Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
(The last three digits in the caption tick along at 60 frame/s. Opening each iamge in a new tab will let you embiggen the details, although the images aren’t all that great.)
The second wingbeat, over on the left, is more visible as the hawk lifts off:
Hawk with snake 2025-11-04 – 112
This was about when I figured out what was going on:
Hawk with snake 2025-11-04 – 151
A hawk can easily outfly me!
Hawk with snake 2025-11-04 – 207
The snake dangling from the hawk’s talons didn’t see it coming, either:
Hawk with snake 2025-11-04 – 213
Up and away!
Hawk with snake 2025-11-04 – 225
About 2.3 s of elapsed time: plenty for a hawk and not nearly enough for me. Or the snake, for that matter.
The day after I set up the Wasp Blower, the carnage was terrible to behold:
Wasp Blower – carnage
Two weeks later, the blower is chopping up two or three wasps each day.
As far as I can tell, the blower killed essentially every wasp leaving the nest and most of the returning foragers:
Wasp Blower – shattered wasps
After two weeks, (nearly?) all of the eggs remaining in the nest have hatched, the larvae / pupae have starved for lack of incoming food, and I’ve put out ant bait traps to discourage scavengers.
The plan is to keep running the blower until a week goes by without any kills, then seal the crack under the door sill.
I have no idea how the queens (Yellowjacket wasp nests have multiple queens!) are doing in there, but they must be getting pretty hungry and, we hope, will not survive the winter.
This makes me feel awful, but not nearly bad enough to regret dealing with the critters.
A colony of Yellowjacket wasps moved into a gap somewhere inside our front door, which we noticed only after they set up a heavy traffic pattern over the front step. The nest is far enough up inside the door frame (or, shudder, the wall) to be immune to rattlecan insecticide spray and the wasps simply tiptoe across sticky-trap sheets laid on their entrance paths.
That’s a hulking 12 V electronics case fan mounted on a cardboard bulkhead inside what’s basically a tunnel, with its power supply plugged into a widowmaker extension cord screwed into the light fixture next to the door.
The fan blows away from the door, with the general idea of killing wasps leaving the nest. Arriving wasps can walk home around the box, but departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill, whereupon they’re sucked into the fan, shattered by the blades, and blown out onto the step.
A Yellowjacket can make headway into a 1 m/s wind, but not for very long, which explains why most of them prefer walking home.
The carnage looks awful, so it seems to be working …
We’ve seen several new rabbits munching greenery in the back yard, but this little one may be studying auto repair under our neighbor’s car:
Rabbit – automotive hiding place
Unlike mice, even a small rabbit won’t take up residence in the air cleaner.
The weird granulated look comes from a Pixel 6a camera zoomed all the way tight through two layers of 1960-era window glass at an acute angle. The bad camera you have is always better than the good camera you don’t.
A critter made off with our battered plastic rain gauge, so I set up an Ambient Weather WS-5000 station to tell Mary how much rain her garden was getting. I added the Official Bird Spike Ring around the rain gauge to keep birds off, but robins began perching atop the anemometer while surveying the yard and crapping on the insolation photocell.
After a few false starts, the anemometer now has its own spikes:
Weather station with additional spikes
It’s a snugly fitting TPU ring:
Weather Station Spikes – build test piece
The spikes are Chromel A themocouple wire, because a spool of the stuff didn’t scamper out of the way when I opened the Big Box o’ Specialty Wire. As you can tell from the picture, it’s very stiff (which is good for spikes) and hard to straighten (which is bad for looking cool).
The shape in the middle is a hole diameter test piece. Next time around, I’ll use thicker 14 AWG copper wire:
Weather station spikes – test piece
The test piece showed I lack good control over the TPU extrusion parameters on the Makergear M2, as holes smaller than about 2 mm vanish, even though the block’s outside dimensions are spot on. This application wasn’t too critical, so I sharpened the wire ends and stabbed them into the middle of the perimeter threads encircling the hole.
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They’re considerably larger and we hoped would be more able to repel attackers. They also seemed to get off to a late start, as we saw young robins hopping around the yard with other adults while these birds were building their nest, so this may have been their second nest of the season.
The first egg appeared on 5 May:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-18
Two weeks later, the first chick pipped:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-19
Only a mother could love something like that, but they almost always do:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-20
Floppy chicks are (still) floppy one day later:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-21
Rapid growth is Job One:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-22
Taking shape:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-23
And then there were none:
Wreath Robin Nest – 2025-05-24
The M50 trail camera was defunct, so we don’t know what happened to them. Mary didn’t hear a fuss through the adjacent bedroom window, which suggests something grabbed them while Ms Robin was off getting breakfast.
We took the wreath down and replaced it with a slate plaque, because we’d rather not know …
A bird box from long ago emerged from the heap and took its place in an upstairs window:
Bird Box window mount – installed
That big open back held an acrylic sheet letting us watch wrens raise their family; snugging it against the window makes that sheet superfluous. We’re hoping to lure the Wreath Finches from their preferred spot by the front door, but we’re open to any birds in need of a nesting spot.
The aluminum angle formerly securing the box to various wood window frames wasn’t going to work here, so I conjured a pair of rotating T-nuts to fit the track in the plastic window frame:
Bird Box window mount – nuts
They’re made from a 5/16-18 T-nut and two layers of 3 mm plywood, all glommed together with E6000-Plus adhesive because it did not scamper out of the way when I opened the Adhesives Cabinet.
Some doodling convinced me a pair of quarter-circles welded back-to-back, minus cutouts for the metal T-nuts, would suffice:
Bird Box window mount – nuts
The radius must be a little less than the width of the opening into the channel (20 mm) and the diameter must be a little more than the width of the channel behind that opening (32-ish mm), so I picked 17 mm. The metal T-nut flange is just over 20 mm, but the spike cutouts (omitted from the LightBurn layout) let it slip through the opening.
A random block of wood positions the box away from the frame enough to clear the outermost flange carrying the screen. Drilling oversize ⅜ inch holes countersunk the top of the T-nut into the block and eliminated excessive alignment fussiness.
Slicing 20 mm off the bolts fit them into the space available, with a pair of stainless washers covering the gaps.
A doodle with measurements you won’t need, but surely handy for mounting something else around here:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 