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.
And kvetching, too
We were sitting in the Credit Union and, as usual, I scouted out the WiFi situation:
Huh. Not what you’d expect to find in a bank lobby.
In case you haven’t seen what can happen with a thermostat, you can pwn a Nest.
Searching with the obvious keywords should provide plenty of reasons why the Internet of Things isn’t ready for prime time, not that that will slow it down in the least.
I generally ride somewhat further into the travel lane than some folks would prefer, but I have good reason for that. Here’s how bicycling along Raymond Avenue at 14 mph = 20 ft/s on a pleasant summer morning works out…
T = 0.000 — Notice anything out of the ordinary?
T = 1.000 — Me, neither:
T = 1.500 — Ah!
T = 2.000 — I’m flinching into the right turn required for a sharp left turn:
Less than half a second reaction time: pretty good, sez me.
T = 2.833 — End of the flinch:
T = 3.000 — Now I can lean and turn left:
T = 3.267 — This better be far enough left:
T = 3.333 — The door isn’t moving:
T = 3.567 — So I’ll live to ride another day:
I carry a spectacular scar from slashing my arm on a frameless car window, back in my college days: the driver flipped the door open as I passed his gas cap at a good clip. The collision wrecked the window, the door, and my bike, but didn’t break my arm, sever any nerves, or cut any arteries. I did discover human fatty tissue, neatly scooped from under my arm onto the window, is yellowish, which wasn’t something I needed to know.
Searching for Raymond Avenue will bring up other examples of bicycle-hostile features along this stretch of NYSDOT’s trendy, traffic-calmed design…
We are not dog people, so being awakened at 12:45 one morning by a large dog barking directly under the bedroom windows wasn’t expected. After a bit of flailing around, I discovered the dog parked under the windows on the other end of the bedroom:
That’s entirely enough dog that I was unwilling to venture outside and attempt to affix it to, say, the patio railing, where it could await the town’s animal control officer in the morning:
It’s not a stray, because it wears two collars: one with leash D-rings and the other carrying a black electronics box that could be anything from a GPS tracker to a shock box that’s supposed to keep it inside one of those electronic fences. If the latter, a battery change seems past due.
Being a dog, it spent the next two hours in power-save mode on the patio, intermittently moaning / growling / barking at every state change in the back yard: scurrying rodents, falling leaves, far-distant sirens, neighborhood dogs, you name it. We would be dog people to want that level of launch-on-warning, but we’re not.
If parvovirus were available through Amazon Prime, I’d be on it like static cling. By the kilogram on Alibaba, perhaps?
Grainy photos taken in Nightshot IR mode with the DSC-F717, which works well enough after I (remember to) jiggle the Memory Stick to re-seat the ribbon cable connections.
Hat tip to Sherlock in Silver Blaze.
The Little Machine Shop 5200 lathe package includes DROs on the cross slide and compound cranks. The readouts report the position of the crank, not the slide position, which isn’t a major problem on a lathe.
Unfortunately, the compound collides with the DRO on the cross slide:
That is a major problem on a lathe.
When you can’t turn the cross slide more than 45° from parallel with the bed, you cannot set the compound to the (typical) 29° degrees required for (traditional) thread cutting. That’s measured perpendicular to the bed, so it would be 61° on the compound rest scale, if the scale went that high:
This mess doesn’t have a trivial fix, because the DRO body under the (non-removable) display doesn’t quite clear the compound screw:
As nearly as I can tell, removing the entire DRO is the only way to slew the compound beyond 45°, but the DRO replaced the usual manual scale around the cross slide knob, so there’s no analog backup.
The DRO mounts to the cross slide with three screws, so you can’t rotate it 90° to the side to get better clearance:
The other four screws presumably mount the DRO encoder housing to the outer shell.
The setscrew sticking up from the sleeve anchors it to the cross slide shaft. The slit milled into the shaft captures the end of the setscrew:
The knob slides over the shaft, with a screw in the end holding it in place by friction against a split lockwasher; you can apply enough torque to turn the knob under the lockwasher in either direction.
Removing the DRO doesn’t produce more cross slide travel, because the DRO body sits flush with the back side of that large disk.
I think the cross slide knob collides with the compound DRO, but I put it all back together without any further exploration.
