Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Moth 1, with wonderful antenna fringes identifying him as a male:
Spilosoma virginica 1 – right
Moth 2, a female with smaller antenna:
Spilosoma virginica 2 – right
Moth 3, another male:
Spilosoma virginica 3 – dorsal
The underside is diagnostic (ignore the crud on the aquarium glass):
Spilosoma virginica 3 – ventral
We set each one on the goldenrod plant inside the garden gate, whereupon they charged up in the sun for an hour or so, then flew off about their business. They may eat a few leaves in the garden, but they’re not particularly harmful to anything and entitled to a peaceful life.
I must organize all their pictures into a life history.
The replacement NP-BX1 batteries arrived and, as I expected, perform just as badly as the previous pair:
Sony NP-BX1 – Wasabi GHIJK – 2017-09-01 – annotated
The note I sent to Wasabi’s tech support summarizes the details:
The second pair of NP-BX1 batteries are just as bad as the first two. In fact, all four perform worse than the nearly two-year-old Wasabi batteries I’ve been using.
The graph shows the test results from my CBA III analyzer. All batteries were all charged in a Wasabi wall charger.
The top solid red curve shows the as-delivered performance in late 2015 for the battery I labeled “G”, tested at 500 mA. It delivered only 1 Ah, not the claimed 1.6 Ah, even at that relatively low current, but has delivered over one hour of service in the camera.
The top dotted-blue curve shows the as-delivered performance for the NEW battery I labeled “J”, also tested at 500 mA. It delivers only 0.88 Ah, 55% of the claimed 1.6 Ah, at a much lower voltage while discharging.
After two years, OLD battery “G” has more capacity and a higher voltage than the NEW battery “J”!
The lower curves shows the results for the four most recent batteries I labeled H I J K, all tested at 1 A to better match the camera’s actual current; the dotted traces mark the second test of each battery.
The orange traces show battery K has about 0.77 Ah of capacity, less than half of the claimed 1.6 Ah and much worse than the others.
I also re-tested battery old battery G at 1 A, as shown by the dotted red curve labeled “G:2017-09”. It outperforms ALL of the new batteries!
Batteries H and I have date codes BQF22, which I interpret as 2017-06-22: fairly recent stock.
Batteries J and K have date codes BPL28: 2016-12-28. They’ve been sitting around for a while, which may account for the poor performance of battery K.
These Wasabi batteries cost roughly twice (*) as much as they did in late 2015, have /much/ lower capacity, and, to judge from the date codes, they’ve been consistently poor since late last year.
What is going on?
It’s worth noting that Wasabi NP-BX1 batteries are currently $16 for the pair on Amazon and were $9 in late 2015. Allegedly genuine Sony NP-BX1 batteries run $50 MSRP and a suspiciously consistent $37.99 from all the usual big-box sources, including Amazon, where they’re out-of-stock for the next few months. Combining the number of counterfeits in the supply chain with Amazon’s commingled SKU stock bins, I have my doubts about what I’d get by increasing my battery spend by a factor of five.
I think it’s about time to conjure an external 18650 holder / helmet mount for that camera and be done with it.
[(*) Edit: I screwed up the unit of measure: the old invoice had two single batteries. The new order was one pair, so I now pay slightly less for much worse performance. A refund is wending its way through the system.]
An hour before the festivities started, I lashed together an official NASA-approved pinhole eclipse viewer from available materials:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – pinhole projector
Although the solar disk showed up fine on the white paper screen, the Pixel’s camera can’t show the notch growing on the left side, even with HDR+ mode in full effect:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – pinhole projector – interior
As usual for astronomy around here, clouds threatened the outcome:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – high clouds
Near the maximum, the skies cleared:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – lens flare
Although it’s not proof, there’s a definite bite out of the lens flare at about 4 o’clock:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – lens flare – detail
The maples south of the driveway produced lower-contrast images better suited to silicon sensors:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – shadows
And, although everyone was specifically enjoined not to do this, because UV reflection = blindness, the obligatory solar eclipse selfie:
Eclipse 2017-08-21 – obligatory selfie
I’m sure similar lens flares count as UFOs in someone’s telling of the tale.
