Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Janet Drive is across Rt 44 from the patch palimpsest I’ve already described. It serves as an entrance to two strip malls and the Canterbury Gardens apartment complex and, oddly enough, turns out to be a private road owned by Canterbury.
A huge pothole is consuming the pavement in front of the mall entrance behind the Rhinebeck Bank branch:
Janet Dr at 708 Dutchess Turnpike entrance – 2015-07-12
The light gray patches mark smaller potholes filled with what appears to be Sackrete:
Janet Dr at 708 Dutchess Turnpike – patches – 2015-07-12
The potholes made turning from Rt 44 onto Janet a bit of a challenge, particularly with drivers trying to pass on the left during the turn. We now signal for and take the entire lane from Rt 44 to the mall entrance, although impatient drivers still roar around us, directly into oncoming traffic.
Because Janet is a private drive, it doesn’t quite qualify for the Tax Dollars Asleep tag, but it gives you the general idea. The road is not signed “Private Drive” and, at least in that section, is obviously used by the general public, so it’s not at all clear what repair standards apply.
Adapted from an email to NYSDOT (hvtmc@dot.state.ny.us):
The minimum green and yellow times on the signals from Burnett Blvd to Rt 55 are too short for bicycle traffic making a left turn across six traffic lanes.
The pictures show key points from our ride on 2015-07-10, returning from the Balloon Festival in Poughkeepsie. We took the DCRT around Poughkeepsie, went through Arlington to Rt 376 at Collegeview, then took Rt 376 Red Oaks Mill.
The image sequence numbers identify frames extracted from video files. The front camera (a Sony HDR-AS30V) runs at 60 fps and the rear camera (a Cycliq Fly6) at 30 fps, so you can directly calculate the time between frames. The Fly6 timestamp is one hour ahead, for reasons I don’t quite understand.
The red signals are turning off and the greens haven’t lit up yet:
Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 0196
One second later, the car and our bikes are starting to roll:
The yellow signals begin turning on seven seconds after the green:
Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 0633
The car has reached the pedestrian ladder across Rt 55, but we’re still crossing the westbound lanes of traffic. Note that I’m lined up with the lane closest to our starting point on Burnett: this is a big intersection. We may not be the fastest riders on the road, but we’re not the slowest, either.
We’ve reached the far side of the intersection just under 16 seconds from the green:
Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 1142
However, the opposing signals turned green while we’re still crossing the eastbound lanes of Rt 55, 15 seconds after the Burnett Blvd signals went green:
Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Rear 0408
About 2.7 seconds later, cars have been accelerating across the intersection toward us as we reach the pedestrian ladder:
Setting the minimum Burnett green to 12 seconds, the minimum yellow to 10 seconds, and the minimum delay from Burnett green to Rt 55 green to 30 seconds would help cyclists (just barely) reach the far side of the intersection before opposing traffic starts rolling.
As a bonus, adjusting the sensor amplifiers on Burnett to respond to bicycles and marking the coil locations on the pavement in both lanes would help us through the intersection during low-traffic-volume times, as our bikes seem unable to trip the signals.
We take the Wappingers section of Maloney Road from Rt 376 to the Dutchess Rail Trail; it’s our main connection to the DCRT for southbound rides.
Here’s a look at 1500 feet of Maloney, starting just uphill from the entrance to the strip mall (click on any image to embiggen and browse the gallery):
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 1
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 2
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 3
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 4
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 5
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 6
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 7
Maloney Rd 2015-07-18 – 8
Many of those longitudinal cracks go down through multiple patch layers and through the original pavement. Rolling your wheel through them would produce an instant upset.
Most drivers give us as much room as they can, but we’ve had some very near misses. Some drivers object loudly to our presence in the middle of the lane, probably because we’re pedaling slowly up the hill, although there’s really no safe path along the right side of the roadway.
The downhill side seems slightly better, but not by very much.
Verily, ImageMagick can do nearly anything you want to an image, as long as you know how to ask for it:
for f in *png ; do convert $f -density 300 -define jpeg:extent=200KB ${f%%.*}.jpg ; done
That converts a directory full of VLC’s video snapshot images from PNG format, which require nigh onto 4 MB each, into correspondingly named JPG files under 200 kB. The image quality may not be the greatest, but it’s good enough to document road hazards in emails.
