Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
NYSDOT seems oddly reluctant to perform routine brush clearing along Rt 376 from Red Oaks Mill to the Hamlet of New Hackensack, despite the obvious hazard presented by the bushes:
Rt 376 SB shoulder overgrowth – 2016-09
I’ve reported this situation several times over the years, but, as you’ve seen in othersituations, that has no effect.
If it were a pleasant back-country lane, rather than our main route to the Dutchess Rail Trail, perhaps having the greenery take over the shoulder wouldn’t matter quite so much:
Rt 376 SB – semitrailer
Turns out the shoulder just north of Maloney has developed lethal cracks as the pavement subsides into the adjoining section of the Mighty Wappinger Creek. A bit more clearance would still be nice.
We were in the Arlington Square exit, waiting to cross Rt 44 into Adams:
Rt 44 Plaza Exit – 2016-08-02 – 0
If we both line up on the traffic signal sensor loop, it seems to detect us; Mary’s on the right side of the loop, I’m rolling along the left side. This seems to be an old-school dipole loop, not a quadrupole.
Despite the fact that the mall entrance lane is to our left, across that substantial median strip and exactly where you’d expect it, a driver turned left from Rt 44 into the mall exit:
Rt 44 Plaza Exit – 2016-08-02 – 1
He obviously intended to use the lane we were occupying, because it’s the right-hand lane from his direction (where we were obviously not supposed to be), but veered away at the last moment:
Rt 44 Plaza Exit – 2016-08-02 – 2
Which was a good thing for all parties concerned, including the car approaching us in the proper lane:
Rt 44 Plaza Exit – 2016-08-02 – 3
Elapsed time: five seconds.
The driver then turned right, head-on against cars exiting from the parking lot and parallel-broadside with a pickup entering in the proper lane, and somehow didn’t collide with anybody or anything.
From where we sat, there was absolutely nothing we could do but watch death roll toward us.
APRS coverage of this part of the Mighty Wappinger Creek Valley isn’t very good, particularly for our bicycle radios (low power, crappy antennas, lousy positions), so I finally got around to setting up a receive-only APRS iGate in the attic.
The whole setup had that lashed-together look:
KE4ZNU-10 APRS iGate – hardware
It’s sitting on the bottom attic stair, at the lower end of a 10 °F/ft gradient, where the Pi 3’s onboard WiFi connects to the router in the basement without any trouble at all.
You must solder the TNC-Pi2 a millimeter or two above the feedthrough header to keep the component leads off the USB jacks. The kit includes a single, slightly too short, aluminum standoff that would be perfectly adequate, but I’m that guy: those are four 18 mm lengths of heatshrink tubing to stabilize the TNC, with the obligatory decorative Kapton tape.
The only misadventure during kit assembly came from a somewhat misshapen 100 nF ceramic cap:
Monolithic cap – 100 nF – QC failure
Oddly, it measured pretty close to the others in the kit package. I swapped in a 100 nF ceramic cap from my heap and continued the mission.
The threaded brass inserts stand in for tiny 4-40 nuts that I don’t have. The case has standoffs with small holes; I drilled-and-tapped 4-40 threads and it’ll be all good.
The radio, a craptastic Baofeng UV-5R, has a SMA-RP to UHF adapter screwed to the cable from a mobile 2 meter antenna on a random slab of sheet metal on the attic floor. It has Kenwood jack spacing, but, rather than conjure a custom plug, I got a clue and bought a pair of craptastic Baofeng speaker-mics for seven bucks delivered:
Baofeng speaker-mic wiring
For reference, the connections:
Baofeng speaker-mic cable – pins and colors
Unsoldering the speaker-mic head and replacing it with a DE-9 connector didn’t take long.
The radio sits in the charging cradle, which probably isn’t a good idea for the long term. The available Baofeng “battery eliminators” appear to be even more dangerously craptastic than the radios and speaker-mics; I should just gut the cheapest one and use the shell with a better power supply.
