Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
This conversation started during the few hours when I had to turn off my phone’s incoming-call whitelist filter:
Cash Home Sale SMS
Seems to me a cash-for-house buyer who believes anything the seller says about the property is both new to the “real estate” biz and not destined for a long career. Obviously, the whole exchange attempts to increase my engagement and make me agree with everything going on.
Now, should you happen to be moving to the Mid-Hudson Valley and need a really nice shop with an attached house, let me know: we can work out a better deal.
Protip: if you’re in a position to stack seven thousand Benjamins on our kitchen table, don’t get between us and and the horizon.
There is a reason all my calls and texts go through a whitelist filter.
For reasons not relevant here, a new medication has entered the house, accompanied by its Drug Fact Sheet (blurred because you do not have a Need To Know):
Drug Fact Sheet
The background squares are a scant one foot across.
The other side of the sheet is equally dense.
One should review this with each refill to check for new or changed information. Of course, there are no change bars or similar hints.
It might kill ya or cure ya, but you’ll never figure it out from that torrent of verbiage: just like software EULAs, nobody can possibly read and comprehend that stuff.
Which is immediately belied by the situation at the other end of the bag:
Dano Leaf Bag – crimp line typo
OK, it’s just a typo that could happen to anyone, but it first appeared last year and seems to be continuing. Possibly the Town of Poughkeepsie bought a lot of bags and we’re working through the stack.
However, the built-in gashes along the sides of some bags were a new feature this year:
Which frosted Mary pretty severely, as she recycles the used bags as garden path pavers after distributing their contents as mulch, so she’ll be stripping plenty of tape next year.
Although I’m not privy to the Town’s dealings, Dano’s chart suggests the bags cost about 40¢ in truckload lots, about as much as Lowe’s charges for similar bags in retail five-packs. Surprisingly, you can also buy the same Lowe’s bags from Amazon fora lot more, suggesting some folks live much further from a Lowe’s than we do.
A dentist’s office has been a-building for what seems entirely too long, but the outdoor sign finally went up. Being that type of guy, I had to take a closer look at how they wired up the LEDs:
Outdoor sign LED wiring
That’s exactly as half-assed as it looks: unprotected PVC wires emerging from raw holes drilled into the backplate and burrowing into unsealed laser-cut acrylic loosely seated behind the white character boxes.
Everything you see is gonna be full of bugs in no time!
It’s a Hyde Edge Recharge vape pen or it could be a counterfeit. You (definitely not me) get “up to” 3300 puffs from the 10 ml container, with 50 mg of nicotine ensuring you can’t get enough and will come back for more. Although I don’t follow the market, “disposable” vape pens can still contain the fruity flavors prohibited in refillable pens, with the added decadence of throwing the whole thing away when the tank runs dry:
Hyde Charge Vape Pen – components
My admittedly inexperienced eye says the “tank”, which is really just a fiber cylinder soaked in fruity juice + nicotine, still has plenty of hits remaining.
The Basement Shop may never smell the same again.
Of more interest, the silvery lump wrapped in a white felt strip is a 600 mA·hr lithium cell that slurped 406 mA·hr through its USB Micro-B jack when I recharged it. Perhaps the uservictim sucker tossed it when the battery “died”, being unable / unwilling / ignorant-of-how to recharge it? The yellow aluminum case seems faded on the mouthpiece end, but that might be a stylin’ thing.
A closer look at the electronics payload:
Hyde Charge Vape Pen – electronics
The two red wires over on the right went to the coil in the draw tube to the right of the “tank”. Not being interested enough to care, I wrecked the coil while extracting the rest of the contents. Comfortingly, the red and black wires from the PCB go to the positive and negative battery tabs.
A closer look at both sides of the PCB:
Hyde Charge Vape Pen – PCB detail
The SOT23 IC sports an LTH7 topmark corresponding to an LTC4054-4.2 Standalone Charge Controller (Analog Devices absorbed Linear in 2017). The two LEDs to its right glow red during charge and white during each puff.
The black felt disk covers an anonymous pressure sensor activating the coil during each puff. With four pins, the sensor must be far more complex than just a switch, but nowadays puff sensing could require an entire ARM microcontroller.
At first we thought a mighty crunch in the morning meant the trash collection truck had dropped a garbage bin from a great height, but the sound of sirens and a myriad flashing lights revealed the true cause in our neighbor’s front yard:
NHR Crash – frontal view
The extent of the damage was more apparent from the road side:
The driver was walking around uninjured and the ambulance left quietly.
A day later, the trajectory became apparent:
NHR Crash – trajectory
The right side barely kissed the tree on the right, but the front wheel hooked the utility pole (that’s the new pole in the picture), snapped it off at ground level in addition to the usual break maybe ten feet up, and bounced a piece off the other tree:
NHR Crash – utility pole
I didn’t know you could shatter a cast aluminum alloy wheel, but the missing half of the outer face was lying amid the rather scrambled stone wall along driveway.
We’re reasonably sure we know the cause. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
After the flatbed hauled away the car and everybody left, I harvested a few pounds of interesting debris from the lawn:
NHR Crash – tempered glass
It’s tempered glass from the driver-side windows, shattered into small chunks and barely hanging together in those sheets. Laminated windshield glass is entirely different stuff.
The smaller chunks glitter like jewels:
NHR Crash – tempered glass fragments
Obviously, the window had a bit of tint.
The smallest chunk, seen from its flat surface, shows the cuboid fragments:
NHR Crash – tempered glass fragment – front
A side view shows more complexity:
NHR Crash – tempered glass fragment – side
Tempering prevents a glass sheet from shattering into long knife-blade shards. Although the edges of the fragments are not keen, we are dealing with broken glass: they are sharp.
Broken tempered glass also sheds razor-edged flakes perfectly shaped to penetrate bike tires, although most roadside glass comes from ordinary beverage bottles. The tiniest flakes can make a mess of your eyes, so exercise at least some rudimentary shop safety practices.
Those slabs ought to be good for something, even if they fall apart at the slightest touch …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 