brainwagon

Back in October, I attended Pacificon, the local ham radio convention. While I was there I picked up a couple of wacky things that were super cheap on the vendor’s tables, and among them was a super inexpensive battery charger along with an 18650 3.7V Li-Ion battery.

If you’re like me, you are probably used to the common AA and AAA type batteries for most of your portable electronic needs. If you seek rechargeable batteries, these are often the NiMh or nickel metal hydride type. Typical ratings for such batteries is 1.2V and 2400 mAh, or about 2.88 watt hours of power per AA cell.

Recently though, lithium ion batteries in the 18650 format (18mm diameter, 65mm long) have become available and popular. They are a bit better than a AA (which are 14mm in diameter and 50mm long) but are pretty lightweight, and common types have a voltage of about 3.7V and capacity of maybe 2600 mAh for a total power of about 9.6 watt hours, or a little more than three times the power of a good high capacity AA.

Anyway, decided they might be interesting to play with, and the price was (suspiciously) cheap at the show, so I thought I’d give them a go. The combination was an “Ultrafire BRC18650”, along with a super cheap looking charger with the product identifier of “HZM888MA”. It’s hard to overstate how uninspiring the charger actually is. I admit that I buy a fair amount of dodgy Chinese electronics, but this seemed dodgier than most, and because of the energy density and the rumors of batteries bursting into flames has me paying rather more attention to it

My recollection is that when I bought the charger I did test it by charging up the battery and that it did its usual “red while charging, turn green when done” with its indicator LED. But when I found the charger and battery in my storage case, I decided to try it again. Now, my dodgy charger just blinks the red LED, which in the international language of devices should indicate that something bad has happened. Nothing appears to have caught fire though, the battery doesn’t get hot, so I am not sure what is going on. I decided to get a higher quality Tenergy model to test it, and the same thing happens: blinking red LED.

I have decided that ordering a higher quality charger is probably a good idea, especially one that can handle different battery types, so when that arrives I’ll give them both a try.

In the meantime I looked up the UltraFire BRC 18650, and found this article on YouTube, showing that their rated capacities are nowhere near realistic, and they often have less than one third of the total listed on the packaging.

I guess you get what you pay for.

Anyway, these might find their way into an IOT device that I’m working on, and it will be interesting to see how they perform. I may also tinker together a constant current load to test their capacity myself.

In the mean time, buyer beware.

Over the last couple days, I’ve been pondering my journey through 3D printing. After having taken a three month break from it (more on that below) I’ve managed to get my Creality CR-10 back up and running in a reasonable way, and have donated my Anet A8 (my gateway drug to the world of 3D printing) to our hacker space at work, and I’m slowly tinkering it back into fighting shape. Last night I decided to try the “change filament” option in the Marlin firmware for first time, and it worked really well. I made the name plate pictured on the right, first by laying down the base in Fire Engine Red PLA I had, and then once the layers with the embossed lettering started, initiating a Filament Change from the front panel. This stopped the print in progress, moved the hot end off to the side and then retracted the existing filament and told me to load the new color. I used 3D Solutech white. The firmware allows you run several purge cycles to get the old color out. It took several tries to get the filament to turn reasonably white, as opposed to pink, but then I hit continue and it worked perfectly. Neat, and with no fancy G-code modifications.

But I digress.

Dean Segovis tweeted this yesterday:

https://twitter.com/HackAWeek/status/1096020904977428481

and followed up with:

https://twitter.com/HackAWeek/status/1096020906432958465

And this has got me thinking about writing up what I think is good and bad about my choice of 3D printer, and where I think the perfect “hacker” 3D printer might be going.

My first printer was an Anet A8. They are still available, and very inexpensive, at $150. I do not recommend them as a printer, even though I had a lot of fun with mine. It’s actually a remarkably capable little printer, and I made some pretty impressive prints with mine. The pluses?

• It’s inexpensive, at just $150 or so.
• It is (or at least was) a fairly popular option, so a large community with lots of information and upgrades is available.
• Replacement parts are cheap.
• It runs the Marlin open source firmware, so upgrades are relatively easy to perform.

But it does have a number of significant drawbacks.

• It’s not just inexpensive: it’s cheap. The frame is from laser cut plastic, and it’s easy to break parts if you overtighten bolts. In fact everything about the printer is cheap. I spent a lot of time replacing parts which are broken or just substandard.
• It’s not ready to go out of the box. It comes as a kit, and there is a lot of assembly. It took me the better part of a weekend to get it going properly.
• It is not very well engineered for safety. By default, the version of Marlin installed on mine didn’t even have overheat cutoffs. The connectors used to power the hot bed are not really sufficient to handle the current, and present a fire risk. I wouldn’t leave the Anet printing unattended without a serious audit of all the safety features.
• I hate the bed leveling. This isn’t unique to the Anet, I hate it period, but the Anet is pretty bad. The hot bed on mine was not even close to flat, probably well over a millimeter down in the center. Printing directly on the hot bed (or covered with tape) seems wrong. And my pet peeve: nothing that needs to be leveled should ever do so with four screws. It’s overconstrained and never works right. When I used to make telescopes, all my mirrors were adjusted with three screws, which are all you need to define a plane.
• The extruder is a direct drive MK-8 extruder. There are reasons to like the direct drive. In theory, they allow you to use less retraction and they will have less stringing than the Bowden type. But there are several pragmatic issues that make me despite them. They seem more complicated to assemble and disassemble. Because the stepper is mounted right next to the heat block, they carry more mass than a simple Bowden style. Loading and unloading filament is kind of a pain, as you don’t have any way to visually inspect the entry of the filament into the hot block. And the way that it’s mounted on the A8 is annoying, and requires that you unscrew a set screw which is awkwardly placed underneath the assembly when its mounted in the printer.

After tinkering with mine for three months, I was sufficiently excited by 3D printing to justify getting a new printer. I settled on the equally (or perhaps more) popular Creality CR-10. This has become my workhorse printer (well, since I use it primarily for tinkering, perhaps “workhorse” is the wrong word, but you get the idea…)

The Creality CR-10 has a number of significant advantages:

• It is a very popular machine, with lots of information and support.
• It supports the Marlin firmware as well, so upgrades are fairly common.
• It’s much less of a kit. It comes in three parts, and if you know what you are doing, you can probably assemble and get the whole thing going in an hour or so. Not quite “out of the box”, but pretty close.
• It has a 300mm print bed, and can handle prints up to around 400mm high. That is an awesomely large print bed.
• The electronics are housed in a custom aluminum enclosure, and so has a much less erratic appearance compared to the A8.
• It uses 2020 Aluminum extrusion for all the structure members.
• It uses a Bowden style extruder, which makes the moving parts on the X gantry much lighter and generally easier to service. Loading and unloading filament is much easier.
• It is more expensive (~$400) but generally just feels like a better engineered product. I am not constantly terrified that it will burn my house down if I turn my back on it.

