I have now truly experienced the small.
Imagine: An LED chip, nay, SPECK, that is 0.6 x 1.0 mm in size, and only 0.2 mm thick.
That is not much different in size than the period in a 12-point font, and not all that much thicker than the paper it is printed on.
I have, however, successfully soldered two 22-gauge wires to this chip (note: the wire is 0.6 mm in diameter), one wire on either end.
And.
It worked. I made it light up.
It only took three tries, too. Fortunately, I started with 150 LEDs, so even a 1:5 loss is not going to be a problem.
Now I have to epoxy it into a bead and I'll have a glowing bead!
You may all now bask in the glory that is me.
So, did I already mention that the Boom Stick crapped out this year?
It's had a rough run -- during a photo shoot, using it to make vortex rings at high speed, the piston component fractured. The PVC glue couldn't cope with the stress of HUNDREDS of firings and just let go.
So I epoxied it back together and it worked again!
Then, at Scare, I dropped it and fractured it just above the piston mount area, where the air is managed.
So I fixed THAT, and it worked.
But, it stopped working. Stiction, it seemed to me, probably aggravated by a misalignment somewhere.
So I tried a new lubricant -- a spray-on graphite, very exciting. Nope.
It killed an O-Ring so I replaced it. I also worked up a new firing protocol, and it worked mostly okay for a while.
But no. I think, ultimately, the stiction (which can be fixed by reducing the diameter of the piston) plus the piston repair which made the O-ring groove too narrow (so the O-ring can't deform, hence making it harder to fit into the target area and eventually damaging the O-ring) conspired to make it just... not... right.
Plus the dropping, plus the long runs. This Boom Stick is now retired.
Next up -- another one! Bigger! Better! Boomier!
I had a great title for today's post ... and some great ideas for the post... or maybe I just dreamed that I did and actually didn't.
Either way, it's gone now.
I started a batch of ginger cider yesterday, er, Tuesday actually, and it's making happy bubbling sounds. I love the sound of fermentation!
I also put up the page for Scare 2008 and for Maker Faire 2008.
Scare is mostly done with strike now, at least, I've stopped working it! And we are hot on the path of next year's planning; there is way more enthusiasm post-show this year than we've usually had.
I'm also hot on the design for MakerBrain.com - my next website - and hope to have a framework in place for development and testing early 2009.
At NI work, my big EtherCAT project was finished and released pretty much at the 11th hour just before I vanished for the Scare build. So that's cool.
My next NI project will be... something new. I absolutely do not want to go work in the area that I worked in when I first came to NI, because frankly, they suck and I hated id. So I'm putting feelers out to a new area, which is in fact an old area of expertise for me. But I'm not saying, 'cause of who reads this and I don't want to jinx it.
Anyway! I may be even MORE sporadic than usual posting (sorry) because I hope to be very very busy in the coming months.
Gonna post soon I think, maybe this weekend.
Get Scare '08 pics in, write up stuff.
Gonna start working on the new website, gonna write a new wiki for it.
Lots of projects on the horizon.
Still dead from Scare; 16 hour days; 280 hours logged in October, over 370 total (from when I started paying attention).
Still more take-down to do.
Ugh.
So, taking Fri/Mon off for a long weekend with Nik (my son) here, and I want to have some TIME with him this visit. Couldn't get a block of time out from work (stoopid project) but by damned if I'm going to have another month w/o having time with him. Normal two-day weekends are no good; there are still things to be done around the house and with other projects; it just doesn't work out.
Four day weekends are not bad. I'll see how many I can make before he leaves at the end of the month.
As for my journal posting -- I'm not going to sweat the details; it's going to be erratic.
BIG THINGS happening end of year; I'm doing design and research work for a massive website rebuild (not entirely true; not a rebuild; a fresh build; new website under a different name; you'll see. I hope). Scare for a Cure is firing up big now. And I still have Make articles to write. Putting big Tesla on the back burner a bit. Undecided about Maker Faire, what I want to do there.
Last night we had a mostly-successful test on a low frequency resonant driver (big fat tube, whum-whum-whum-whum... neat stuff; like an infrasonic air horn). The compressed air driving it was too hissy and detracted from the effect. Going to try a different air source today, higher volume, lower pressure.
Cutting the new port hole in the pressure chamber (through Sono-tube, tough cardboard), I managed to run the tip of the X-Acto blade deep into the tip of my little finger (weird freak accident, really!). Bled like a stuck... stuck... Edwin! So I dripped all over my white sink and took pictures for color reference.
Blood is a tad more translucent than I thought, at least my blood is. And pretty bright, too.
I'm waiting for it to darken up and "scab" so I can take some "after" pics, then I'll have to clean out the sink.
It still bugs me, though, when movie blood looks like red food coloring in Karo (which it often is). Or when it is basically red tempera paint. Blood isn't red (except that it _is_ red, but not THAT red); blood isn't transparent (though it is a bit, just not like candy).
Ah well, the quest for perfect blood continues.
The Five Stages of Programming:
1. Denial
"My program doesn't suck, and this isn't my bug."
2. Anger
"You are an asshole for implying my program sucks, you can take this bug report and stuff it up your nose! If you would only use my interfaces properly, this wouldn't be happening."
3. Bargaining
"Look, I don't know where this bug is, but it's in a stupid feature; we cover the 80% use case just fine and the user is never going to use anyway. We should just remove the feature."
4. Depression
"My program is full of bugs and it totally sucks; I suck; everything sucks. I think I'll give up programming and go become a monk in a cave somewhere with no electricity."
5. Acceptance
"Yeah, my program sucks; all programs suck, it's their nature. However, they can still be useful. Let's find and fix the next bug, okay?"
... and I do too much.
Going to be leading ("teaching" is too strong a word, given my own skill level) a really really neat class/group in Faux Painting (level 1) dealing with basics, metals, and textures. Gonna be great! Gotta figure out how to wedge a dozen people into my workspace! In such a way that they can work!
So, I need to post step 2 of my Tesla project, which will address the Primary and the DC Power supply, but I'm still researching the DC power supply ("you want HOW many volts at WHAT current? HAHAHAHAHHAHAH!" is pretty much what I get out of most references)...
... in so doing, I stumbled across this Gem:
"PM-SRC operates in three modes, namely, mode-1, mode-2, and mode-3."
Now I see why those PhD engineers get the BIG BUCKS.
I has them:
http://www.simreal.com/content/IGDAPicnic
Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I am designing a Tesla coil from scratch. I’ll be using the work of those that came before me of course, because while I like to do things the hard way, I’m not entirely insane. This installment of my build notes is the starting point in my thinking; from a desired arc length, I will work backwards through the design until I reach the wall plug. Then I’ll refine and construct the coil, and hope that it works!
At first, I thought it would be useful to simply bring up the relevant theory, maybe run some calculations, throw up some graphs, make a SPICE model, and then the various parameters might be made obvious. As it turns out, there are quite a few models of operation for the Tesla coil; piecewise, you can assemble an amazing mathematical model of the entire thing (though poking around in these models made my brain hurt). The trouble is that there appears to be a lack of agreement on exactly what is the _right_model.
Corum & Corum wrote a detailed paper to refute the simple lumped-component model in favor of a distributed-inductor model [1][2], thereby throwing the gauntlet down between the two primary camps: radio people and non-radio people. The radio people tend to see the Tesla coil secondary like an antennae (and there is good reason to do so). However, the Corum^2 paper had a nicely-worded rebuttal by Terry Fritz [3] and work by Ćosić et.al. seems to show that the simpler lumped model does in fact work fairly well [4], which bodes well for easier SPICE simulations.
These two models only matter when it comes time to find the correct operating frequency of the coil. On the one hand, the inductor (coil) + capacitor (topload) LC circuit has a characteristic resonance in the lumped model. On the other hand, the wire length of the secondary coil (in conjunction with mysterious speed-of-electricity-in-copper issues [5]) gives a characteristic quarter-wavelength frequency for optimal voltage amplification on the top end of the coil.
Some calculators (and coilers, I assume) simply punt and adjust the circuit so that the LC resonance simply matches the quarter-wave resonance and brush the whole argument under the carpet.
Theory, it seems, is not the place to start. What we do have, however, are a number of rules-of-thumb guides that define the working space of the average coiler, and a whole raft of electronics formulae that can be used to crunch out the details later.
There are many assumptions that I make right up front. Since I’m coiling to make pretty sparks for display purposes, I want to optimize for zap factor. Other choices could include stable high voltage for physics research, or a high-frequency plasma discharge with low noise characteristics to make a plasma speaker.
Given the purpose, you now get to choose a technology. I’m choosing the DRSSTC (dual-resonant solid-state Tesla coil pioneered by Jimmy Hynes, Steve Ward, and others, and kitted up by Daniel McCauley (which makes a really nice entry point to the field, thanks Dan!). Of course, you could also go with the traditional spark gap coil, vacuum-tube control, the so-called “online” configuration, and so on.
First Decision:
9 to 10 foot sparks using DRSSTC technology.
Okay, maybe I _am_ insane.
How much power will that take? D.C Cox of Resonant Research Labs has an extended mix version of John Freau’s spark-length-to-power formula [6]:
d = k’ * sqrt p
Where d is spark distance in inches, p is input power in watts (or VA as metered from the wall), and k’ is a “fudge factor” coefficient based on the secondary coil diameter:
Dia. k’
3-10” 0.85
11-16” 1.00
17-20” 1.30
21-36” 1.70
37-48” 2.0
But what should our secondary coil diameter be? In other guides, they say you can expect a spark length 2 to 3 times the height of the secondary coil (needs reference), and looking ahead a bit, we see that a diameter of about 1/4 the secondary height is reasonable.
Given a 9’ (108”) spark, that is 2 to 3 times longer than the secondary winding, we have a winding height of 36 to 54”, and with a height/diameter ratio of 4:1 that leaves us with a 9” to 12” diameter coil. Plugging that in to the k’ table, we can just pick something near 1.
p = (d/k’) ^ 2 = (108/1.0)^2 = about 12kVA
12kVA is a big chunk of power. From a 15A outlet running at about 115V RMS (though I’m not entirely sure my voltmeter is given me RMS here; a 125VAC peak-to-peak calculates out to about 90VAC RMS) for 1.7kVA (or 1.3kVA), we should be able to get 12kVA bursts from a capacitor bank if we only fire for 10% (giving some allowance for inefficiency). So it might be possible. Especially if I use a 20A circuit and not the lame 15A.
The RRL guide also indicates we need a toroid major diameter of 1.7 to 2.0 times the secondary’s diameter, with a minor to major diameter ratio of 3.8 to 5.0, which is eerily similar to the guidelines for the secondary coil aspect ratio.
For example, Daniel McCauley’s Eastern Voltage Research guide [7] gives aspect ratios for various smaller coil diameters:
Dia. h/d
<=4” 4.5:1 to 5:1
to 6” 4:1 to 4.5:1
>6” 3:1 to 4:1
Deep Fried Neon [8] gives similar advice, recommending secondary diameters for various powers, and then ratios from diameter:
Power Dia.