Rt 376 2015-07-06 – Walker to Maloney – 3
The density option overrides VLC’s default 72 dpi, which doesn’t matter until a program attempts to show the image at “actual size”.
I didn’t realize that the define option existed, but it seems to be how you jam specific controls into the various image coders & decoders. Some of the “artifacts”, well, I can’t even pronounce…
VLC’s snapshot file names look like vlcsnap-2015-07-06-12h10m27s10.png, so bulk renaming and resequencing will be in order.
The Sony HDR-AS30V camera takes surprisingly good pictures in low light conditions, at least if you’re not too fussy about details like license plates…
At dusk, on our way to the City of Poughkeepsie’s Independence Day fireworks show:
Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 0
Returning in full dark:
Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 1
A light fog set in as we got out of the city:
Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 2
The Cycliq Fly6 faces a major challenge from in-its-face headlights, even with some background streetlighting:
Night Ride 2015-07-04 – Fly6 – 1
In full dark, it’s enough for mood-setting:
Night Ride 2015-07-04 – Fly6 – 2
That ride marks the annual exception to our general Don’t Bike After Dark rule. We set our blinky taillights to the legally required steady mode, although I think a low-power blink mode would be more conspicuous. Perhaps an occulting light (constant bright with dim pulses) would be better, but I’m not sure that’s legal.
A roadie on a fancy bike, riding dark without lights and reflectors, passed us. Watching him dodge a car that entered an intersection without seeing him once again demonstrated that cyclists are, in general, their own worst enemy.
At this instant, neither of us realized the other was present:
Starling-0145
Despite what it looks like, the blackbird (maybe a starling) passed just beyond arm’s reach directly ahead of the bike at eye level:
Starling-0167
And away!
Starling-0173
At 60 frames per second, that’s 466 ms of elapsed time.
Stepping through the video, frame by frame, the bird’s wings flap at a consistent three frames per stroke = 50 ms/stroke = 20 stroke/s = 1200 stroke/min. A bit of rummaging produces a study suggesting a starling’s normal rate is 10 stroke/s, so the critter had the throttles firewalled at war emergency power.
It makes my pedal pushing seem downright inconsequential…
After about 1 TB of data spread over three months and maybe 100 bike rides, the second Sony SR-64UY 64 GB MicroSDXC card I bought last summer has failed… barely two weeks inside the one year warranty.
As with the first card, this one works fine except for the speed: it cannot record at 1920x1080p @ 60 fps. The only indication comes from aiming another camera at the display to capture the failure as it happens.
Just before the failure:
HDR-AS30V – MicroSDXC failure – 1
It’s taking stock of the situation:
HDR-AS30V – MicroSDXC failure – 2
Presumably, it’s patching up the abruptly terminated file:
HDR-AS30V – MicroSDXC failure – 3
Another box is on its way to Sony Media Services…
Over the last year, the price of an almost certainly genuine Sony SR-64UY Class 10 UHS-1 MicroSDXC card has dropped by 2.2 dB: $40 to $24. Now, however, the SR-64UY is the “old model”, so you can pay $30 (-1.3 dB) for an SR-64UY2 rated at 70 MB/s transfer speed (up from 40 MB/s), albeit with no change in the card’s speed class.
Huh.
Both cards failed after writing 1 TB of data (give or take maybe 20%) in 4 GB chunks over the course of 100 recording sessions. The cards still work, in the sense that they can store and accurately retrieve data, just not at the Class 4 (not Class 10) speed rating required by the HDR-AS30V at 1920x1080p @ 60 fps.
The table in the Wikipedia Secure Digital article says Class 4 = 4 MB/s, which is slightly faster than the camera produces 4 GB files in 22:43 min:sec = 3 MB/s. A Class 10 card should write at a sustained 10 MB/s, so the SR-64UY write speed has dropped by at least a factor of 3 from the spec. I’d expect the root problem to be the error correction / block remapping / spare pool handling time has grown as the number of failed blocks eats into the card’s overcapacity, but I have no inside information.
When the replacements slow down, I’ll see how they work as Raspberry Pi memory…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 