Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Category: Science
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
Another year of being the Domain Expert of scam-by-mail gadgets, obsolete ABS codes, and water heater anode rods:
Blog Page View Summary – 2019
Plotting the log of page views against posts in descending order of popularity gives a power-law relationship of some sort:
Blog Page View Graph – 2019
The log-log view has odd discontinuities:
Blog Page View Graph – 2019 – log-log
Overall page views are down 30% from last year: 205k vs 290k.
WordPress served 1 million ads (vs 1.2 million in 2018) on those 205k page views, nearly five ads per page view, which seems horrifying. If you’re not using an ad blocker, you surely have difficulty finding the blog post amid all the crap.
The implosion of on-line advertising continues apace, however, as WordPress paid only 63% as much per ad: $0.40 (vs $0.70 in 2018) per thousand views. Obviously, ads on WordPress blogs aren’t worth much these days.
While I could pay WordPress their upgrade ransom to eliminate the ads, it’s better if you defend yourself by eliminating all ads, wherever they may be.
After a day of snow + sleet + ice, followed by overnight cooling, the bird feeder looked like this:
2019-12-19 – Ice on bird feeder – Day 0
The ice generally doesn’t bond across the top, so the sheets slide off separately to the front and back. This time, they stayed together and began sliding off to the side.
The next two days were unusually cold and the glacier stopped sliding:
2019-12-21 – Ice on bird feeder – Day 2
The temperature warmed enough during the day to let the glacier resume sliding, whereupon it fell and shattered on the patio.
No birds or squirrels were injured during this incident.
Mary made a batch of veggies in tomato sauce and froze meal-size portions as winter treats. The moist air inside the containers froze into delicate ice blades on the zucchini slices:
Veggie ice crystals – overview
A closer look:
Veggie ice crystals – detail
The blade cross-sections might be oblong hexagons, but it’s hard to tell with crystals melting almost instantly after the lid comes off. Some of the smaller hair-like blades reminded me of tin whiskers.
Recharge and test to get the blue lines, with the red lines from the DOT-01 batteries:
Wasabi DOT-01 NP-BX1 – 2019-11
The double blue line came from a second recharge of that battery, just to see if more electrons would help. Nope, it’s still dead.
The Wasabi battery with the highest capacity also has the weirdly rippled voltage trace and, when I extracted it from the test holder, came out disturbingly warm and all swoll up. This is A Bad Sign™, so it spent the next few hours chillin’ on the patio and now resides in the recycle box.
The trend is definitely not uniformly downward, perhaps due to my increasing ability to accelerate (small) masses against the local gravity vector and, definitely, garden harvest season. My pants still fit fine, if that’s any indication.
I’ll add a skin-fold caliper dot to the weekly record after I can get repeatable measurements, perhaps by marking the test spot with a Sharpie.
I got an Alead / Nolan HearLinks (many adjectives) Telecoil receiver to boost my ability to hear music & presentations at Vassar, because they recently slotted telecoil loops into the floors of their public venues. It took a few concerts to get the appropriate volume setting, after which I wondered how sensitive the receiver was:
Alead T-coil receiver – test setup
The small T in the upper right corner marks the receiving coil location, with the coil oriented parallel to the body’s long axis. It’s the secondary winding of an air-core transformer with a single-turn (perhaps using Litz wire) primary embedded in the floor, with the induced voltage obeying the usual transformer equation:
For a given installation and receiver position, pretty much everything is fixed, with the voltage depending only on the H field caused by the primary winding current.
The induced voltage is linearly dependent on the frequency, but the transmitter equalization filters apparently flatten the spectrum to get equal receiver amplitude between about 100 Hz and 5 kHz.
The coil in that picture has nine turns, with four passing through the Tek current probe. Applying 10 mVpp to the winding produces a corresponding current:
JDS6600 10mVpp 1 kHz – 4 turns – 1 mA-div
The scope sees 14 mVpp = 1.4 div at 1 mA/div = 1.4 mA. Dividing by 4 turns means the coil actually carries 350 µA. The signal generator has a 50 Ω output impedance, so 10 mV should produce about 200 µA, which seems a bit low. On the other paw, the signal generator sees the coil as a dead short at 1 kHz, so I don’t trust the numbers.
Whatever magnetic flux it may be produces a 1 kHz tone at a somewhat higher volume (for the same receiver setting) than the fancy Vassar loops, so the flux is in the right ballpark. With a bit more attention to detail, perhaps I can tinker up a current-mode loop drive amplifier.
The Alead receiver has an internally generated tick audible at the audio volume I need for the Vassar loops, which is 5 to 7 steps down from the maximum volume at 15 steps. It seems related to the internal Bluetooth hardware, although it’s present even when the receiver is not paired with my Pixel phone and, in fact, is unchanged even when 100 feet from the nearest electronic device.
When I reported the problem, they said:
Yes, you can hear very minor tick sound on telecoil mode. It is caused by some electronic and current to make those tick sound. Sorry for this defective on the design.
It had one job that it doesn’t do well, so it’s on the way back for a refund.
Evidently, I must build an audio loop receiver to get what I want …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 