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.
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
Dump into a stick blender cup:
Blend thoroughly. Slurp.
Notes:
AFAICT, this is the only way to make an avocado palatable.
There is absolutely no connection with yesterday’s post.
Perhaps because we’re using better quality earbuds, the Baofeng UV-5 radios on our bikes produce extremely loud audio, even with the volume knob just above its power-on click. Reducing the volume requires a series resistor downstream of the diodes clipping the pops:
The color codes come from previous work.
Because we have different earbuds and different hearing, my radio has a 140 Ω resistor and Mary’s has a 430 Ω resistor. Getting the right value requires a few iterations of on-road testing, but it’s not particularly critical; the volume knob should end up roughly in the middle of its range.
For now, all the “circuitry” lives among layers of Kapton tape:
Speaking of volume knobs, Baofeng radios have large flat-top cylindrical knobs (unlike Wouxun’s fluted knobs), so I added a pointed snippet of reflective tape to make the position visible:
The flash lights it up, but there’s enough backlighting behind your (well, my) head to make it easily visible under normal conditions. Once you figure out the proper volume, it’s easy to set the pointer in that direction before every ride.
To the road!
Our first ride with the Baofeng UV-5 radios subjected us to loud pops around each transmission. Back on the bench, this is the signal applied to the earbud during a no-audio simplex kerchunk:
The small noise burst to the right of the center, just before the downward pulse, happens after the carrier drops and before the squelch closes; it’s familiar to all HT users.
The huge pulses, upward at the start and downward at the end, cause the pops. They’re nearly 3 V tall, compared with the 300-ish mV squelch noise, and absolutely deafening through an earbud jammed in my ear. Mary refused to listen, so we finished the first ride in companionable silence.
I think the radio switches the audio amp power supply on and off to reduce battery drain. It’s obviously a single-supply design, so we’re looking at a hefty DC blocking capacitor charging and discharging through the earbud resistance. I suppose that’s to be expected in a $25 radio.
The obvious solution: clamp the audio signal to something reasonable, perhaps with a pair of nose-to-tail Schottky diodes across the earbud. Rather than using axial diodes, along the lines of the 1N5819 diodes in the WWVB preamp, I used a BAT54S dual SMD diode as a tiny clamp:
No pix of the final result, but it’s basically two wires soldered alongside the SMD package, surrounded by a snippet of heatstink tubing to stabilize the wires and protect the SMD leads. It might actually survive for a while, even without the obligatory epoxy blob.
The BAT54S clamps the pops to 200-ish mV, as you’d expect:
That’s a kerchunk at twice the vertical scale. The very thin spike at the start of each pop isn’t audible, as nearly as we can tell, and I’ve cranked up the audio gain to make the squelch noise more prominent. Your ears will determine your knob setting.
With the audio amp applying 3 V to the diodes at the start of each pop, you’re looking at an absurdly high pulse current. I’m sure the radio exceeds the BAT54 datasheet’s 600 mA surge current limit by a considerable margin, but I’m hoping the short duration compensates for some serious silicon abuse.
Tamping those pops down made the radios listenable.
I’ve often observed that Baofeng radios are the worst HTs you’d be willing to use.
My venerable amateur radio HT APRS-voice interfaces have recently begun failing and, given poor APRS coverage in Poughkeepsie due to having two iGates shut down (due to the aging radio geek population), I decided it’s time to simplify the radio interface. Given that HTs are designed to run with an external electret mic and earbud, the “interface” becomes basically some wires between the radio’s jacks, a repurposed USB plug on the bike helmet, and the PTT switch on the handlebar.
I expected to add a resistive attenuator to the earbud, but it wasn’t clear whether the mic would need an amplifier similar to the one in the APRS interface, so I decided to start as simply as possible.
The general idea is to anchor all the cables to a plate on the back of the radio, interconnect as needed, then “protect” everything with tape. The pocket clip has M2.5 screws on 26 mm (not 25.4, honest) centers, so that’s how it started:
The four holes beside the tabs will serve as starting points for rectangular notches holding cable ties lashing the wires to the plate:
Like this:
That’s hot and nasty, straight from the bandsaw.
After some edge cleanup, add obligatory Kapton tape to insulate stray wires from the aluminum:
The alert reader will note beveled corners on one plate and square corners on the other; think “continuous product improvement”.
The big rectangular gap in the middle of the plate provides (barely enough) finger clearance to push the battery release latch.
Now, to wire it up …
The dimensions of the recess surrounding the jacks on the Baofeng UV-5, just to have them around:
Which came from measurements of both the Wouxun and Baofeng radios:
Long ago, I put Shimano PD-M324 pedals on Mary’s Tour Easy, because she prefers a pedal with a platform on one side and SPD cleats on the other.
Those are newish-old-stock from the Big Box o’ Bike Parts, as she’s worn out the previous pedals.
She recently got a pair of Specialized MTB shoes:
The shoes work fine with the more-or-less standard Shimano PD-M520 double-entry SPD pedals on my bike:
But the soles jammed against the frame on the PD-M324 pedals.
So I carved away enough rubber around the cleat sockets for clearance to float properly with the cleats latched. A bit of trial-and-error, probably with a bit more to come after on-the-road experience, but definitely a step in the right direction.
Protip: always always always arrange the workpiece so the blade trajectory cannot intersect any part of your body, no matter what slips occur.
These herringbone gears were part of updating my old Thing-O-Matic:
But, as the saying goes, that’s not a herringbone gear. This is a herringbone gear:
We always read the signage:
They’re parked in front of the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, PA.
The front rim on my Tour Easy developed a distinct bulge, of the sort usually caused by ramming something, but I’m not Danny McAskell and the bulge got worse over the course of a few weeks, suggesting the rim was deforming under tire pressure. Having ridden it upwards of 35 k miles with plenty of trailer towing and too much crushed-stone trail riding, the brake tracks were badly worn and it’s time for a new rim.
An Amazon seller had an identical (!) rim, except for the minor difference of having a hole sized for a Schraeder valve stem, rather than the Presta valves on the original rims. One can buy adapters / grommets, but what’s the fun in that?
The brake track walls are 1.5 mm thick on the new rim and a scant 1.0 mm on the old rim, so, yeah, it’s worn.
A few measurements to get started (and for future reference):
If you don’t have an A drill, a 15/64 inch drill is only half a mil larger and, sheesh, anything close will be fine.
Introduce a suitable brass rod to Mr Lathe:
Break all the edges and drop it in place:
One could argue for swaging the adapter to fit flush against the curved rim, but commercial adapters don’t bother with such refinements and neither shall I.
The 7.0 mm length got shortened to fit flush with the center of the rim:
It’s brass, because the rim is heaviest on the far side where the steel pins splicing the ends live, and, with the tube & tire installed, the rim came out almost perfectly balanced. Which makes essentially no difference whatsoever, of course.
The shiny new rim sports shiny new reflector tape (from the same stockpile, of course).
That was easy …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 