<500W 3” to 4”
to 1.5kW 4” to 6”
to 3kW 6” to 10”
>3kW 10”+
Dia. h/d
3” 6:1
4” 5:1
6” 4:1
8”+ 3:1 to 5:1
Given all this, where are we now?
9’ (108”) sparks
12kVA power
3:1 to 4:1 secondary aspect ratio
3’ to 4’ (36” to 48”) winding height
9” to 12” winding diameter
Various guides, such as Richard Quick’s archived discussion on Pupman [9] and TeslaMap’s guide [10], among others, indicate that 800 to 1,000 turns on the secondary are optimal (though when it comes down to actual coils in hand, I’ve seen winding counts of 2,000 and more). My Mini Brute has roughly 1,000 windings (I didn’t count; my next coiler is going to have a quadrature counter in it, that will be handy) and generally follows the guidelines for a 3:1 aspect ratio.
Picking a nice round number of n=1,000, we need a wire spacing of .036” to .048” (36 to 48 mils). This lands us right around 18gauge [19] (17..19ga; 18 is a common size though). 18ga is 40.3 mils, and Classic Tesla’s Turn Calculator [11] gives a single-layer enamel thickness of 1.5 mils. Taking into account some inefficiency in winding, and we have about a 43” heigh coil. At the aspect ratio chosen, we need about a 10” diameter form.
The easiest to find material to use for the form is PVC (polyvinyl chloride) or PE (polyethylene) water pipe. The _best_ material, electrically, is polystyrene or polypropylene; but we can make PVC or PE work, and coating it with epoxy or polyurethane helps improve its dielectric performance as well (or so say the guidelines).
Schedule 40 PVC is easily found in 3” and 4” diameters (with actual ODs of 3.5” and 4.5” due to obscure historical reasons). Harder to find is schedule 40 in 6”, 8”, 10”, and 12” trade diameters (OD of 6.625”, 8.625”, 10.75”, and 12.75”).
Whereas all ANSI “schedule” pipes are listed as having the same ODs [12], however I’ve discovered that “green” plumbing pipes are different (and, as best I can find, metric). This green-colored plumbing is apparently based on smooth-wall polyethylene, which is popular in Europe, but deeply confusing when purchased as (what I thought was) schedule 20 PVC, but which in fact did not conform to ANSI dimensions. So stay alert! It’s a jungle out there.
Assuming I can find it, I can use 10” trade PE sewer pipe, which has an actual outside diameter of 10.75”, a perfectly acceptable size according to all accounts. If I can’t find that, I might be able to modify a Sonotube, or start trolling the local plastics suppliers [13]. I’d love to use some of that transparent PVC, but the cost is a killer [14].
Of the many parameters that can be used to define the secondary coil, the guidelines in fact give us answers to most of them, and the rest can be easily calculated:
Form Diameter, Length, Wall thickness, Material, & Dielectric behavior
Wire Gauge / diameter, insulation thickness, and length
Coil Height, avg. Diameter, Winding count and spacing
Coil DC Resistance and AC Reactance, Inductance and Capacitance
Quarter-wave resonant frequency
Coil Q factor
Most of these values are constrained by the original desire for a 9’ spark, the availability of secondary form materials, and the rules of thumb listed above.
The design so far:
9’ (108”) sparks
12kVA power
4:1 secondary h/d aspect ratio
43” winding height
10.75” form diameter
18 gauge (0.0403” + 0.0015”) wire
1,000 windings
TeslaMap’s calculator [15] says that 43” of 18ga wire will give me 998 turns, using 2,800 feet of wire. Deep Fried Neon’s calculator [16] agrees, and gives me an inductance of 59.8mH and a self-capacitance of 18.3pF. Tesla Coil CAD 2.0 [17], with similar secondary values, gives me 950 turns, 2,670 feet of wire, 54.4mH, and 20.2pF, adding the interesting detail of a 92.11kHz quarter wave resonance (but did they take into account the slowdown of electricity in copper [5]?) and a need for a 34 to 35pF topload capacitor to make it resonate at this rate.
Note that 100kHz is a decent frequency to run at, well within IGBT limits when soft switched (though 50kHz would have been even more friendly, and the IGBTs do tend to be rated at 25kHz or less when hard switched).
The secondary circuit consists of a coil of wire, with a given inductance L and possibly quarter wave resonance lambda/4, plus a capacitor and discharge terminal, typically a sphere or toroid, with a capacitance C.
In theory, I want a topload toroid of approximately the same minor diameter as the secondary coil (10”), and with about the same aspect ratio to its major diameter (40”). Looking at what supplies are easy, and costs, that’s just not going to happen -- though it WOULD give me a nearly perfect effective topload capacitance of about 35pF according to the JavaTC calculator [18].
Instead of the $600 spun toroid of the correct dimensions, let’s try a simpler and cheaper one made from classic 4” trade diameter dryer vent (also about 4.5” actual OD).
A 40” toroid with 4.5” minor diameter gives (via JavaTC again) about 30pF effective capacitance on this coil; adding a second one below it with a 36” major diameter gives us the 33pF capacitance, which is close enough at this stage of design.
The tighter minor diameters will mean an easier breakout, with a lower potential maximum voltage, but it’s such an easy material to find it may be worth it. Anyway, toploads are the easiest part to swap out for experiments.
Secondary Design:
9’ (108”) sparks
12kVA power
4:1 secondary h/d aspect ratio
43” winding height on about a 48” form
10.75” form diameter
18 gauge (0.0403” + 0.0015”) wire
~1,000 windings
~54-55mH inductance
~20pF self capacitance
40” OD 4.5” aluminum duct toroid on top of another
36” OD 4.5” toroid
33-35pF topload capacitance
~92kHz quarter-wave and lump-model resonance
With this rough sketch in place, I could move on to the primary or bog myself down into mathematical and/or SPICE analysis... I’ve leaned on the various calculators pretty hard so far, and haven’t crunched the numbers myself yet... but right now... it’s dinner time!
References:
[1] http://www.ttr.com/corum/
[2] http://www.blazelabs.com/teslacoil.pdf
[3] http://www.pupman.com/listarchives/1999/October/msg00428.html
[4] http://www.tesla2006.org/presentations/other/The%20Analysis%20of%20Tesla%20Coil%20Apparatus.pdf
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index
[6] http://www.classictesla.com/download/resonance_tips.pdf
[7] http://www.easternvoltageresearch.com/designfiles/paper_howto.pdf
[8] http://deepfriedneon.com/tesla_guide.html
[9] http://www.pupman.com/listarchives/1995/january/msg00139.html
[10] http://www.teslamap.com/guide.html
[11] http://www.classictesla.com/java/cst.html
[12] http://www.crestwoodtubulars.com/pipe_schedule.html
[13] http://www.regalplastics.net/
[14] http://www.clearpvcpipe.com/
[15] http://www.teslamap.com/download.html
[16] http://deepfriedneon.com/tesla_frame6.html
[17] http://www.richardsplace.net/tesladownload.htm
[18] http://www.classictesla.com/java/javatc.html
[19] http://www.interfacebus.com/Copper_Wire_AWG_SIze.html
http://www.classictesla.com/FormulasForTeslaCoils.pdf
http://www.classictesla.com/download/tc99.pdf
(cross posted to www.4hv.org)
You may or may not know, dear reader, that I've been poking at the problem of creating physical low-frequency resonance for some time now. I've tried a few things, including a subwoofer-driven Helmholtz resonator thrown together from Sono Tubes and Duct Tape (indeterminate results, some possibilities).
I fell back, during past haunts, on using bass-shakers bolted to the crawl tunnels and hand-tuning the frequency generator to get a good subsonic. When that works, it's an amazing and beautiful thing (people refused to go in on early tests, it "just felt weird"). Sadly, that system of open-loop resonance falls out of tune too easily. I should add a microphone or other sonic transducer to it and make it closed loop, and then I'll melt your brain in the tunnels! Bwahahahahahah!
::ahem::
Today, however, I finally succeeded in making an air-powered resonator out of about 32-feet of 4.5" diameter sewer pipe (and some duct tape, of course). It... resonated! First it squawks like a demon-tormented goose, and then if rumbles and shifts and then... tones! Not pure, but pretty nifty nonetheless.
An eight foot pipe produces a surprisingly high tone, and 32 feet of it isn't as low as I would like. However, there are a zillion things to tune -- airflow, back pressure (once I build a back-pressure chamber), elasticity of the membrane, sealing characteristics of the driving tube, and most important for good low frequency amplitude, diameter.
Yup yup yup... maybe a switchback of forty feet of 12" sono tube with tubable back pressure and a durable membrane... mmmmmmm yeah.
My bathroom sink was draining slowly lately, and I finally remembered this during a time of day/week where I could _do_ something about it.
Normally I use a hooked wire and pull mats of hair and soap scum out, no big deal (we Wise mammals do shed a fair amount). But in _my_ sink, I find just a little bit of hair+scum and then a wall of... mycological FLESH, perhaps; a veritable _skin_ growing on my drain pipe. Horrible, horrible skin, with a curdling of hair and soap on its inner passage, like some demonic esophagus. ::shudder::
Speaking of horrific, thinking about water use and this foolish ad I saw for a lawn care service. In this ad, they said "you must water your lawn or it could die! And to resod could take $1,500! And your resale value is heavily tied to the green of your lawn!"
Forgetting for a moment the foolishness of the whole "lawn thing" in such an arid area as Texas, let's look at some assumptions.
We used 3,000 gallons of water in our last billing cycle. We don't water our outside unless things look really desperate.
We have some friends who used 15,000 gallons in their last cycle. Assuming that, for their larger household, they would normally use say 5,000 gallons indoors, that leaves 10,000 gallons of outdoors use.
The watering months, here, are perhaps from June through September -- four months. Lighter watering in other months, heaver perhaps in July and August, let's just average it out and say 10,000 gallons of lawn watering for four months.
The City of Austin rates are currently, for single-family residential customers, in dollars per thousand gallons:
0 - 2,000: $0.93 ($1.86 max)
2,001 - 9,000 $2.43 ($17.00)
9,001 - 15,000 $4.18 ($25.07)
15,001+ $7.63
So for this hypthotical household OF 15,000 gallons, the cost is (rounding up the thousand gallon deltas):
(0.93*2) + (2.43*7) + (4.18*6) = $43.95
Wastewater costs much more than water to process ($3.18 per 1,000 for the first 2,000, $7.18 per 1,000 thereafter), but these rates are calculated for the entire year given your winter water use, so they don't scale here.
Now, for a 5,000 gallon user (e.g. the sample family above without lawn watering) the numbers are:
(0.93*2) + (2.43*3) = $9.15
So, $34,80 per month for watering the lawn, times four months in the calculated period, is almost $140 a year. In eleven years, then, you will have saved enough to re-turf your lawn.
I know our water bill is in fact about nine dollars a month, for about three thousand gallons. Talking around, I'm hearing about water bills for $200 or more, though -- these must include the sewage fees and random fees that are tacked on throughout any given bill.
I was expecting the heavy lawn watering to cost more that $40 -- more like $100 -- which would give $300 to $400 a year in lawn watering costs, the saving of which would pay for a re-turfing in just four years or so (about the time it would take for the lawn to really die a lot).