I really like mine. I think that it’s an excellent buy if you are a tinkerer and want to learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of 3D printing, but don’t want to either invest a ton of money nor waste your time with a pile of substandard parts. But there are still things which I don’t like about the Creality CR-10, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t enumerate some of them.

• Fans are noisy, and it has a lot of fans. The extruder carries two small fans, which are usually not a lot of trouble, and are straightforward to upgrade. The worst ones are inside the power supply/control box. And while we are complaining about the control box, it’s annoying to open to gain access, and you will need to gain access to upgrade its firmware because the controller doesn’t contain a proper Arduino boot loader.
• The Anet A8 had dual Z steppers, which helped keep the X axis level. The Creality drives only one side, and to keep it level and moving smoothly, you have to adjust it fairly carefully and keep the tension just right. There are upgrades for the Creality to make it a dual Z machine, but that’s an extra cost and I haven’t done mine yet.
• The extruder is a Bowden sort, which means that only the heater and fans are carried on the X-axis. That also simplifies the mechanics there, but the stock housing is pretty bulky and makes access and viewing of the nozzle more cumbersome. It also has questionable value in directing the nozzle fan. Updated “fangs” are available, I printed the Petsfang v2 for mine, which I have my own complaints about (it’s a pain to install and take off, and it’s not the easiest thing to print) but it works better.
• All the bed leveling issues I had with the Anet A8 are true for the CR-10 as well. I installed an https://www.th3dstudio.com/ezabl-kit/EZ-ABL bed leveling kit on mine to help, and while it does work, it’s been a bit fussier than I would like. The overall repeatability of measurements seems pretty iffy (maybe only accurate to 0.2mm) and occasionally much worse. I think if I were to redo it, I’d probably go with a BLTouch instead.
• The bed itself wasn’t super flat (probably off by half a millimeter). I covered it with a piece of mirror tile from Lowes, which helped, but I ended up using 5×5 probing to help get things to lay flat on the first layer. Honestly, can we actually get flat build plates? The telescope maker in me hates this with the power of a burning sun.
• The controller is based upon the ATmega 1284, which means that the Marlin firmware fits barely into the controller. When new features come out, sometimes you have to disable other functionality to get them to work. I’ve been using the TH3D Unified Firmware Package which works pretty well, but I do wish we had more space. A replacement motherboard is actually pretty expensive to replace ($40) and doesn’t have replaceable stepper drivers, which makes a failed stepper driver a bigger issue than it should be. A motherboard like the MKS Gen L is only $20 or so and allows the possibility of replacing the driver modules with higher quality (and quieter) drive modules. I haven’t done that, but I like the idea. The overall board layout seems nicer as well, and the board supports dual extruders and has the ATmega 2560 which has double the flash space.
• I’ve mostly done printing with PLA and a smattering of PETG. I tried to get the bed to heat to 100C for printing ABS, and it seemed like the maximum temperature it could reach was about 82C. If you are wanting to print ABS, you’ll probably need to do some mod to insulate and/or boost the power to the hot bed.

In the end though, I guess I mostly like the Creality CR-10 because nothing about it is very mysterious or proprietary. It is in some ways a fairly obvious design, with lots of room for tinkering, replacement or improvement. It is also capable of making good quality prints at a reasonable cost. I have been considering pickup up an Ender 3, which is the little brother to the Creality for jobs which are smaller, and maybe updating the CR-10 to use a larger nozzle (0.6mm) for larger coarser prints. I’ve also been thinking that it would be possible to easily create a home brew printer using aluminum extrusion, an MKS Gen L (or even better) mother board, and many of the same parts that I would use on the CR-10.

But for now, the CR-10 works well for me, and for the pointless kind of things I do, it’s a nice little printer.

If you have any questions or would like to add any of your experiences, leave a comment.

I’ve been wanting to make a computer-controlled mechanical gadget for quite some time. When I finally got a 3D printer a little more than a year ago, I began to think of how I might make a device that could direct a pen under computer control. I even took the time to order a CNC shield which could be used to drive the four channels needed for a 3D printer, but I never really got too far on that project. The NEMA-17 steppers that I ordered have largely sat in a box.

Until a couple of days ago. I wanted to do something, but maybe wasn’t quite ready to embark upon a project as complex as a 3D printer or CNC milling machine conversion. If the cost was low enough, it wouldn’t matter if the thing I built was particularly great: I would learn enough by doing the project to make it worthwhile, and I would gain confidence that perhaps would make me enthused enough to try a bigger project.

Hence, the computer-controlled Etch A Sketch project was born.

I’m of course far from the first to do such a thing. I didn’t let that particularly bother me. I sometimes refer to my hobbies as “timidly going where others have gone before,” and this is no exception. I knew that I wanted to use two of the steppers I had on hand, and probably use the CNC shield that I had. A quick order to Amazon Prime had a nice shiny new Etch A Sketch delivered to my house, and I went to Thingiverse to see what kinds of brackets and adapters people had used on their project. I settled on this set of parts and set my newly repaired and functional Creality CR-10 to printing the new parts.

There were a couple of issues. The original page didn’t have STL files for all the parts, you had to refer to older projects to get the STL files for the larger gears. When I printed one, I found that the center hole was significantly loose. Luckily, the author had uploaded the OpenSCAD file for generating the gear. Reading through the code, I found that the shaft hole was set to a diameter of 5.25mm, whereas a quick check with calipers revealed that mine were more like 4.5mm. I went ahead and printed a new one and tested it. It was a very tight press fit, which was just what I wanted. Huzzah!

The two mounting brackets are curved to fit the front panel and are to be attached with hot glue. I was dubious about this, but a reasonably large amount of glue was spread and the brackets pushed into place. It seems to work rather well, and it looks like they will hold just fine. I then pushed the two gears onto each side. There was a little bit of vertical misalignment: the large gear on one side was originally pushed quite deep, and didn’t mesh well with the smaller gear when it was in place. I used a flat bladed screwdriver to pull it back away from the body until it lines up pretty well. As yet, I don’t have any code to drive the motors, but turning the shaft by hand seems reasonably easy and the amount of backlash or slop is, well, probably not a big deal.

My intention was to drive the two steppers with a system like GRBL, which is a G-code interpreter that is used to drive CNC machines using an Arduino and some stepper drivers (provided by the CNC shield that I mentioned above). But as of this moment, I seem to be having some difficulty configuring the software. I may actually instead just write some simple code to test the stepper motors (perhaps by driving the steppers to draw a square on the Etch-A-Sketch) before I try to anything more complicated. It really wouldn’t be hard to drive the steppers using a simple set of drawing commands: all I’d need to do is dust of the Bresenham’s algorithm that I learned back in my early teens, and I’d be good to go. Next step is to read up on the wiring for the CNC shield wiring, and get the 12V supply running to the steppers to power the gadget. It might also be good to 3D print a stand to hold the Etch A Sketch in a more upright position. Hopefully, by the next time I post about this, I’ll have some video of it doing something nice.

Stay tuned.

