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.
Taking & making images.
Most of the things I design don’t have moving parts, so I printed emmitt’s Gear Bearing as a fondletoy:
Setting the clearance to 0.5 produced a free fit with absolutely no cleanup or run-in required; the center hole is a sliding fit for a 6 mm hex wrench.
I should do another one with knurling around the outside…
The picture has strongly desaturated reds, which reveals the top surface a bit more clearly.
Spotted this in a greenhouse:
Just like fire extinguishers and bike helmets, you never know when you’ll need to use this thing in a hurry… then it’s too late to clean out all the crap that accumulates on any flat (or concave) spot.
Not that I’m completely innocent, of course.
The DSC-H5 had been outdoors for a few hours, hiking with us at 25 °F, so the lens fogged instantly when we walked through the greenhouse door.
These critters can serve as good examples of what we’re not doing today:
They span 48 seconds of life on a single flower; just another busy day at Innisfree Garden.
Hoist some spicy grog for them…
Picked up a Sandisk 32 GB Micro SD Card from a reputable supplier for $0.62/GB, in the hope that Santa will deliver a helmet camera:
Until that happy event, I verified that it can store and return 32 GB of white noise with absolute fidelity.
It came formatted with an empty FAT32 filesystem that allows single files up to 4 GB. Reformatting with exFAT supports vastly larger capacities and, in this case, allows single files up to 32 GB. Whether it’s actually legal to use exFAT on a Linux box remains up for grabs, but installing exfat-utils, which drags in exfat-fuse, does the trick.
Verifying the SD Card capacity went swimmingly, much along the lines of the original recipe. The data file size came from the card’s FAT-32 formatting and is a smidge less than the capacity after reformatting the card with exFAT. Close enough for this purpose.
dd bs=1K count=31154656 if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin (This took the better part of an hour; I didn't record it.) sudo mkexfatfs -i babeface -n SanDisk32GB /dev/sdb1 mkexfatfs 1.0.1 Creating... done. Flushing... done. File system created successfully. sudo dumpexfat /dev/sdb1 dumpexfat 1.0.1 Volume label SanDisk32GB Volume serial number 0xbabeface FS version 1.0 Sector size 512 Cluster size 32768 Sectors count 62325760 Free sectors 62317504 Clusters count 973719 Free clusters 973711 First sector 0 FAT first sector 128 FAT sectors count 7616 First cluster sector 7744 Root directory cluster 7 Volume state 0x0000 FATs count 1 Drive number 0x80 Allocated space 0% time rsync --progress /mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin /mnt/part/Test.bin Testdata.bin 31902367744 100% 9.15MB/s 0:55:24 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1) sent 31906262150 bytes received 31 bytes 9594425.55 bytes/sec total size is 31902367744 speedup is 1.00 real 55m25.791s user 3m16.088s sys 2m7.808s df -h /mnt/part Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 30G 30G 4.0M 100% /mnt/part time diff /mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin /mnt/part/Test.bin real 28m43.878s user 0m4.044s sys 0m42.902s ll /mnt/part/Test.bin -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 31902367744 Dec 2 18:32 /mnt/part/Test.bin* rm /mnt/part/Test.bin df -h /mnt/part Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 30G 4.1M 30G 1% /mnt/part
I’m probably easily impressed, but wow that’s a lot of data in a little chip of plastic… for $20 delivered.
While the rest of the Master Gardener tour group walked on to the Island, I lay face-down on the Channel Bridge at Innisfree for a frog’s eye perspective:
Painting these pastels would pose a challenge:
Hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5 on an overcast day that accentuated those colors.
The trio of batteries I built for the Sony DSC-F505V two years ago faded away; that camera seems particularly hard on the batteries, perhaps because they’re two cells in parallel that don’t share well. Two of the three seem pretty well gone:
Back then, I bought 12 cells, built six into those batteries, and left six charged cells sitting in a bag. After rebuilding the two worst batteries with those new-old-stock cells, it seems they maintained a substantial fraction of their charge while resting in the cool and the dark:
However, the camera would regard them as discharged, because it infers charge state from voltage. Squinting at the curves, their condition after a few minutes is roughly equal to a new & freshly charged battery produces over on the right when it’s nearly discharged.
The other curves show the result after their first charge in two years: basically, full capacity. The fact that both pairs of curves come pretty close to overlaying means they’re still well matched.
The third cell isn’t up to their spec, but it’s close enough to not bother rebuilding right now: 1.2 vs 1.4 A·h.
The Kapton tape pull tabs work wonderfully well, as the rebuilt batteries fit the compartment rather more snugly than the un-hacked cases.
Word got around quickly after I set up the bird feeder at the corner of the patio, one week before Mary’s Project Feederwatch data collection started up:
You can tell this chipmunk wasn’t at all bothered by my presence:
We call them fur birds, but they don’t count for Feederwatch:
A few days later, I put a casserole of fresh-cooked brown rice on a patio table to cool, only to have a raccoon drag it off. Of course, the Pyrex bowl shattered on the concrete: neither of us got much of the rice…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 