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
Perhaps an acidic environment would be more to its taste?
Here’s another pill after a day in vinegar:
Time-release melatonin – 24h vinegar
In both cases, poking the somewhat dissolved pill separated it into gummy chunks, so it’s probably working as designed. I suppose the usual stomach churning would help.
This being a quack nostrum, there’s no way to tell what’s inside or how much you’re getting, but I didn’t expect to get way more B6 than you’d expect from the large print on the label. Lesson: always read the fine print, no matter how well it’s concealed.
0/10 – would not buy again.
As before, the results do not differ significantly from placebo, so this is a triumph of hope over experience.
A pleasant Friday morning ride with several stops:
KE4ZNU-9 – APRS Reception – 2016-09-09
KE4ZNU-10 handled the spots near Red Oaks Mill, along parts of Vassar Rd that aren’t hidden by that bluff, and along Rt 376 north of the airport.
The KB2ZE-4 iGate in the upper left corner caught most of the spots; it has a much better antenna in a much better location than the piddly mobile antenna in our attic.
Several of the spots along the southern edge of the trip went through the K2PUT-15 digipeater high atop Mt. Ninham near Carmel, with coverage of the entire NY-NJ-CT area.
The APRS-IS database filters out packets received by multiple iGates, so there’s only one entry per spot.
All in all, KE4ZNU-10 covers the southern part of our usual biking range pretty much the way I wanted.
Another Walkway Over the Hudson Moonwalk provided a good view of the Poughkeepsie waterfront:
City of Poughkeepsie Waterfront – night view
The railroad station’s parking garage produces the big mass of sodium light in the middle and (I think) the bleached church on the far left has mercury vapor floodlights.
The smaller spots of cold-white LED lighting scattered here-and-there will gradually expand and, in five years or so, take over the entire vista …
The bottom, of course, carried a heavier layer of crust:
Wagner cast iron skillet – before – bottom
The wet areas came from the usual after-breakfast washing.
Looking down into the electrolytic stripping bath, with bubbles forming on exposed metal areas around the crust on the bottom of the pan:
Wagner cast iron skillet – in stripping bath
After a day of electrolysis, all the crust was gone. Low labor, low danger, no fuss, not much muss.
Given three stripped pans, the seasoning process involved wiping them with flaxseed oil, baking at 500 °F for an hour, cooling for two hours, and repeating. Six iterations occupied a long day, uncomfortably warmed the kitchen during a long hot summer day, and turned out to be just fussy enough to fit around some short-attention-span projects.
Fast forward one day.
The outside of the seasoned pans looks lovely:
Wagner cast iron skillet – after – bottom
I’d have been hard-pressed to pick out the “Wagner Ware” before stripping the pan.
The inside of all three pans had a peculiar mottled appearance:
Wagner cast iron skillet – after – top
The medium pan:
Medium cast iron pan – after – top
The small pan:
Small cast iron pan – after – top
The dark spots might suggest I used too much oil and it puddled / collected / whatever while baking, except that I’d slathered the oil on using a scrap from a cotton towel (actually, many scraps, one per iteration), then wiped it off with more towel scraps before baking the pans.
Breakfast proceeded pretty much as usual and the giant omelet (5 eggs, lots of chopped chard, two finely chopped bacon rashers, cheddar cheese, plenty of oil, stuff like that) seemed to stick somewhat less than usual: it’s not a Teflon-coated pan, but worked pretty well.
I did the usual post-breakfast KP, which involves washing the pan with ordinary dish soap, scuffing the recalcitrant bits, and dropping the pan in the dish drainer. I don’t scour the pans, but I don’t treat them with fawning obeisance, either; they’re utensils, not sacred objects.
Just before lunch, this appeared:
Wagner cast iron skillet – washed – top
The bottom sported similar rust spots:
Wagner cast iron skillet – washed – bottom
So that suggests I didn’t apply enough oil. Or scrubbed too hard. Or did something utterly wrong.
