Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Having an ancient flip phone in need of a battery, I ordered a Kyocera TXBAT10133 battery from eBay. Described as “new” (which, according to the Ebay listing, means “New: A brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging”), I was somewhat surprised to see this emerging from the box:
Kyocera TXBAT10133 – not really new
It obviously led a rather hard life before being harvested from somebody else’s obsolete flip phone and is definitely not “new”.
Not yet having a deep emotional attachment to the thing, I set it up for a capacity test:
Kyocera TXBAT10133 – contact clamp
Given a very light 100 mA load, it shows about the same capacity as the original battery in our phone:
Kyocera TXBAT10133 – 2019-03-29
Given the precarious contact arrangement, the glitches near the right end aren’t surprising.
The battery label claims a 900 mA·h rating, so both have nearly their nominal capacity at such a reduced load. In actual use, the phone has a low battery after a few hours of power-on time, far less than when it was new.
The seller promises a replacement. For all I know, there are no genuinely “new” batteries available for these phones.
We’d been eating a “healthy” high-carb / low-fat diet, which produced the more-or-less expected 1 lb/yr weight gain over the course of three decades. Given that we eat about 106 Cal/yr, being off by a mere 0.3% seemed fixable, but we were always hungry while trying to cut out calories.
In April 2016, we decided our tummies had come between us, so we switched to a mostly ketogenic diet (clicky for more dots):
Weight Chart 2016 – Ed
Having a Master Gardener in the family complicates dietary choices along the ketogenic axis, but Mary raised more green-and-leafy veggies, less squash-and-corn, and we keto-ized our meals reasonably well. Moderation in all things works fine for us, so losing 25 pounds at about 1 lb/week wasn’t particularly stressful.
Continuing through 2017, you can see how regular bike riding season affects winter bloat:
Weight Chart 2017 – Ed
Our cycling vacation in July 2018 produced a blip, but the rest of the riding season worked as expected:
Weight Chart 2018 – Ed
It’s straightforward to crash-diet two dozen pounds, but maintaining a more-or-less stable weight for the next two years suggests we’ve gotten the annual calorie count about right. FWIW, my bloodwork numbers sit in the Just Fine range, apart from the somewhat elevated cholesterol level typical of a keto-ized diet.
Starting in late 2018, however, a stressful situation of a non-bloggable nature (at least for a blog such as this) produced an unusually high number of road trips, motel stays, and generally poor dietary choices:
Weight Chart 2019-03 – Ed
The situation now being over, our lives / exercise / diet will return to what passes for normal around here and my goal is to lose another 10% of my current body weight, ending at 150 pounds, by the end of the year. In round numbers, that requires losing half a pound = 1700 Cal/week, 250 Cal/day. Not power-noshing an ounce or two of nuts a day should do the trick.
If it makes you feel more science-y, you can use the NIH Body Weight Planner, but it produces about the same answer: knock off 300 Cal to lose weight, 250 Cal to maintain it, at essentially the same exercise level as before.
We’ve been recording our weights as dots on graph paper every Saturday evening for the last four decades, so I know for a fact I averaged 148 pounds when I wore a younger man’s clothes. I’ll re-post the 2019 chart, adding four dots every month, during the rest of the year.
With the wrecked 5U4GB safely in the trash, I popped a smaller, somewhat less stately triode from the Big Box o’ Hollow-State Electronics and wired it up with a pair of SK6812 RGBW LEDs:
Triode – Purple-green phase
The tube’s markings have long since vanished, but, at this late date, all that matters is an intact glass envelope!
After two years, the ordinary white foam tape holding the knockoff Arduino Nano lost most of its sticktivity and easily popped off the 3D printed base:
Triode – Nano PCB – white strips
Two layers of 3M outdoor-rated foam tape clear the bottom-side components and, based on current evidence, its stickiness should stick forever more:
Triode – Nano PCB – 3M strips
The alert reader will notice the mis-soldered 1 kΩ SMT resistor above-and-right of the CH340 USB interface chip. I think those two resistors are the isolators between the 328P microcontroller and the CH340, letting you use the TX and RX lines as ordinary I/O without killing either chip.
Despite the mis-soldering, it evidently passed their QC and works fine. Seeing as how I didn’t notice it until just now, it’ll remain in place until I must open the lamp base for some other reason, which may never happen.