Anyway, I still don't water my lawn. Instead, I'm aggressively converting it into non-grass coverings.
Woot! I just coiled about 1,000 turns (12 inches of 30 gauge... or was it 32? I should check) in maybe 15 minutes coiling time.
That's some kind of new record. And, the coil is pretty good. Only had to stop twice for gaps (no overlaps); left one gap not fully closed, so it's not perfect yet, but pretty good. And, 15 minutes! That's like eight times faster than the first one.
Now to automate the tensioning/guide process that I currently do with my hand (oooo hand cramps); and THEN to make a ponoko pattern and rebuild it into a nice version. With a turn counter; I'm thinking embedded magnets and hall effect sensors in a quadrature format. Or maybe optical. The pedometers tend to bounce really badly (one step for the lift peg, one or two more steps when they fall off the lift peg, very sad).
The tin shed is up in the backyard; the doors worked a LOT better once I stuffed a rock under one corner of the foundation to torque it all into proper alignment. Bah! The big rain (previous to THIS big rain) made all my cinderblocks settle unevenly. Humbug!
I spread the lumps of dirt (most of 'em; Marla swears she'll move the rest this week or something; she wanted me to stop, 'cause I guess I looked liked was going to die out there in the humidity), and I laid most of the paving stones around it, and it's all kind of nice. It will be even prettier once the grapes grow back, or something, to fill in the stark nakedness of that corner. I'll post pics later.
Oh, the rain, I need to see how much water leaks in... may need to assault the whole thing with a caulk gun. Wheee! Or maybe glow-in-the-dark gluestick. That would be amusing
I just ordered from ABC fill-in-the-blank services a "full exclusion" rat service, for a tad over $500. Ouch. But then again, I just got a reimbursement on my property tax due to my finally getting off my ass and putting in for a homestead exemption, totalling a tad under $400. So that helps a lot.
July is ... tomorrow! Egads! And I have a lovely four-day weekend as part of it, during which I want to settle down a connect-the-dots design (and start the prototype implementation), and I want to get starting schematics and SPICE simulations on the new Tesla coil. And maybe some parts ordered.
I'm going to go wayyyy off into high-risk territory and put some International Rectifier IGBTs into parallel conduction -- a task fraught with negative feedback and runaway current loading, which can lead to some lovely pyrotechnics. However, with the soft-switching I have planned, and running them actually SLOWER than rated (for a complete turnabout from normal Tesla practice), I think it will be just fine.
Plus, these parts are (a) cheap and (b) accessible. The part I _wanted_ was (a) expensive, and (b) really hard to actually GET. In fact, I got a call from the corporate rep and I had to tell him my plan... to us IR's part. Because it's cheap. And I can buy it. He was all, "but it shows here that it's in stock in distribution!". I countered with the hard-to-refute knowledge that of the 2 (two!) distributors that claim stock, one doesn't have stock, and the other has a horrible and useless website without any ordering forms.
Sucks to be him.
What a week... trying to get a fix from my H/W guy so I can freakin' TEST the changes that have come down the pike, so I can get a decent update to the rest of the team so THEY can test, so we can be done with this damn project.
Of course, we have three revisions of the device and the newer images don't work right on the older hardware (e.g. Rev C firmware on Rev B device; not my fault, it's hard-wired that way; if my H/W guy had used reverse logic on the sleep line it would have worked, but noooo, probably not enough room for an inverter. Or the '!' sign in the VHDL. Who knows.)
So yesterday I send out an e-mail that includes the note that the modified image I was sending FIXES the Rev-B sleep issue, but MAY BREAK four specific modules due to creeping incompatibilities. This gives us a lot more devices we can use for testing, with the effect of just losing 4 of 36 modules... no big deal, big improvement overall.
I get a ping from one of the guys downstairs saying that the RevB sleep hack doesn't work, they can't use modules! Okay, so my H/W guy messed up (don't we all?) and the hack doesn't work. Bring one up and I'll verify the problem.
Umm. Guys. This works. I see the module, I see data...
Oh! It turns out it only fails on THIS module. And this second one as well.
Both of which were listed as possibly broken in my e-mail.
These are smart guys. Did they not read my e-mail at all? It wasn't even a long e-mail! I kept it short!
::headdesk::
Thank god it's Friday; I _may_ get through this day without killing someone.
Finished the Shed structural elements last night; took over two hours, less than three. Marla was an excellent helper and spare hand, spare brain.
In retrospect, we should have left all of the screws slightly loose until all panels were in place -- getting the roof on was six flavors of annoying, trying to torque the shed walls into shape.
The instructions say "Measure diagonally to be sure the shed is square." We didn't bother with this because the instructions made no mention of what to do if the shed were NOT square, which fits in just about right with my experience with the Chinese approach to debugging -- which is to say, they don't. No error reporting, because that might indicate weakness. Bugs? We don't have any bugs! Our tests prove it, see that green light? If you measure your shed and it's not square, clearly you lived a poor life and should just go die now. Hah.
So the shed was not square, but leaving the screws loose until the end would have made it easier to finesse into position. That would have required more forethought than _I_ had going, and would have been something useful for the instructions.
Oh, and don't get me started about the highly accurate placement of holes in this metal shed thingy. Yup. Putting the hinges on, if you tighten two of the three screws, the third screw hole is over half a diameter out of place. That's some quality machining there Lou.
Needless to say, the doors don't hang right yet. Another task for the coming weekend.
I spent the rest of the evening trying to find an IGBT or other transistor shaped device that can (a) handle 600 amps, an arbitrary number I pulled out of my ear that is about ten times the IGBT I use now; and (b) can switch at 100kHz, another arbitrary number, but my current Tesla goes at 168kHz, so 100kHz frequencies seem reasonable.
I found one very nice 600A IGBT on eBay for $47, normally a $470 part, but it switches at 25kHz. In fact, most if not all high power IGBTs switch at the 20-25kHz range.
I do so want to build this massive Tesla in DRSSTC style, though, which means BIG SWITCH. Or, maybe, lots of little switches in parallel, except that IGBTs don't parallel gracefully, not like MOSFETs. But MOSFETs have issues with current dissipation at high voltages.
So the quest goes on.
Curse you evil Day Star.
This weekend was spent melting under the relentless sun, shifting chunks of clay and sandstone matrix to create a (mostly, somewhat) level foundation for my 8' x 3' "garden" shed. Hehehehhe. "Garden". I have a "Fire Garden". Heheheh.
Yeah.
Well, six 12" square concrete deck footings, dug 5" to 8" deep or so depending where on the SLOPING DAMN HILL of my back yard they were at, means removing only 2 or 3 cubic feet of earth. Not so bad, eh? Shouldn't take too long, eh?
That's what I thought too. However, a million percent humidity (INFINITE HUMIDITY; rain + sun = miasma) and near-100-degree temps made it grueling and tiring work, even with the wonderful help I had (Thanks Matt, Michelle).
So, two days worth of mornings, several hours each (until we fell over, basically), and the foundation is set, the 2x4 framework (pressure treated with alkaline copper, I believe), the 3/4" plywood topper (which should be on the metal frame and not the 2x4 frame, ah well, I'll live), the shed base, the doors, and some bracings -- built.
But no shed yet. I'm a bit frustrated about that, really.
Might finish that Tuesday.
I also read a bunch of my materials for the Flame Effects Operator License, but without knowing what kind of material they will test for, I have severe doubts about what I need to try and memorize. And I both hate and am quite poor at memorizing random crap.
Work will probably be pure suck this week, but is bound to get better once/if/when we pound the last nail into its coffin.
For now, I just need to wake up.
Work is going pretty good -- the team that owns the modules realized they messed up on this family, fixed their registers, and when I incorporate their changes my stuff works too! Yay! That's the last four that need looking at... going green even as I write here.
Of course, one of eight channels fails on this OTHER family over HERE, but hey, I don't want to get bored.
Dunno yet about the other issues yet. Maybe they have crumpled before my might logic. Heh. HEHEHehhehehehhe. ::snerk:: Right.
On a different note, I've been have some existential moments again, and I really hate that.
I went in once for dental surgery (root canals) and got a full knockout for the trip. Edwin gone. Edwin back -- and the work was done. Nothing in between, nada, blank, black.
Certain head trauma, too, will cause complete loss of memory. It just doesn't make the trip from short term to long term.
Certain drugs, too, won't knock you out so much as wipe the experience from the slate.
Certain other drugs can be used to wipe memories during recall.
So, these existential moments always harken back to that loss of existence I experienced (in retrospect) during that surgery. Edwin gone. And not waking up. Gone gone gone.
Terrifying.
There is nothing, literally nothing, more terrifying. This is why we invented religion, after all, and why it sticks around so persistently in spite of evidence.
::sigh::
And Chinese programmers? Yeah. Error handling? Yeah.
Been bugging them for 12 to 18 months about their need to, you know, catch and report errors. They started poking at that, I think, last week.
My head's gonna assplode.
And now they are giving me annoying attitude about MY error reporting, which has been in place, I dunno, for a year and a half now? Two years? They want "all clear" messages for events like pulling modules... all clear? WTF? All clear from what? When they tell me to reload the configuration, I do that, and I'm clear. What else would they like? Blood? Two weeks before drop-dead date? Give me a freakin' break!
So, work is stressing on me pretty hard, but the drop-dead date is June 30, so it _will_ be done by then, one way or another.
Of course, my efforts are totally absorbed into supporting, debugging, and doing timing and even data-motion tests on these 35 or 36 devices that plug into mine... testing that SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE by the OTHER team, you know, the team that these devices belong to. Yeah. Them. They were all ready to release 'em without checking, you know, that they actually follow timing spec. "We got data, it's good!" Is it really? Do you know WHEN that data was captured? I do!
I've found bugs, and my cohort on that team has fixed bugs, and we are down to the last three or for, all of one family.
I had one marked green (as in good) and then I found a subtle problem in the timing. Goody. Now it's better.
Thursday had dance class again, that was fun! I'm a tad out of shape; East coast swing was hard work. But fun!
Skipped Bolero, my tendinitis was really giving me gyp; I gotta wear my muscle strap I guess.
Friday night, I had to clean up the garage a bit so the Make Magazine photographer could, you know, photograph. Hi Pam! Nice lady. During the arrangement, I dropped a dancing-flame tube pillar on my toe -- this is an 8" PVC pipe, an adapter, a subwoofer, and a 4-foot long board as a foot. My right big toe is funny colors and I limp now.
I skipped West coast swing Friday, due to funny-colored toe, and instead we had a lovely anniversary (Friday the 13 is our first-date anniversary) with my sweetie wifie.
Today, I moved about two tons of paving stone (wearing my muscle strap thing), with help from Marla, Tall Matt, and Paul (pretty much in sequence like that). The common factor was me limping around arranging stones, and the sun beating down on my (hatted) head. Reminded me of Flipside.
Now, soon, movie time! Or maybe more ibuprofen. That stuff really works.
Tomorrow am? The remaining 3/4 ton or so of paving stone. Whee!
Oooo a baby kitten is attacking my shorts. Want a kitten?
Well, we managed to tame the back yard -- which was filled, hundreds of square feet of it, with four foot weeds and plants such as sunflowers, and I don't know what all.
