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.
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
Although the oven igniter I just installed worked, its 3.0 A current fell below the gas valve’s minimum 3.3 A, which, based on past experience, suggested it would fail in short order. Just to see what happened, I sent a note to the seller, who offered a warranty swap and, after a bit of fiddling, the replacement arrived:
This one draws exactly 3.3 A, so it just barely meets both its product description and the gas valve’s minimum current.
We’ll see how long this lasts …
Mary brought this back from the garden after it fell over while she was working in that plot:
Another one returned a few days later in somewhat better shape:
We already knew lower-case letters were a bad idea and now we know a thin slab of untreated wood might survive two months when jammed into the ground.
Nothing unexpected, of course.
At least the lasering technique should come in handy for something else used in more salubrious conditions.
I put the camera in the front yard to monitor a new groundhog hole, then mowed the lawn. Although smoke drifting in from the Canadian fires has posed a problem, the air quality wasn’t this bad:
It turns out the camera’s case seal isn’t quite up to the task:
The lip around the front half of the case presses against a rubber gasket around the rear half, which means the water on the electronics chassis is inside the camera case:
Fortunately, the water condensed on the inside of the glass lens protector, rather than on the camera itself:
I let the whole thing dry out on the bench for a few days and all seems right again.
The leak does make me think leaving it out in the rain is a Bad Idea™, which isn’t the sort of thought one should have about a trail camera.
Diurnal pumping can explain many electronic failures. For the record, the monitoring station on the Walkway Over the Hudson vanished a while ago, probably due to rampant electronic corrosion.
An unfortunate confluence of weather, schedule, and enthusiasm led to mowing all the yard in one session:
I managed to remember to pause the tracker during a break in the middle, so it’s really just shy of three wall-clock hours from start to finish. It’s amazing how much work you (well, I) can get out of 100 mg of caffeine.
Despite what you see here, the path on what’s euphemistically called “our lawn” show a much more organized solution to the problem of covering our property with non-overlapping foot-and-a-half stripes. As with my leaf-shredding track, I neither venture into the road nor mow the neighboring yards.
Bonus: slept like a stone that night …
Spotted in a soon-to-be-rebuilt rest area on I-87 north of Kingston NY, a chandelier stuffed with old-school CFL bulbs of various vintages:
The yellowish dome on the far right might still house an incandescent bulb, but I can’t tell from here.
Judging from the high color temperature and even illumination, the chandelier next to it has 16 newish LED bulbs:
What’s of interest: both chandeliers have two dead bulbs and, perhaps, the center floodlight of the LED fixture had died, too. We don’t know how long they’ve been in place, other than that the LEDs are certainly more recent, but a 6% failure rate is nothing to brag about.
From what I’ve seen, the reliability of both CFL and LED bulbs is greatly overstated and certainly do not justify preemptive replacement of a working bulb of any vintage.
Spotted outside a second-floor window:
Each air conditioning unit has a pair of lightning rods atop it, with their aluminum grounding cables securely clamped to the steel frame underneath.
The rod reclining on its side caught my eye. Perhaps its fat cable wasn’t relaxed enough during installation, although I thought those wide bases would be firmly screwed to the unit’s steel top. Of course, that could be the only one without screws.
The building extends another three stories upward from that roof, but our experience suggests lightning strikes where it will.
The trail camera uses two parallel banks of four series AA cells to get enough oomph for its IR floodlight. I’m not convinced using bucked lithium AA cells in that configuration is a Good Idea, but it’s worth investigating.
These are labeled HW, rather than Fuvaly, because it seems one cannot swim twice in the same river:
In any event, they come close to their claimed 2.8 W·hr capacity:
The lower pair of traces (red & black) are single cells at 2.7-ish W·hr, the blue trace is a pair at 5.4 W·hr, and the green trace is a quartet at 9.8 W·hr. Surprisingly close, given some previous results in this field.
Recharging the cells after those tests shows they all take 3 hours ± a few minutes to soak up 730 mA·hr ± a few mA·hr, so they’re decently matched.
Measuring the terminal voltage with a 10 mA load after that charge lets me match a pair of quartets to 1 mV, which is obviously absurd:
The numbers in the upper left corner show the initial charge of four cells at a time required the same time within a minute and the same energy within 4%.
Sticking them in the trail camera must await using up the current set of alkaline AA cells.
Bonus: a lithium fire in a trail camera won’t burn down the house.
After all, pictures like this are definitely worth the hassle:
Looks like a pair of WiFi antennas …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 