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.

Tag: Improvements

Making the world a better place, one piece at a time

Tour Easy: Anker 20K V2 USB Power Bank

After five years, it’s time to replace the Anker 13000 mA·hr USB power banks / chargers I used with the M20 cameras and then the C100 cameras:

SJCAM M20 Mount – Tour Easy side view

The Anker 325 20K V2 power bank is considerably chunkier, as befits its 20,000 mA·hr cell capacity (although the fine print says 12,500 mA·hr output):

Anker 20K V2 Power Bank – installed

The white tape stripe on the top marks the USB port on the end to reduce the fumbling involved in an out-of-sight socket. There’s also a USB-C port on that end for both charging the pack and powering other devices.

The new mounting cradle descends directly from the 13000 cradle:

Anker 325 20KV2 Power Bank – slicer preview

The model includes a projection of the battery on the XY plane for export to an SVG file suitable for laser-cutting an EVA foam pad to cushion the bumps.

The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:

2024-08-05
Rail Trail Brush Clearing

Having an aversion to getting slapped in the face by Blackthorn branches overhanging the Dutchess Rail Trail, I generally give up waiting for anybody else to do the job:

Brush clearing B – 2024-07-14

They’re not all Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa), but Ailanthus altissima grows like a weed around here and requires heavy cutback:

Brush clearing C – 2024-07-14

It’s not just small branches:

Brush clearing A – 2024-07-14

Apparently, there was no law against that …

Brush clearing E – 2024-07-14

A recent storm dropped many trees across the trail and the maintenance folks deploy bigger saws than I can carry:

Brush clearing D – 2024-07-14

Three months after we were told they had ordered replacement tiles, I’m beginning to think I must buy some on Amazon and do this job myself, too:

Overocker ADA – continued disintegration – 2024-07-21

Maybe it’ll get done when the weather cools …

2024-07-30
Laser Test Paper Beam Alignment Targets

Having failed at making flexible plant tags, I figured using laser test paper to make laser test targets might work:

Test paper – target patterns – 2024-07-03

They descend from my original dot-mode laser beam targets:

OMTech 60W laser – beam alignment – 2022-03-22

The dots just barely punch through the back side (open in a new tab & zoom for more dots):

Test paper – target patterns back side- 2024-07-03

The plastic coating chars and buckles with each pulse, but remains in place:

Test paper – 2 shot – uncleaned – 2024-07-03

Wiping the surface removes the loose coating / ash / debris to expose the underlying charred paper core:

Test paper – 2 shot – wiped – 2024-07-03

Those are two pulses marking the ends of each axis, so the machine remains well aligned after the fourth-quarter tweak.

A single pulse shows the beam has a nice round shape with well-defined edges:

Test paper – 1 shot – wiped – 2024-07-03

In principle, the beam should be more intense toward the middle, but I suspect that’s beyond the paper’s ability to resolve the energy; the beam either burns through the coating or it doesn’t. In all those targets, the back surface of the paper remains undamaged.

Manila paper targets seem to have better energy resolution and take much less time to produce:

Beam Alignment – Mirror 2 detail – 2023-09-16

The black test paper will certainly come in handy for something, though.

2024-07-17
Door Knob Lock Orientation

For the usual historic reasons, the exterior doors on our house all have different knobs with different lock orientations (and keys), so it’s difficult (for me, anyway) to verify they’re locked with just a glance. The correct solution of replacing all the knobs seems like a great deal of effort & expense for very little benefit.

This is easier, albeit considerably less stylish:

Doorknob 1

When the twisty thing aligns with the label, it’s locked:

Doorknob 3

No matter what orientation it has:

Doorknob 2

The scars in the paint show some of those doors have sported many knobs over the last half century or so.

You’d think such a thing could be standardized, but nope.

If we lived in a fancier house, I probably couldn’t get away with it.

2024-07-11
Clothes Washer Hose Bumpers

For obvious reasons, the water hoses tend to thump against the wall and the sheet-metal back of the clothes washer, so I added foam disks to mute the noise:

Clothes washer hose bumpers

They’re closed-cell polyethylene foam, laser-cut from a sheet about 15 mm thick. The cut is a yawning 2 mm wide near the top, but it pretty much doesn’t matter in this application.

The black line in the split is a snippet of the usual outdoor-rated foam tape, which probably won’t stick well to PE foam. If these fall apart, a cable tie around their waist should suffice.

The nice clip in the foreground is one of two intended to corral the drain hose. It’d be nice if LG included a few clips for the water hoses, but no matter where they were, the hoses would want to go elsewhere.

2024-07-10
Acrylic Grid Bathtub Soap Tray

Although the house has a shower stall, I want to fix the cracks in its floor before we use it, so we’ve been taking showers in one of the bathtubs. As is always the case, the soap tray / grab handle is positioned for someone reclining in the tub, making it both too low and too awkward for either of us.

Normally, I’d just stick a soap tray on the wall and be done with it, but the tub wall is covered with small tiles that defeat sticky cups; more permanent adhesives are not under discussion.

So I dropped a TrayInsert grid into a NotesHolder box, stuck them to the existing fixture with snippets of (regrettably black) outdoor-rated foam tape, and there it is:

Acrylic grid bathtub soap tray

You’ll surely not have 3.2 mm acrylic for the grid and 2.5 mm acrylic for the box, but those two linkies have the jawbreaker URLs required to regenerate exactly what I built using the incomparable boxes.py site and you can tweak them as needed.

The general concept had it stick out a bit from the fixture handle to let soap gunk drip into the tub, not down the wall, and to have an easily removable grid for cleaning. I doodled all manner of clever hooks to engage the ceramic handle before coming to my senses; this is a prototype, it may not solve the problem very well at all, so let’s find out if it works before making it better.

The WordPress AI urges me to remind you of the safety issues surrounding DIY projects. IMO, should you need such reminders, they won’t do you any good and you must immediately stop reading this blog.

Fair enough?

2024-07-09
Samsung Microwave Light Improvements

After replacing the gas / humidity sensor in the Samsung microwave, replacing the pair of 40 W (!) halogen bulbs with G8 LED bulbs didn’t pose much of a challenge:

Samsung microwave light – LED-ified reflectorized

Those are not the best bulbs for the application, as they’re allegedly equivalent to 20-25 W halogens, but I had some on hand from a previous relamping project and they seemed promising.

G8 halogens have a flattened section just above the pins that these G8 LED bulbs lack:

G8 halogen vs LED bulb – front view

It’s more obvious from the side:

G8 halogen vs LED bulb – side view

The curvature of the soft silicone LED body magnifies the components to look like they fill all the available space, but a little deft X-acto knife work flensed the body down to fit the microwave’s ceramic socket without exposing any of the electrical innards.

Because the LEDs dissipate only 3 W and barely get warm, I replaced the original translucent glass diffuser panels with (yes, laser-cut) clear 3 mm acrylic, then tucked a strip of aluminized mylar above the bulb to bounce some of the light from the upper chips down where it would do more good. I think it’s possible to melt the acrylic with a stovetop mishap, but we don’t make those kinds of recipes.

They’re not daylight shining on the stove, but they’re much brighter than the halogens at maybe 10% of the power.

2024-07-08