But we tamed it. Hard work, done in the morning and evening to avoid the worst of the heat. In the progress, we created about a cubic yard of new compost pile!
The old compost pile is now in use as dirt, spread here and there to support the nutrient needs of other beds.
I'm a tad sore, but otherwise fine. My tendonitis is giving me a bit of an attitude, but the cider is helping counteract the ache ::grin::
If our idiot HOA approves, I'll be putting a shed over the old compost area on the weekend of the 21st.
NEXT weekend, I need to lay nearly three tons of rock in the back yard, which should be interesting.
Oh, and I got replacement parts for the crispy Tesla, so I'll probably revive it next week.
I've been doing housework too, but slowly... I'll see if I achieve my June goals of planning, housework, and yardwork soon enough.
Die, thing of EVIL!
I'm sure that is what Papageno is saying. He's been really cranky, even hissing at Pico de Gato; it's like he is having flashbacks to 'Nam.
All because I let Marla bring a teeny tiny little female calico kitten into the house. A moment of weakness. Just a moment, but it was enough.
The Thing of Evil (Bats McMurphy, since she was found in a tree outside the mental hospital) is locked in a room upstairs, for the most part, and is temporary (hahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha! Fostering! Good one!). But Papageno is not amused regardless.
And Pico, poor Pico, being hissed at for no good reason.
Picked up wee Pico today, he's gotten heavy. Thick.
Outside of tiny fuzzy intruders, the weekend was nice. Did stuff, went places, bought some books, napped, shopped. I had a real weekend for the first time in, ohh, maybe forever! At least six months.
Work continues to be madness; my editor continues to evade me; and I'm organizing my one-time and ongoing projects for the coming year. My lists numbers 43 right now, and I think I forgot a few.
::sigh::
Anyway, Marla is cruising through the hundred or so pics I took of the tiny beast, so I'll link to them when they are up. Or something.
Oh, I think I'll focus more on Ballroom dancing than Taiji this year. Maybe.
I'm surprised I never noted in my recipe/note file which cap marking went with which cider; I guess I always figured it would be obvious ... but with my memory! Hah! I know better!
I'm PRETTY SURE I labeled them backwards, that the Mr. Blue Cider is the one I meant to label Ginger Bastard, and vice versa. Anyway, I really like the Mr. Blue Cider, but I'm not as keen on the Ginger Bastard -- and I think the heat was not necessarily kind to the Bastard.
However, Mr. Blue seems to have come through the ordeal just fine. I'm _thinking_ Mr. Blue is the spicy second batch, and Ginger Bastard the more mundane first. Hard to say. My notes, and journal posts, are not immediately forthcoming.
Yeah, my memory sucks. But I get compensation for it, via other skills and abilities.
Out campsite at Flipside was approximately 60 feet across, and a bit deeper than that. I need to decide if I want to design a toroidial shade structure for 50' or for the full 60'. With a 60' toroid, we get a 20' minor diameter, and a 20' center space. With a 50' toroid, we can slice it different ways:
20' minor with 10' center
15' minor with 20' center
Our shade tents were 10' by 20', to give a reference size (e.g. small carport size). Hmmmmm.
Things to ponder.
Technically, I'm doing nothing this week, this being limbo week. My house and yardwork and planning are supposed to start this weekend.
We'll see how that goes.
I started a Flipside post, I dunno, last night? But something happened, I got distracted, my computer froze, and I ultimately went to bed instead.
What is today? Wednesday? I've been home two days now and conscious, oh, about thirty seconds.
I tend to move at full-speed-ahead, but doing that in over 100F weather with 40% humidity is a recipe for disaster. I would have keeled over a couple of times if it weren't for the support of my friends. As I sat in the reclining camp chair during strike, trying not to sob from exhaustion, all I could think was, "I can't stop moving yet, I'm not done!"
I suppose in 20 or 30 years, that devotion to "getting things done" is going to kill me... I'll try to slow down some by then.
I found this Flip to be a tad less of a mystical experience than the first, but then again, it's never the same as your first, is it? The burn went weirdly (e.g. not according to expectations) and was shorter than I would have liked, but had moments of eerie beauty that we would not have seen if it had burned according to plan. The crowd was more passive this year, and for that I blame the brutal pounding weather. The fireworks before the burn were brilliant; there were things in there I had never seen before! Or, maybe I had seen them, but when put up with small lift charges, to be seen RIGHT ABOVE MY HEAD (as it were) and not five miles away, it was awesome. Very very nice. Who did that? Where did the pyros get their stuff? What did they use?
No -- must. not. begin. new. hobby.
Anyway, my garage is full and getting a pyro license takes more teamwork than flame effects, and I'm not so good at belonging to groups, going to meetings, and stuff.
Our camp, the Odd Ones, revolved around the emergency event transmitter ("this is Mad Spark with KFLiP 100.1, We Pump Less Thump, 40 watts at 40 feet from our all-natural Moso bamboo tower"). Of course, to be useful in emergencies (and we were), we had to keep people listening (we did). It was awesome! It's a tech job where I get to annoy and entertain people for hours on end! I was in heaven.
As for my own technology, it suffered some from the brutal weather. Did I mention it was hot? Behringer makes a fine piece of inexpensive equipment (hey, I'm not going to pay top dollar for stuff I use just a few times a year), but I found some limitations.
In the heat of the day, their mixer tended to get an intermittent buzz in the right channel. At first, I thought it was in the Fender amp, which I was using for the house speakers, but no -- it was in the mixer. Maybe if I get really bored I'll tear stuff down and look for, I don't know, ant bites or little six-legged corpses. Because ants were freakin' EVERYWHERE, and I killed one on my equipment every few seconds with my thumb.
The Behringer A500 reference amps sounded, I dunno, a bit soft and not terribly bright, coming out of my Fender 128W PA speakers. However, the Fender 128W PA sounded all kinds of bright and crisp, projecting out into the hilltop. Fancy that, a package system sounding better as a package. At home, though, I love the sound of the Behringer reference amps. The only difference being their location: the small confines of my living room, versus the great outdoors. Inside, the Fender sounds sharp and brittle.
Anyway, the A500 was a trooper! I drove it from half an hour to an hour at a time, in the red clipping zone, and until one channel after another turned off because of thermal overload. I doubt they really drive at 500W (250 per channel). Poor amplifiers. Amazingly enough, they both still work.
Which is more than I can say about the Pyle 8" subwoofers I had driving the dancing flame tubes. In at-home testing I noticed that one pillar had problems. It wouldn't always work; it worked when I _pushed_ on the cone, but not when a thump displaced the cone. That worried me. I marked it and went on.
During the trip to Flip, the pole pieces of one driver (the heart and core of the speaker!) just... fell out. I saw it laying there in the bottom of the pillar during unloading. WTF! It turns out the bolts arrayed around the bottom of the speaker were just... decorative. The pole piece is in fact epoxied into place, and that epoxy was NOT doing its job.
I managed to re-insert the pole piece into the voice coil, and it all worked again and it is now being held in by just the shear force of my frustration. And magnetism. I suppose the magnetism is doing most of it, since I'm kind of mellow today.
So, ultimately, one tube was only running one speaker, and I turned it off entirely when Tall Matt noticed that fire was coming out of the dead-speaker base, driven there by the other speaker. Not so good. I expect the silicon check valve is going to look a bit weather when I do my tear down and overhaul.
The other, recently built, tube held up like a trooper.
Next up: better subwoofer drivers (bigger than 600W I think) with more linear throw and better ::mumble:: rating to handle the front pressure. I need a subwoof that likes pressure, such as it might feel in a sealed box.
The pillar of fire was pretty, this was my new project in flame this year. I liked the lantern topper I made in metal class, and it helped keep the flame burning during the stupid big winds we had all weekend, but with it you could not see the vortex nature of the flame. After the first day, I took the topper off and kept the vortex spinning gently at all times the radio was running in the dark. It was beautiful, if subtle.
My color change for the flame worked fairly well, with the Red (Strontium Carbonate, terrifying though that may be, but only $4.50 a pound) being absolutely fantastic. Green started to work at one point -- I had several green chemicals in there, and I don't know which one was doing the heavy lifting -- choices are Copper Oxide, Barium Carbonate, and Boric Acid. Yellow was also fun, and it was basic ordinary baking soda. I used a carrier of pool filter powder (diatomaceous earth) as a carrier, so very little actual chemical was released. And I didn't run it much with people downwind. I do try to avoid actually killing or maiming with my toys...
I need to empty my tanks now and dispose of, or store, these chemicals safely. It is all just pottery glaze. But then again, pottery glaze is kinda dangerous stuff.
The pneumatic valves that drove the powder had an effect that caused my air to leak out too fast, so I couldn't run much color (since I couldn't recharge the compressor unless it was the only thing on the generator, something I will fix next year). When I exhausted the valve, powder blew back down the supply tube and clogged the spindle. Oops! It didn't do that in testing! I need to drop a check valve into the system and it will all be fine. Before then, I need to completely tear down those three valves and service them, because they are now small complicated doorstops.
Like last year, I loved being a DJ -- I was one of those DJs you hate on the rock stations. Who knew? But it was a blast. I'll try to collect better music for next year -- I had some new stuff this year, too, but I'll get more. I want a new playlist for the tubes anyway.
I really needed wind breaks (again, as always) because when we weren't being fried by the sun, we were being sandblasted by the wind. We rigged up some tarps, and it was not bad, but the wind was vicious. I made translucent wind breaks when I ran the tubes in the wind tunnel, er, horse barn at Maker Faire 2007, but those were made from temporary materials. I have a half-baked idea of how to make some permanent ones, that could transport and store, and be decorative, that I can use at Maker Faire 2008 and for future Flipsides. Have to do this. Yup.
I need more propane next year; I froze out about an hour before I was ready to, and I was running only one tube at low pressure for all of the last night. I want to run at the 10-20PSI range, I _was_ running in the 15-30PSI range which is too much, but I _did_ run in the 5-15PSI range that last night.
I need to get off my ass and make remote ignitors; I swore I wasn't going to run Matt ragged relighting, but I did anyway. I have the switch wired in and everything! He does enjoy policing the crowd, though, and he gets to interact with people and stuff, so it works out anyway. I just don't want to take advantage of his good nature needlessly.
The Tesla was cool, for the short life that it had. During packing, we essentially dropped a house on it. The four nylon bolts that hold the secondary column to the base all sheared off, causing the secondary to jolt onto the strike rail's support, lifting and snapping two loops of wire. It also made the toroid go all catywumpus, but that part was no biggie.
I made a delicate surgical repair on the Tesla Saturday evening, and by some miracle that worked! Matt is going to help me make transportation cases for this Tesla and the big one when I complete it, which will be awesome.
When I fired the repaired coil up to validate it, the Singing Tesla guys (Arc Attack) heard me and came over, and we chatted and stuff. Those guys rock... they noted that my Tesla wasn't really in tune, which is true, and they made polite happy noises about the little guy. Its a sturdy and capable little coil, and I was pleased to show it off.
