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
Right now, it’s a two-day-old cross-striped cabbageworm. Its kin are voracious consumers of Brassicacae out in the garden and Mary’s raising it as a show-n-tell exhibit for her Master Gardener compadres; she advised it to not start any long novels.
Each time it molts, it eats all of its skin except for the transparent cap over the first body segment:
Monarch Windshield – 2017-08-09
If the rest of the caterpillar were behind the windshield, it’d be feet-upward with its “face” at the top.
The picture comes from a focus-stacked set of microscope images captured with VLC; I turned the positioner’s elevation knob the smallest possible amount between each of 16 images along the 1 mm (-ish) height of the capsule. This magic incantation applies more weight to high-contrast and high-entropy regions:
align_image_stack -C -a monarch vlcsnap-2017-08-09-18h4*
enfuse --contrast-weight=0.8 --entropy-weight=0.8 -o Monarch_Windshield.jpg monarch00*
# empty line to reveal underscores in previous line
My pocket camera has begun kvetching about a low battery rather more often than before, which suggests the batteries I’ve been using since 2014 have gone beyond their best-used-by date.
This came as no surprise:
Canon NB-5L – 2017-08-05
I re-ran a couple of the batteries to make sure they hadn’t faded away from disuse, which didn’t materially change the results. The lightly used Canon OEM battery continues to lead the, ah, pack.
The camera’s lens capsule accumulated a fair bit of dust from many years in my pocket, which lowers its overall contrast and wrecks the high f/ images produced with the microscope adapter.
We watched a female Monarch Butterfly lay eggs on the stand of milkweed behind the house. She also found a lone plant in the vegetable garden that’s now standing in a vase on the kitchen table where we can keep an eye on the proceedings.
So far, so good:
Monarch Butterfly Egg on Milkweed Leaf – 2017-07-29
They look much better without a flash, honest. The cut-up cardboard box threw much needed shade; the auditorium has big incandescent can lights directly overhead.
Anyhow, what with one thing and another, the two LED test fixtures spent another few dark and cool days in the Basement Laboratory. When I finally plugged them in, the SK6812 RGBW LED array light up just fine, but three more WS2812 RGB LEDs went toes-up:
WS2812 LED test fixture – more failures
That brought the total to about 8 (one looks like it’s working) out of 28: call it a 28% failure rate. While WS2812 LEDs don’t offer much in the way of reliability, running them continuously seems to minimize the carnage.
So I wired around the new deaders and took that picture.
Flushed with success and anxious to get this over with, I sealed the tester in a plastic bag and tossed it in the freezer for a few hours …
Which promptly killed most of the remaining WS2812 chips, to the extent even a protracted session on the Squidwrench Operating Table couldn’t fix it. When I though I had all the deaders bypassed, an LED early in the string would wig out and flip the panel back to pinball panic mode.
It’s not a 100% failure rate, but close enough: they’re dead to me.
As the remaining WS2812 LEDs on the various vacuum tubes and bulbs go bad, I’m replacing them with SK6812 RGBW LEDs.
For whatever it’s worth, freezing the SK6812 tester had no effect: all 25 LEDs lit up perfectly and run fine. Maybe some of those chips will die in a few days, but, to date, they’ve been utterly reliable.
We found this critter keeping a watchful eye on the construction at Adams Fairacre Farms during our most recent grocery trip:
Mystery frilled lizard – detail
I think it’s an undocumented alien that entered the US stowed away in a tropical plant, because it was affixed to the array of ceramic pots outside their (open) greenhouse windows:
Mystery frilled lizard
To the best of my admittedly limited herpetological knowledge, none of our native lizards / geckos / whatever have such a distinctive dorsal frill / fin / ridge. I have no idea how to look the critter up, though.
We left it to seek its own destiny. Unless it’s a mated female (hard to tell with lizards), it’ll have a lonely life.
Perhaps it practices rishratha, which is entirely possible.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 