December 28, 2015

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 28, 2014, my fashion statement.
Five years ago today: December 28, 2010, vacuuming up fish.
Nine years ago today: December 28, 2006, pushy sales types.
Random years ago today: December 28, 2003, free corkage, wow.

MORNING
           Ha, did I score a bicycle this morning. My gripe with my old unit, before it was stolen, was the inherent weakness of the frame. It was an ordinary cheap bike with an electric motor. Take a look at this puppy. It’s a custom designed frame missing a couple parts. One is the battery, I’ll get to that. Two, it is missing the pedal assist cable. Three, it needs a new controller. The expensive part is the battery.

           This is an expensive bike and somebody stole the battery. It was in a locking bracket, so they stole the whole bracket. This bike sat in the garage after that for a year, until they donated it to the club on Xmas morning. And, quick show of hands, who in the club has the cash to replace that battery? I test drove it in regular mode this morning and it will be a relatively cheap replacement for my old unit. The bike retails for something like $1,000.
           That calls for a breakfast meeting later, during which time we went over the outstanding club projects. Two things stand apart. First, the majority of what we do has nothing to do with robots. Second, like it or not, we have two departments. The light duty work here and the heavier work over at the clubhouse.
           This bicycle is not a runner yet, but if all goes to spec, I’ll have one excellent eBike at around 30% of the cost of new. One telltale mark of quality is that heavy duty front pipe up to the handlebars. This step-through design is not “for old people”, but a normal result of the battery case being mounted over the rear tire. This makes it difficult for all riders to swing a leg over the top as on a regular bicycle. If you have a cargo basket on top of the battery, that probably can’t be done anyway.

           Now when I say light work, I am not referring to fine cabinetry word. I am a prototyper, not a finishing carpenter. Here’s the example of the new wooden case for the Nikon camera, a video gadget that normally would be thrown out as not worth repairing. This is the sort of project that regularly does not get reported here because it isn’t robotics, instead it is gronk ordinary. But isn’t that how things get discovered? Tell you what, let’s go over this otherwise drab project.
           You’ll see two types of wood on the casing. The front, sides and bottom are ¼” plywood, clamped and glued. The back and top are article board, somewhat flexible, as the buttons are now all recessed. Not that you’ll be impressed, but notice how clear the photo is, because it is the result of one tripod taking a picture of another.
           You can see the steel tripod, now forming the mount for this camera. One side effect is that people do not mind this wooden camera anywhere near as much as a plastic unit pointed in their direction. I intend to mount a lens hood on it for that specific reason. Then label it “infrared camera” or something scientific-sounding.

Note the permanent power cable dangling to the left. That goes to a small box of defunct motorcycle batteries. These hold enough power to operated my old 110VAC converter, which then goes through a transformer back to 3 VDC. Inefficient as hell, but the price is right. This makes the unit as transportable as many low-end television rigs.
When complete, this rig will be carried like a fishing pole, with the power supply and recording equipment in a small suitcase. This is not a handycam, this is modified to be a barely adequate replacement for a ton of more expensive gear.
The smaller holes in the camera casing are for the flash, the rangefinder, and the microphone. This camera does not have a microphone jack. I’m rigging up two test recording devices. One, the wireless lapel mic. Two, the lapel mic directly into the Olympus digital recorder. Both have quality issues, but both produce a more consistent volume than possible from the built-in microphone, although indoors I find that microphone to be of exceptional quality.


NOON
           Here’s one of those, I dunno, call it a mini-Segway. It certainly lacks the intimidation factor of one of the big units coming your way. It seems to be very accurate to control. I had been looking at reports on the “OneWheel” after seeing advertising of the thing going cross-country. This would not be possible with the tiny wheels shown here. Also, they appeared to be of fairly rigid material. That makes it useless off the pavement. Mind you, the kid says the range is several miles. I’d confirm that before buying.

           Another ho-hum project would be the repair of the sticking key on the Yamaha keyboard. No way could I find the problem with a probe, so I dismantled it. Come on, guess what I found? Wedged into the hollow behind the key—and it was middle C, wouldn’t you know—was, tell you what, Try to guess again. Long ago, I had been using a tiny drill bit half-way across the room. The chuck was not tight enough and that eentsy bit flew off the drill and disappeared. Until now. A drill bit, folks, a friggen drill bit!

           The next thing that interested me was steam engine valves. That’s correct, and here is a site with some interesting animations. I did not know the original Newcomen engine had manually operated valves. That’s correct, the operator, no doubt one of the original drop-outs, stood by and flipped the valves at the far end of each stroke. The slow movement and low pressure made the job safe. They say.
           What got me interested in the valve system was reading about flywheels and then remembering my toy steam engine. I didn’t know then, but the system on that toy was a “wobbler”, a type of single throw piston that was brought back to position by the momentum of a flywheel. What I did not know is there was no “compression” stroke. The steam was already compressed and it was a valve that allowed the pressure into the cylinder at the “top” of the piston travel.
This got me thinking it is possible to make such a valve using flat sliding wooden plates. Or, more accurately, using the one technology that I have any experience at when it comes to building anything of the sort.