They kept asking if I'd blown a coil yet, and I hadn't which seemed to amaze them. Of course, Sunday night, I was tweaking my settings trying to set up maximum spark (for my untuned coil, with no decent ground, using air strikes) and it blew it's little brains out. Poof! No zappies for Sunday. I told 'em I blew the crap out of my coil, and they welcomed me to the big time.
Debugging the failure will be educational, though, and give me more fodder for my new coil's design. I want to make it bullet proof, if possible.
My camp mates were awesome, across the board. People just did what needed doing, there were some rough spots (I hear) but we also worked our way through them (as far as I know). It was wonderful to see neat things happening as a group! I could ignore aspects of camp and know they would just get done, by those more capable of doing them. It was awesome.
Plus, Sofia kept me alive Monday. I really appreciate that. It turns out that working in the heat until your arms tingle is a bad thing.
Who all was in there? I'm going to cheat and look at the list...
Marla (M2 on the radio) came too this year! It's SO not the type of thing she would go to spontaneously, but she enjoyed it, got to swim in the creek a bunch, and hung out with me some. She even DJ'ed and got good responses to her music.
Sofia is, I swear, the heart of the group, she is the central spinning repository of love that binds us all together. Dave is part of the Sofia and Dave (Dave and Sofia?) pair, and he's a solid, quite, nice, capable guy, with powerful big camping skills. I'm pretty sure his work was vital for keeping large bits of our camp from becoming airborn...
Silona has a catalytic role, and she is a scout and a gatherer of people, finding interesting folks and hooking them into our web. We got new camp mates this year, who were cool folks that look like they may integrate nicely.
With Silona came JRob (JRW on his LJ, so I call him JRob; someday I'll have to ask if he hates that) also called Robmumble, and I swear I heard him called silent Rob on the radio too... dunno. A quiet guy, but talented, into the video and graphic arts. He did our signs, and made our logo awesome, and did beer labels; tentative at first, he seemed to pick up on the ad-hoc nature of our madness, and his talent really added a touch of class to everything! He even spun a DJ set!
Tall Matt and Susan of course, to be thanked separately but listed together. Matt and I (and Jim and eventually Randy) did the load up and initial setup of camp. Matt brews awesome beers and got me started up in brewing again, plus the tie-dye, plus his mellow nature, plus all the effort he put into the camp with the work, the couches he built, the ranger work he did during the event; he's my good friend in Austin and a valuable core piece of our camp. Susan and Matt come as a pair, and Susan helps keep us alive, and has such a calming presence (I feel); it's always delightful to be doing things with them.
Michelle (just Michelle) is part of what I feel is my core friends group; from the haunts to flip to the odd ones, there is a core set that overlaps for me. She is the party person, which is funny as she is also an auditor and an accountant of sorts, but sadly was left to her own devices once the evening drifted into the deep hours and us fogies fell into our tents to sleep to the serenade of thumpy music. Michelle rocks, and I give her grief online, but things wouldn't be the same in the group without her. She brings party, food, and good times to us all.
Beth is new to the camp, and a fun lady; our worlds overlapped in distant ways back in the days of the SCA, it turns out. With Beth is Randy Z (or was it the other way around?), and these two launched into the entire event with great enthusiasm. Randy cooks masterfully, and takes justifiable pride in his culinary work.
Chris and Mindy made it too, long time odd people but first time to flip; alas, things did not turn out for them (for reasons to distant from me to have made it into my awareness) and could not stay. Mindy made a super nifty generator baffle for us, but our generators were so awesome we were able to put it around a dangerous bush in our camp where it served valiantly. Chris is quiet, like many of our group, so I don't know him well yet, but he is a nice guy.
Jim Radio, of course, is our Radio Guy, and an amazing experience in his own right. A force of nature, a nice guy, or a bastard, I'm not sure which, his family has been associated with Sofia's for, I dunno, generations, and also with Silona... that's some core group there! I'm thrilled to be doing things with Jim, he has passion and ... stuff.
Karen came with Jim this year, and she, the World's Most Dangerous Blonde, is thirty one flavors of awesome. The two of them together create some kind of event horizon of awesome, that once you have crossed it, there is no return. She works as a medic (a tame word, medic; she's a medic's medic I hear), was a PET at the event, and may well play with us in the haunt this year (and I may get to play moulage with her! Heaven!)
Sheilagh, neat lady! Don't know her! Had fun!
Tanjent, Sean, and Corprew -- new guys. All seemed pretty solid, engineer kind of guys, camped with us and did stuff around the event. I enjoyed my chats with them, Tanjent especially I think.
All in all, a great camp, a good time. It will be fun to see what next year brings.
What's done is done, and what's undone will have to wait until next year... pushed through a full rollout of my equipment yesterday, ensured I had enough cables and jumpers and whatnot (I didn't, I bought more), and then I put it all away again ready for loading Wednesday.
My garage, though, appears to have multidimensional qualities... it's a garage, not a clown car! It's amazing how much stuff I have crammed in there.
Running a watt-meter test, I'm going to take in the vicinity of 500 watts in the audio gear. I didn't do a full burn test, that would have been more work. Hope it all works!
Of the four dancing-fire drivers (e.g. speaker columns), one of them has a short or a break or a loose wire -- it doesn't work reliably. I may either just not use it at the event, or I may tear it down and find the flaw (which will NOT be easy or fun). Or I may hook it up and just swear at it a lot. We'll see.
Then last night I printed and then Matt and I cut and pasted labels on, I dunno, 7 or 8 or 10 cases of beer and cider.
The first labels I laid out at work, and did some things that made our life much more difficult than necessary. However, I did the beer labels in a more reasonable manner. And in general, I learned a lot about what is easy and what is hard in drink labels, so next time will be super easy!
Now to find a source of lightweight colored paper, the lightest stuff that can run through a laser printer. Preferably with water-tight colors.
Today I'm mostly just enjoying the sense of relief at not having to assembly anything more for the event. Well, I had to run some errands, and we need to clean the coolers and the new water containers. This and that, easy stuff.
I investigated the attics and found definite sign of rodentia. Judging from the spoor, it's a small rat or a large mouse -- most likely, the lowly Roof Rat, according to bad pictures of rodent poop I find online. Also, there are... pathways trodden in the insulation in the attic, and tunnels leading down into it. And poops. Did I mention the poops?
So... poison. Probably a bromadialone anticoagulant ::shudder::. Nasty stuff. I also poked around for obvious openings (lots of cracks, but nothing big) and tree access (yes, not touching the house, but close). And nothing that's easy to address. I hate to kill the little bastards, but I'm not sure other plans will work.
If Sparky the spare cat were still here, I'd just leave the ladder propped up in the attic, and I bet there would soon be nothing more than one chubby cat left.
Stoopid cat.
Some of y'all may have been noticing I've been a bit stressed-looking lately... or maybe I've just come out and said "I'm really stressed right now, sorry" and then sat in the corner and, I dunno, emitted stress lines.
I feel a tad better this morning after fighting some stuff out in my dreams last night (oh yeah, my favorite way to spend the night), but yesterday I reached a fever pitch of cranky.
Okay, so I'm working on this program that runs on a board that controls stuff. Here is the context for this program.
The hardware it runs on is designed and managed by my other team member, and includes OTHER hardware designed by ANOTHER engineer, plus a communications interface from a German company. This hardware was designed well before I came on board, and in that design there was a good big chunk of memory I thought I could use. I thought wrong, because when I went to the H/W guy to option its use, I got shot down... so I had to spend a significant chunk of time doing unnecessary and complicated memory management and optimization. That cost a lot of time.
The German company also defines the protocol we are communicating with. So I'm writing to a German spec, and need to conform to it to be called "good". Our company and this German company are the ONLY people with usable software under this new spec, so to test and validate my work I need to compare it to the German stuff. However, the German program doesn't work right (yet) and we won't have a functional version until.... June? Maybe? These guys are notoriously slow and late, and it's because they go on vacation, I swear, two weeks out of three. Every time I write, they are on vacation and then get back to me one or two weeks later. So that's useless.
To verify that systems conform to their standard, the Germans are writing a conformance tool, of which we have a broken and mostly nonfunctional version. They say they will have the final version by end of June, two weeks or so after we are supposed to have been entirely done with the project. This tool WAS promised for Jan/Feb, but those dates are long past. So, July? Maybe. And I fully expect monkeys to fly out my ass too.
This is the same German company that changed the core, heart, critical aspect of the specification in radical and annoying ways during development. Twice. We still haven't entirely recovered from that chaos.
My device and software are controlled by a computer with its own big program, and our company of course is writing that, since we can't ship the German stuff with our label on it, that would just not work. Of course, the team writing OUR software is green, doesn't communicate well, and is primarily located in China. They do things "differently" there. If, by "different" you mean "badly". Not all of them, there's fine work coming out of some teams there I hear. No, it's just been our team. We won the crap lottery.
Certain critical aspects of this system that SHOULD have been working and tested six to nine months ago finally started working in shaky baby steps about one month ago. And things keep coming up from that team that surprise the hell out of me, things that have been in place in my side for, in some cases, a year or more, and in others, three to six months. Why am I getting feedback just now? What the hell are these guys doing? Writing a slave device in a vacuum is not a recipe for success. We are supposed to be bootstrapping, building this up together, and that requires lots of things that have not been happening until very very recently.
This project as a whole is part of a larger software and hardware platform, and a significant aspect of my system is that there are 35 or so modules that can plug into my device, in combinations of up to 8 at a time (you do the math). Which is tough, since my software has to manage all of these modules, and more in the future, with not enough memory (see above). But, with cleverness and hacks, I've made it work. Mostly. We're still testing to be sure.
These plug in devices have existed here for a while, and are nice little bricks of hardware, if a tad under-documented (don't TALK to be about internal deliverables and documentation, unless you want me to go off on a long and angry rant).
Our assumption, critical to our schedule, is that the wrinkles have been worked out in the controlling code for these modules, by the team that actually OWNS them (which, hint, is NOT US). This assumption is false, so now I'm finding serious flaws in the control code and parameters for this other team... because my team's testing is actually looking at the details and not giving it a quick eyeball from 10,000 feet up.
Of course, it doesn't help that the documentation and supporting details for these things is scattered all over hell and back, is inconsistent at times, and is sometimes just plain wrong. It doesn't give me the confidence I'm looking for when working on a project.
I'm not alone in working on these things, which is good, because this project is just too huge for one person. I've got a great testing resource who, what? Oh, some other team fucked up (again) and now the company is in a panic (again) and I'm losing my testing resource? Again? Thanks guys. Remember that internal deliverable and documentation rant? A lot of our recent panics can be traced back to our failures in that arena... do you still think that it takes too much time and resources to do the damned development correctly?
How about the guy writing our validation tests for manufacturing? Oh, right, he's on three other projects too.
My tech lead? I have a tech lead? Oh, there he is, yeah; he's a great guy, I honestly like him and he's bright and helpful, but he's also overloaded.
How about my resource for understanding and FIXING the interface code to the modules? She's great too! Very helpful, very supportive, when she's actually available. Too bad that everything else her manager owns is more important than this. Some of that is my fault; I think I had a brief window where I could have captured her attention on my project, but some panic or failure on my side took me away from modules for that...week. Nice big window there guys, thanks.