Okay, as per the previous installment, I carted my new current transformer tap upstairs, and plugged in the Litter Robot. It entered its startup sequence, which ran the motors back and forth, and I was able to grab some data. It looked like the following:

Using the built in ADC of an Arduino would give me relatively little accuracy, and the shape of the waveform isn’t super pretty. This gives me some pause.

But it was immediately apparent to me that I was amazingly stupid, and I was totally taking the wrong tactic, with the result that I was making things way too complicated.

See, the fact is that the Litter Robot plugs into the wall, but it does so via this little wall wart:

It is nominally rated at 120V at 0.5A, which means that even if it was running flat out, it would generate a voltage of just 50mV. But I suspect that the reality is that the voltages will be quite a bit lower, because the Litter Robot doesn’t actually take that much power, and because the current transformer probably doesn’t operate very well at these very low current levels.

In other words, I’m using the wrong sensor for the job. I went this direction because my inspiration Brian was already going down this path and I was interested in AC sensing, but had I thought about it, the obvious way to implement what I wanted would be to put a current sensor in the output of the wall wart. In fact, I have a perfectly reasonable sensor for detecting current (and voltage) in that kind of situation: an INA219 based I2C current sensor that is identical to the ones I used in my DC current loop for my solar satellite project. These sensors actually have pretty good sensitivity down to the milliamp range, are inexpensive and compact, and I wouldn’t have to tinker around with mains voltage. It is true that I have used them mostly in DC current sensing applications, but it should not be especially difficult to use them to detect AC current. The wart puts out DC of course, which makes it doubly easy. I’ll review the datasheet and start to figure it out.

I really should think these things out first, before I order parts.

Okay, here’s a strange little project that is pushing the limits of what I understand in a couple of ways, and I thought I might write it up and also ask a question from those more knowledgeable than me.

Here’s the idea: in our upstairs bathroom, we have a Litter Robot. This is a commercial product, and basically is a spherical pod that serves as a litter box. When the cat does his business, motion detectors note his arrival and departure, and several minutes later motors engage which rotate the pod around and cause the waste to be sifted and removed from the box, and then rotates back to its starting position. Our cats seem to like it just fine, and it means that daily scooping isn’t required. Huzzah!

As it happens, there is an add-on to this model which makes it an IoT device and it will communicate its operation and control via BlueTooth to your phone. I thought this was a kind of frivolous (and not inexpensive) addition, so we didn’t bother. But refusing to spend a lot of money on a well designed product means I can spend a similar amount of money to bodge something of my own that will be a finicky Rube Goldberg. I justify this by noting that it is a learning opportunity.

I should also thank Brian who inspired this project with a similar “cat litter box” theme: he wants to automatically trigger an exhaust fan. I’m more interested in just the “sensing” part, and may use something like dweet.io or possibly MQTT to merely log when the Litter Robot does a cycle.

Rather than try to do any reverse engineering of this (rather expensive) robot that my wife really loves, the approach that I thought would be most reasonable (and which Brian is again responsible) is to create a current sensor that will note when the current to the robot increases, indicating that the motors are engaged. The way that we decided to do that is by using a current transformer. The idea is to basically create a short extension cord that passes the hot wire from the AC circuit through the center of a clamp on current transformer. You can plug this into the wall, and plug the desired appliance into the other side, and the current transformer will supply a signal (either current or voltage depending on what type you get) that can be sampled by a microcontroller, and you can then do appropriate action depending on what you discover.

So, a scrap piece of Romex, and a trip to Home Depot later, along with an order for a current transformer, and I created this little experiment (again, following in Brian’s footsteps):

The extension cord is just indoor Romex, which consists of three 12 gauge wires in a plastic cover. The ground wire is basically a bare copper wire, and it has two insulated wires which are white and black. You wire the bare wire to the green plug, and then put the white on the silver screws in each end, and the black on the gold colored end. I then checked the operation, first with a wiring fault detector, and then by just trying to use it as an extension cord. No problems were noted, so it was safe to proceed.

I then slit part of the out covering to expose the inner wires. The current transformer is (I’m told) only supposed to have the “hot” or black wire passing through it, so I created a little slack and passed it through the snap on part of the current transformer. A little electrical tape (and a little more for good measure) and I was done.

The current transformer is an SCT013-010 from YHDC which cost about $15 via Amazon with Prime. Here, I will tell you pretty much all I know about such things, since I am well out of my areas of knowledge and experience (which is rather the point of this project).

A current transformer is used to monitor the current flow in a circuit. When the current flows through the hot wire which passes through the center of the ferrite core, it induces a much smaller current on the output of the secondary.

If the current transformer is of the “current output” type, then a shunt resistor (called the burden resistor) is normally placed across the output, and the voltage drop is measured across it. Since you know the voltage drop and the resistance, you can solve for the current through the secondary, and then use the specification of the transformer to compute the current through the primary circuit. Normally the output of such a transformer has a pair of protection diodes wired across the outputs because if the secondary output is an open circuit, the switching of the AC causes large voltage spikes at the output, which isn’t good.

If the current transformer is of the “voltage output” type, then the burden resistor is built in to the transformer, and the output is merely a voltage. There doesn’t appear to be a pair of protection diodes that were present in the current monitoring type, likely because the resistor is built in.

The type that I chose was a voltage output type, with a nominal rating of 10A/1V. I took this to mean that if a 10A AC current was flowing through the primary, it would generate a 1V output on the output of the circuit. This means that the signal would be about 100mV/A, which I thought would be about right, or at least measurable via the ADC in an Arduino or an ESP8266.

But before I tinkered with putting a microcontroller in, I thought I should just look at the output of the sensor. I plugged a lamp into my extension cord and I hooked up my trusty Rigol scope to the output of the current sensor and had a peek. And here’s where something confusing happened: I got this.

See, I was expecting to see something approximating a nice sine wave. Unless the transformer is operating in “saturation” mode, one would expect the output to be more or less a linear representation of the input current. But that’s not what we have here. It looks rather like the kind of spikes that you’d expect from some kind of kick back from switching an inductor, but that’s well, not supposed to happen, at least as far as I know. This kind of signal is pretty useless for trying to determine power consumption, since it’s not at all linearly related to the input power.

Five minutes after getting this result, I realized that I was tired and it required more pondering. I shut it down and went to bed. This morning, I still find it to be pretty odd. I’m wondering if perhaps the bad waveform has something to do with the nature of the load I placed on it: the lamp was a cheap compact fluorescent that also serves as a bug zapper. Could that be part of it?

In any case, I am in unfamiliar waters, and if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to tweet (@brainwagon) or leave a comment here. I’ll update you with more information as the project continues.

Addendum: I just went out to the garage and tried a different load. I had a parabolic heater from Costco sitting there, so I decided to plug it into the circuit and see what it did. It generated a much more reasonable looking waveform.

This signal was about .82V rms, which represents a current of about 8.2A, or a total power (assuming 120V) of about 984 watts (the nominal rating of the heater is 1000W). Huzzah!

So, the new questions are:

• Is the problem with the other load merely that the load is too low to be measured accurately, or is it the nature of (maybe) a poorly switching fluorescent?
• Does the Litter Robot have sufficient current draw to operate in this more linear regime?

