Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
It’s been sitting there for least five years, as witnessed by the sun-yellowed hot melt glue blob, which is pretty good service from a switch intended for indoor use. The 3D printed button never fell off and, in fact, was difficult to remove, so that worked well.
I took it apart and cleaned the contacts, but to no avail, so her bike now sports a new switch with a similar rounded dome:
Tour Easy – new PTT switch
I clipped the wires a bit beyond the terminals and soldered the new switch in place, so it’s the same cable as before.
Ordered 100 stainless steel M3 washers from a “US Seller”, received this:
M3 stainless steel washers – short count
Yeah, it looked a bit short to me, too.
The chopped and bent washers in the upper right corner suggest the seller got floor sweepings from his source, which is about what you’d expect for a bottom-dollar vendor.
The seller refunded half, which wasn’t particularly generous, but I wasn’t ready to go to the mat for two bucks.
Unfortunately, the thermal tape on one of the CPU heatsinks was sufficiently wrinkled to prevent good contact with the CPU:
RPi taped heatsinks – as received
The seller sent a replacement copper slug with tape on one side. Presumably, they glue it to the heatsink with thermal silicone:
Moster RPi Heatsink – silicone adhesive
Of which, I have none on hand.
So I did what I should have done originally, which was to drop a few bucks on a lifetime supply of thermally conductive heatsink tape, apply it to the bare side of the slug and stick the slug to the heatsink with their tape:
Moster RPi Heatsink – replacement adhesive tape
The blue stuff is the separation film, with the tape being white. It doesn’t match the black tape on the other side, but seems gooey enough to work.
Done!
Despite the heatsink hype, ball grid array chips dissipate most of their heat through their pads (and perhaps a central thermal pad) into the PCB, so sticking a heatsink atop the package is largely decorative, along the lines of hotrod ornamentation.
The epoxy packages used in previous Raspberry Pi iterations had better thermal conductivity to their top surface:
RPi 3 B – epoxy CPU
Than the more recent metal-top packages, which surely have inert-gas fill under the lid:
Yes, the heatsink does conduct some heat into the air, even if not nearly as much as you might want.
(*) I’m pretty sure “Moster” was a typo in the original eBay listing which took on a life of its own to become something of an unofficial trademark. All of the search results ship from Duluth, Georgia (USA), regardless of the nominal seller; feel free to draw your own conclusions.
Verily, given the right tools, any job becomes do-able:
New Utility Pole – installing
It was fascinating for me and just another day at the office for everybody else:
New Utility Pole – wiring
They nailed the original pole tag to the new pole, complete with the original 1940 nail:
New Utility Pole – pole tag 144701
I expect this pole will outlive me, just as the original pole outlived the folks who built our house.
The most memorable comment came from the person doing the CHG&E damage assessment, who really really wanted this to not be their problem: “Anybody could steal a pole tag and nail it on that pole.” I asked what location their records showed for the pole tag, whereupon the conversation moved on.
Second-place award: no, we were not interested in trenching underground lines 300 feet along the property line, at our expense, to avoid an “unsightly” pole.
For unknown reasons, I was supposed to figure out which telecom utilities had wired the pole, notify them, and wait for them to tack their cables to the new pole. I called both Verizon and Altice / Optimum, got service tickets, and watched them close the tickets without further action. I tried re-opening the Verizon ticket and was told somebody would be there within 48 hours. An Optimum guy showed up, promised a quick return visit from a team with proper equipment, but nothing happened.
I suppose having no customer at the end of the cable removed any motivation to clear their hardware off our lawn, so, after two weeks, I deployed the bolt cutter, rolled up the cables, and scrapped ’em out.
After a few days of topping off the rear tire on Mary’s bike, with no gashes or debris in the tire, I finally replaced the Michelin Protek tube and autopsied it:
Michelin Protek tube autopsy
While it’s possible to extract the valve and perhaps even clean / replace it, I think that’s just delaying the inevitable. The rubber shreds may be necessary to fill large punctures, but they seem to wreck the valve seal.
Her bike now has an ordinary (pronounced “cheap”) tube inside the Schwalbe Marathon Plus armored tire. We’ll see how long this lasts.
I managed to open a terminal emulator, whereupon all of the non-built-in shell commands couldn’t be found.
Proceed as before: binary-copy the entire MicroSD card to another one, pop it in the RPi, and it’s all good again.
For the record, the new card is an unused Samsung Evo Plus. I do not understand the difference between the “Evo Plus” and “Evo+” branding, other than to suspect one of being a very good fake.
In round numbers, MicroSD cards seem to last a year under what seems like not-too-demanding service; I’m not running the MPCNC all day, every day.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 