So -- yeah -- stress. Trying to squeeze success out of a project that is aimed about 30 degrees off target and is flying quickly and steadily into the weeds.
The lights in our ceiling fixture in the living room have been quietly expiring, one by one, over the years. Slowly they fade and go out, until there is just one dimly lit bulb and four dusty globes hovering over our head. The living room is dim and grey.
I could get some kind of A-frame ladder to replace them, but ladders that tall are expensive, and the ladder I _do_ have is too short.
As it turns out, Matt and I were going shopping together at Lowes, for Flipside supplies (of which I still have a number of odds and ends to pick up) and I mentioned I wanted to get a light-bulb grabber stick thingie for this. And he already had one! That he doesn't use!
Bonus.
So I retrieve it from the depths of his garage (well, Matt did the actual retrieving) and used it to extract the old bulbs. It did this quite nicely.
Then fiddled a bit but it would not put in the spiral fluorescents that I had. Sure, I could buy flourescent bulbs that were in an incandescent envelope (I think), but where's the fun in that?
So a little bit of hemming and hawing, and some fiddling about, and I was able to modify the bulb grippy thingy to work on spiral fluorescents.
Double bonus!
And now there is light. And it is bright, and nicely spectrumized!
Well, Saturday was the final art welding class! I got MOST of the welds on the steel donut done, and it's not a bad piece of work. Impressed some class-mates with my ability to weld the thin sheet metal without blowing big nasty holes in.
After that, an LoTV board meeting (I'm secretary for TWO boards of director, more fool I). Got those minutes on the wiki, got the Scare minutes on the wiki... I don't remember if I sent my scare notes or not from that last meeting but I think I did.
Sunday, finished the construction work on the second dancing fire tube, and even painted the stands! I removed the old coupling from the old stands and put in a new, sturdier one as well. Only cut one finger and scraped another.
Was going to do a full test burn, but by then I was getting pretty tired, and has to move on to household chores.
Did some yardwork, did a MINIMAl amount of indoor work (e.g. fixed Marla's sink). Set up the tent in the living room (hooboy that was interesting) and then realized that I couldn't remember where I put the seam sealer. Hopefully I find it before flip and then I can seal up the rain fly seams on setup Wednesday. Keep your fingers crossed for dry weather the 21st!
Next weekend is ALL MINE! Bwahahahahahaha! No Saturday lost to class!
I intend to do a full system setup/test, including color tests, and watt testing, over the weekend.
Oh, this week, before then, need to get the Honda EU1000 generator working. It needs some maintenance. Going to work with Matt on that Tuesday.
Wed is the makeup dance class, for when I skipped due to having put my eye out. The eye, by the way, is fine now; dusted it off, popped it back in, took a few painkillers, and I'm good to go.
(kidding! Read back for the real details)
Okay, work beckons. But damn, it's Monday. And I am not enjoying Mondays like I used to.
Quick update while food is cooling....mmmm... King Ranch Casserole. Yum!
My eye is doing fine now, my work is being worky, and things are all generally moving in a forward direction.
Two weeks from RIGHT NOW I will be sitting under a tent, setting up.. equipment. Art. Science. Fire.
I have all of my propane hoses and harnesses and manifolds hooked together now. Three of my six POL fittings, it turns out, have check valves built in! Neat! Internally, the tanks also have overfill prevention valves, so generally, things should work out okay wiring the tanks together. We are looking at #300 of propane here, to burn off in a few evenings. I'll do a full test this weekend and have next weekend free to do full panic in.
I wired up my new 3,000VA variac to a nice 12ga extension cord (which required some cutting and fiddling). It's a lethal device, with 110VAC hanging out where it could conceivably be touched (mostly shrouded, but I'm paranoid) -- I need to get a nice high-voltage-danger sign for the console table.
Right now I'm putting some salt through a... ball mill... of sorts (it has balls in it! stainless steel balls, and some conical abrasive media)... in an attempt to make sodium chloride powder (vs. crystals) to act as a chlorine donor for my copper oxide and/or barium carbonate, to make a better green flame. I hear boric acid works too for green; I have some! I will have to try it.
I wonder where I can get some potassium iodide cheap and locally... hmmmmm...
Anyway, I aint'nt dead yet, and rumbling towards some grand finale soon.
So, yeah, ummm... hydrocodone will be kicking in soon, nice to have those leftovers from an unrelated problem I had late last year.
Saturday I was in a mist of grinder grit and steel dust as I converted large quantities of sheet steel into sharp buoyant satellites, most of which were absorbed into the ventilation system at ACC. Most. Not all.
A little bit of eye irritation occurred during my two hours of grinding, but I though little of it. Dust in the eyes, big deal, been there done that, familiar territory. The annoyance passed and I went on with my day.
Sunday evening, though, my eye got a bit more irritated. Annoyingly so, but also easily dismissed as tiredness and a residual scratch from the previous day. During our shopping trip Sunday night I picked up some red-eye eye-drops.
As it turns out, red-eye soothing eye drops do very little good when you have a golf-ball-sized chunk of grit/steel/whatever embedded in your eye.
I managed to get to sleep Sunday night, but my eye was kicking up a fuss, and throughout today's fun at work (Monday, my favorite) it get more and more irritated. As did the rest of me. So I called my eye doctor, Lester Kitchen (a great guy), and made an appointment for 4:45 today.
I soldiered through the day with no joy and lots of squinting. People averted their gaze, or stared horrified as I wandered through my tasks, my red rimmed eye aflood in tears.
Leaving work, I discover that bright light makes my eye hurt even more, as the pupil contracts. Ouch.
The always friendly Dr. Kitchen set me up in his machine, made my eye fluorescent, and then proceeded to use bright lights and various filters to highlight exactly what was up in my optic center. That is when he took the picture of the golf ball previous mentioned; a sizable chunk embedded in the lower-medial octant midway between the pupil and sclera.
It would have to go. Imagine my excitment, for a moment. Sure, my eye hurt. But now I would have the doctor doing who-knows-what to it to remove this vile intruder.
That "who-knows-what" began with a soothing (well, stinging, but it self-correctly quickly) application of numbing eye drops. Two or three times, in fact; the Dr. was quite good about the pain management.
Once I was good and painless, he propped my head back in his infernal machine, had me fixate on a distant point, and then he started golfing in my eyeball with what he called his sand wedge. To no effect, the particle was too deep (into the second layer, it seems).
Next up was a device he says he's had little chance to use, just a few times in recent memory; it looked roughly like an 8-gauge syringe needle mounted in a noise-hair trimmer, and made roughly the same sound (once he replaced the dying battery).
It took a few minutes, and quite a few jabs with the spinning needle of DOOM, before he managed to dig down to the particle and send it packing. Or flying. Or whatever it did.
It is now gone, with nothing more than a sizeable crater (I assume) to mark its passing.
I am now the proud wearer of a contact-lens "bandage" which I get to irrigate regularly with antibiotics and, between those doses, lubricating eye drops, as my poor abused cornea heals.
On the bright side, he said I had the steadiest eye he's worked on in a long time... and the third he has worked on today!
It's a busy season for eye cruds, apparently.
My litany of grief or, as we affectionaly call it, "Monday".
Saturday I spent a couple of hours grinding my toroid piece edges so they fit correctly and made the correct diameter, and as part of that process some grind crud flittered into my left eye, a minor annoyance. Except I think I scratched something, and it still irritates me today, it's annoying, especially since my left eye is the one that can actually read (my right eye has a weird distortion in the lens). Red-eye drops do nothing much, the constant tearing makes my glasses spotty, and it's impossible not to run it... so the lid is bitching at me now too.
My tendinitis is really getting on my tits, up my nose, and torquing my twinkies.
I wanted some comfort tea but I lost my beautiful mug at work and I need to search other break rooms for foam mugs for crappy work coffee because...
... I left my go-pills at home, the ones that keep me from going into a coma after I eat lunch, so coffee instead to wind me up and harass my stomach.
And to top it all off I forgot to bring chocolate. I bet if I go to the cafe to buy a bar, they will be all out.
Working in the shop Sunday, I made good progress doing a test setup, running all my tubes and wires and careful notes, and antiquated notions... need a few more brass Tees and a couple of 3/8" MPT to 1/4" FPT adapters, but overall, it's going to be lovely. But working Sunday, especially after lunch, was a slog through random free-floating anxiety, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it. It was better when mongo was there, though by the end of the day I was pretty worn out anyway.
If I survive this day (which is a dubious notion at this rate) I have dance lessons tonight... which will either be a lovely joy or very very difficult. At least Richard is used to my brain coming up broken at these things, and I don't get as cranky and bitchy as I used to.
Nothing really to say here ... everything is in progress... nothing new is done.
Had my blood drawn this morning for my physical, which is early next week. No coffee today, a condition that left me less than fresh by mid-day... my head still aches from the lack, though dosing myself with chocolate after work helped for a time.
I turn 44 tomorrow.
I want to complain about all of the external factors that made/are making my project at work horribly over schedule. But there's not much point to that! I mean, I can't really go into the fun details -- and the generics aren't interesting. Not enough RAM from an early decision (that I fought against), costing me time via implementation complexity and debugging. Core spec changes... twice! Poor spec to begin with, underspecified. Poor communication between the two teams, poor and late integration, and on and on...
My body is tired and sore, I need to do more Taichi, but I'm spending that time in projects until June. After that, we'll see.
Tonights festivities mostly consisted of shaving the cat's ass-fur.
The cat did not approve. We spent a short time attacking his hind quarters with a comb, scissors, and the electric nippers, and got a good double-handful of cat fur off his his nether parts. We quit when he started hissing at us... but made good progress! Our style has improved over last year.
Looking at the cat, you can't tell we did anything at all. That cat is, I swear, entirely composed of fur.
Forgot to mention that I bottled the final sweet cherry cider the other night. I'm also working on tidying some labels up too, just started though.
Did more wiring on the control console. Note to self: don't buy crimp connectors locally; The 3M crimps from Mouser are superior in every way, including price.
Work is aggravating, but I can't really talk about work because everything I do is a secret. Ah well.
Goodness, is it Tuesday night already? And bedtime even.
Well, the weekend was full, as usual, though much of the fullness was welding class. Cut that short to do a market survey thingy, earned some spare cash so that's good. In class, got to play with a TIG, and that was very cool! Now I want one.
A bunch of pictures and videos of my projects (in progress) can be found below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j8empHrUVc
http://www.simreal.com/content/FlamePillar
http://www.simreal.com/content/TeslaCoil
http://www.simreal.com/content/RadioTower
I need somebody! Or a couple of bodies...
The great and compassionate Oliana0 mentioned that my community of friends would be a good resource to tap, to help out with Flipside.
There is one thing that I would like some help with (most of what I do, it would be hard to delegate).
I need a covered space in my back/side yard to store my propane tanks.
I have four #20 tanks at about 12" diameter (and short, and stackable), and will have two #100 tanks at about 16" diameter (and tall, and not stackable).
You are not supposed to store propane tanks in an enclosed space, and since I installed that cat door in my garage I've taken to closing the big door all the way... making that enclosed.