Stay tuned for more information.

Back around 2016 I had a tough time. A vertebrae in my neck began to pinch on the nerves that run down my left arm and began to cause pain and weakness. In the end, I had to have an injection into my spine to calm the pain, and spent months in physical therapy. I missed some of the first visits with my youngest granddaughter: while my wife flew out to Florida on an extended visit, I remained home on pain medication waiting for it to subside.

About this time I discovered the question and answer website Quora. On it, people posed questions, and people wrote answers. It had a number of unique features compared to other websites:

• It wasn’t a forum for debate. The purpose was to allow people to ask and answer questions, and the answers would be evaluated by a system of up or down voting.
• Comments on answers were allowed, but they were entirely at the discretion of the person who originally provided the answer. If a particular answer was especially ignorant or hateful, the author could simply delete it. This feature alone was an enormous benefit to maintaining reasonable discussions: obvious trolls simply found no traction.
• It proclaimed that their policy was “Be Nice, Be Respectful.” Unlike platforms like Twitter which have allowed all kinds of hateful or even threatening content to persist on their platform, hateful comments were generally deleted by authors, and hateful answers were generally reported and removed.
• Quora policy was that people use their real names. Fake identities were not permitted, and when detected generally quick action was taken to remove them. This also helped elevate the quality of discourse.

I found it fun and a useful distraction from my arm pain. While flat on my back, I started writing. I don’t believe that I was a particularly good writer, but I had a few good moments. My answers spanned a wide variety of topics (for a while I was one of the top ten writers on the subject of “Peanut Butter” or “Cats”) but I spent a lot of time musing about various political themes in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, and answering a large number of questions about atheism, topics which I never thought to cover here on my own blog.

And, without doubt, my own blog suffered as many of you observed. Since I was flat on my back, many of my own projects lapsed. It was simply easier to answer random questions than it was to develop a coherent project and document it for the enjoyment of all.

But on Quora, I reached a much broader audience than my blog had ever reached. In my best week, I was getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. I rocketed past one thousand followers (a level that I’ve never reached on any other platform, even Twitter) and then two, three, five thousand. I got my first “Top Writer” status in 2016. Today the number of followers I have has slowed, but I still have over eight thousand followers and have been consistently ranked as a Top Writer.

But as of this week, I think I may have written my last Quora answer.

The platform has changed. I’ve no idea what their business model or business plan is, but many of the things that I liked about it in the beginning began to be blunted or removed.

It really begins with the quality of questions. I spend a lot of time in the political arena, and I was not immune to the increasingly partisan nature of political communication in the United States. You might expect some degree of partisanship to creep into answers, but what’s really become annoying is how often it creeps into the questions themselves. I routinely downvote such questions. More often than not, when I investigate other questions by the same author, I find a questionable identity that has been creating dozens of questions in the span of a day. Sometimes they are all on a particular theme, but as time goes by, it seems like some are deliberately injecting different but relatively anodyne questions to (I presume) create an illusion that they are in fact a real person.

But it goes further. Recently Quora instituted a program where people could get paid some small amount of money for writing questions. Writing good question is indeed valuable, or even key to Quora’s value. But this has created an odd kind of perverse incentive. It isn’t hard to find people who are doing nothing but writing questions, at a rate of several per hour, in an obvious attempt to game the system and make money. I spent another minute and found another. My feed (and probably everyone else’s) is clogged with crap of this sort, and there is no getting away from it. Far from incentivizing the creation of good, thoughtful content, Quora has instead provided an incentive to open the fire hose of drivel so that a few people could make a few pennies.

But something bothers me even more.

There are tons of fake identities on Quora. I am normally not opposed to anonymous posts. I recognize that there are some legitimate reasons to want to hide your identity. Perhaps you don’t wish your employer, family or friends to know some particular details about your life. But more often than not, anonymity and false identities are used to create poor quality content that may created to manipulate public discourse on topics that clearly need sober and lucid discussion. As more information comes out about state actors using Facebook prior to the elections in 2016, it raises the distinct possibility in my mind that the increasing popularity Quora makes it increasingly desirable as a vector for injecting disinformation into the minds of the public. Even if you aren’t a state actor, there are likely other groups or people who are gaming Quora to drive traffic to other websites or perhaps just to influence the public narrative about topics of the day. Judging by the number of complaints from other Top Writer colleagues, I’m not alone in noting an increase in obvious spam-related answers. It’s not hard to find posts or Youtube videos about “how to drive traffic to your website using Quora.”

Bleh.

One last thing: Quora is almost entirely opaque as a platform. I can get some basic statistics about my own answers from a webpage, but Quora provides no API or analytics that allows me to gain more insight about Quora answers. I can give you this overview of my views over the last 30 days:

But I can’t answer all sorts of meaningful questions like “How many views per day am I getting?” “Is the trend up or down?” “What topics that I’m writing in are the most viewed?” “What are the views per day for a particular answer that I wrote?” And likely dozens of more questions that I haven’t thought up.

On a related topic, there is no meaningful way to search Quora. It’s impossible to find an answer that you wrote with keyword search, much less anyone else. Among other things, this means that many questions are asked over and over again, with slightly different wording.

Sigh.

But really, in the end, the thing that depresses me the most is that it seems to me that Quora simply doesn’t scale. Maybe it’s simply impossible for public discourse of this kind to scale, and that it will always generate 99% chaff and 1% wheat, but it felt like it was doing a better job before, and now it is fundamentally broken.

So, a couple of days ago I simply logged off with no intention to return. Breaking the habit is difficult, but as you may have noticed one positive benefit is that I’m back to boring you all with reports about cleaning my garage, which at least has the virtue of being a true story about me, who is an actual person.

And for the most part I’m happier writing about vacuum cleaner repair than talking about the increase in hyperpartisanship in the United States. I hope that overtime I will recover my desire to talk about the nerdy and mundane, and that somebody’s life will be better for the effort, even if it is only mine.

I’m back to thinking about radio and electronics. Tools and woodworking. The upcoming Maker Faire. And maybe even some new topics, like building ships in a bottle or model railroads. I think that even though fewer people will read this stuff, more people will feel happier having done so.

At least, I hope so.

I didn’t accomplish much in the garage on Sunday, but I did manage to take down some old, flickery and generally unreliable flourescent lights and replace them with some very inexpensive LED lights. I had previously tried to continue to use two of the old fixtures, including their old fluorescent ballasts, but in general that proved to be more trouble than they were worth. The connectors were already unreliable, and occasionally one of them would just turn off and back on again at intermittent intervals. I grew tired of them, and decided to just take down and take them to the recycling center and replace them with new but inexpensive LED shop lights.

I unplugged the old fixtures and then took them down. They were actually screwed into mostly dry wall, I’m kind of shocked that they didn’t just fall out of the ceiling. We decided to make a run to the El Cerrito Recycling and Environmental Resource Center to get rid of them and the stock of old fluorescent bulbs that we had lying around. They are a great resource, and took everything but the ballasts (I had to snip them out). I guess they have some kind of hazardous chemicals in them, and I have to take them to Richmond Hazardous Waste instead. We have some old paint cans we have to take over there anyway, so that will probably be on next week’s task list.

