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: Recumbent Bicycling

Cruisin’ the streets

Newmowa NP-BX1: 2025 Batteries
A new sextet of NP-BX1 batteries for the Sony AS-30V helmet camera arrived:

Newmowa NP-BX1 – 2022 vs 2025

The traces:
- Blue = 2025 batteries
- Red = 2022 batteries when new
I don’t know what the bump in the middle of the new battery discharge curve means. Something weird in the chemistry, I suppose. Getting good batteries from Amazon surely remains a crapshoot and I now have four chargers.

Recharging all six batteries required 5488 mA·hr, just over 900 mA·hr apiece. Running the camera on a one-hour bike ride burns 600-ish mA·hr, so that’s comforting.

Comparing the new results with the 2022 batteries tested last month:

NP-BX1 – Newmowa 2022 in 2025-06

The upper traces appear in red in the first plot, the lower curves come from three years of use.

I’ll deploy the two best 2022 batteries (D and F) in the SJCAM M20 keeping watch from the Forester’s dashboard.
2025-07-08
Newmowa NP-BX1: Three Years Later

A pair of the 2022 batch of Newmowa NP-BX1 lithium batteries for the Sony AS-30V helmet camera no longer survive a typical hour-long bike ride:

NP-BX1 – Newmowa 2022 in 2025-06

The best four have a capacity down 14% from the good old days and the weakest pair are down 29%.

The camera uses 1.9 W, so a battery with 2.5 W·hr capacity should last 78 minutes, but about 400 mV of voltage depression causes the camera to give up before using its full capacity.

So they have a useful lifetime of maybe two years in our regular bike riding schedule and I should have bought replacements last year. I hope the next batch isn’t New Old Stock or recycled cells.

2025-06-26
Sandisk 64 GB High Endurance MicroSD Card: End of Life

After about 7.5 years (!) the 64 GB card in my Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera breathed its last:

SanDisk 64 GB MicroSD card – end of life

Over the course of several rides I noticed many video files ended prematurely or would not play. I gave up attempting to reformat the card in overwrite mode using the Official SD Card formatter after four hours, which says the wear leveler in the card has no spare capacity.

In round numbers, I ride 1700 miles a year at 12 mph, so the card recorded 1000 hours of 1920×1080 video at 60 frame/s, storing one 4.3 GB file every 22.75 minutes for a grand total of 12 TB of data.

Although that’s 188 times the capacity of the card, it rarely held more than an hour or two of data at any one time, because I copy the camera video files to a 3 TB USB hard drive after each ride. I don’t know how the exFAT file system interacts with the card’s wear leveling, but overall it’s much better than the non-high-endurance cards I’d been using way back when.

A new Sandisk 128 GB High Endurance card cost a third of what the 64 GB card did and, after setting the partition label to AS30V, it’s off to a good start:

Street Lamp Pole – Rombout House Ln – 2025-05-07

That’s the street lamp pole installed on the replaced base at the corner of Rt 376 and Rombout House Lane, with the barrels gradually being pushed closer and closer to the pole by turning traffic on the newly paved lane.

That pole is not going to see the end of this year.

Update: The barrels vanished this morning:

Street Lamp Pole – Rombout House Ln – 2025-05-08

Definitely the triumph of hope over experience.

2025-05-08
Tour Easy: Broken Seat Parts

So hardened socket head cap screws survive fifteen years of hard service on my Tour Easy’s seat stay:

Tour Easy – broken seat stay screw

I replaced both screws with stainless steel 1-½ 10-32 socket head screws, with a reshaped head on the drive side, and we’ll see how long these last.

A few days later the continuing creak led to finding a broken gear clamp on the left side of the seat back:

Tour Easy – replacement seat frame clamp

Apart from the atypical lack of grime, you couldn’t tell that’s the replacement clamp, because the broken one looked exactly the same way. The clamp strap broke where it bent around the bottom edge of the seat pan bracket, probably due to the flexing caused by the broken seat stay screw.

Riding season is in full effect!

2025-04-24
Cycling Shoe Sole Carving

As before, the sole & lugs on Mary’s new Specialized cycling shoes requires too much torque to release the cleat, so I once again carved off everything that got in the way:

Cycling shoe sole carving

A field test prompted a little more carving, but you get the general idea.

This surely affects the shoes’ lateral stability, but getting her feet out of the cleats when & where needed outweighs everything else.

2024-10-09
Royal Carting Truck: Squeeze Play

I’m riding downhill from Red Oaks Mill toward the bridge across the Wappinger Creek, pedaling a bit over 24 mph = 37 feet/sec, far enough into the lane to avoid trash along the curb on the right:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 078

Although you can barely see the vehicle passing on my left, I’ve just realized I am in one heap of trouble.

Half a second later (the frame number in the caption ticks along at 60 fps) I’m caught in the slipstream:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 108

Another half second and I’m leaning slightly to the right:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 138

Make that wobbling:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 158

Well, that’s a relief:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 178

The truck is now completely within our lane and I’m further to the right, so our paths really were converging:

Royal front 2024-09-13 – 208

Elapsed time: 2.2 seconds.

The view from the rear shows the driver started with reasonable clearance (these frames tick at 30 fps):

Royal rear 2024-09-13 – 090

A second later, the dumpster grabber is about even with my handlebars, corresponding to the first helmet camera picture:

Royal rear 2024-09-13 – 120

A third of a second later:

Royal rear 2024-09-13 – 130

The rear wheels passed much closer:

Royal rear 2024-09-13 – 180

In general, Royal’s drivers give us plenty of clearance.

In this case, I think he badly misjudged how fast I was moving and figured he would be well past by the time he had to be completely in the right lane to avoid vehicles in the left-turn lane on the bridge.

However, intent wouldn’t make me any less dead after a trip around those tires …

2024-09-18
Sting-Kill: Everyday Carry Tube

One of Mary’s gardening cronies suggested Sting-Kill might reduce her dramatic swelling [^1] after a bee / wasp / insect sting. Because it must be applied immediately after the sting, the swab must be on hand in the garden or on a bike ride, but the glass vial inside seem entirely too fragile to survive amid the usual clutter of a purse / pocketbook / belt pack / bike pack.

Well, I can fix that:

Pill tube – PETG default

It’s a KeyChain Pill Tube from Printables, enlarged 20% in the XY plane to fit the Sting-Kill swab, with the white applicator end fitting neatly into the domed screw-on lid for a bit of cushioning.

The solid model looks about like you’d expect:

Pill Tube – slicer preview

Despite that preview, I printed it with a brim. PETG sticks tenaciously to the Textured PEI steel sheet and a brim wasn’t really needed; just pop the parts off the platform when cool.

Somewhat to my astonishment, the threads screwed together easily, smoothed out after a few on-and-off cycles, and it’s ready for a moment we both hope will never occur.

[^1] Mary did tote an EpiPen back in the day, but a few near misses indicated she’s no longer quite as sensitized. She does swell up something powerful and we’re hoping immediately applying a Sting-Kill will help knock it down.

2024-09-02