Frost Free Flowers

The saga of my lantana continues. I've been trying to get some lantana established in my front yard now for quite a while, but I keep getting stymied by the occasional overnight frost in the winter causing them to die back. I'm pretty sure that once they manage to get a few good years in, they'll be vigorous enough to outgrow the damage, but it's a bit of an uphill battle to get there.

The photo below shows kind of 3 phases of this issue. In the back is a relatively new specimen that hasn't seen any frost damage yet, in the middle is one that got kind of minced last winter, and in front is a tiny little puffball that died back, didn't totally exit this mortal plane, and is now a very compact plant that's slowly getting back into actually growing.

Now I'd previously tried shielding these from the cold by using cardboard boxes, and this had somewhat limited success. I'm sure it saved the plants from some frost damage, but it was a huge pain to deal with the cardboard, and the cardboard itself would eventually get soggy after sitting out on cold, humid nights and eventually fall apart. It turns out, however, that you can get this nonwoven fabric to spread out over the plants, and it's supposed to at least be designed for purpose.

I don't know if that'll translate into actually working well, but I guess we'll see. I just spread it out here to test to see if it would fit and the answer is "yes, just barely." I probably could have gone one size up. When I put this out for real I'll be weighing down the edges with some boards or rocks or something to keep it from blowing away; there isn't really any wind overnight here (usually, especially not when there's a frost), but I'm sure I'll occasionally forget to pull it in first thing in the morn.

Minute Hour

The Moog Taurus was a foot pedal operated bass synthesizer used by a number of top billing acts in the 70s and 80s, perhaps most notably by Geddy Lee of Rush. More recently, Moog revised the concept into a desktop module called the Minitaur, driven by midi inputs rather than being integrated into a hulking beast of a foot pedal board.

As you might imagine, given this context, I happened to find myself in the possession of a Minitaur, and unsurprisingly the one I picked up was sold for the low, low price of "for parts or repair."

Well I'm certainly not going to use it for parts, so let's repair it.

This repair adventure had a bit of a twist in it; I had initially thought only one component had got cooked, but soon realized that there was going to be more to it than just that. But it was nothing I couldn't handle.

This is the first piece of actual Moog-branded equipment that I've added to my pile. I picked up (and restored) the MG-1 synthesizer a while back, but it was badged as a Radio Shack Realistic unit despite being manufactured by Moog. So it's kind of nice having something with the actual Moog logo on it.

Crystaler Clearer

So I was still feeling a bit annoyed at the cloudiness of my cold brew coffee maker. It just looks so milky and sad when it comes out of the dishwasher.

So I decided to have a closer look under the microscope at the haziness to see if I could figure out what it might actually be.

Hmm, well, it definitely looks like it's on the surface. I wonder what would happen if I poked at it with a blunt pick?

Oh, yeah, ok that's definitely on the surface.

Now I'd tried polishing this off before with little success, but I decided to give it another go, and really put some effort into it this time. I also went in with a guitar pick (much larger and safer to use than the metal pick I was using under the microscope) to scrape off the thickest build-up, and this is the result.

It's perhaps not quite back to brand new, but it's definitely a huge improvement.

Scoping It Out

I've had a Siglent 1104X-E for a while. It's a pretty nice budget 4-channel scope, all things considered. It's great for quickly checking a waveform, figuring out its frequency, and even doing a little bit of logic decoding. However, I have a project coming up where I'd like to do quite a lot of automated measurements for validating something, and doing that manually by capturing a waveform on the screen, moving cursors around, calculating offsets between pulses, etc is just not going to  happen.

Luckily this scope comes with a USB and ethernet connection straight out of the box. Except cables are for peasants so let's give this thing wifi instead.

This $10 TP-Link adapter, which is apparently the spanish version, a fact I did not notice while purchasing, is identical to Siglent's $50 adapter, just with 40 less dollars on the price tag. However, you do need to ensure that you get one of the V2 or V3 models, not the V4, because of course they changed the chipset without changing the part number because why wouldn't they?

Anyway, with the correct version obtained, it just plugs right into the USB A port on the back of the unit.

And then it just auto-detects as soon as it boots up. From there it needs a little bit of fiddling and faffing to connect it to the network (picking the right SSID, entering the PSK, the usual stuff) and then it's good to go.

And hey, there it is.

And it shows an input signal just fine over the connection.

And you can even expand the UX to show all the controls.

But most importantly you can also access the instrument via SCPI to automatically capture and offload raw data from the scope. That means I can do my automated data collection and analysis with just a simple python script. Sweet.

Crystal Clear

I've had this cold brew coffee maker for a while now, and it's starting to get a bit of a white haze on the clear plastic.

I asked the clanker what to do about this, and it suggested that it's probably due to the oils in the coffee binding with the plastic. It suggested that a mix of peroxide and borax would clean it out, and that seemed plausible enough, so let's try that.

In goes the borax.

And the rest of my peroxide, because apparently I was running low. I'll set it upside-down in the sink to steep away for a while, since most of the haze is at the top of the clear plastic.

Well, it's clearly doing something.

But did it work?

Nope, not even a little bit. We did science, and received the null result.

However, I did notice that the mixture managed to completely delete the aroma of coffee that had become a permanent fixture of the maker, and so I tested out if that was a fluke by pouring it off into my coffee mug and letting it simmer in there for a few hours, and it eliminated the leftover coffee smell from it too.

Neat.

Compact Synthesizer

Back in the late 1970s, 1977 to be specfic, Yamaha came out with a line of synthesizers grouped together under the moniker "CS" for "Compact Synthesizer". They were certainly compact compared to previous models like the GX-1 which weighed 600kg, but they were still solid, mighty beasts in their own right.