You also aren't supposed to store these things out in the open (though I suppose you CAN, since people DO), since overpressure from high temperatures and direct exposure to sunlight can be bad.. plus, UV and Rain conspire to age things faster than desired.
So a leaky garden shed, a roofed enclosure, something... where I can store my dangerous tanks.
My untuned Tesla (how the HECK do I tune it? Adjust and pray? Voodoo?) will throw about two feet of spark in its current configuration.
My variac claims to be a 5-Amp device but I'm running it at, through a clever change in fuse, at 10-Amps. Hey, it's short pulses!
And still, I blow the fuse solid if I ramp the coil up too much. Not just melt, but BLOW, like, vaporized copper all inside the fuse tube.
Which is kinda neat.
I also saw a spark in the volt meter on the variac once, so I'm thinking I'm getting hella noise back up the line. I need to test and/or filter that.
As for Sparky the Spare Cat... he's gone. Haven't seem him at all in over a week, maybe two now. I miss him. A long hair grey cat with white toes (called "Frenchy" for his/her French manicure) is eating the cat food, slowly, timidly.
I'm about to put in an order for propane fittings and hoses, valves, and to pick up a propane tank... and to top up all my other tanks. This all is going to cost me a chunk of change! Sure, a nine dollar connecting hose is no big deal, but when you need nine of them...
Ah well, such is the price of mad science.
Yayyy! An hour of futzing around with the Tesla, checking various thises and thatses, and I get a POWERFUL suspicion that my feedback is working against me.
So, I swap the feedback wires.
Bzap! Yayyy! A tiny little spark! I turn a know and... bzap! A spark with a different tone!
Oh yeah.
Mmmhmm.
Yeah, it's from a kit. Yeah, it's not so complex. But I am still very excited to be making high voltage.
Oh yeah. Heheheh.
It is, I think, resonating at about twice the frequency I expected (I'll tap the feedback and find out for sure), so I'll have to futz around with this.
With proper tuning, I should be able to get some good sparks, though!
And with bad tuning, hell, I still get sparks.
This is great! I needed a success right about now.
There's a thought out there that I do ten times as much stuff as most people do... and there may be some merit to that. Though, in my own head, I seem to do about half as much as I think I should be able to.
This weekend I started up, in welding class, the steel donut project (13" outer diameter, 4" minor diameter). It should be... interesting!
After that, I burned a half hour in napping, and at four or so went on to do... something? Well dang, now I don't remember. I was going to talk about what I _actually_ did this weekend and now my mind is a blank over the sequence!
Sunday, I know I mowed and edges the front and side lawns, but those are pretty small tasks, just taking an hour. Did some shopping for parts and with Marla, ate out, a couple nice hours in the world.
I cut the parts for the radio tower, and rolled the brackets into nice round shapes. Next up I have to heat-bend the tabs, and weld on the uprights. Easy!
I assembled the Tesla and carried it to the shop. I also put away a raft of crap that had tumbled out into the living room, and packaged up a bunch of boxes. Before THAT, I did measurements on the primary and secondary LC networks in the Tesla, and came up with an approximate resonant frequency of 190kHz, which corresponds roughly with expectations. However, my signal generator has a horrible blind spot above 175 and below about 50 on its dial... meaning, the 190kHz range is really really hard to work in.
Plugging in the Tesla on Saturday... nothing. Not a glimmer of life. So I'll have to open it up some and debug it further.
That's the story of my life right now... debugging things that should be working.
The new Variac I bought didn't work, for example, when I tested it Saturday. I took it apart... no, I TRIED to take it apart, but a critical set screw was broken. Cheap Chinese crap, you know? So, got a screw removing device, drilled out the knob around the setscrew (that was in crooked, so hard to access), drilled a small hole in the setscrew, and then cranked it out. Tada! A 5-minute task expanded into an hour!
Then, take apart the variac to discover that whomever built it had weird ideas about lubrication. The thick, sticky grease you find covering Chinese import tools? Yeah? Well, it doesn't work very well when used to lubricate a moving part (the contact in the variac that must drift up and down to track the coil).
Cleaned, lubricated with REAL oil, re-assembled, and it's better than new. Literally.
I watched a Luc Besson movie on Saturday, burning a couple of hours there, and it was fun! "District B13" -- a good action movie with some fun Parkour, and a buddy-antibuddy-buddy thing going on, in a dystopian future France. It was also transparently political/social, but I forgave it that clumsiness because it was also very pretty.
I did sketch up the pneumo/propane networks I need for my Flipside shows, and started hunting down parts for those. Parts! I swear, it's like pulling toenails, finding the right parts sometimes.
What I _hoped_ to do was get a working Tesla (and WOULD HAVE if it had worked; this guy made a few design decisions I feel were ill-chosen, and I'm sure one of those is causing the grief). I hoped to assemble at least part of my second Ruben's Tube (got parts, no assembly). I hoped to do a fire test of the Fire Pillar (which really isn't a pillar, but more of a tripod). Hoped to finish a bracelet with lights for Marla (got parts, though). Had a vague hope of experimenting with an interesting sound resonator, but not even!
So, ten times? No. Maybe twice. And yet still half or less of what I had hoped for.
I think that, overall, I am pushing forward on too many projects this year, with deadlines that are too aggressive (I wanted to have a big splash at Flipside), and as a result, am just getting bogged down. That, and five hours of class, plus an hour of travel, on Saturdays is a huge hit.
So overall, this Jan-May experiment, not a success. I'll reset in June.
Yesterday I popped open on of my ginger ciders, the mild one, it's not bad...
Tonight, the spicy cider, oh yeah! That's an AWESOME ginger cider, I'm tempted to not even bring it and hord it for myself. Mmmm mm mm tasty.
And.
Alcoholic. Gotta be worth, maybe, 2-3 beers of buzz in one of those.
BOTH ciders have fizz now! It took a month or more, but they carbonated. Not too heavy, but definite. Very very nice.
Maybe tomorrow I'll try the sahara cherry.
The new cherry cider is doing... absolutely nothing in the secondary. It fermenged with a bang, and the stopped.
Maybe I'll bottle it next week. I hope it turns out good.
Okay, I dragged my tired, abused body off of the couch to siphon the new cherry cider over to the secondary. The siphoning doesn't take long, but before I can do that I have to mix up a boatload (er, bucketload) of sanitizer, clean my tools, clean the destination carboy, and continuously float and wipe all the cat hair off of everything... that has been in the closet all this time. Man. Cat hair. Fluffy, fluffy cats. And after, once I've siphoned cider all over the floor, there is MORE cleaning.
Anyway, I thiefed (thieved?) a sample out while it was siphoning, to check the gravity. Dang it, someone glued the hydrometer to the bottom of its tube again. Thief. Thief. Thief, float! Aha!
Unreadable, and WAY off the charts again (well below 1.000). The cider is really opaque this time and I can't see through it to the scale.
As I wander around exclaiming to Marla how opaque and bizarre this batch is, the secondary overflows. Oops!
I dribble some of the thieved cider into my shiny new vinometer (which needs a protective case, I fear for its safety) and read... 12%. Wowza! Oh, no, I read that backwards, that's probably 8%. Did it again and it emptied ENTIRELY. That's not right. Did it a third time to get 6%. Also, the particulates in the cider are probably messing up the reading.
I'll have to do some math and get a sanity check.
The final test -- a drink of it. Yes! It's alcoholic and reasonably sweet! Just like I wanted.
Hopefully, it will settle and do nice things in the secondary, and then off to the bottles.
Between now and then I need to formulate my carbonation strategy.
The cherry cider stopped bubbling sometime over the weekend, but with classes, scare cleanup, and taxes I haven't had time to move it to the secondary.
I'm dying to see how it tests and tastes! Maybe tomorrow. Or Thursday. Or something.
Work has been work, and projects have been stalled by Taxes.
Ugh.
But, because I spent OUT THE WAZOO on equipment for Simreal, I'm up for a decent refund (less than a grand, more than five hundred). So, good job, Edwin!
I just hope my weird spending spree in '07 doesn't spring an audit. Bah. I don't want to have to tap-dance my way through my crappy accounting.
Next up: clean up my Quicken so that account happens auto-magically.
Oh, and file the '07 simreal "no, I sold nothing in Texas" report.
Well, saw my Sunday Night Movie last night (it being Sunday Night), and while the movie was probably good but I couldn't really tell.
The audio synch was off. Not like bad-dubbing off ( I was watching it in the "original language" anyway, which was a mix of Mandarin and English it turns out, with English subtitles), but really really off.
I mean, the lips will move or a door will slam open; the scene will cut, and cut again, and maybe a second OR TWO later, the sounds play.
I mean, wtf?
What is funny is that this is from Tartan Asia Extreme which, in earlier videos, had fairly rough DVD programming. This DVD, though, was more slick, had blocked more of the control keys so you couldn't avoid the advertising, had more special features and stuff... really top-notch programming in there. And the movie itself was damaged beyond any repair internally. I guess they got a great programmer at the expense of, I dunno, an audio guy or any kind of quality control!
Suck.
I tried all three audio tracks (2.0, 5.1, and 5.2 DTS) to no effect.
So I'm a bit grumpy about the lack of a decent movie on my Sunday.
Five hours of class again, Saturday, while I did the final assembly (welding) and cleanup (grinding and sanding) on my thingy (the topper for the fire pillar).
It's very shiny now! But the teacher had me go outside to do this work... it's noisy and messy! And, as a consequence, I'm sunburned here and there. back of my neck and the backs of my arms. Very annoying! But I'm putting aloe stuff on it, and hopefully it will be better soon.
Right after class, we went to the lodge (Scare for a Cure's location) and threw an old room away. This wasn't built buy us, but was donated after some movie was done with it. A beautiful room! But heavy, and really just useful for a one-shot thing... so to the dump with it!
This took two trips and the rest of the day, and I discovered this evening that I hurt my right shoulder too. Did this, probably, because I was compensating form other pain in my connecting tissues... sucks getting old.
So, today, Sunday, was spent almost entirely in financial updating. Now, all three of my accounts are shiny and reconciled, and my taxes have been started. I'll finish them up during the week.
Had a brief interlude today for a Flipside meeting, and that was good.
Right now, I am trying to decide if/what size of amplifier I want to fill out my audio rack.
Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's Friday... and even better, Even Friday is being held at Ruby. Oh man, a quiet evening of just hanging out with some of the best people in the universe is just what I need...
An interesting surprise last night... I had two "short" bottles of cider, one of the mild and one of the hot ginger, in the 'fridge from back when I tested the various ciders. You know, the other day.
Pop, fizz! Strong fizz in both. Was it because they were bottled last? Because of the ludicrous amount of head space in the bottles? Because of the extra month in the 'fridge?
Who knows!
The new cherry is still bubbling madly, and it smells lovely.
Now, back to the grind.
Grind, grind, grind...
Last night I mixed up a batch of what I hope will be sweet cherry cider. By morning, it seemed to not be bubbling, so I gave the lid a little poke and it exploded in bubbles! Blooboobobobobobobobobobobobooob..
... and settled down to a decent rate of bubble.
Tonight after work, it's bubbling it's little heart out! Oh yeah, them are some happy yeasty beasties.
Mmmmmm.
