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.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Batmax NP-BX1 Batteries

Having recently lost one of the year-old DOT-01 batteries, a quartet of Batmax NP-BX1 batteries for the Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera just arrived:

Batmax DOT-01 Wasabi NP-BX1 – 2020-04

The orange curve is the last surviving (“least dead”) Wasabi battery from the 2017-08 batch and the dark green curve just above it is another DOT-01 from 2019-02. The problem is not so much their reduced capacity, but their grossly reduced voltage-under-load that triggers a premature camera shutdown.

The Batmax batteries measure better than the craptastic Wasabi batteries, worse than the STK batteries, and should survive the next year of riding. As before, I have zero belief that Amazon would send me a “genuine” Sony NP-BX1 battery, even at six times the nominal price, nor that it would perform six times better.

Batmax is one of many randomly named Amazon Marketplace sellers offering seemingly identical NP-BX1 batteries: Newmowa, Miady, Powerextra, Pickle Power, LP, Enegon, and so forth. Mysteriously, it’s always cheaper to get a handful of batteries and a charger, rather than just the batteries, so I now have a two-socket USB charger:

Batmax NP-BX1 – USB dual charger

Despite the “5 V 2 A – 10 W” and “4.2 V 0.6 A – 5 W” label on the back, charging a pair of batteries after a ride started at 700 mA from a USB 3.0 port. The charger makes no claims about USB 3 compliance, so I’d expect it to top out around 1 A from a generously specified port.

2020-03-11
Losing the Battery Bag

Because the cheap batteries I use in the Sony HDR-AS30V camera provide just slightly less runtime than our longest usual ride after a year of use, I carry a spare battery in a small red felt bag. The bag also holds a USB card reader helping to make the MicroSD card somewhat less lose-able on its trips betwixt bike & desk.

Here I am, swapping batteries in Adam’s Fairacre parking lot before starting the trip home:

Losing the Red Bag – setup – 2019-02-25

You can see it coming, right?

Eight minutes later, we’re turning onto the Dutchess County Rail Trail:

Losing the Battery Bag – flight – 2019-02-25

And then it’s gone:

Losing the Battery Bag – gone – 2019-02-25

Mary drove past there on her way to a distant meeting, but the little red bag was not to be found anywhere. Maybe it’ll reappear on a fence post or taped to the bulletin board; I’ve tried to return things I’ve found that way.

I expect somebody got a nice present and, if naught else, it’s good to drop happiness into the world.

There’s another reader and a quartet of batteries on their way.

2020-03-07
Diamond-Drag Styrene Engraving: Line Width

Engraving all the Tek Circuit Computer scales on a single sheet of styrene plastic with a diamond drag tool produced a test piece with plenty of lines and characters:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – in action

I covered one quarter with good old black Sharpie, a lacquer crayon, and well-aged black acrylic wall paint:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – raw color fill

Applying a sanding block removed the rubble + scribbles and brought the surface down to the engraved patterns:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – 225 250 300g 2400mm-min

The lacquer crayon doesn’t seem to adhere well to styrene:

Diamond on styrene – 225 250 g 2400mm-min – lacquer crayon

A closer look shows I probably sanded off too much of the surface, perhaps above some grit below the sheet, because those lines almost vanish:

Diamond on styrene – 225 250 g 2400mm-min – lacquer crayon

The crayon may adhere better to deeper lines. These are obviously too shallow and the pigment seems to come off in chunks:

Diamond on styrene – 300g 2400mm-min – lacquer crayon

The acrylic trim paint filled its patterns, despite having turned into a gummy mass during decades on the shelf:

Diamond on styrene – 225g 2400mm-min – acrylic paint

The Sharpie ink, being basically a thin liquid, completely filled its patterns and (apparently) soaked into the rough side walls. The lines seem to be 0.1 mm wide at 225 g downforce:

Diamond on styrene – 225g 2400mm-min – Sharpie

They’re less uniform at 250 g:

Diamond on styrene – 250g 2400mm-min – Sharpie

A 300 g downforce produces (somewhat) more uniform 0.15 mm wide lines and slightly distorted characters:

Diamond on styrene – 300g 2400mm-min – Sharpie

I have no way to measure the actual engraving depth. If the 60° diamond tool had a perfect point, which it definitely doesn’t, then a 0.15 mm wide trench would be 0.13 mm deep. I’ve obviously sanded off some of the surface, so those lines could be, at most, 0.1 mm deep.

All in all, the engraving came out better than I expected!

2020-03-05
Dutchess Rail Trail: Beaver Lodge & Dam

A beaver family built their lodge next to the Dutchess Rail Trail:

Beaver Lodge – DCRT N of Golds Gym – 2020-02-23

It’s just to the right of the fence post, on the far side of the pond.

Dutchess County’s aerial survey in 2016 showed a dry-ish area west of the rail trail, with a culvert to the north:

Beaver Lodge – DCRT N of Golds Gym – 2016 CIR image

We went back the next day and stopped at the culvert. Their dam spans the entire near side of the pond, upstream of the ditch (just above my hand) leading to the culvert:

Beaver Lodge and Dam – DCRT N of Golds Gym – 2020-02-25

The helmet camera pictures look west from the rail trail, with the lodge in the northernmost open area. The wide-angle camera lens exaggerates the distance, but the lodge is only about 35 feet from the fence.

