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.
Taking & making images.
With some heavy weather on the way:
Bracing the Pixel 3a on the deck railing. Despite the star near the top, it decided to not invoke Astrophotography mode.
This was apparently a Pink Moon and a Supermoon and surely some other adjectives nobody cared about until Webbish media discovered they could generate ad revenue using clickbait headlines concerning a monthly event.
We just enjoy the sights out along the driveway, whatever they may be.
We extracted the Praying Mantis oothecae while clearcutting the decorative grasses bracketing the front door. As far as I can tell, they’re still charged up and ready for use.
The masses resemble rigid foam wrapped around grass stems:
It’s a mechanical joint, not an adhesive bond, and the dried stems slide freely through the openings:
From one side:
And the other:
They’re now tied to stems of the bushes along the front of the house, which (I hope) will resemble what the little ones expect to find when they emerge, whenever they do.
We’re riding home with groceries when a small white shape scampered across a yard and jumped onto a stump:
If you’ve ever seen a gray squirrel, you’ll recognize the shape, even in this gritty enlargement:
Wikipedia says this one is likely a leucistic white squirrel, rather than a true albino squirrel. There is, of course, a website. tracking “white squirrel” sightings.
The relevant coordinates, for science:
41°41'39.9"N 73°52'56.6"W
41.694410, -73.882374
Can’t say if this one had black or pink eyes, but it was pure white!
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:
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:
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.
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:
You can see it coming, right?
Eight minutes later, we’re turning onto the Dutchess County Rail Trail:
And then it’s gone:
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.
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:
I covered one quarter with good old black Sharpie, a lacquer crayon, and well-aged black acrylic wall paint:
Applying a sanding block removed the rubble + scribbles and brought the surface down to the engraved patterns:
The lacquer crayon doesn’t seem to adhere well to styrene:
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:
The crayon may adhere better to deeper lines. These are obviously too shallow and the pigment seems to come off in chunks:
The acrylic trim paint filled its patterns, despite having turned into a gummy mass during decades on the shelf:
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:
They’re less uniform at 250 g:
A 300 g downforce produces (somewhat) more uniform 0.15 mm wide lines and slightly distorted characters:
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!
A beaver family built their lodge next to the Dutchess Rail Trail:
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:
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:
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!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 