Once it slows, to the secondary with it! And then come bottling time? I think I'll have to add champagne yeast to this and all the others if I want fizz. I'm thinking that none of my ciders petered out due to lack of sugar, but instead just hit their maximum alcohol concentration.
My only concern is if I give it a much too robust of a yeast on bottling... will my bottles explode?
Okay, I _finally_ put together the last cider for this Flip season, with some changes from the previous recipe. I've had the parts sitting here for, I dunno, a week or two, but it's been hectic; or I've been slow; or something.
Stayed home from TaiChi tonight, felt puny (yeah yeah, it makes me feel better to go) but then later I was glad I held back because I got a good half hour of feeling downright sick; and then that faded.
Weird.
Anyway, for the new recipe, I doubled the sugars (up to 16 oz honey, 16 oz turbinado sugar, and 4 lbs of white cane), and swapped out a gallone of the cider for an additional half-gallon of black cherry and an additional half gallon of the raspberry-cranberry blend.
Upon tasting, it's SWEET. Dayum. Sweet sweet sweet, but with a complexity too.
Upon measuring, it's in the 1.070 gravity range... the same as the original! Apparently the cider I use is heavy, without having the same benefit of sugar as... sugar.
Grinding through the projects at home, I feel like I'm moving through a weird time distortion, everything going at half speed. I put my head down at 5:00 to do some soldering and look up to find it's 7:30. Damn!
So I did accounting in short order (much faster than expected, for a switch) and more this and that. Turns out one of my switches is the wrong kind, so I ordered more. I can still go back to debugging the tesla, though, just without that mode switch; only I have to do taxes, the LoTV board meeting, the Flipside meeting, and welding class. I'm thinking... not this weekend.
Yesterday at work, I had an interaction with a manger-type person who has authority over my project, but who in fact is only very peripherally involved in my aspect of it. And who makes decisions using a completely different criteria than I use, as best I can tell, and who I absolutely can not talk to -- it is like talking to an alien, a bug, a cockroach. Whenever he touches my project, I feel like he makes it suck more; and in no wise have I ever felt like what I was saying makes any difference at all. He asks me only for the form of it, but has already made up his mind; I always feel ambushed and abused afterwards, though he is unfailingly polite. It's like he walks into the project randomly, jerking the steering wheel and aiming me in a direction that feels wrong.
I hate it, and I get far too upset when trying to talk with him.
Weird, I posted this in LJ, and not in MT -- this was definitely meant as an MT post! Ah well, you get a duplicate. Whee!
No spark for me. I'm trundling through the bring-up instructions, interspersed by crimp connectors, hole drilling, tapping, soldering, and various other cleanups (everything works fine! No, that's not true, see below) and then I see "power up the advanced modulator." Crap. I forgot about that. Oh well, time to solder that board together! Should be a breeze, but it means I won't get through the rest today... so no sparks for me.
During my tests, for the display board, I heard a "crick, crick, crick" sound... like... heat expansion! Crap! Click off and feel around, my 15-volt regulator is TOASTY. And putting out about 2 volts. That means... dead short. Somewhere.
Maybe I did something stupid with the jumper cable, like connected 15-volts to ground. I futz around with that some, and no, even though the topology of IDC ribbon cables hurts my brain, it's all good.
Test the power board, and it's powerful. No problems there.
Test the display board and yup, 15-volts is shorted to ground! But where? Out comes the jeweler's loupe, for a detailed inspection. While I don't approve of many of the things Daniel did with this layout (e.g. soldering directly to power planes SUCKS and is avoidable; needs larger dead spaces around pads in the middle of power planes; weird connector placement, etc etc), it's all good under magnification.
So, resistors. Nope, they are resisting. Diodes? Diode-rific! The IC? Pull it! Nope. The capacitors. Well, I can't really test those, they read as shorts anyway, since they bridge 15v and ground (being there to give the system that old stiff upper lip, what what).
Fortunately, there are only two caps, a 10uF and a 0.1uF, so I pull them and whaddya know! No short. It was the 10uF cap that was the problem, dead short through the device. Bastards.
I find another 0.1 and drop it in, and I'm clean out of 10s so I get one an order of magnitude smaller (whatever, it will be fine) and put it in. All is good, and the display works now, with no burning sensations coming from the power supply.
The next sphincter moment is when I calibrate the current feedback display, which is a bar-chart showing 0 to 1,000 Amps in 100A increments. 1,000 Amps is represented by 12 volts at a particular place in the system, so I bring out my variable power supply and wire it up to that sensor point.
Twiddle twiddle, peg! The supply pegs at 1A (it's limit) at just about a volt. I can get it it twitch up to maybe two volts before it clamps. Hmmmm.
I get out the HEFTY power supply, see what 10 amps does heheheheheh (yes, I realize I'm not thinking clearly here, it was my afternoon brain slump, clearly). What it _does_ it get fiendishly hot, I can tell by the smell. Oh look, here's a 1.6 ohm, 3-watt resistor! Taking 12 volts across it, that what, 7 amps or so, around 90 watts of dissipation? Yeah, that's not good -- and to make it even MORE embarassing, I read about some OTHER guy frying his resistor in the forums. Derrrr.
So I attach the signal generator and get NEARLY 8 volts peak to peak out of it when loaded, zapping pulses into the sensor. This works pretty darned good and I get it rough-tuned with that.
To fine tune, I dial the monster power up to 12 volts (again) and just TAP the sensor with it; 90 watts in short bursts is fine. Tuned up and happy, now I can indicate 1,000 amps of fancy tesla goodness during operation. Yayy! Overcurrent is set to about a third of that for startup, but we can change this in time.
In other news, I remembered that I don't _do_ finances on Sunday, but on Monday -- since Mondays already suck, I just throw more suck into it and I don't really notice. I still have to do taxes next weekend, either that, or get hit by a truck or something. People keep going, "Oh, I just hand it off to the accountant..." well yeah, but doing the actual tax stuff isn't my hassle (I love Turbo Tax, even if I do enter the data manually and not via Quickbooks)... no, it's the polishing and buffing (or, perhaps. nine months of data entry) on the biz account that is looming like dark clouds on my horizon.
Ah well. Maybe THIS year I'll keep that account up to date. I haven't been SO FAR but hey, the year is young.
Ugh.
Being a responsible adult really runs against my grain. I should go out and be an artist in the woods or something.
And I would too! Except then I couldn't afford parts. Tesla coils can be spendy.
I love crimp connectors; lug ends and spade ends and slip fittings and all kinds of stuff. Much nicer than frayed wire. Mmmm, crimps.
I've avoided all kinds of distraction this week as I bulled ahead on my daily work, trying to catch up. I would be in sight of parity now, if it weren't for NI Tech or Week or whatever the hell it is... internal tech conference, fun stuff, but it will eat a day or two of my catch-up time.
That focused effort, though, cost me; I was even crabby at the poor Shanghai guy. Next week should be better, unless random people decide we have to support fancy features that they said we would not support this release (the root of my crabbiness). Make up your minds, guys; we ship pretty damn soon.
This weekend, I did stuff in welding class, and now I'm going through the "bring-up" checklist for the Tesla coil. Later, I'll solder up the "advanced modulator" circuit to drive it. I've got most of the other electronic and/or mechanical aspects well in hand, so I may even see sparks tomorrow.
Tomorrow also has me doing some house finances (I've been putting it off), some laundry (out of undies!), and starting a new cherry cider (I hope! Gotta mix me some booze!).
Next weekend, salvaging my business accounts (neglected through most of last year) and taxes. Whee.
Oh, and working the yard, I stabbed a finger and a thumb with hidden prickly pear cactus, the bastards.
The finger I stabbed is warm... all the other fingers were cold from the workshop, but the stabbed one was not!
Weird.
So welding class was good Saturday, started what will probably be an ill-fated "topper" for one of my fire effects. I also plan on making a hammered-steel toroid for a Tesla top-load (4" minor by 13" major diameter toroid). The teacher clearly thought I was insane once he realized what I wanted to do...
Then, after class, a brief nap (I was all worn out) and then working on the Tesla stuff. Mostly mechanical stuff with the box and supports and stuff, though I wound the primary coil out of 1/4" copper pipe, and a strike-rail out of 3/8" copper pipe. The primary was hard work! The copper pipe kept binding in the supports. But I eventually beat it into submission, though I was also totally beat by the end.
This morning, yardwork for a couple hours! I used the leaf blower that I bought for the fire effect (since I haven't hacked it yet) to blow leaves and acorns. Yeah yeah, using a tool for its stated purpose, boring! But it worked really well, and it was very quiet! Neat stuff! Once I got the leaves a little bit airborn, our strong morning winds carried most of 'em off down the street. Ah well.
If anyone wants acorns, we have about ten thousand or so...
This evening, more layout, drilling, tapping, random Tesla stuff, and I wound the primary. This is a thousand turns or so of 30 gauge (very fine) wire, on the new winding jig.
My ad-hoc pulleys couldn't cope with the resistance I was giving them while winding, so I ended up turning the jig by hand... so now my left hand/arm/muscle/tendon system is pretty much fed up with me, between holding stuff in metal class and turning the primary jig all evening.
On the bright side, the primary coil is beautiful! Very nice. And I'm just about ready to wire everything together and begin testing. Next weekend I should see sparks... hopefully the GOOD kind.
Before long I need to spend one of my weekends in doing taxes. I am so avoiding that. Ugh. My business account is a mess and I need to tidy it up first, it will take all day.
Opened the other cider, marked '1', last night... flat flat flat, like Texas. Or Kansas. Or one of those other flat places. So, definitely, in the ciders, I have to change yeasts to carbonate, or bottle before the secondary fermentation is done. This one was also quite dry, but without the dry mouthfeel you get in a wine; sort of a smooth wet dryness. No sugar! But no tannins, of course. And no hint of ginger, at least not compared to the cider marked '0' which was actually the second one bottled that night.
I'm not sure which is which, but I think '1' is the difficult cider and '0' is the second batch, just based on the ginger-factors. I'll have to review my notes to be sure.
Not bad, still, but the other one was much better!
I'll have to whip up a new cherry version this weekend, I think, too.
Mmmmmmmm. Cider.
Okay, yesterday I chilled two full (and two half, 'cause I could) bottles of the batch-0 and batch-1 ginger ciders.
Today, I popped a batch-0 cider to find it... completely still. No fizz! Argh! Of course, this was a difficult cider to begin with, so I guess I'm not surprised. I'll now about batch-1 when I open it... tomorrow? Tonight? We'll see.
It's still quite tasty, and the ginger (in this MILD version) gives it a bit of the bite that carbonation would have added.
I still haven't decided to re-inoculate the cherry cider or this batch now, to make fizz. It would be a pain to do so, but I -like- fizz. But I like these still, too, in spite of not liking other still ciders.
We'll see.
Nik, my son, has been playing with labels for me. Here is a preview of the cherry label that is awesome, though in color (needs conversion to B&W for easier use in my limited world):
http://www.simreal.com/sahara_cherry.jpg
He is working on some ginger ideas too, and has something for the Odd Brewery Collective (I told him he was a fallback in case our primary artist comes up blank). I'm liking it so far! I hope he scans the new works soon.