I didn’t want to replace them with anything expensive, so I decided to continue with some cheap $20 hanging fixtures that I got from Lowes. I had good luck with a couple of these cheap lights from Lowes and manufactured by Lithonia. They actually are an integrated unit: you can’t change the bulbs out, they simply run until they are dead, and then you replace them. They are nice and bright, and I had installed two of them a couple of years ago with no complaints. They are also incredibly lightweight (which could also be considered as “flimsy”) at a weight of 1.7lbs. Ironically, they are listed as “4ft” bulbs, but the fixture length is a little over 45 inches. I purchased four more of these, and hung two of them immediately, with the other two waiting until I can get rid of some telescope grinding equipment. I just used wimpy hooks to attach them to the rafters, but the hooks have too fine a thread to be secure in just dry wall. I’ll have to get a couple of dry wall anchors to fix one in the place I intend.

At about 36 watts a piece, I now burn about 150ish watts for lighting in there, but the garage is actually bright and easy to work in. Huzzah.

Addendum: I also decided that my Workmate rack of yesterday wasn’t entirely adequate. Because it was only fastened to the wall in the center (that’s the only convenient stud to attach it too) it actually looked like it could twist a bit (the wood is soft and the lever arm is relatively long). I decided to change the simple cross bar into a T shape. I took out my Kreg pocket hole jig, and bored two holes in the end of another scrap, and then fastened it to the original crossbar with glue and pocket screws. I drilled a couple of holes along its edge with a Forstner bit, and then fastened it back (a little bit lower) on the wall. Now, since it has fastening bolts along 2 feet of stud instead of just a couple of inches, it’s rock solid.

So, today I had a list of a few simple tasks in my garage that I thought would be good to get to. It’s now 2:30 in the afternoon, and I’ve… gotten some of them accomplished.

Just to the left of my door as I enter my garage, I had assembled a fairly rickety looking (but probably fairly sturdy) set of sheet metal shelves, and over the years they had acquired a thick layer of pointless crap and a few things that were actually worthy. In particular, it was the resting place of my old Philips 25Mhz oscilloscope, which I hadn’t used since I purchased my relatively spiffy 100Mhz Rigol scope a few years ago. Still, it works, and I thought that perhaps it would be a worthy contribution to our maker lab at work, so I dusted it off and set it aside, and then cleared the shelving unit. The amount of usable stuff was approximately what could fit in a shoe box, the rest was put in a garbage bag and will be gone on garbage day.

I drug the shelving unit outside and had a good look. It’s actually in pretty good shape, and while I don’t have space for it immediately, perhaps relocating it and using it for gardening supplies would be a good idea. I’ll ponder that some more.

In the mean time, I thought it would be good to find a way to hang my trusty Black and Decker Workmate 225. It’s a useful gadget, but it often ends up where I trip over it, or buried under other things. I thought I would just use a pair of bicycle hooks to attach it to the wall, and ordered a pair from Amazon Prime. Sadly, on the day it should have been delivered, they reported it lost and today I see that they refunded my money. But, my sweet wife went out and got me a set of 10 utility hooks from Target which worked out well. I found my good studfinder, and went looking for a stud in the place where I had removed the shelving. I found a scrap of 20″ long 2×4 and put two pilot holes into it, and inserted the largest curved hooks into it 10″ apart. I then predrilled a pair of holes in the middle so I could fasten the board to a stud, and drove it in using some 2.5″ construction screws I had left over from my workbench project. Voila!

It’s not the greatest bit of carpentry, but it gets it out of the way.

There has been a steady decrease in the amount of crap in my garage, but it’s still fairly crowded. Sometime in the next month I hope to get rid of my old telescope grinding machine. which should free up a couple of square yards of space. I have someone who wants it, but we are trying to arrange a suitable time to hall the monstrosity off. In the mean time, I still have a lot of crap and only a little space.

Some of it was being taken up by a tangled pile of hose and cords which was my Weekender power washer. I decided that I needed to figure out a way to get it all back in its case, which meant disassembling some fittings that I hadn’t done in ages, and which had resulted in me piling it on a bench earlier. I tried looking up the manual, hoping it would provide some hint, but it appears that the manufacturer has gone out of business, so I wasn’t able to figure it out. A little poking and prodding got most of the hoses disassembled, but the spray gun itself was a little odd. I ended up pulling a bunch of screws and disassembling it. Future me might want to remember this little tidbit: to get the spray wand off the handle, push in and twist.  I suppose it should have been obvious, but it took disassembling for me to figure it out.

I’ve taken to making photographs of the make and model number of new tools that I get and uploading them to my Google Drive account. Along with their manuals (which I scan using my Brother scanner/printer and upload to Google Drive) I have found this to be really useful. Just for fun, here is a look at how all the parts go back in the case, along with the ID tag for the power washer:

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The truth is that if I have any problems with it in the future, I’m likely to replace it anyway, since it’s not the most glorious power washer anyway. But for now, it’s back in its box and stashed on storage shelves until next time.

I did some more vacuuming. I might go out and replace two old set of ballasted fluorescent lights with some new (and much brighter) LED lights, but overall I think today might be done.

Oh, and by the way, this marks the first time I used my new DeWalt drill and driver. Both are really powerful! I will have to get used to them. I used the drill to do the pilot holes in my 2×4, and it was insane how quickly it punched through the 2×4. The torque of these brushless motors is freakin’ amazing. It really pointed out that the drill bits I have are dull, because it did have a tendency to skip around. I should probably get some new drill bits (perhaps even some bradpoint bits) and get a bit more practice to keep the drill from wandering away from the mark (or punch a small divet using an awl). The impact driver was amazing. I drove these 2.5″ screws into the wall stud without a pilot hole with no problem at all. Definitely need some more practice in the brave new world of power tools. I think I am glad I still have my wimpy little 6v Black and Decker drill for less aggressive uses.

Have a good weekend, all.

I think maybe twenty years ago when I was in the height of my telescope-building mania I started acquiring books about lathe work and machining from Lindsay Books. Lindsay Books made a business out of finding old out-of-print books in the public domain and republishing them cheaply. Such books were usually centered around machining and craft, and it was a cool resource. Their catalogs were also awesome to receive. Alas, Lindsay Books is no more: the proprietor decided to retire a number of years ago.

One of the most interesting was a seven volume series of books titled “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scratch” by Dave Gingery. Luckily, these books are still available at Gingery Books and continue to serve as inspiration for new generations of people who become interested in machining and foundry work.

For you see when Gingery said “from scrap”, he literally meant from scrap. You begin by building a charcoal foundry, really just a bucket lined with a refractory material and fired with charcoal, melt old scrap aluminum from old lawn mower engines or ladders, and then learn to cast green sand. You cast the first parts for your lathe using this foundry. To get it flat, you use the very old technique of hand scraping against a surface plate. You create additional parts by melting scrap aluminum, shape them with rudimentary hand tools, and eventually get to the point where your lathe can begin to make parts for itself.

