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.

Tag: Wildlife

Other creatures in our world

Vole Traps: Rebaited

Although the drilled sunflower seeds worked reasonably well, various critters gnawed through the threads and escaped unharmed with the seeds. We tried gluing seeds to the trigger with good old Elmer’s Non-Toxic School Glue, only to find garden ants absolutely love the stuff.

Well, if voles like seeds, they’ll surely like nuts:

Rat traps – walnut halves

Those are rat traps (much bigger than mouse traps) with walnut halves secured to the top and bottom of the trigger with hot melt glue.

Yes, the plywood plates under the traps hold them together. There’s no reason to put fancy new traps outdoors where they succumb to weather in short order; these are veterans from previous episodes.

Having taken out two voles with sunflower seeds over the course of a week, the walnuts accounted for two more voles in three days. Mary thinks a neighbor vole needs a day to notice its buddy has gone missing, so the average pace may be a vole every other day.

Bonus: Gnawing on the nuts or trying to pull them away triggers the trap, so those walnuts are still out there.

The community gardens have enough voles to attract Red Tailed Hawks, which have started perching on fence posts and stooping on voles foolish enough to run along the paths or into grassy areas. Some gardeners seem disconcerted by the presence of such large birds in close proximity, but Mary assures them they’re helpers.

2024-08-30
Slotted Spiders

Starting from an SVG file set up for 3 mm material, apply the usual optimizations & tweaks to get a usable LightBurn file, then go nuts:

Spider Collection

The big one is two cross-laid layers of corrugated cardboard using up the better part of three Home Depot Large moving boxes:

Spider – LightBurn layout – 2x cardboard

That little bitty grid is the 700×500 mm laser cutter platform, so I just slap a sheet of cardboard in place, update the workspace from the camera, select the next layout, drag it over the cardboard, and Fire The Laser.

The smaller cardboard spider over on the left is built with a single cardboard layer and succumbed to the square-cube law: the legs are entirely too bendy for the weight of the body. Although it’s not obvious from the pictures, both cardboard spiders have a keel plate I added under the body to support most of their weight.

The brightly colored little spiders got a coat of rattlecan paint without any underlying primer and definitely look like that happened:

Spider Collection – detail 2

The edge-lit fluorescent green spider is sized around 2.9 mm material, the clear spider uses 2.3 mm acrylic, and the chipboard one in the background is at 1.8 mm:

Spider Collection – detail 1

The eyes are fluorescent red or green acrylic with concentric circles engraved to catch the light. They’re more effective than I expected, although they won’t look like much after dark.

We now live in a neighborhood with youngsters and Halloween this year will be so much fun …

The WordPress AI image generator caught the general idea of “cardboard spiders”:

Spider – WordPress AI image

So. Many. Legs.

2024-07-23
Slotted Beetles

Continuing the theme of slot resizing & overall scaling:

Beetle Collection

The original model has 3.0 mm slots and arrived in CorelDraw format requiring a bank shot off InkScape to create an SVG file suitable for LightBurn. After the usual cleanup & optimization, I applied global rescaling to match the available material.

The smallest beetles use 1.9 mm chipboard:

Beetle – 1.9mm chipboard

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:

Beetle – 3x cardboard

That bad boy needs black stripes on yellow in the universal “Fear me! I am a seriously dangerous creature!” danger marking.

The layers are laid out with crossed corrugations to make the part less bendy, which is more necessary for the relatively slender legs.

It’s two feet long and chewed up the better part of two Home Depot Extra Large moving boxes:

Beetle – LightBurn layout – 3x cardboard

The gridded rectangle represents the 700×500 mm laser platform.

The little ones are kinda cute and not too threatening:

Beetle Collection – 1.9mm

Yes, that is one of the Goldbug Variations.

2024-07-22
House Finch Nesting Attempts
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.
2024-07-15
Daisies Dancing
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:
```
ffmpeg -framerate 4 -start_number 75 -i IM_%05d.jpg -s 1920x1080 Daisies.mp4
```
The result of which now appears on Youtube:

Daisies dancing

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.

For whatever it’s worth, I had to put the open camera in full sunlight on a table out on the deck to dry out the water left from a recent rainstorm. Whether the water comes from diurnal pumping or a leak through the rim gasket, I cannot say, but it can’t possibly be doing the PCB any good.

I do not expect the video to go viral …
2024-07-12
Squirrels Need Sleep, Too

Spotted outside a window:

Sleepy Squirrel

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 …

2024-06-17
AI Artistry

My techie news feed spat out a reference to an AI text-to-image generator, so I figured I’d try it out.

The caption is the prompt producing the image, with the style in parentheses …

steam engine black and white engraving full page detailed (art)

Much wheel! Such hinge! Crazy piston! Also, where do the red cowcatcher and amber headlight come from in a “black and white engraving”?

diesel engine black and white detailed (photorealistic)

Well, it is an “engine”.

diesel engine black and white detailed (anime)

Now, that is a manly engine, but with red widgets.

steam boiler
black and white engraving full page detailed (anime)

It has the appearance of an old catalog page, until you look closely.

OK, let’s try for some wildlife …

pileated woodpecker line drawing, black and white, on tree (art)

So. Many. Legs.

stained glass window bird motif (photorealistic)

Not bad. Not bad at all.

coloring book chickadee on twig (art)

Chickadees seem like relentlessly cheerful little birds, but that oddly spherical critter is definitely having a hard time.

phoebe sketch, black and white, detailed, full frame (art)

Oops.

phoebe bird sketch, black and white, detailed, full frame (art)

That must be a mil-spec phoebe, because it definitely doesn’t resemble any phoebe I’ve ever seen.

Bottom line: Although the pictures are much better drawn than I can do, the (in)accuracy of the content prevents it from solving any problems I have.

2024-04-16