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?
We spotted a pile of room safes in one of the motel stairwells:
Judging from what we found in the room, it’s out with the old and in with the new:
Too bad about the mounting pedestal, though: same size, different orientation.
Something unexpected always lurks in the datasheet …
One day, long ago, this tree grew in a certain bedroom:
And then a flower appeared in the laundry room:
Much to our delight, she asked for forgiveness, not permission … which was, of course, granted immediately.
It seems the DCW&WA SUV makes regular trips through the “No Motor Vehicles” bike access:
If it’s not them, then it’s somebody following their example.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should … but, of course, the ordinary rules apply only to little people, not public servants.
Someone in the bike advocacy apparat once told me I’m the most cynical, bitter person they’d ever met, at least on the subject of getting along with public servants. As I see it, I came by my attitude honestly.
The rodents around here have great trouble with outdoor bowls, but this trio ended in a deep six gallon bucket next to the garage workbench:
Even though mice don’t seem like cuddly creatures, they ended their days snuggled together; we’ll just ignore the cannibalism thing.
Heck of a way to go, even for rodents. I renewed the steel wool blocking a gap in the garage door.
Our Compact Edition of the OED doesn’t get much use these days, but Mary needed a magnifier for a class on quilt judging and the OED has one that seemed just about right:
The magnifier comes in a removable box fitted neatly into the drawer, revealing a surprise underneath:
A detail view:
It’s a plastic ant from a bag in the Kiddie Surplus box my Shop Assistant grew up with and a pleasant reminder of long-ago days, carefully placed where only I’d ever see it.
Of course, it’s still there …
Being a sucker for infrastructure and numbers, the fire sprinkler system pressure gauges in the motel stairwell proved irresistible.
The first floor gauge shows a nice round 100 psi:
Up on the second floor, it’s 90 psi:
With a different brand of gauge, it’s also 90 psi on the third floor:
Maybe 85 psi on the fourth:
Squinting at the parallax, call it 80 psi on the fifth:
At the top of the vertical pipe on the fifth, on the other side of a valve, we return to the original valve company at 78 psi:
Water weighs just over 62 lb/ft³ at room temperature, which works out to 0.43 lb/in² per vertical foot. Not having packed my laser distance widget, I’ll guesstimate 12 feet and 5 psi per floor.
A quick graph with an eyeballometric straight-line fit:
Call it 0.42 psi/ft, which is pretty close to the right answer.
Hitching a charged, albeit worn, NP-BX1 lithium battery to the astable multivibrator produces a blinding flash:
The current pulse shows the wearable LED really takes a beating:
The current trace is at 100 mA/div: the pulse starts at 400 mA, which seems excessive even to me, and tapers down to 200 mA. It’s still an order of magnitude too high at the end of the pulse.
On the other paw, maybe a 14% duty cycle helps:
The top trace shows the base drive voltage dropping slightly, although I suspect the poor little transistor can’t take the strain.
The LED really does need a ballast resistor …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 