This is amazing for at least two reasons: not only do you end up with a useful machine tool, but doing so teaches you far more about machining than you could ever hope to do by simply reading or even studying. It is the epitome of “learning by doing.”

I never embarked upon a foundry project of my own, but I continue to be interested in machining. What is awesome is that platforms like Youtube have provided a place for people to document their own builds along this path. A couple nights ago, I found some good ones that I thought I’d share.

My path began with Paul’s Garage. He’s a somewhat whimsical and self-taught guy who has been playing with foundry stuff for a while, but has recently embarked upon a lathe project of his own, courtesy of some donated parts to get him started. He’s just at the first step (scraping the bed flat) but it served as an entry point into the Youtube activity surrounding this kind of work:

But obviously, he’s just beginning and it doesn’t satisfy your need to binge watch Youtube videos just to have a single episode. I urge you to subscribe to his feed and to go back through his other foundry videos as well.

For your viewing pleasure and a more complete (sixteen parts or more) video about the process, Cressel Anderson’s Makercize channel is awesome. He began his video series about three years ago with a video about making the bed for his lathe, but actually finished his project and has now moved onto making a metal shaper (volume 3 of the Gingery Series).

If you have only five minutes, you can watch his overview video that illustrates a lot of the process.

Again, well worth watching.

And I should also add a plug to the “Stig” of Youtube foundry videos, the elusive (but prolific) myfordboy. For a decade he’s been making cool videos about metal casting in the home workshop. His videos are minimalist works of art: he doesn’t talk or even show his face during the videos, but he embarks upon interesting projects and displays good and proper technique. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe he’s made a Gingery lathe (as his name implies, he has a beautiful Myford lathe) but he seems to like to tinker with machine tools and engines of all sort, and has even begun to stray into 3D printing to help him make cores for casting. Honestly, there are days of material that he’s produced, so I’ll begin at the beginning: Episode 1 of his “Metal Casting at Home” series (there are now 80-ish episodes in this series):

So far, I haven’t done any of this stuff, I just live vicariously through these amazing bits of making. But I do enjoy people doing amazing work and using largely forgotten skills. If you like them, I urge you to subscribe to their feeds, and let me know of any similar people in the comments.

When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I was really interested in model railroading. Like most boys, I had an inexpensive toy train set that ran around on the carpet until someone stepped on it, swore, and then I had to pack it away, perhaps making another appearance around Christmas. But I read Model Railroader magazine and gawked at the magnificent layouts that people had, perhaps taking up the entire basement, with hundreds of cars, and beautifully sculpted trees. In particular, I liked the romance of steam locomotives, and to this day I find trains to be pretty interesting.

Recently, one of my Facebook friends mentioned that Rod Stewart was a model train enthusiast. Calling him an “enthusiast” is damning him with faint praise. He apparently built a lot of his incredible layout in hotel rooms while touring. Judging by the pictures, it’s really amazing.

But back to me…

I don’t have the room, patience or skill to aspire to anything that could even be listed in the same breath as his, but I began to wonder: what could I really achieve? Could I build a small but interesting layout using reasonable time and budget? I’ve been acquiring some wood working tools that makes the benchwork easier to achieve, and while my house is crowded with all sorts of crap of my own, and my modelmaking skills (which never were amazing) are pretty modest, so would it be worthwhile to tackle a new project like this?

So, I did what I always do. I hit the web to look for inspiration, and to refresh what knowledge I used to have but may have forgotten.

First, gauge. All of previous toys had been either O or HO scale, but I had definitely preferred HO at the time, as my layouts were always space constrained, and HO gave me enough space so that I could put some switches in. But in considering possibilities for a new layout, I’ve begun to consider N scale, which is a little over half the size. The locomotives are positively diminutive, but it does mean that a layout which would be 4’x8′ in HO can probably be squeezed into a much more manageable 2’x4′ layout, which seems really attractive to me.

But what could I really accomplish on such a small layout? I didn’t know, so I went out looking for inspiration. And I found it in abundance on the All Gauge Page at thortrains.net. As it says, it contains tons of information about layouts of all gauges, sizes and interests. But what I found most helpful were some of their layout designs like this page full of N scale mini layouts. What’s especially cool is that they include lists of all the track that you need to construct them. There are a bunch of other nifty small layouts here as well as well as many others. There is a ton of information here. I haven’t begun to scratch the surface.

Something as small as this could still be interesting. At just 2’x2’6″, I could easily imagine constructing this entire layer as part of a small coffee table with a glass top, which would both protect it and make it serve a dual purpose.

I’ve no idea whether this will stick in my head as interesting, but for an evening at least, it was pretty interesting to think about.

Previously I had written up a bit on my project that I have called my “solar satellite station.” I used quotes around the word “solar” in the title because for the past couple of months, it has mostly been sitting on my workbench in my garage, occasionally powered up by a 12V charger rather than the sun. My hope is to get it out into the sunshine fairly soon, but that’s rather waiting on a couple of changes to the software. Most importantly, it consumes rather too much power than I would like which I suspect is that it runs continuously, even though it samples the data (temperature, pressure and current) only periodically. If I utilized the deep sleep mode of the ESP8266, chances are excellent it would reduce the power consumption by a factor of ten or more.

But that is a post for another day. Today, I thought I would bore you with graphs from the data that I’ve been logging. Currently I have detached my charger, so it has been running from the battery power (a 7.2Ah lead acid battery, if you haven’t been following along). First, the temperature in my garage:

The skies were clear last night, but we are expecting some rain today (indeed, it’s already begun) and we don’t have much sun today, so I would expect it to be a bit chilly. On to atmospheric pressure:

This was sensed with the MPL3115A2 sensor from adafruit. This is about as significant a drop as I’ve seen in recent memory. The prediction is that we are going to see three or more inches of rain in the next couple of days. Neat.

Now, onto power and current consumption. I have separate INA219 voltage/current sensors monitoring the lines to the solar panel as well as the battery. The “solar panel” in this case is currently an unplugged charger. As you can see the current is zero amps, so the battery is not being charged at all. The voltage has dropped by about half a volt in the thirty six hours or so that the graph spans. The voltage is actually pretty much equal to the battery voltage, since the charge controller has a common positive between the panel and battery circuits. Power is the product of voltage and current, and is of course zero as you would expect.

Moving on to the battery side of things:

The battery side indicates the total consumption of all elements of the system. You can see that it’s average about 74 milliamps at 12.65 volts, or about 936 milliwatts. This is the combined consumption from the charge controller and its inefficiencies, as well as powering the two ESP8266 (one is still being used as a serial bridge for debugging) and all the various I2C sensors. If we call that 1W, then we can estimate the total capacity of the setup pretty easily. The battery is a nominal 12V at 7.2Ah, or 86.4 Watt/hours. That means that we’d discharge the (large and rather heavy battery) in under four days. Since I really want the battery to be discharged no deeper than 50%, a couple of days is probably all it can really take.

