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.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Panasonic Eneloop Pro NiMH Cells: First Charge

The Sony DSC-H5 expects a much higher voltage from its pair of NiMH AA cells than the tired Sanyo Eneloops from 2010 can provide these days.

Eneloop – 8-cell pack – 2010 – 2016 – merged

The two upper curves show the first two charges for those eight cells back in 2010.

The lower curve(s) started out with the wrong endpoint voltage (purple part of the middle curve), so I restarted the test (green curve) and edited the graph image to splice the two curves together into the purple/red curve.

Although the capacity measured in mA·h isn’t much lower, the voltage depression reduces the available energy and trips the “low battery” alarm much earlier. In round numbers, the old cells were good for a few pictures, even hot off the charger, and didn’t have much energy left without being recharged before use.

A quartet of Panasonic Eneloop Pro cells just arrived from BatterySpace, a nominally reputable supplier, all sporting a 14-05 date code suggesting they’re just shy of two years old. The packaging claims 85% charge retention after a year, so they should have a bit more than half of their rated 2.45 A·h “minimum” (or 2.55 mA·h “typical”, depending on whether you trust the label on the cell or the big print on the package) capacity remaining (although we don’t know the original state of charge, done from “solar power”). The lower curves say they arrived with 1 A·h remaining:

Panasonic Eneloop – First Charge

However, the terminal voltage on those bottom curves would have any reasonable device reporting them as dead flat almost instantly, so you really can’t store Eneloops for two years: no surprise there.

One pass through the 400 mA Sony charger produced the upper curves, with the dotted red curve from Cell A lagging in the middle. After that test, another pass through the charger brought Cell A back (upper solid red line) with the others, so I’ll assume it took a while to wake up.

A pair of these in the camera will produce 2.2 V through 2.2 A·h, far better than the aged-out Sanyo Eneloops.

Charging them at 400 mA = C/6 certainly counts as a slow charge. I’ve been charging the Sanyo cells in slow chargers in the hope that they’ll remain happier over the long term.

The Panasonic Eneloops perform much better than some other cells you’ve seen around here, which may be due to the fact that I paid $5 each for them…

2016-03-20
Sony NP-FS11 Lithium Battery Rebuilds: 2016

It seems that two years is about as long as the NP-FS11 batteries last, as shown by the two lower curves from the ones I rebuilt in December 2013 with cells from 2011:

Sony NP-FS11 2011-2016 Packs

The two middle curves with those same colors show the “back then” performance of those batteries: they’re shot in both total capacity and terminal voltage.

I bought enough cells back in 2011 to leave two cells unused until now, which I built into a pack and charged. The green curve in the middle shows the result: those cells haven’t lost anything over the last five (!) years, as their performance still matches the other two batteries when they were new.

The red curves come from a pair of batteries made with fresh new cells from batteryspace.com. They’re nominally 650 mA·h cells, so the NP-FS11 configuration (two parallel cells) should produce 1300 mA·h; surprisingly, they show 1500 mA·h with a nice voltage curve.

So, although the 2011 cells work as well as their (now defunct) siblings, that pack can’t deliver the same capacity as the new cells. I expect I’ll rebuild it with 2016 cells in about a year.

For whatever it’s worth, rebuilding these batteries goes much faster when I don’t have to saw them open. The Kapton tape wrapped around the case halves secures them well enough; there’s no need for fancy gluing.

NP-FS11 Battery Rebuilds – 2016-03

Yeah, I should make better labels. It’s hard to form a deep emotional attachment to the poor things, though.

Here’s a case where something performs better than expected; I don’t always buy cheap junk from the usual eBay vendor…

2016-03-19
Monthly Image: Red Oaks Mill Dam

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:

Red Oaks Mill Dam – dam breast upstream rubble

There won’t be much left in a few more decades …

2016-03-15
Vacuum Tube LEDs: Fire in the Noval

Replacing the original Noval socket in the string with the platter-friendly version, bracing the wiring with duct tape, balancing it on my desk, and firing it up:

Noval socket – red phase

The green phase looks nice, too:

Noval socket – green phase

Those screws are too big.

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!

2016-03-08
Sony 64 GB MicroSDXC Card: The Final Failure

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…

2016-02-22
Monthly Image: Frost Growth

The northeast vent on the well pit grew an ice rim during the same night that frosted the roofing nails:

Well Pit Vent Frost

The other vent remained clear, so the prevailing breeze definitely goes in one hole and out the other:

Well Pit Vent Frost – inlet

Well Pit Vent Frost – inlet

A waterproof Hobo datalogger hangs from the string.

2016-02-15
Hollow State Electronics: Desk Decorations

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:

MHVLUG – Hollow State Decorations – Lightning Talk

Some of the posts won’t go live for a week, but here’s a peek into the future:

Vacuum Tube LEDs – IBM 21HB5A Beam Power Tube – violet amber phase

Dang, that came out well…

2016-02-06