We planned to dance naked in the yard, but our neighbor’s lawn crew picked that moment to scalp his grass and we chose discretion over valor …
A silver Honda Accord Civic (NY HLS-3678) passed me on Raymond, just before the Vassar Main Gate roundabout, with about as much clearance as one might expect:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 1
I noodled along Raymond at 18 mph and the car pulled ahead at the usual 30 to 40 mph. Just after the College Avenue roundabout, the car pulled off to the right, as if to park, but continued rolling slowly and I gave it plenty of clearance:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 2
The car immediately pulled out into the lane, directly in front of the Escalade that’s been following me at a courteous distance since the Main Gate roundabout, and pulled up close behind me, which immediately put me at DEFCON 3. Basically, drivers get exactly one bite at my apple; anyone who deliberately passes me a second time is likely up to no good.
As always, I signal and take the lane going into the Collegeview Avenue roundabout, still at 18-ish mph, whereupon the driver lays on the horn rather heavily. Apparently, he intended to accelerate past me into the roundabout, but I got in the way:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 2r
I’m now cranking 20 mph. A block later, the car passes me, rather closely this time:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 3
Maybe this is a friendly wave, but the horn thing suggests otherwise and, in any event, it’s hard to tell in real time running:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 4
At this point, I presume he’s gesturing me to GTFO the road:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 5
And we part company:
Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 6
Raymond Avenue would be a lot more bicycle-friendly without some of the drivers …
The clip-on lenses for the (fancy) camera in my soon-to-be-obsolete Google Pixel XL don’t fit well on the case I added to improve its griptivity:
Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – angle
The upper half of the clip rests on the rim of the case around the bezel, with only the end of the foam pad against the glass:
Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – angle overview
That’s pretty much the only stable position.
Sticking a disk of stair-tread rubber on the foam adds just enough thickness to match the rim:
Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – aligned
The lenses came with two clips, so I left one unmodified to fit the Pixel without the case:
Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – clamps
Not that that happens very often, but …
The lenses are about as good as you’d expect for ten bucks from Amazon. Stacking the 0.67 “wide angle” lens on the camera enlarges the field-of-view by a third with closer focusing at maximum zoom, so the minimum FOV drops from 2 inches down to 1 inch at a reasonable distance. The 10x “macro” lens is basically useless, with a focus distance well within the Pixel’s shadow under any normal lighting; if I were that sort of guy, I’d conjure a small LED ring powered from the USB-C port.
The Sandisk Extreme Pro 64 GB MicroSD card in the Sony HDR-AS30V died on the road once more, got reformatted, worked OK for a while, then kicked out catastrophic I/O errors after being mounted, so I swapped in the High Endurance card:
Sandisk – 64 GB MicroSDXC cards
The Extreme Pro still passes the f3probe tests, so it’s not completely dead, but if I can’t trust it in the helmet camera, it’s dead to me.
It survived 17 months of more-or-less continuous use, although we didn’t do nearly enough riding for three months early this year. Call it 14 months x five rides / week x 1 hour / ride = 300 hours of recording. Multiply by 4 GB / 22.75 minutes to get 3 TB of video, about 50 times its total capacity.
The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Sony cards failed after less than 1 TB and 15-ish times capacity, making the Sandisk Extreme Pro much better. However, it’s painfully obvious these cards work better for low-intensity still-image recording, rather than continuous HD video.
Using them as Raspberry Pi“hard drives” surely falls somewhere between still cameras and video, although Octoprint’s video snapshots and streaming media must make ’em sweat.
We’ll see how Sandisk’s High Endurance memory works in precisely the application it’s labeled for.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 