Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The previous owners apparently surrounded a cedar (?) tree with a ring of large, decorative rocks. The tree vanished long before we arrived, with the stump accreting random stones, bricks, and similar impedimenta ever since; my first task involved (re)moving a couple hundred pounds of rocky debris.
After using the stump as a fulcrum for that steel bar to break the rotted roots and loosen the surrounding soil, it’s out and away:
After building the third Glass Tile unit, one of the LEDs didn’t light up due to an easily diagnosed problem:
Glass Tile – WS2812 failure – PCB cold solder – as found
A closer look:
Glass Tile – WS2812 failure – PCB cold solder
Shortly thereafter, the Nissan Fog Lamp developed an obvious beam problem:
Nissan Fog Lamp – failed WS2812 effect
The WS2812 had the proper voltages / signals at all its pins and was still firmly stuck to the central “heatsink”:
Nissan Fog Lamp – failed WS2812 detail
It also passed the Josh Sharpie Test:
Glass Tile – WS2812 failure – tape – unknown
I’m particularly surprised by this one, because eleven of the twelve flex-PCB WS2812s in the Hard Drive Platter light have been running continuously for years with no additional failures.
The alert reader will note the common factor: no matter what substrate the LED is (supposed to be) soldered to, no matter when I bought it, no matter what it’s wired into, a WS2812 will fail.
They’re all back in operation:
Glowing Algorithmic Art
Although nobody knows for how long …
Obviously, it’s time to refresh my programmable RGB LED stockpile!
A shed snakeskin appeared when I opened the garage door:
Snakeskin – overview
The skin sits atop the retaining wall next to the door, on a stone(-like) background with poor contrast: even an empty snake has good camouflage!
The exterior looks like genuine snakeskin:
Snakeskin – exterior
I didn’t know the interior has an entirely different pattern:
Snakeskin – interior
As far as I can tell, the snake was going about its business elsewhere in the yard.
To be fair, there’s some luck involved.
Update: After Mitch nudged me, I found the (somewhat the worse for wear) snakeskin again. The head end was split, much as I described, but the tail end was intact (the snake having pulled out like a finger from a glove) and what I though was the inside of the top was the outside of the bottom, just pushed inward to form a very thin double layer.
The pivot on the Fiskars Small Detail Scissors (the name is larger than the hardware!) in the bathroom gradually worked loose to the point where I hauled it to the Basement Shop and whacked the rivet with a concave punch:
Fiskars Small Detail Scissors – pivot restaking
Setting the rim of the rivet down a smidge tightened the joint wonderfully well and two oil dots smoothed the action.
I grew up using these concave punches (I have several sizes) to set finish(ing) nails, but apparently real nail punches have a nubbin in the middle to engage the little recess in the nail head which used to be common, back when finish nails arrived well-finished from the factory.
They’re not roll pin punches, either, because those have a different nubbin to support the inside of the pin.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 