The ice behind this sundog foretold a snowstorm:
When I first saw it, the contrail bisected the sundog, but we had to walk to a safer spot before I could fumble with the Pixel.
See? I’m not always searching for treasures amid the roadside trash …
Category: Photography & Images
Taking & making images.
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A Spirograph for Christmas
Gotta play with my new toy:
Spirograph – liquid ink – ceramic tip That’s with a set of liquid ink and ceramic tip plotter pens. They’re unbelievably cranky, but produce wonderfully fine lines:
Spirograph – liquid ink pen – detail Text comes out exactly the way vector lettering should look:
Spirograph – liquid ink pen text – detail There’s a slight shake visible at 500 mm/min = 8.3 mm/s, but it’s Good Enough.
All the pen-and-ink traffic around the center produced a ring of damp green fuzz:
Spirograph – liquid ink – ceramic tip – center detail The artsy part of the plot ran at 1800 mm/min = 30 mm/s, with little of the wobbulation at 6000 mm/min = 100 mm/s. None of that would matter with a router, of course.
It’s a nice, Christmasy design in kinda-red and sorta-green.
From the stack of plots accumulating near the MPCNC bench:
Plots 7 and 9 show the tape sutures required to produce a 26×18 inch sheet covering the MPCNC’s full work area. The squat plots fit on B-size sheets and the rest come from 17×14 inch artist’s sketchpad sheets.
I used Google PhotoScan to capture and rectangularize paper sheets from the floor or atop the bench, then battered the contrast and crushed the file size with a one-liner:
i=1 ; for f in 1* ; do printf -v dn "Spiro %02d.jpg" $(( i++ )) ; convert $f -level '10,80%' -density 300 -define jpeg:extent=300KB tweaked/"$dn" ; done
The plots look great in person (modulo some incremental software improvements), but the slideshow images look awful because:
- Google PhotoScan produces surprisingly low-res images
- I’m overly compressing the results
They’re not (yet) art and there’s no point in a high-quality workflow.
Enjoy the day …
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Critters on the Patio
A light snowfall revealed plenty of overnight traffic on the patio:
Small animal tracks in the snow I should set up an IR camera to watch what’s going on out there!
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Epson R380: Re-re-routed CISS Tubing
Alas, what seemed like a better tube route didn’t work any better and, in fact, the generous loop snagged crosswise between the print head box and the R380’s frame. So I deployed the big diagonal cutters and a nasty end cutter to chop a channel through the side of the box:
Epson R380 – modified print head box As far as I can tell, the thin section above the reinforcing gridwork exists specifically to get in the way of routing CISS tubes, but I suppose it could be just for pretty.
With the tubes coming directly off the top of the tanks and folding neatly as the print head moves under the frame, I could rearrange the supports to hold the tubes in a nearly straight line throughout their motion:
Epson R380 – straight CISS tube route So far, so good.
Although the yellow ink now feeds properly and all the nozzles appear up on the test page, the printer output has an overall cyan tinge that gave the Annual Christmas Letter a gloomy aspect. Maybe the latest bottle of cheap Light Cyan ink isn’t quite as light as it should be?
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Monthly Image: Rt 376 Repaving
NYS DOT repaved the section of Rt 376 between our house and the Red Oaks Mill intersection during a mid-October week, doing most of the work overnight to avoid jamming traffic to the horizon in all directions. Having nothing better to do, I supervised the proceedings …
They prepared the surface by milling off the old pavement during three successive nights, which was just about as noisy as you’d think:
Rt 376 Repave – milled surface The asphalt spreader sported bizarre LED lights:
Rt 376 Repave – Spreader in Wait Southbound paving began with a crisp new truck:
Rt 376 Repave – Starting southbound He would look the same rolling a highway straight through Hades:
Rt 376 Repave – Rolling The short truck cleared the overhead wire:
Rt 376 Repave – Southbound under wire Then they chucked up a series of longer Flow Boy trailers:
Rt 376 Repave – Feathering the Edge Despite all the machinery, the job requires guys with rakes and shovels.
All the pictures come from the Pixel, hand-held with automagic exposure and HDR+.
My tax dollars were definitely awake and hard at work during those nights!
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Cycliq Fly6 Failure and Teardown
My Cycliq Fly6 continued to shut down during rides, even with a new video-rated card, suggesting:
- The fault resides in the camera
- The Samsung card is just fine
Following all the steps recommended by Cycliq Tech Support didn’t improve the situation. It’s just under two years old and thus outside the warranty, so they advised me to buy their new, not-quite-released-yet Fly6, now with Bluetooth / ANT+ / phone app / shiny, but still with a non-replaceable battery.
