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: Repairs

If it used to work, it can work again

FitBit Charge 5 Reboot

Wearing my FitBIt Charge 5 tracker in the shower without activating its Water Lock feature occasionally produces odd results, but the most recent mishap ventured deep into the peculiar:

Jammed FitBit Charge 5

Its complete lack of buttons makes the thing completely waterproof, but also means it cannot continue when the touch / swipe interface gets horribly confused.

The recovery process requires snapping it onto its USB charging cable, then pressing the nearly invisible button embedded in the USB connector shell three times, with one second between each press: click hippopotamus click hippopotamus click.

Then it restarts / reboots and eventually all is well again.

Perhaps I can now recall the magic incantation without digging through the online help again, because I am certainly not going to suddenly remember to do the Water Lock dance before showering.

2023-08-03
Gooseneck LED: First Failure

Twelve years ago I rebuilt a gooseneck lamp to carry a surplus LED head:

Finished LED Floodlight

One of its three LEDs just failed:

LED Gooseneck lamp – first failure

Given that I very deliberately glued the whole thing together in the sure knowledge “the lamp should outlast me” and much later built the other LED head into a desk lamp, well, it’s like that and that’s the way it is.

The Sherline will be just a little bit dimmer in all those photos …

2023-07-28
Schwalbe Marathon Plus vs. Glass Chip

My pre-ride thumb check showed a flat rear tire on Mary’s Tour Easy:

Glass chip – end view in tread

So we fetched groceries with the car.

As usual, no tire armor can withstand a glass blade:

Glass Chip – side view

It’s a bit over 5 mm from the knife edge to the ground-flat end, just long enough to punch through a rather well-worn Schwalbe Marathon Plus tire and poke a slow leak in the tube.

The tire has covered enough miles to wear the tread down to maybe half a millimeter over the blue armor layer:

Glass chip – tire damage

Time for a new tire!

For the record, the odometer is just shy of 35 k miles and she rides about 1500 miles a year; somewhat less over the last year for reasons not relevant here. As best I can tell, the tire has been on there for about five years and 7000 miles.

2023-07-27
Manjaro XFCE Slow File Loading
A month or so ago a Manjaro update caused all file loading to take minutes, rather than seconds. This sort of breakage seems endemic to rolling update distros, although most glitches vanish within a few days as more knowledgeable users track down the problems and apply the fixes.

File loads and program startups continued to be achingly slow, so I trawled the Interwebs in search of a resolution, tried various suggestions, and had no success until:
```
sudo pacman --remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
```
Some background information:
A description of what a desktop-portal is all about:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal#List_of_backends_and_interfaces
When using Free Software, when it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. In this case, I do not profess to understand how the pieces fit together.
2023-07-24
Kenmore 362.75581890 Oven Igniter: Third Contestant

Although the oven igniter I just installed worked, its 3.0 A current fell below the gas valve’s minimum 3.3 A, which, based on past experience, suggested it would fail in short order. Just to see what happened, I sent a note to the seller, who offered a warranty swap and, after a bit of fiddling, the replacement arrived:

Oven Igniter B – 3.3 A initial current

This one draws exactly 3.3 A, so it just barely meets both its product description and the gas valve’s minimum current.

We’ll see how long this lasts …

2023-07-18
SJCam M50 Condensation

I put the camera in the front yard to monitor a new groundhog hole, then mowed the lawn. Although smoke drifting in from the Canadian fires has posed a problem, the air quality wasn’t this bad:

SJCam M50 camera condensation – foggy image

It turns out the camera’s case seal isn’t quite up to the task:

SJCam M50 camera condensation – detail

The lip around the front half of the case presses against a rubber gasket around the rear half, which means the water on the electronics chassis is inside the camera case:

SJCam M50 camera condensation – case edge

Fortunately, the water condensed on the inside of the glass lens protector, rather than on the camera itself:

SJCam M50 camera condensation – interior

I let the whole thing dry out on the bench for a few days and all seems right again.

The leak does make me think leaving it out in the rain is a Bad Idea™, which isn’t the sort of thought one should have about a trail camera.

Diurnal pumping can explain many electronic failures. For the record, the monitoring station on the Walkway Over the Hudson vanished a while ago, probably due to rampant electronic corrosion.

2023-07-06
Sunbeam Clothes Iron Salvage
For just under twenty bucks, Mary has a new clothes iron and I harvested the heating element from the longsuffering Sunbeam iron:

Sunbeam clothes iron – heater connections

Per the notations:
- AC Line enters on middle terminal to thermostat
- Thermostat controlled Line on left terminal to heater
- AC Neutral to heater terminal on right
The heater measures 12.6 Ω cold, so 9.5 A → 1.1 kW.

The iron had an insulating sleeve on the thermostat shaft capped with a plastic dial, which makes perfect sense for something in contact with the hot side of the AC power cord.

The IC date codes suggest it’s been around since 2002, so it’s about two decades old. In that time, one of the two electrolytic capacitors succumbed to the plague:

Sunbeam clothes iron – capacitor plague

I think the relay and electronics implemented the iron’s timed shutoff function, but it does seem rather complex for that.
2023-07-05