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.
If it used to work, it can work again
Well, this didn’t take long:
The upper five-LED string in the middle module failed open-circuit, which left the remaining two strings handling too much current. The five LEDs across the middle look like they’re running at War Emergency Power and the lower five are limping along:
The dark spots in the middle are overexposed pixels.
I soldered in a replacement from the same bag and it’s all good again, but I expect that won’t last very long.
A month or two ago the Huion H610Pro tablet’s buttons stopped working with the input-remapper macros I set up to do useful things. Considerable searching showed that the Digimend kernel driver project previously handling the buttons went inertial two years ago and, apparently, no longer worked with contemporary kernels. Further searching suggested old Huion tablets, which mine certainly is, should be handled by the native kernel / X drivers, so I uninstalled Digimend.
Which produced a persistent error message from the DKMS machinery telling me something awful was happening with the now-missing Digimend.
An Arch Linux BBS thread suggested manually removing various detritus left behind during successive kernel updates in places like /usr/lib/modules and /var/lib/dkms. Given that my desktop box runs the 6.18 kernel, I felt reasonably confident in removing the 5* kernel directories and anything mentioning digimend from those locations.
After the box started up the next morning, all the tablet buttons once again worked the way they use to.
The nice thing about Free Software is having access to all the pieces when something breaks …
The OEM lithium batteries in my Nuheara IQbuds² MAX not-really-hearing-aids lasted for about 2-½ years before needing replacement. Two more years pretty well did those in and I replaced them again without fanfare about a year ago.
After replacing the 802050 pouch battery in the charging case and having discovered two spare LIR1654 batteries at the back of a workbench, I installed those and renewed the gaffer tape holding the earbuds together:
The workbench stash also disgorged the old Varta LIR1654 batteries, but not the OEM ones, so a test session seemed in order:
The Varta batteries (red and blue traces) are in sad shape, after two years of regular use and another three years idling in a small bag. The EEMB batteries (pink and cyan traces) are in better shape, despite their year of use, with the lower pair of traces showing their as-extracted charge and the upper three traces their just-charged capacity.
They’re still doing better than their 0.4 W·hr nominal capacity, which is not to be sniffed at, particularly as the tester’s minimum 150 mA current presents a rather stiff load for a 100-ish mA·hr cell.
This being a quick-n-dirty set of tests, a simple discharging “fixture” sufficed:
The charging “fixture” wasn’t much fancier:
The EEMB batteries are in the bag and may remain in good shape after two more years, ready for another tour in the earbuds when their relatives wear out.
As fate would have it, the telescoping stalk on Mary’s helmet mirror broke off at the ball mount a few days after I assembled another spare mirror:
That’s the point where all the stress concentrates, but the stalk lasted almost exactly six years and didn’t owe me anything.
So I clamped the mirror+shaft+ball from a spare into the mount on her helmet, and she rode off as planned.
Once again being down to a single spare, I drilled a few more 10 mm balls:
Cleaning up the end of the broken shaft let me shove it into a drilled ball:
The insert and random screw came from the stub end of the broken shaft: ramming it into the cleaned-up end makes the job look Good Enough™.
Clamp the repaired stalk into the spare mount, drop the drilled balls & lathe fixture back in their bag, and maybe it’ll be another six years before they’re needed.
Life is good!
One of Mary’s garden neighbors recently started biking, she recommended he needed a helmet mirror, and I handed her a spare from the Bag o’ Mirrors:
So I built another one:
Fortunately, the Bag also had that (slightly rusted) mirror with a drilled ball, so all I needed was a new printed mount with two brass inserts and screws.
Now we have two spares against future need:
They’re much better than the old yellow Az-El mount, but I couldn’t have made the ball mounts without that experience.
Both versions outlasted all the commercial versions we’ve had over the decades, so that’s a 3D printing success story right there.
The Kohler fill valve in the Main Bathroom’s Kohler toilet tank began leaking, but (unsurprisingly) the shutoff valve on its water pipe no longer completely shut off, thus converting a simple replacement into A Plumbing Project. Because toilet shutoff valves sit below all other valves / faucets / plumbing, the pipe can spew a generous amount of water straight up while you’re fumbling with the new valve, no matter how well you (think you) drained the pipes.
So I deployed scrap towels around the pipe, buttered the new valve threads with joint compound, applied various wrenches with appropriate muttering, and swapped the valves without damage to the premises:
AFAICT, the chromed pipe and corroded trim plate are original; no possible motivation can convince me to replace that plate. The tattered PTFE tape on the pipe suggests the valve I replaced might have been only a few decades old, albeit with a correspondingly deteriorated washer.
With the water shut off, I replaced the fill valve with a Fluidmaster valve from Box o’ Plumbing Stuff #3; it was new-in-box despite being maybe a decade old. Turned the water back on, fiddled with the float setting to match the Water Line level, and declared victory.
Which lasted until user feedback indicated the new fill valve wasn’t shutting off. After a fruitless day of fiddling about, I replaced the original seal with a repair part taken from Box #3:
The fill valve now works perfectly, for reasons having nothing do with the the appearance of either seal, and victory has once again been declared.
Houses, as Gee observed, are trouble.
Several years and realignments later, the brake sensors on Mary’s Tour Easy became slightly mobile on the foam tape holding them to the brake lever mounts and, of course, anything affecting the sensor position relative to the magnet inevitably makes it overly sensitive to the brake lever position.
For unknown reasons, the DPC-18 displays devote zero pixels to the brake sensor status, so the only indication of a brake sensor being active is when the motor cuts out. This is not to be tolerated, particularly in traffic, so both the sensors and their magnets are now remounted on fresh tape with careful attention to proximity.
The magnet is snugged against the sensor when the lever is released:
The activation point is about a third of the way to the fully pulled position:
I would prefer having the magnet move parallel to the sensor’s long axis, but that’s just not the way these levers work.
The left-side sensor cable is now snugged to the brake cables to keep it out of harm’s way as she installs & removes the water reservoir on the handlebars under the fairing:
For symmetry, the right-side sensor cable sports a similar tiedown:
Having recently discovered brake sensors with integral LED status indicators, I plan to update that whole mess in the near future.
