several characters in the URL to make it invalid, but it closely resembles the original.
Of course, everything is outsourced these days, so the physician and her staff have nothing to do with the scheduling and patient information group, so they will have no idea what’s going on or be able to do anything about it.
We’ve never seen a skunk by day, so this was a bit of a surprise:
Skunk by night
We occasionally smell a skunk by night, but this critter seems peaceable enough:
Skunk by night – detail
Skunks usually have a striped back, so this one’s pure white fur will be easy to identify should we meet again, ideally at a mutually respectful distance.
I walked up to a sign-in kiosk with an interesting difference:
Kiosk app update
If they ask a question on a public-facing device, they must expect a response. Right?
This interesting assembly sprouted from an upstairs wall:
Wash hose valve
The brass fitting seems intended for a braided hose leading to a nozzle, but there was no corresponding floor drain in the room. I’m sure the shutoff valve in the bottom elbow was turned off.
Back in the motel, I attempted to plug in my charger:
USB sockets vs AC plug
The currently trendy black-on-black design scheme doesn’t work well in the low-light environment of a motel room. The white plastic tabs in those USB sockets were the only visible parts of that whole assembly.
As the saying goes, “Without temptation, there can be no virtue.”
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 