A stand of birch trees near the lodge now looks like a combination buffet and construction yard. When beavers discover ferrocement, their structures will become much more obvious.

Go, beavers, go!

2020-02-29
Tek Circuit Computer: Styrene Engraving Test
Engraving all three Tek Circuit Computer decks on a single sheet of styrene plastic with the diamond drag tool:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – overview

The three patterns overlap here & there, but the intent was to have plenty of engraved lines for further study:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – in action

The vivid blue glare comes from a flashlight at grazing incidence off to the left, with brutal color correction back to something sensible.

Engraving each deck at a different depth gave a range of downforce:
```
EZ='EngraveZ=-0.5mm'
Runit Bottom Engrave

EZ='EngraveZ=-1.0mm'
Runit Middle Engrave

EZ='EngraveZ=-2.0mm'
Runit Top Engrave
```
I fed all three of those G-Code files into bCNC, applied them to the same sheet with the same origin touchoff, and it worked fine.

The tool holder rate of 200 g + 50 g/mm produced downforces of 225, 250, and 300 g. In retrospect, the range wasn’t really broad enough, so Moah Force may be in order.

The diamond produced plenty of swarf:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – swarf

Wiping the surface with a strip of masking tape clears away the loose rubble:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – cleaned

The innermost scale comes from the top deck, engraved at 300 g. The long shadows from the plastic pushed up along the tick marks seem to indicate the deepest trenches, although I don’t have any way to measure their depth.

I scribed and snapped the sheet into quarters so I can (mis)treat the engraved patterns in various ways:

Diamond on styrene – engraving test – raw color fill

What a mess!
2020-02-28
HON Lateral File Cabinet Shelf Bumper Replacement

Somewhat to our surprise, our “new” HON Lateral File Cabinets include a pop-out shelf:

HON Lateral File – shelf – closed

The trick: push the bar inward against fairly stiff spring pressure, release it suddenly, watch it pop out maybe half an inch, get some fingers under the front edge, then pull it outward:

HON Lateral File – shelf – extended

Obviously, opening the drawer above the shelf will sweep whatever you put there onto the floor and opening the drawer below seems futile. I suppose it produced a bullet item on the features list.

Note that the topmost “drawer” is also called a “shelf”, because the front cover slides up-and-inward to reveal the contents. Should you stand eight feet tall, you might be able to look down on that shelf, but we mere mortals barely see its contents at eye level.

Dismantling the cabinets preparatory to deep cleaning revealed a pair of rubber bumpers along the rear edge of the shelf:

HON Lateral File – shelf bumper – installed

The slightly angled front side of the bumper (on the right) collides with a crossbar below the drawer just above it, preventing you from pulling the shelf entirely out of the cabinet.

Remove the bumper by pressing down and rearward (to the left), shoving the protruding lip into the slot with a thumb / screwdriver, then pull it upward through the slot:

HON Lateral File – shelf bumper – removed

The second cabinet had only one bumper, so I traced it twice onto a rubber sheet half as thick as the OEM bumper, bandsawed the shapes, and introduced them to Mr Belt Sander for cleanup:

HON Lateral File – replacement shelf bumper

Jammed side-by-side into the slot, they’ll serve the purpose:

HON Lateral File – replacement shelf bumper – installed

As with the replacement foot on the first cabinet, they’re not the prettiest things you’ve ever seen, but Mary doesn’t expect to use the shelf and they’ll never actually bump into anything.

Even the Pixel phone’s HDR image processing has trouble dealing with dark gray objects on a black background in dim light …

2020-02-26
Drag Knife Blade Wear

Having used the same two drag knife blades intermittently over the last three-ish years, I wondered just how worn they’d gotten:

Drag Knife Blades – sides

For scale, the cylindrical part of the blade is 1.0 mm OD.

The blade with the longer face (left above and bottom below) has seen the most use and is definitely rounded at the tip:

Drag Knife Blades – tips

Three unused blades have sharp tips:

Drag Knife Blades – unused 60 45 30 degree

From the top, the (nominal) blade angles are 60°, 45°, and 30°, generally indicated by yellow, red, and blue plastic caps. However, various eBay sellers disagree on how to measure the angle (up from surface / outward from axis) and which cap colors correspond to which angles.

The unused 45° blade bracketed by the two used blades:

Drag Knife Blades – unused in center

The two lower blades have angles somewhere between 30° and 45°, suggesting slack grinder and QC tolerances. If the actual angle matters to you, buy an assortment (from one seller!), measure what you get, and don’t be surprised when the results aren’t anything in particular.

Perhaps, with careful attention to alignment in a non-pivoting / collet holder, one might scribe exceedingly narrow lines.

The microphotographic setup:

Drag Knife Blades – microscope stage setup

That’s the back of a sheet of carbon paper (remember carbon paper?), which is deep dark gray in normal light. It’s sitting on the sheet of 100 mil grid paper providing scale for small objects, atop the microscope stage positioner, with cold white illumination from an LED ring light.

Protip: even worn blades remain lethally sharp …

2020-02-21