I know I can do better. Currently it’s maintaining two processors, each with their own WiFi connections. If I removed my debugging one, power would immediately drop by half. And I really need to get back to using deep sleep mode. I prototyped a deep sleep version of the code that just sent temperature, but I haven’t worked on deploying it yet. I also want to shift to using my own MQTT server. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend. Until then, I’m off into my garage to cut up boxes for the recycling bin. Have a good weekend, all.

Okay, this doesn’t really count as a hack or anything, but it is a tiny bit of virtuous behavior: I fixed an old Rigid 12 Gallon shop vac that I had sitting around. I hadn’t used it in a while, probably a few years when I had a water leak in my garage this summer. I used it to suck up some water and gook, but noticed that the switch on it had broken and it was jammed in the on position. I could still turn it on and off by unplugging it, but that wasn’t super convenient. I also noticed that it didn’t smell particularly great, with a slight “motor burning out smell”, so I set it aside until last weekend.

Before Christmas, I disassembled it to see how difficult it would be to repair. First of all, I noted that the filter was… well beyond disgusting. Clogged, dirty, it would be truly surprising if any air got through it at all. I removed it, and then disassembled the top of the vacuum. I found that the switch was actually a pretty easily replaced item: made by Carling Technologies, it was held in place by a couple of clips, and wired to the power line with a couple of slide on spade connectors. The glue-on label for my vacuum had long since departed, so I wasn’t able to find the exact model, but it appeared that the switch in many similar models was officially discontinued. But a little searching on line yielded this switch, which appeared to be the same size and had a similar clip structure. Unlike the original, it was a rocker style switch instead of the “bat” shaped one it came with, which was fine with me, as those switches seem to break more easily in my experience.

Got the switch today, fitted it in (worked perfectly) rehooked up the switch and plugged in the vacuum. I had pressure washed the can, and had removed the bad filter. Turned it on, and… it works! Huzzah. Of course I installed the switch in backwards, so the “ON” position is actually off, and “OFF” is on, but I don’t feel like unscrewing it just to fix that. While running it, I could smell a hint of what I smelled before, but I left it running for about five minutes, and the scent seemed to fade, but I am not sure if anything is wrong. Perhaps a little lubrication is in order, I’ll have to look it up. In the mean time I’ll get a replacement filter. I suspect I’ll get a few dollars worth of use out of it anyway, and I may as well use it until it’s dead.

It will get some use to get rid of some dirt and grime in my shop this weekend.

Addendum: Matthias Wandel (in addition to being a fascinating woodworker to watch on YouTube) had this nice video on oiling the bearings in your shop vac.

Okay, I never have been much of a woodworker, and haven’t done anything significant in a decade or so. But as I’m trying to clean my garage workshop and get things tidy and in order, I have decided that it would be both cost effective and fun to construct some crude workshop furniture. I got myself a Kreg pocket hole jig and a new miter saw over the Christmas holiday, and decided to go ahead and try to make a rolling cart that I could use to store some items like my combination disk/belt sander and vacuum cleaner for dust collection, as well as possibly provide some additional mobile work surface.

Skipping to the end, a short day in the garage yielded this cart:

I’m generally happy with it, but I did have a few notes/criticisms about the general construction that I’m going to keep in mind for future construction projects.

• I went to home depot to buy four 2x4s and 2 2x6s to form the frame and risers. They didn’t seem to have dried lumber in 2×6 form, so I built this out of green Douglas fir. The lumber was fairly straight, but the moisture content was probably somewhere north of 18%. I could have let it dry out over time, or gone in search of dry lumber somewhere else, but I was impatient, and decided that using green lumber would probably be fine. Indeed, I think it will be fine, given the crudity of my carpentry skills.
• The frames were assembled with pocket screws, which I seemed to have mixed results with. I think in at least one case, I stripped a screw by over tightening. Perhaps I should get a better drill with a proper torque clutch.
• The rest of the frame was screwed together with 2 1/4″ deck screws with a star drive. This worked rather well. I didn’t drill pilot holes. I will next time, I think in at least one case where I screwed one in near the end, I got some splitting.
• I used 3″ locking casters from Harbor Freight, which worked well. I fastened them down with the same #10 2 1/4″ deck screws, but with a #10 washer to help center them. I did predrill those holes, and managed to snap a drill bit off doing one. Note to self: get some better drill bits.
• I made the table taller than the original design, and noted that the top had a bit of flex front to back. After the table dries out a bit more, I’ll probably screw a board across both sides, or maybe some thin sheet plywood to stiffen it up more. It’s plenty strong for storage, but if you were going to use it as a platform for power tools, the vibration may not be good.
• For quickness/expedience, it’s held together with just screws: I didn’t glue any of the joints. That ultimately limits the strength and rigidity. If I get a small table saw, I’d probably rip them more square and put some half lap joints in, and do a proper gluing job. But for now, it’s fine.

Anyway, the plans are available on the Kreg website. The only modification I made was to make it a bit taller to match the height of my other bench and to match the casters that I had on hand. It was a good refresher project, and the first time I used pocket screws. I’ve got some other projects in mind, so stay tuned.

Okay, as part of my ongoing attempt to clean my garage (“Project Virtue”) I called up some friends from the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. I had a pile of telescope making supplies that frankly I’m not going to live long enough to use effectively, and I thought that I would try to get rid of some of this stuff. They ended up hauling away a bunch of tubing, some blanks (both totally raw and some ground) and various bits of hardware like focusers and mirror mounts.

Frankly, I was hoping they would haul away more, but it appears that I’ll have to do some work to get rid of some of the more “specialty” items. I’ll probably write up some of the others later, but today’s post will focus on this:

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This is an Elgin Model No. 2-12, Serial Number 9120. What, you may ask is that? It’s a dual spindle grinding machine for making optical components. This machine was in the Telescope Maker’s workshop at the old Chabot Observatory where it sat mostly unused for years (I can’t remember anyone actually using it) and when the telescopes were moved to the new science center location, I decided to save this machine from the junk pile, and took it. My guess is that it probably dates to the 1940s or so, but I could be wrong. I’ve been unable to find any information about the machine (feel free to contact me or comment if you do know about them.)

It is amazingly, ungodly, heavy. When I naively said I would take it, I went over to the machine and have it a hard push on one corner. It didn’t budge. So, think I, “it must be bolted down.” Uh, no. It wasn’t. I never weighed it, but it’s got to be north of five hundred pounds. It is astonishingly heavy and sturdy. Luckily, when I took possession, my friend Ken welded some heavy casters on the bottom so that it was possible to wheel the machine around. I recall he also donated the use of his heavy pickup to bring it home. Where it has sat ever since.

It has two spindles, each powered by a separate motor and having a separate power switch. I hesitantly plugged it in and with some hope gave the switches a flip. First, the good news: the right spindle fired right up. The bad news? Not so much for the left spindle. I can hear a faint electrical whine, so I suspect it might be something as simple as a starting capacitor for the motor. I haven’t investigated further.

