Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Heavy rain during an unseasonably warm spell rearranged the deadwood over the Red Oaks Mill Dam:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2016-03-04
Much of the wood collects around the pool on the other side of the bridge where the Mighty Wappingers Creek makes a right-angle turn to the left and continues toward the Hudson.
After the rain, the weather became much colder (which was OK, as I didn’t have to shovel the rain off the driveway), and the spray froze on the deadwood:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – icicles on deadwood
A few weeks ago, we walked by the dam at the right moment to catch the sun highlighting the rubble upstream of the decaying dam breast:
The getter flash covers the entire top of the tube; shining an LED down through the evacuation tip won’t work and even a laser doesn’t do much. That saves me the trouble of trying to create a cap that doesn’t wreck the tube’s good looks.
I originally planned to use white / natural PETG for the socket, but the more I see of those things, the more I think black is the new white. The sockets should vanish into the background, to let the tubes (and their reflections) carry the show.
The (yet to be designed) base must vanish under the platter edge, too, which puts a real crimp on its overall height. I’m not sure how to fit an Arduino Pro Mini and an FTDI board beside the existing socket; perhaps this calls for a unified socket-base design held on by those screws, rather than a separate socket inside a base enclosure.
Even though I know the tubes are inert and cool, I still hesitate before removing them from their sockets with the Neopixels running: you simply do not unplug a hot, powered device!
The fourth Sony MicroSDXC card went into service in late September 2015 and has now failed after about 60 sessions in my Sony HDR-AS30 Action Camera. This one sported a U3 speed rating and I had hopes that would improve its longevity, but that doesn’t seem to be true.
The defunct Sony card (marked in red to avoid confusion) will join its defunct compadre and the Sandisk Extreme Pro card goes in the camera:
Sony 64 GB MicroSD SR-64UX – failure
The 16 bike rides in December added up to 220 GB; call it 13.75 GB/trip. January 2016 shows only three rides and it failed after two February rides: barely 60 rides for a total of 825-ish GB of video data. The three previous Sony cards failed after less than 1 TB of data, putting this one in the same ballpark.
I have no way to measure the actual write speed, but the camera shuts down after recording less than a minute of 1920×1080 @ 60 f/s video. Previous cards worked fine at lower video resolutions and recording speeds; I’ll assume this one behaves similarly. It might make a capacious “disk” for a Raspberry Pi.
When the previous card failed, Sony’s “customer support” decided that there might be something wrong with the camera’s firmware causing it to trash the cards, so there was no point in replacing the card under warranty and I should send the camera in for a checkup. When I pointed out that they’d strung me along for a year, until the camera was out of warranty, without mentioning even the possibility that the camera might be at fault and asked whether they’d pick up the $100+ bill for having the camera “examined”, the Nice Man said Level 2 would get back to me after “48 working hours”. When prodded, he agreed that “48 working hours” equaled “6 working days” and didn’t include weekends; when we had that settled, I knew they had no further interest in this matter.
Sony hasn’t called back and, by now, I don’t expect they ever will. It’s not worth my time to pursue this any further, but if you’re wondering how well Sony MicroSD cards work in Sony cameras and how well they support the failures, now you know.
So, starting with this riding season, we’ll see how long a Sandisk Extreme Pro card survives…
I did a lightning talk / show-n-tell last Tuesday at the MHV LUG meeting and covered one end of a table with the Neopixel-lit bulbs & vacuum tubes & hard drive platters I’ve been playing with:
The ceramic ring screws down around the socket shell and pulls it up against the base; the threads have only as much precision as required to keep it from falling off. I may need to add a leveling shim just so I don’t have to explain why it’s always crooked.
Well, a picture of plastic on my M2’s platform, anyhow:
Digital Machinist Cover – Winter 2015
I swiped that image from Digital Machinist‘s writeup of the Winter 2015 issue. They run 3D printing articles that are vastly more technical and detail-oriented than the usual glowing PR fluff pieces found elsewhere; I’ve been writing about G-Code and 3D printing for quite a few years now.
They could have used an action shot taken earlier in that sequence, but it doesn’t fit the cover’s vertical layout:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 