Seeing as how the Fly6 works as well as it ever did, apart from the minor issue of shutting down both dependably and intermittently, the problem is almost certainly a bad battery. Cycliq does not offer a repair service, nor a battery replacement service; being based in Australia probably contributes to not wanting to get into those businesses. You’re supposed to responsibly recycle the Whole Damn Thing when the battery goes bad. Which, inevitably, it does.
Protip: anything with a non-replaceable battery is a toy, not a tool.
The most recent ride gave some evidence supporting a bad battery. The first shutdown happened after about half an hour and it gave off three battery status beeps (four = full charge, as at the start of the ride) when I restarted it a few minutes later. It shut down again a few minutes later while we were stopped at a traffic signal and gave off one lonely charge beep when I reached back to restart it, indicating a very low battery voltage. The battery voltage (and the number of startup beeps) increased with longer delays between shutdown and restart, but after the first shutdown it’s never very enthusiastic.
Having nothing to lose, let’s see what’s inside:
Cycliq Fly6 Teardown from inside Don’t do as I did: you should extract the MicroSD card before you dismantle the camera.
Remove the rubber plugs sealing the four case screws:
Fly6 – Exterior screw plugs out The case pops open, with a ribbon cable between the LEDs and the main circuit board:
Fly6 – Case opened Pull the ribbon cable latch away from the connector before pulling the cable out.
It’s amazing what you find inside a blinky taillight these days:
Fly6 – PCB Top side I’m sure there’s a fancy 32 bit RISC computer in the big chip, along with plenty of flash ROM just below it. The clutter over on the right seems to be the power supply. Yeah, it has a camera in addition to blinky LED goodness, plus USB charging, so eight bits of microcontroller aren’t nearly enough.
There’s supposed to be some nanotech waterproofing protecting everything inside. It sure looks like magic to me and, in any event, solders just like a layer of ordinary air.
Note: the case screws are slightly longer than the PCB retaining screws:
Fly6 – Case and PCB Screws The underside of the PCB has even more teeny parts, along with, mirabile dictu, a battery connector and (most likely) battery charging stuff:
Fly6 – PCB Underside A plastic piece holds the “Rechargeable Li-Ion Battery Pack” in place:
Fly6 – Battery in place A strip of gooey adhesive holding the mic and speaker wires in place also glues the battery strap to the case, but it will yield to gentle suasion from a razor knife.
Pause to count ’em up:
- Four case screws (longer)
- Three PCB screws
- Two battery screws
It looked a lot like an ordinary 18650 lithium cell to me and, indeed, it is:
Fly6 – Battery – label More razor knife work removes the outer shrinkwrap. The cell has a protection PCB under the black cardboard cover:
Fly6 – Battery Protection PCB – on 18650 cell I don’t know what the yellow wire does:
Fly6 – Battery Protection PCB – wire side The FS8205A on the left may be an SII S8205 protection IC preset and packaged for a single cell:
Fly6 – Battery Protection PCB – components After all that, yeah, it’s a dead battery:
Fly6 OEM 18650 – EOL – 2017-12-06 The red curve shows the in-circuit charge state after taking it apart, the green curve comes from charging the bare cell in my NiteCore D4 charger. I have no idea what the nominal current drain might be, but a 0.25 Ah capacity is way under those Tenergy cells.
A new cell-with-tabs should arrive next week, whereupon I’ll solder the protection circuit in place, wrap it up, pop it back in the case, and see how it behaves.
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Sandisk 32 GB High Endurance Video Monitoring Card
Despite my misgivings, “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com” suggests I could return a Sandisk 32 GB High Endurance MicroSD card if things turned out badly:
MicroSD 32 GB – Samsung EVO and SanDisk High Endurance Unlike the Samsung cards, Sandisk charges a substantial premium for not buying through Amazon.
Verifying the card using
f3probeproduced the same results as with the earlier 64 GB card and copying the existing files from the Fly6 card (on the left) went smoothly:rsync -rtv /mnt/Fly6/ /mnt/part
“High Endurance” means it’s rated for 5000 hours of “Full HD” recording, which they think occurs at 26 Mb/s. The Fly6 records video in 10 minutes chunks, each weighing about 500 MB, call it 1 MB/s = 8 Mb/s, a third of their nominal pace. One might reasonably expect this card to outlive the camera.
As with the AS30V, we shall see …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 