So, here’s the thing: does anyone want this thing? Realistically, I’m not going to invest the time and energy to get this thing tuned up in and in use, so I’m looking for someone to give it a new home. If you can spin me a good story as to why I should give it to you so you can make cool stuff with it, and show up with a U-Haul, some straps, and a ramp and some burly friends to help out, I will almost certainly let it go for free. I live in El Sobrante, CA, so this is probably of interest mostly to people in the SF Bay Area, but perhaps people farther afield might be interested.

Feel free to pass links to this post anywhere you see fit. Contact me via email, or my twitter handle @brainwagon.

Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for the New Year!

I’m in the middle of the “Winter Break” at Pixar. The studio mostly empties between Christmas and New Years, and they take the time to do some improvements and maintenance to the building. I thought it might be a good idea to continue my attempt to do similar improvements in my garage/workshop area, so that’s on the top of my list this week.

This endeavor generally reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes story The Musgrave Ritual, which opens with a lament from John Watson about his roommates rather untidy habits. I’m sure that were Carmen to read the following, she’d find some striking similarities to my own habits:

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner.

The Musgrave Ritual

Carmen and I have been living in our current house for nearly twenty years, and our garage has increasingly become storage, and inefficiently used storage at that. All sorts of boxes and containers were strewn about, containing both treasure and crap in equal measure. But a few months ago, we had a problem with a leak in our water heater which created quite a mess and I’ve been trying to dedicate some time each week (mostly on the weekend) to separate the wheat from the chaff and turn the space back into a real, working space where I could tackle new projects in a more efficient manner. I call this effort “Project Virtue” in the hopes that I will develop tidier habits, and make bursts of creativity more productive.

Of course whenever you embark on a project like this, you end up with a bunch of sub-projects, and then sub-sub-projects. The hope is to prevent some kind of infinite regression like Atlas’ turtles (“it’s projects upon projects, all the way down.”) It feels that way, but I am making some headway.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I wanted to repair my Black and Decker CMM1000 cordless electric lawnmower which seemed to have a completely dead battery that wouldn’t charge.

The batteries arrived over the weekend, and I got to work. The mower actually takes two batteries which were held together back-to-back with mounting tape. Luckily, I had some on hand, so I taped the new batteries together, and then transferred the shorting strap to place the batteries in series. A quick check with the multimeter indicated that the batteries were charged, and so I reinstalled the battery and tested out the lawnmower. Huzzah! Fired right up. I went ahead and used it to mow the front lawn. It has some pluses and minuses compared to my gas mower. It is much quieter, and the mechanism for adjusting the mow height is really nice and adjusts all the wheels simultaneously. But it is not as powerful, and I had problems using the bagging function (it’s better a simple mulching mower). I also have gotten used to my gas mower’s powered wheels, which makes it much easier to use despite both mowers weighing a similar amount.

After cutting the lawn, I also tested the charging adapter. There was a small chance that the adapter was also faulty, but it seemed to work okay. Note to myself: the charge meter only works when the safety is installed and you start the mower. It does not indicate the state of charge while charging. You should see the red led come on when charging, and it will turn green when charging is complete.

So, I popped the stack: mower is fixed. If it is going to take up space in the garage, it will at least be because it is a functioning tool.

Another sub-project was fixing the dog door in our garage. We’ve never owned a dog, but apparently one of the previous owners did. The door was fairly large-ish, and covered with a flap which had suffered over time. The net result was it was both drafty and allowed various varmints and critters (and on one occasion, a pregnant cat) to set up shop in our garage. So, I removed the hardware and found a scrap of plywood that I could cut to the right side and bolt in place over the opening.

I hit the board with a coating of Krylon exterior primer/paint, and screwed it in place. My perpetual problem of finding screws of the right size at our local Home Depot continued, but while cleaning I found my underutilized angle grinder, so the long bolts presented no real problem.

I also moved my aging Linux box to the garage, and got an inexpensive $80 LED TV from Best Buy, which I mounted using an unused TV mount from Harbor Freight.

I scrounged up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and I was good to go.

I’ve still got a lot of cleaning to do, but increasingly the floor is becoming visible, trash cans are filling and being hauled away each week (probably the current bottleneck) and I’m beginning to organize tools and work more efficiently.

But… I’m also in acquisition mode, and thanks to Santa, I’ve got some new additions. I’ve been wanting to have a chop saw for quite some time. I have borrowed one from the Richmond Tool library, but having one of my own seemed like it would be useful. I’m not much of a wood worker, but it would be great to be able to do small projects like building planter boxes and workbenches. Carmen must have been paying attention, because she ended up surprising me a Dewalt DW715 12″ compound miter saw. Very nice! Of course, I lack workbench space for it, so after reading some web reviews, I drove over to Harbor Freight and got one of their Heavy Duty Mobile Miter Stands using a 20% off Super Coupon. It is pretty beefy, and has a couple of features I really like. It has large wheels, and you can actually roll it around with the saw mounted on it. The mounting brackets are actually really nice, and have a two-stage release mechanism which makes it easy to take the saw off and put it back on. Things that could be improved are that there is a significant amount of play in the supports for the rollers, but some shimming would probably help considerably. The ability to store it upright against the wall is pretty nice for space-constrained workshop areas.

Ultimately though, I know I need some additional workbench space, and I want to make at least one on rollers. I don’t want anything too sophisticated, but I do want it to be sturdy and useful. I also didn’t want to fuss with it forever, I wanted it to be a project that I could complete for modest money, with a single trip to Home Depot and a Saturday.

That brings me to an expenditure where I’m trading time for money. I decided that it would be worthwhile to acquire a pocket hole jig, and settled for the Kreg K4 Jig. I could have gone cheaper, but I think that would perhaps be false economy. The larger system is designed to do work with 2×4’s more efficiently, and includes things like the specialty clamp and vacuum adapter for dust removal.

Kreg also maintains a list of cool projects, and I found this cool Easy Build Workbench that looks pretty much like what I envisioned: 32″ x 48″ with locking casters. The only modification I am going to make is to build it taller: I want my benchtop to be at 36″. I’ll probably get some 3″ locking wheels from Harbor Freight which should mean that the 2×6″ uprights need to be 32.5″ in height. I’m also thinking of adding a power strip to one end and a place to wind a power cord.

After I get this bench done, I have a couple of other projects in mind, including a stand for my drill press (it’s not bolted to the the current stand, which is probably not a good idea), a drill press table and fence, and maybe some additional jiggery to make the Kreg more useful. I’ll probably also do some planters for our back garden, and maybe some additional home improvements. And then I can get back to my electronics and ESP8266 hacking.

I’ve also got a friend coming over on Saturday to take away some of my telescope making inventory. It dawns on me that I have lots more stuff in my garage than I will use in my lifetime, and finding new homes for a lot of it will make other people happy and will also clear up additional space for me. If we discover anything cool while digging, I’ll be sure to post about it here.

Best wishes to all, and thanks for reading.