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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
This nest appeared in a path near Mary’s Vassar Community Gardens plot:
The bird obviously took advantage of modern technology, because it’s held together with generous loops of plastic string:
We don’t know where it came from or how it got onto the path.
A snapping turtle headed toward the beaver pond on the Dutchess County Rail Trail:
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.
Today I Learned: snappers are the New York State Official Reptile.
In the process of installing a Bafang BBS02 mid-drive motor on a friend’s diamond-frame bike, I discovered, once again, how little anybody cares about the colors inside cables:
The cheerful rainbow on the right is the stub end of the Bafang display extension cable I built into the previous adapter.
The new cable on the left seemed like it might match the canonical colors:
It comes heartbreakingly close:
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:
Visually, they’re both green-ish, but sometimes the Pixel camera accentuates any differences.
Sometimes I get text messages:
Bzzzz … click … NO CARRIER …
I’m reasonably sure “Caroline” is really a property flipper, so we’re not in “her” target market.
Should you be interested in moving into the Hudson Valley, we can probably make a mutually beneficial deal. Protip: use email.
If only Android allowed whitelisting SMS message sources.
Mary spotted a White-breasted Nuthatch facing off against a red squirrel on the patio near the birdfeeder, wherein the nuthatch spread its wings to look as fearsome as possible. The squirrel seemed unfazed, perhaps because a bird the size of my thumb simply doesn’t pose much of a threat.
A few minutes later, the nuthatch repeated the display from the feeder, starting with a hostile side-eye:
Then he (we’re pretty sure) went into full-on threat mode:
Nuthatches are perfectly happy hanging upside-down from any convenient perch, so it’s not quite as ungainly as it may seem. However, the threat bounced off the squirrel, which continued stuffing itself from seeds scattered by none other than the nuthatch.
The nuthatch threat display seems identical to the nuthatch courtship display, so we may have been witnessing an offer for rishathra.
Ya never know!
Taken through two layers of 1955 window glass with the Pixel 3a zoomed all the way, then ruthlessly cropped.
I knew this would happen, so I made sure to not order anything that could possibly arrive at the same time:
I’ll apply the grease by hand, so the fact the cartridge cannot fit into a piston-fed gun doesn’t matter:
I recently placed one order for a BFW and another for four small bottles, all of which arrived in a single box with a thoroughly flattened air pillow strip. Fortunately, the bottles were plastic and survived unscathed, but I’m sure it got ugly in there.
Given that one order for multiple items has arrived in three different boxes on two different days, it’s exceedingly difficult to work around Amazon’s corporate-level indifference for safe packaging.
This happened while switching from natural to black PETG:
A closer look:
Those pix happened after trying to extract whatever-it-is with tweezers, so it’s definitely something with a higher melting point than PETG.
Removing the (warm) nozzle with the block held in a vise reveals a tuft of something:
The tuft accumulated several turns while unthreading the nozzle from the hot end.
Heating the nozzle a bit more released the tuft:
The black-to-clear transition tailing off at the bottom came from the PETG around the tuft in the cone-shaped end of the nozzle above the aperture. The 100 mil squares suggest the tuft was a distinct entity, rather than a collection of threads, and might have been over 5 mm long.
Perhaps a fragment of PTFE or another high-melting-point plastic?
Reassemble in reverse order, reset the nozzle to Z=0 on the platform, and it’s all good.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 