A great musical interlude on the patio announced an airlift of construction materials eventually producing this pile inside the top cover of the propane tank:
Carolina Wren – nest started atop propane tank
The male Carolina Wren switched from the Tweedle of Great Nestbuilding to the less musical Mighty Chirr of Disapproval, presumably because he noticed a mouse (or, perhaps, chipmunk) occupying the lower ring of the tank. Rodents and birds do not coexist well at all; I have no doubt a mouse would climb right up the tank for a supply of breakfast eggs.
I must blow the crud off the tank before the next fill.
I clearcut a stand of spearmint and turned it into three jars of what should become mint extract:
Homebrew mint extract – start 2021-06-17
The left jar has 3 ounces of mint mostly covered with 80 proof vodka and the other two jars each have 5 ounces submerged in 180 proof grain alcohol.
Nine days later:
Homebrew mint extract – 2021-06-26
The vodka is now on the right and shows a weird layering caused by the leaves extending above the light yellow liquid; I’ve been inverting the jars every few days. The grain alcohol looks more like the previous iteration, with uniformly decolored leaves in dark green liquid.
A closer look:
Homebrew mint extract – vodka vs grain alcohol – 2021-06-26
What’s happening in the vodka jar does not look like a nominal outcome …
These two discrete LM3909 circuits recently stopped blinking:
LM3909 AA alkaline – Green and Blue
The green LED (on the left) took six months to wear its pair of not-dead-yet AA alkalines from 2.7 V down to nearly zero.
The blue LED in the radome took two months to go from 1.0 V (!) to nearly zero. It didn’t start very bright and went decidedly dim along the way, but the LM3909 circuitry still managed to jam a few microamps through the LED.
In both cases, one of the cells was reverse-charged by a few hundred millivolts, although neither leaked.
Both got another set of not-quite-dead AA cells and they’re back in action.
A snapping turtle headed toward the beaver pond on the Dutchess County Rail Trail:
Snapping Turtle – DCRT – 2021-05-26
At this time of year and phase of the moon, she is most likely in search of a good spot for a nest and her clutch of eggs. Being an aquatic creature, she and her progeny surely benefit from Team Beaver’s engineering.
The new cable on the left seemed like it might match the canonical colors:
Bafang BBS02 display cable pinout
It comes heartbreakingly close:
Bafang Display Cable – extension colors
Brown and Orange connect as the naive user might expect, which does reduce the likelihood of incinerating the motor controller / USB adapter / laptop by connecting the 48 V battery directly to the logic-level electronics.
However, White wasn’t on the original menu, Green is now TXD, and Black has become, comfortingly, GND.
Verily, it is written: Hell hath no fury like that of an unjustified assumption.
This socket connector has a watertight shell making it extremely difficult to mate and unmate with the pin connector on the bike. Watertightness being unnecessary, a little razor-knife action seems in order:
Bafang Display Extension Cable – shroud trimming
Visually, they’re both green-ish, but sometimes the Pixel camera accentuates any differences.