The data output is now on pin A5, to match the rest of the glowing widgetry:
Triode – Nano installed
Blobs of hot melt glue affix the SK6812 and wiring to the socket:
Triode – socket wiring
The original “plate cap” wiring ran directly through a hole in the hard drive platter, which I embiggened for a 3.5 mm panel-mount headphone jack. The knurled metal plug looms next to this smaller tube, but it looks better (in a techie sense) than the raw hole:
Triode – plate cap plug
Octal tubes have an opaque Bakelite base, so I devoted some Quality Shop Time™ to the post:
Triode – base tip exposed
Although I’d made a shell drill for 5U4’s base, this base was so crumbly I simply joysticked the spinning cutter around to knock off the rest of the post:
Triode – finished base
The shell drill would open the bottom to admit a bit more light. I may do that to see if it makes any visible difference.
I didn’t expect the serrations in the top mica plate to cast interesting patterns around the platter:
Triode – cyan-purple phase
Memo to Self: use the shell drill to avoid nicking the evacuation tip!
Fortunately, the link fell off in the box and I recovered all the pieces for a failure analysis:
Chain Mail Armor – failed link – glue spots
I’d glued the PLA together with IPS #4, a hellish mixture of plastic solvents including methylene chloride, one of the few chemicals able to chew into PLA, but there’s not much penetration or bonding going on.
Let’s try that again with a bit more solvent.
First, slide the bars into place:
Chain Mail Armor – failed link – bars in place
I applied four solvent drops in two passes to give it time to work its way in, put four matching drops on the armor cap, squished the cap in place, tweaked the bar alignment, then applied pressure while contemplating the whichness of the why for half a minute while the solvent worked its magic.
Things look pretty good once more:
Chain Mail Armor – missing link – repaired
There’s no way to determine the repair’s goodness, other than by deliberately trying to snap off a bar, so I’ll just put it back in the box and hope for the best.
Hydrant valves attach directly to the water main, far below the frost line, which means the hydrant itself should be dry when it’s not in use; the ice reveals a nasty valve leak. The corroded paint suggests a longstanding leak, but I admit to not noticing anything before now.
I uploaded the picture so I could include the URL in an email to the local fire department. I’ll take a look the next time we walk by to see what’s happened.
It’s been running more-or-less continuously since late 2016, so call it
Because I’d be crazy to replace it with another likely-to-fail WS2812, I had to remove both of them before installing SK6812 RGBW LEDs and updating the Arduino Nano.
Unfortunately, I did a really good job of bonding the side light to the tube with epoxy:
Failed WS2812 – 5U4GB broken glass
The last tube manufacturing step involved flashing the getter onto the tube envelope, so as to remove the last vestige of air. Admitting air oxidizes the getter:
Gently pry the metal cover outward to clear the latches along the sides:
DSC-F717 – Memory Stick socket cover latches
The cover remains held in place by two tabs inside the holes on either side of the Memory Stick contacts, one of which is already free in the previous photo:
DSC-F717 – Memory Stick socket – bottom
The small spring on the left ejects the Memory Stick and will, if suitably provoked, launch itself across the bench. Be prepared!
Use a pointy instrument to ease those tabs away from their latches and pop the top:
DSC-F717 – opened Memory Stick socket
I cleaned the contacts, not that they appeared particularly filthy, gently bent them upward by three micro-smidgens to apply a bit more pressure to the card’s contacts, and reassembled the socket in reverse order.
I put a strip of Kapton tape on the back of the cable termination paddle (shown here during the previous repair) to ensure a snug fit:
DSC-F717 Memory Stick socket – cable entry
Unfortunately, I snapped off a locking tab on one of the ribbon cable connections to the main board:
DSC-F717 – broken cable clamp
The cable threads through the middle of the clamp, which then slides into the socket and applies pressure to the contacts through the cable: no clamp, no pressure, no good.
For lack of anything smarter, I tamped the clamp into the socket and applied a strip of Kapton tape to maintain everything in more-or-less the right position:
DSC-F717 – tape-anchored cable
Definitely unpretty, but better than nothing. While I was in there, I reinforced the other connections with similar clamps.
Reassemble the camera in reverse order and it’s all good:
DSC-F717 – repaired – first image
It probably won’t last another decade, but ya never know …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 