Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Everything is held together by ordinary wood glue, squeezed together for a few moments until the two parts no longer slide around.
One layer of 3.9 mm corrugated cardboard:
Beetle – 1x cardboard
The fancy gold & hologram decorations come from what’s surely non-laser-safe PSA vinyl sheets, cut by offsetting the top layer shapes inward a reasonable amount. The eyes come from random colored paper or painted chipboard.
Two layers of cardboard add up to 8 mm:
Beetle – 2x cardboard
That’s purple paper left over from the layered paper quilt blocks and, obviously, my glue stick hand is weak.
Three layers of cardboard makes each part half an inch thick:
Earlier this year, a pair of House Finches chose the a pine cone wreath hanging outside our front door for their nest.
One day a Starling attacked:
Starling Attack – IM_00052
Starling Attack – IM_00053
Starling Attack – IM_00054
There’s a Youtube video of the action following those pictures:
Ms. Finch suffered a peck to the head raising a few feathers into a small topknot, but seemed otherwise undamaged. The eggs survived unscathed and a month later they fledged a quartet of new finches:
House Finch chicks – pre-fledging – 2024-05-18
Yes, they’re surrounded by a ring of bird crap: finch chicks can aim and fire overboard, but they don’t have much range.
The same finch pair abandoned their second nest after a Brown-headed Cowbird added an egg and punctured both Finch eggs:
House Finch nest – Cowbird egg vs punctures
Their third attempt failed after four eggs when a Cowbird added a fifth:
House Finch nest – Cowbird egg with 4 finch eggs
A few days after that picture, something tore that nest apart and destroyed all the eggs:
House Finch nest – destruction with feathers
The scattered feathers suggest a major battle with severe injuries.
Three nesting attempts produced only four fledglings: a bad year for those two finches.
Morning KP provides considerable time to watch the goings-on in the back yard, including the wide variety of pollinators (formerly known as “bees”) in the stand of daisies just off the deck:
Daisy thumbnail – 348
I wondered if the flower heads tracked the sun or just sort of stood there, so I deployed the trail camera to take one picture every five minutes for a bit over 24 hours. Converting just under 500 images into a movie required this incantation:
The short answer: daisies don’t really track the sun, but they move more than I expected. The stalks carrying unopened flowers writhe all around, occasionally getting stuck on other stems and suddenly snapping free. I was particularly surprised at the number of bees going about their business just around midnight.
The one on the right stayed in that pose, with eyes getting heavier and heavier, until it nodded off. The other squirrel wasn’t quite that far gone and, after a minute, turned around to see what was(n’t) happening.
Those two squirrels have been chasing each other around the yard for several weeks, so they’re either siblings or a mated pair.
I’ve never seen a squirrel take a nap before and it seemed like a good idea for the afternoon …
I thought cleaning that mess up would solve an intermittent power problem, but the camera continued to fail immediately after being deployed and finally refused to work at all.
The camera case has eight (!) AA cells in one half connected to the electronics in the other half by a pair of wires that pass through the hinge between the halves:
M50 Trail Cam – pivot wire route
The steel rod is the hinge pivot, with the battery half wearing brown and the electronics half in lighter plastic. As you’ll see in a bit, the rod is fixed in the electronics half and the battery half pivots around it.
The two short case sections on the right contain the two wires carrying the 6 V battery power. Some gentle manipulation suggested the fault lay inside those hinge sections, which meant I had to figure out how to get them apart.
The other end of the steel rod has a knurled section jammed firmly into the electronics half, but I managed to carve away just enough plastic to expose just enough of the knurl to get just enough of a grip (yes, with a pair of genuine Vise-Grip 10WR Locking Pliers, accept no substitutes) to yoink the rod out:
M50 Trail Cam – extracted pivot
With the hinge released, the problem became immediately obvious:
M50 Trail Cam – failed hinge wires
Yes, those are wire strands poking out of the hole in the left hinge section.
A tedious needle-nose tweezer session extracted the remains of the wires from the hinge and cleaned out the adhesive:
M50 Trail Cam – extracted OEM PVC wires
Although those two hinge sections are hollow with plenty of room for the wire, it seems the assembler squirted adhesive into both sections to glue the wires in place. As a result, every time I opened the case to charge the batteries, maybe two millimeters of wire twisted 180° degrees. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.
I snaked a pair of 20 AWG silicone-insulated wires through the hinge sections:
M50 Trail Cam – silicone rewiring
The OEM wires had PVC insulation, which is a terrible choice for wires that will undergo lots of flexing, but that’s what SJCam used.
Two untidy blobs of acrylic caulk do at least as good a job of sealing the case openings as the black gunk visible in the earlier pictures:
M50 Trail Cam – new caulk
I left all of the wire in the hinge un-stuck, hoping the twist will distribute itself over maybe 5 mm of wire and last longer.
In anticipation of future repairs, however, I left enough of the knurled end of the hinge rod exposed to get an easy grip:
M50 Trail Cam – restaked pivot
Solder the new wires to the old pads, assemble in reverse order, and it works as well as it ever did:
The alert reader will note I did not reset the camera clock after charging the batteries, a process requiring the janky SJCam app.
The two finches on the right have been constructing a nest in the wreath hanging at our front door. They tolerate our presence, although they’d be happier if delivery folks dropped packages elsewhere.
While I was turning this year’s leaves into mulch for next year’s vegetables, a supervisor landed on my glove:
Pale Green Assassin Bug – front
I thought it was a very small stick insect covered with leaf chaff, but it turned out to be a Pale Green Assassin Bug nymph with built-in armor and spines:
Pale Green Assassin Bug – rear
Something like that, anyway.
This katydid supervised while I put the tools away:
Short-winged Meadow Katydid
Those scary stern claspers must come in handy for something, but I’d rather not be on the receiving end.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 