Haven’t a clue about what happened. If I didn’t follow the seasoning process, I don’t know what I’d change. Ditto for washing up; it’s not like we haven’t been using the pan for decades.
After supper, I washed & dried the pan, slathered on a generous oil coating, and let it sit, all in the hope the oil eventually forms a good crusty layer.
By and large, the pan works better than it did before and the seasoning not nearly as well as I expected.
That container lives in the garage, where the air temperature pretty much tracks the weather.
When the air in the main compartment heats up, it pushes fluid up into the dispensing compartment. Although both caps were screwed on finger-tight, apparently the smaller cap leaks just enough that the pumped fluid can push the air out through the not-so-good seal.
Another few weeks and it’d be sitting in a puddle!
Having had the weaker of the two surviving STK batteries die 36 minutes into a ride, I tested them all:
Sony NP-BX1 – 1 A test – 2016-08-17
The X axis shows W·h, rather than the usual A·h, because that seems more useful in a world of constant-power supplies.
The test current is now 1 A, rather than the previous 500 mA, to more closely match the camera’s actual load. The CBA tester doesn’t have a constant-power mode; I think that doesn’t make much practical difference.
The orange curve (STK D) is the failed battery, ending after 1.4 W·h. At an average 3.2-ish V, that’s 26 minutes, which is close enough to the actual run time, given the different current.
The upper two curves come from the mostly unused Wasabi batteries (F and G), also from November. They have lost a bit of their capacity, but show the highest voltage out toward the end, so that’s good.
The black curve is the lightly used Sony OEM battery that came with the camera. Although it has about the same ultimate capacity as the other three “good” batteries, the voltage depression suggests it’ll trip out early.
The others are pretty much debris by now. I suppose they might be good for LED blinkies or some other low-voltage and low-current application, but …
So I’ll start using all four of the better batteries and see how the run times work out in actual use.
I stuck some old 12 V 7 A·h batteries in my homebrew power supply for the HP 3801A GPS Time / Frequency Standard, fired it up, put the antenna where it could see a good chunk of the sky, gave it a day to warm up / settle out, and it’s perfectly happy:
------------------------------- Receiver Status -------------------------------
SYNCHRONIZATION ............................................. [ Outputs Valid ]
SmartClock Mode ___________________________ Reference Outputs _______________
>> Locked to GPS TFOM 3 FFOM 0
Recovery 1PPS TI -38.3 ns relative to GPS
Holdover HOLD THR 1.000 us
Power-up Holdover Uncertainty ____________
Predict 366.2 us/initial 24 hrs
ACQUISITION ............................................ [ GPS 1PPS CLK Valid ]
Satellite Status __________________________ Time _____ +1 leap second pending
Tracking: 4 Not Tracking: 6 UTC 18:22:19 22 Jul 2016
PRN El Az SS PRN El Az 1PPS CLK Synchronized to UTC
3 34 104 48 * 1 36 48 ANT DLY 0 ns
17 62 308 103 6 27 220 Position ________________________
19 39 281 50 11 21 58 MODE Hold
28 80 133 64 *22 Acq .
24 12 319 LAT N 41:39:32.328
30 15 191 LON W 73:52:26.733
ELEV MASK 10 deg *attempting to track HGT +82.87 m (MSL)
HEALTH MONITOR ......................................................... [ OK ]
Self Test: OK Int Pwr: OK Oven Pwr: OK OCXO: OK EFC: OK GPS Rcv: OK
scpi >
The FFOM 0 entry says the Frequency Figure Of Merit is “within specifications” of 10-9, averaged over one day. That means the actual frequency should be within 0.010 Hz of 10 MHz.
Feeding the 10 MHz frequency reference into the (equally warmed up) HP 8591E spectrum analyzer and selecting an absurdly narrow span produces a comforting sight:
HP Z2801A GPS Receiver – 10 MHz ref – HP 8591E
Given the horizontal resolution, that’s dead on 10 MHz.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 