Actual 6 inch DROs based on linear encoders seem to run $40-ish and other folks have fitted them to their mini-lathes. Verily, I don’t do much threadcutting, so I’ll just put this mess on the far back burner.
That DRO ticks me off every time I look at it, though…
Dumb design, no question about it.
According to the Forester’s manual, the Tire Pressure Monitoring System kicks in after the car reaches 25 mph. It evidently takes a while to figure things out after that, because the TPMS light blinked on a mile from home on the way to Mary’s Vassar Farms garden. I pulled into the next parking lot, measured 20 psi in the left rear tire, then found this staring me in the eye:
Well, that certainly simplified the diagnosis!
I unloaded two bags of shredded leaves and a pile of hoses, swapped in the (limited use, donut-style) spare tire, and continued the mission.
The TPMS light wasn’t on when I drove to Squidwrench the previous evening. Judging from the wear, that screw appeared during the various errands following our 800 mile road trip, which is good news of a sort, and depressurized the tire over the course of a day or two.
The receipt from the fix-it folks cautions that a plug is a temporary fix, because “the injury has compromised the integrity of the tire”. On the other paw, the Forester manual tells me “All four tires must be the same in terms of manufacturer, brand (tread pattern), construction, and size. You are advised to replace the tires with new ones that are identical to those fitted as standard equipment” and then provides a checklist:
When you replacing or installing tire(s), all four tires must be the same for following items.
(a) Size
(b) Circumference
(c) Speed symbol
(d) Load index
(e) Construction
(f) Manufacturer
(g) Brand (tread pattern)
(h) Degrees of wear
There’s absolutely no way to get an identical replacement tire, let alone one with the same tread wear, but I am so unready to replace all four tires after 12 k miles / 2 years.
We shall see how this works out…
I enjoy exposing my tired old Kindle to random assaults, so I’m always on the lookout for FREE WIFI! hotspots:
You can’t resize the text, there are no linkies to the details of the Kohl’s Terms or Kohl’s Privacy Policy (viewing them would presumably require a browser, which would require using the WiFi, which you haven’t yet been approved to use), leaving a decision between “Hit me!” and, oh, maybe re-reading The Martian.
In the local Sears some months ago, I spent the better part of 20 minutes scrolling their lengthy T&C, following the links (which they provide through the same peephole!), and generally admiring their legal department’s sophistry.
I’m not a formal member of The Society for the Easily Amused, but I support their cause and, obviously, don’t get out nearly enough.
The fourth Sony MicroSDXC card went into service in late September 2015 and has now failed after about 60 sessions in my Sony HDR-AS30 Action Camera. This one sported a U3 speed rating and I had hopes that would improve its longevity, but that doesn’t seem to be true.
The defunct Sony card (marked in red to avoid confusion) will join its defunct compadre and the Sandisk Extreme Pro card goes in the camera:
The 16 bike rides in December added up to 220 GB; call it 13.75 GB/trip. January 2016 shows only three rides and it failed after two February rides: barely 60 rides for a total of 825-ish GB of video data. The three previous Sony cards failed after less than 1 TB of data, putting this one in the same ballpark.
I have no way to measure the actual write speed, but the camera shuts down after recording less than a minute of 1920×1080 @ 60 f/s video. Previous cards worked fine at lower video resolutions and recording speeds; I’ll assume this one behaves similarly. It might make a capacious “disk” for a Raspberry Pi.
When the previous card failed, Sony’s “customer support” decided that there might be something wrong with the camera’s firmware causing it to trash the cards, so there was no point in replacing the card under warranty and I should send the camera in for a checkup. When I pointed out that they’d strung me along for a year, until the camera was out of warranty, without mentioning even the possibility that the camera might be at fault and asked whether they’d pick up the $100+ bill for having the camera “examined”, the Nice Man said Level 2 would get back to me after “48 working hours”. When prodded, he agreed that “48 working hours” equaled “6 working days” and didn’t include weekends; when we had that settled, I knew they had no further interest in this matter.
Sony hasn’t called back and, by now, I don’t expect they ever will. It’s not worth my time to pursue this any further, but if you’re wondering how well Sony MicroSD cards work in Sony cameras and how well they support the failures, now you know.
So, starting with this riding season, we’ll see how long a Sandisk Extreme Pro card survives…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 