Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
The Fly6 rear camera on my bike started giving off three long beeps and shutting down. Doing the reformatting / rebooting dance provides only temporary relief, so I think the card has failed:
Sandisk Extreme Plus vs. Samsung EVO MicroSD cards
The Fly6 can handle cards up to only 32 GB, which means I should stock up before they go the way of the 8 GB card shipped with the camera a few years ago.
Some back of the envelope calculations:
It’s been in use for the last 19 months
The last 22 trips racked up 88 GB of video data = 4 GB/trip
They occurred over the last 6 weeks = 3.6 rides/week
Call it 250 trips = 1 TB of data written to the card = 32 × capacity
That’s only slightly more than the failure point of the Sony 64 GB MicroSDXC cards. The Fly6 writes about a third of the data per trip, so the card lasts longer on a calendar basis.
So now let’s find out how long the Samsung cards last …
We explored the interior for several hours, all the way to the lower Turret 2 barbette:
USS Massachusetts BB-59 – Turret 2 Lower Barbette 16 inch Shell Storage
Each 16 inch projectile weighs 2700 pounds, with 800 shells distributed around three turrets. Looking at the drawings doesn’t make up for seeing the machinery.
The Massachusetts did shore bombardment during the Solomon Island campaign, where my father was assigned to guard a forward observer targeting Japanese redoubts and caves. He said the first rounds went over the far horizon, the second group landed short in the valley, and, from then on, the observer called out coordinates, walked the impact points down the valley, and wiped out each target in succession. BB-59 may not have been on the other end of those trajectories, but he said the Navy saved them plenty of trouble and inconvenience …
Contrary to what you might think, the gorge underfoot appeared almost black to the eye, particularly against the glare from the floodlights, so the HDR works very well:
The “1/10 s shutter speed” probably has very little to do with any physical event. AFAICT, the Pixel camera records 30 images/s for the on-screen preview, then uses various images before-and-after the shutter click for motion compensation and HDR processing. If so, “1/10 s” corresponds to three images.
I had the Pixel location tracking in “battery saving” mode with the GPS turned off:
In reality, the bridge is about 90 feet above sea level. The “GPS Time Stamp” and, presumably, the date, use UTC. We’re in UTC-4, with Daylight Saving Time in full effect, so we were comfortably early for the 8 PM show.
The camera doesn’t produce DSLR-with-big-glass quality images, but it fits in my pocket and it’s better than my old Canon SX-230HS for most purposes.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 