One year ago today: April 5, 2017, a cannonball.
Five years ago today: April 5, 2013, but it ain’t bass-playing.
Nine years ago today: April 5, 2009, view from Cape Fear.
Random years ago today: April 5, 2011, you don’t own the card . . .
Why look at the reflection of that excellent car in the window of the donut shop this morning? Okay, you can stop staring now. The gig for Sunday is confirmed so I’m taking the day off. Starting with coffee. I’ve started a new book, this one a novel about some guy who wins a lotto ride on a space ship. Called “Orbit”, the first chapter involves his wife leaving him over this. That, and he apparently didn’t take the job her father offered him with the oil company.
We have two new visitors. Tiny birds, smaller than the wrens. They have dark blue feathers and don’t sit on the tree branches, rather cling on to the bark. They can also run along the bark. All this while the front room is full of sawdust and planks so I can’t find my Concise. I have never seen this bird before, so I hope to get some video. The closest thing I can find is a bird called a red-eyed vireo, except this pair did not sing, were smaller than listed (though they may be juveniles), and apparently these vireos are extremely rare.
The scooter is ready. Now to find when we can drive the truck over to get it. My concern is that all this chasing around this week has brought my house-fixing to a standstill. I took measurements on the sub panel and sure enough, no matter how I run the cable, it cannot be done with a single 25 foot roll. I’ll need a second roll, which can be 15 foot, but is practically the same price. Even if I run it diagonally, the hypotenuse is still a foot too far away to the only convenient place to mount the sub panel. And diagonal wires may not be up to code.
While sketching this, I had what I thought was going to be a great Steve Martin comedy playing in the background. “Cheaper By The Dozen”. Instead, I found a lot of the scenes disturbingly unrealistic. I’m well past the age where such things make any difference, but I guess I don’t find families that have more kids than they can handle to be any joking matter. I see the humor in the plot, it was a fun movie. But anyone who thinks big families are neat should talk to somebody who was raised in one. Of all my childhood friends, only one ever got married and that was to a woman who could not have children. When I read that the white race is doomed, I believe it Conspiracy theory says there is an evil hand at the throttle that has intentionally made it too expensive and difficult to raise white children.
Ah, what the hell. Once my band is out there playing, sooner or later I’ll meet the one. I really feel that the reason I have not met a keeper in all these Florida years is because I was not in the right kind of band. The Hippie had a reasonable, if stale, song list, but the only gigs he booked steadily were his solos. The big band hardly played ever, and even then they cheaped out, charging like $150 for a five piece. I’ll confess any time that I have no mechanism for meeting women except music, I’ve never had women I met any other way last more than a few months. Darn rights I have an ulterior motive to get this band out and playing. I love being able to pick and choose.
The Ehang 184.
(about $300,000)
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I’ve got another tune pending, a chick song. Brandy Clark and “Stripes”. I’ve heard it on Bushnell radio and a time or two at Karaoke. I was surprised to learn she wrote the song “Mama’s Broken Heart” for Miranda Lambert, but when I pira . . . er, I mean read the lyrics, I can see it. I couldn’t borrow the music for educational purposes because of the library computers, but we’ll have it by tomorrow. It’s a catchy theme, this gal won’t shoot her cheating boyfriend because she doesn’t look good in prison fashions. It is rough on the bass guy to have to keep running over and over the same tunes, that is not the way it is supposed to go. But the pavilion called to confirm a second time, we are there on Sunday.
Once more, I’ll carry the show because this week, my guitar player balked at singing once more. I’m not that great and I need some help and, well frankly, I’m even propping up the guitar playing a lot of the time. Now don’t get me wrong, this is a go project unless I get a call from Marissa or Taylor saying they’ve come to their senses and realize surrounding themselves with the pretty boys is not the answer, and it’s time they teamed up with a real bass player. In other words, this band is a go. Did I mention, lousy as we were last time, the guitar players are already coming out of the woodwork?
For relaxation, I tore apart the old printers for the motors and discovered one of them was a scanner. One of those slowpoke Lexmarks, so I had it apart in fifteen minutes. Scanner means it had only the one stepper motor, but two driver motors. And that’s our research for today. I’ve read about these motors using a feedback timing system. There’s nothing like seeing the actual parts, and here it is for you. I’ll explain what’s going on.
Inside the roller compartment, one of the wheels has a disk like the one I’m holding. It looks like it is shaded around the rim. Place it on the Barska, shown in the next photo, I’m pointing at the relevant section with a pink pencil. Under 10x magnification, it doesn’t take much, the grey shading is revealed to be a series of timing marks, visible on the microscope LCD. The last photo is just a higher resolution of the timing marks, so you can see how crisp they are.
There is a sensor with a laser that shines through these gradient marks and measures speed and distance as the paper roller turns. It can feed back to the motor speed control very precise positioning information. It counts the number of marks, I believe each mark is 1.5° which is plenty accurate for most printing. Many printers also have a second similar system to position the print head, but it is a strip along the width of the paper tray. I can’t wait to get my work desk set up again. Without it, I spent an hour setting up and taking down the gear to get you these few pictures.
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