I initially installed Xastir on the Pi, but it’s really too heavyweight for a simple receive-only iGate. APRX omits the fancy map displays and runs perfectly well in a headless installation with a trivial setup configuration.
There are many descriptions of the fiddling required to convert the Pi 3’s serial port device names back to the Pi / Pi 2 “standard”. I did some of that, but in point of fact none’s required for the TNC-Pi2; use the device name /dev/serial0 and it’s all good:
<interface>
serial-device /dev/serial0 19200 8n1 KISS
callsign $mycall # callsign defaults to $mycall
tx-ok false # transmitter enable defaults to false
telem-to-is false # set to 'false' to disable
</interface>
Because the radio looks out over an RF desert, digipeating won’t be productive and I’ve disabled the PTT. All the received packets go to the Great APRS Database in the Cloud:
server noam.aprs2.net
An APRS reception heat map for the last few days in August:
KE4ZNU-10 Reception Map – 2016-08
The hot red square to the upper left reveals a peephole through the valley walls toward Mary’s Vassar Farms garden plot, where her bike spends a few hours every day. The other hotspots show where roads overlap the creek valley; the skinny purple region between the red endcaps covers the vacant land around the Dutchess County Airport. The scattered purple blocks come from those weird propagation effects that Just Happen; one of the local APRS gurus suggests reflections from airplane traffic far overhead.
An RPi 3 is way too much computer for an iGate: all four cores run at 0.00 load all day long. On the other paw, it’s $35 and It Just Works.
The camera runs at 60 frame/s, so the entire show spans a bit more than half a second: zzzzzip!
I think it’s a member of the Yellow Jacket wasp family, noted for their in-your-face attitude and repeat-fire stinger. They’re highly capable flying machines, that’s for sure…
We were pulling out of the local “health food” store with fresh-ground nut butters in the packs, nearing the end of a 17 mile loop on a fine Sunday morning.
I generally ride somewhat further into the travel lane than some folks would prefer, but I have good reason for that. Here’s how bicycling along Raymond Avenue at 14 mph = 20 ft/s on a pleasant summer morning works out…
T = 0.000 — Notice anything out of the ordinary?
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0018
T = 1.000 — Me, neither:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0078
T = 1.500 — Ah!
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0108
T = 2.000 — I’m flinching into the right turn required for a sharp left turn:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0138
Less than half a second reaction time: pretty good, sez me.
T = 2.833 — End of the flinch:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0183
T = 3.000 — Now I can lean and turn left:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0198
T = 3.267 — This better be far enough left:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0214
T = 3.333 — The door isn’t moving:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0218
T = 3.567 — So I’ll live to ride another day:
Raymond Ave – Door Near Miss – 2016-08-03 – 0232
I carry a spectacular scar from slashing my arm on a frameless car window, back in my college days: the driver flipped the door open as I passed his gas cap at a good clip. The collision wrecked the window, the door, and my bike, but didn’t break my arm, sever any nerves, or cut any arteries. I did discover human fatty tissue, neatly scooped from under my arm onto the window, is yellowish, which wasn’t something I needed to know.
Searching for Raymond Avenue will bring up other examples of bicycle-hostile features along this stretch of NYSDOT’s trendy, traffic-calmed design…
NYSDOT re-striped Rt 376 using paint with sprayed-on glass beads, rather than plastic strips, which produces lovely rainbows when the sun comes from directly behind. Alas, my helmet camera can’t resolve faint colors against the background glare and doesn’t show the circular reflection cutoff:
Glass Bead Retroreflection – 2016-07-20
However, the scattered beads light up the pavement’s cracks and crevices.
Four days later, the drifts of beads have dissipated to leave bright reflections anywhere the tires don’t reach:
Glass Bead Retroreflection – 0219
That’s along the big traffic circle at the Raymond / Collegeview / Forbus intersection.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 