One year ago today: August 2, 2014, drone “skeet-shooting”.
Five years ago today: August 2, 2010, 20% or else.
Six years ago today: August 2, 2009, Idaho fashion show.
MORNING
Feast your eyes on it. The most dainty piece of metalwork in my life. This is the shaft coupler I’m faking for the drill table. Can you see the set screw to which I’m pointing? Designed in a crowded Karaoke bar by the most non-mechanical person of the century without a lick of training. And it works. You can make out the 7” carriage bolt, it has two nuts that secure the soon-to-be motor drive shaft to the . . . the what? I guess if it was rack and pinion, it is the pinion.
I told you all that intense study of drilling pilot holes was going to pay off like this. I am so happy. As soon as it gets light, I’m going to wake up the club and buy breakfast all round. I am encouraged because this unfamiliar metal work responds to the same techniques of attention to detail as woodwork, which I learned only this year. Well, such as I’ve learned, I mean.
Everybody decided to sleep in, so I went for toast and coffee myself. Today will be as quiet as I can make it. A good book and since it looks like rain, I don’t have to pretend I’m not here. NPR is currently taking calls on the subject of whether women who were “in their third trimester” when they saw the 9/11 videos are entitled to disability benefits for the “post-traumatic stress they passed on to their unborn infants.” Hang in there NPR, anyone who disagrees is obviously an insensitive lout.
I cannot find any tutorials on how to program an Arduino to follow a drilling pattern. There are applications out there, but I don’t know how to use them. Or translate them into Arduino code. So there’s another layer of complication. I’m conjecturing how it might be done using an array, while sipping ginger tea from Batch No. T-400107, it says on the label. Why not, I just made a quart of eggnog flavored pudding.
NOON
Ah, quiet times at home. Not missing out on a thing in the world. When I was young, there were things to do on the weekends. Every little town had a movie theater, there was a ball park to chase foul balls for a dime each. Home runs were a quarter. There was a swimming hole at Clear River and you could always walk along the railways tracks for miles and catch a ride back with a farmer going grocery shopping. Now, the movies are in a cineplex, the tickets to the game are $35, parking at the beach is $8 per hour, and the railroad is a fenced in right-of-way. No tresspassing.
It packs a wallop, the literature says the 57 is the degrees used to slow roast coffee. This is supposed to give it a more chocolate like aroma. It is instant coffee, so heavy on the caffeine. You need that when drilling in oil. Literally, I found the best way is to immerse the entire piece of metal into a small bath of light oil with a magnet to attract the filings.
And one of the oils I’ve used is pumpkin. It smells nice and lets you see the work. Careful to segregate this expensive oil right out of the kitchen. Another advantage is a quick dip in detergent completely removes the oil residue when you are done.
AFTERNOON
Stepper motors, the ones you want to use, have six wires. Some have five, but I’d rather not bother with non-standard parts. Some have four wires, but they are a different kind of stepper altogether. The point here is that there is no standardization of the wire colors, so you are forced to find the two “center taps” on your own. Ah, I heard someone say just look up the datasheet on-line. Ho, ho, easier said than done. On-line you get bastard rat sites like “Datasheet Archive” that dance around and put countless fake download buttons on every page.
Those pricks know what you want, but they jack you around. The problem is, these New Age Millennials hate any kind of organization. I understand their mentality, they want complete chaos so they can lose themselves in the muddle. They are not satisfied to remain disorganized themselves, they must hate those who are. That’s why they hate “the system”. Their close cousins, maybe a little too close, are the jerkoffs who think their full volume backing track of pansy music is impressing the youTube viewing community.Stepper technology is difficult in itself, a situation not helped by all of the on-line examples being wrong. I was finally able to get the motor to rotate in one direction by brute force coding. That’s figuring out the firing sequence and setting each pin high and then low. This is not the correct way to get a stepper to perform and the motor is so weak, merely touching it stops the rotation. It’s a start. I recall seeing a binary representation of the commands though it would be a pity to have to resort to machine code.
So, we have yet another semi-advanced topic on the Arduino where the experts let you down. Their code does not work and without a deep understanding of the requirements of stepper control, there is no way the average Nova cut-and-paste programmer is going to troubleshoot it.
EVENING
Concluding that anyone who says steppers are easy is taking some kind of shortcut, I relaxed and watched documentaries. Code-breaking, silver treasure ships, and a NASA documentary. I thought the NASA program was on the Challenger explosion, but instead it was on and on and on about how McAuliffe was the most wonderful of God’s creations until I had to turn it off at the six minute mark. The syrup was making me dizzy. “History isn’t just about explorers, but also about their wives . . .” McAuliffe, first feminist civilian in space. The other six dead? Well, they were men, so let’s talk about their wives, too.
I’m over-tired, what a long day. Would you like to watch one of these totally indoctrinated self-absorbed hipster lady-boy commentators make a fool of himself? Here’s a video of one who interviews a group of random people and refuses to believe they like Trump. He can’t deal with it and shits his pants. He’s the Whoopi Goldberg of the Millennial set.
As Trump continues to lead, “surveys” now show a political miracle, that people prefer a person they agree with over one who they think can win. Good, it breaks the stranglehold the establishment has had on America politics for 150 years. And now, one can only assume miraculously, the media itself is beginning to question the validity of its own process. You see, their “polls” keep showing that the one candidate they cannot manipulate with their baiting and leading questions keeps coming out on top. Ergo, there must be something wrong with the process.
All kidding aside, Trump is the worst threat to the government-media-corporate-military state that has ever come along. They have to get together to stop Trump, or he is going to kick their asses in the White House the way he has done it already in the poles. There have been other self-funded candidates, but the difference is, Trump stands a chance. And that chance is getting better by the day. God bless America!.
ADDENDUM
One of the fastest ways to get my attention is to ban something off the Internet. That applies to “copyright infringement”, but certainly to anything blocked over religious or nationalistic issues. Like how completely the Canadian government got the Bieber hockey game blocked, or the way the international Jewish community is blocking “Holohoax” videos, some of which are incredibly well-made. For now, these censors are succeeding not because they are righteous, but because they learn over time where and how to apply pressure.
Mind you, some of what survives is comical. Like the holocaust “survivors” stating under oath to be eyewitnesses to inmates being herded past trees to the gas chambers. Oops, the allied reconnaissance photographs show the trees were not planted until after the war. And the photos are always very clear, because there is no smoke. None. Anyway, censorship and prohibition do not work. Well, actually they do—but in the opposite direction.
Last Laugh
. . . and it’s not even the Miami Herald!
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