AFTERNOON & EVENING
           Here is a shelf of light bulbs up at Home Depot. These are not the “new” style of bulbs that remain frightfully expensive and falsely claim to last 28 years. I’ve had two that lasted less than one year. Where, I ask, is the law when people go around saying a $9 light bulb is “saving you money”. The thing to notice about this rack of ordinary filament bulbs is something that Home Depot somehow manages to not notice.

           In each display, all of the 60 watt bulbs are gone. Sold out. Yet the 40s and 75s on either side are barely touched. What part of “duh” is Home Depot not getting? This happens up there time after time, which tells us the people who make decisions over at that outfit are not quite as bright as the missing 60 watt bulbs. Further, these bulbs are placed inconveniently down at floor level while the shoulder-height ledges were packed with the “new” ecology bulbs, in your face. Your bulb is “obsolete”.

           Help me create a term or find out if the term already exists and I don’t know. I conclude the marketplace is overdue for a replacement term for “planned obsolescence”. That term is misunderstood to imply a product breaking or becoming unserviceable shortly after the manufacturer’s deadline for return. Wrong, it is merely the way a product becomes “outdated” in the eyes of the consumer. Like last year’s car. It is probably in fine condition, but it looks and acts out of date.
           The term I seek applies to a more sinister situation. I’m talking about the situation where you must go along with something you know to be wrong (the “new” mercury bulbs are poisonous) just to get your job done. I seek a term or phrase that describes how manufacturers deliberately put junk on the market, calculating that mass sales will cause something shoddy and overpriced to become the standard. The goal is to rope you into purchasing more of their bad product just to keep yourself afloat.
           It isn’t the same as lock-ins or predatory pricing, which are already illegal. It is more of an indirect but still methodical coercion on the consumer to buy something he would likely not otherwise. That is, to use obsolescence like a vulture. Prime example is Hewlett-Packard ink jets, where price-gouging is the rule (see addendum). It is their greedy policy of making ink cartridges that will not fit different models of their own printers—even though they contain the identical product. You are forced to buy a new printer to get cartridges that fit.
           The difference is subtle, but it’s there. They now indirectly force the obsolescence upon you. Where before it was merely planned, now it is out for plunder. You can’t plan around them like before, since they now have paid squadrons of Millennials waiting for you to even try. The strategy seems to be dumping some half-baked technology on teens, who have been indoctrinated by the public education system to believe they are the smartest generation ever, until that slipshod contrivance becomes a standard. Then even those who don’t want it are forced to use it.
           Example, in New York City, it is practically impossible to get a pizza or a taxi without using a smart phone. And you take away pizza and taxi from NYC and whaddaya get? All the excitement and cultural finesse of Washington, DC. The trick is to stay awake long enough to spot it before it swirls down the pipes.

ADDENDUM
           I’m the worst enemy of ink-jet printer companies, and I’ll prove it again. I realize I’ve credited those bastard-rats with too much intelligence. You see, I never questioned their price-gouging on the cartridges, but never wondered where they came up with that plan. Maybe I presumed it was sheer greed. Then, this morning while looking for pencils (I’m a huge consumer of pencils) I found a tray of my old ballpoint pens.
           Stay with me, these pens were around a long time before printers. I found that the ink refills for all the older Bic pens were compatible. But when it came to American-designed (often Japanese-built) pens, there were all kinds of different sizes and shapes of refills. So, HP even copied that. They didn’t have the brain power to come up with that one on their own. I hate those numbskulls. (As I’ve said, they are selling ink at $1 million per barrel. Do the math.)

           Here's a picture post added here later. It should be some irrelevant scene, but it that scene should be a crystal clear closeup. That would be the modified Nikon camera on the new tripod. There, I see it, a Charleston Chew. Who remembers those when they were 5¢. Not me, they were twice that in my day. Chocolate and vanilla, who could ask for anything more? The picture is solely here to test the suitability of the new camera settings.
           Mind you, the bar didn’t even come in the dollar size shown here, but there were a lot fewer fat piggy people back in those days. In fact, no candy back then came in a size this big.

           Anyway, my experiment with the video link last day was successful, some of you may have noticed. I remind all this blog is primarily prose, it is not for the idly entertained. All who read this blog regularly will easily notice you come away with some new knowledge that you can use, which means this blog is inherently worth more than the Liberal media. Got that, Huntington?
           The problem is the upload to youTube is no longer automatic. Nor are the settings, and of course you now need an “account” for both Google and youTube, it didn’t used to be that way, you know. I’ll see if it is possible to tinker with the systems, but I’m not so sure I would be posting many videos here. I do like the idea of going to a real blog rather than one of the countless clone video blogs. Let’s see what I come up with.
           For those who have never tried it, a 4 minute finished video requires about an hour of skilled labor to produce. Even that timing is dependent on a skilled cameraman, good subject material (hard to find), and the slightest special effects or fancy inclusions can easily double all the requirements besides the time, which I stated optimistically.
           The tunnel video had no titles, no fades, it was a single clip, and the sound was definitely native. Don’t expect instant results. Besides, I am still modifying the Nikon camera, including the task of building a new casing, and no, it will not be waterproof. One change will be making the default a video instead of a still. I find it better to take stills out of a video than to snap individual pix on the same camera—but only when that still is intended for use in a video. Mind you, I’ve gotten some damn good quality shots that way.


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