This line started out with the CS-50, CS-60 and legendary CS-80 polyphonic synths, along with the CS-10 and CS-30/CS-30L monophonic synths. This was followed by the stripped down, budget friendly CS-5 and CS-15, then the slightly more computerized CS-15D, CS-20M and CS-40M, all of which were monosynths (with some asterisks) and finally the CS-70M polysynth that effectively ended the series before the DX7 took over.

Of all of these, the CS-40M had piqued my interest the most, as it was natively a duophonic synthesizer, meaning that it had most of the characteristics of a monosynth, but could play two notes at once instead of just one. While some duophonic synths (or duophonic-capable synths like the CS-15) achieved this duophony by splitting a normal two oscillator synth architecture and feeding a different pitch control voltage into each, the CS-40M was more like two fully featured dual-oscillator monosynths glued together. This makes is almost entirely unique in the synthesizer landscape, and few (if any) synths have been made like this since then.

Anyway, as it happens I was browsing around the Japanese auction sites looking to see if a cheap CS-40M might pop up, when I noticed that someone had posted a CS-30 on a 1¥-starting-bid listing. It caught my eye as it looked quite clean, and you never know how these auctions will go, so I bookmarked it and went about my day.

Well, I'm sure you can guess at what happened next.

As claimed in the auction, this synth is in delightful condition, barely showing any signs of its near 50 years of age. It even came with this cool original road case.

And the road case even came with this cool original CS-30.

Oops.

So yeah, what actually happened was that two different sellers listed nearly identical CS-30 auctions, both with 1¥ starting bids, with one of them just so happening to include a road case. I kind of wanted to pick up one of them, but with the conditions being so similar I didn't want to just bid on one, get outbid at the last minute, and not have a chance to bid on the other one, since they were coincidentally ending within 20 minutes of each other (and too early in the morning for me to wake up for it).

The plan I devised was a simple one: I'd just put in an optimistically low bid on both, and then see what happened. Ideally someone would swoop in and buy one and then there just wouldn't be enough interest in these old synths to support two sales at once, so I'd get the other one for a bargain price. But I fully expected to get outbid on both and then continue my search for a CS-40M.

Well, it turns out that I guess I have a bit more optimism than Japanese synth hunters, and yeah, I ended up with both.

Luckily even with the shipping cost (They're 33lb each not including the road case. Le ouch) these still came out way cheaper than what I would have paid to pick one up domestically, so I'm quite happy with how things turned out.

That said, these are Japanese units, so they're wired for 100v. Let's have a quick look inside to see if we can do something about that.

These old Yamahas are really a work of art.

And yup, there's the yellow 100v tap and the brown 120v tap, just like it shows in the service manual.

So nothing to it but to do it!

I actually have some more plans for things to do inside this beast... or, well, these beasts. But that's an adventure for a future post.

I'm Ready For My Closeup

One thing you might not consider in every day life is the fact that cameras have a limited focus range. Generally on the far end they'll focus out to infinity (which is to say, parallel light rays will end up focused to a point, at least within the basic limitations of the optics), but on the near end they can often be quite limited when you really want to get in close to something.

Now if you have something like an iPhone you might just be stuck with whatever optical system it came with, or maybe you might try a stick-on adapter lens or something. But when we venture back to the olden days of standalone cameras, we start to get some real options.

Like, for example, close-up adapters.

If I were to try to take a picture of the label on this box with just the regular 14-42 zoom lens on this camera, I'd get something like this.

Yes, I took a close-up picture, but it's obviously violently out of focus, so not particularly useful. But if I add one of the close-up adapters, things start to look much more clear.

This is using the +10 diopter adapter, which, if no other lenses are involved, will focus at 1/10th of a meter. The lens on my camera claims it'll focus at 1/5th of a meter, so +5, and adding the two together gives us a new minimum focus of 1/15th of a meter. So that means going down from 20cm to 6.66cm.

Things are a bit less dramatic with the other adapters, which yield a combined minimum distance of 1/6, 1/7, and 1/9 meters (16.6cm, 14cm, 11.1cm respectively). But the bonus with them is that the maximum focal distance is much less compromised, because remember that the main lens only goes out to infinity, or 0 diopters, so the maximum focal distance is 1m, 50cm, 25cm and 10cm with the adapters. That means that if I only had the +10 diopter, I'd end up with a gap between 20cm and 10cm where I wouldn't be able to focus at all, but the +4 bridges that gap, and the other two give different options of focus lengths depending on the situation I'm in. For example, if I were taking photos of flowers I might want the +1 or +2 to be able to take some close up pics and some wide pics.

Anyway, the kit comes with a nifty carrying case and some lens wipes, so that's cool.

And the lenses themselves apparently have an antireflective optical coating, which is definitely helpful for reducing lens flares.

As a practical demonstration, let's try taking a picture of a PCB out of a Yamaha Reface DX. Because I happen to have one of those handy. Here's as close as I can get with just the regular lens.

Like sure, you can see stuff, and if you crop in you can get some pretty good detail, but you can't really make out what all the surface mount components are.

Adding the +1 adapter gets us a bit closer.

It's in no way a dramatic difference, but still gets things a bit closer.

Moving to the +2, things are starting to get closer still.

This is starting to look like a proper close-up photo.

And naturally, +4 brings things even closer.

And then +10, the closest of all.

With the obvious downside being that at this level of zoom the depth of focus is really quite tight. I actually had to take this picture 4 times to get the focal plane just right, as moving the camera even a few mm back and forth would shift the focus quite dramatically.

Oh yeah, speaking of the camera, I picked up a Lumix GF5.

It's entirely in Japanese, because they lock down the language packs to discourage cross-market shopping. So I guess that year of Japanese language study at university finally paid off. I actually picked this up a few months ago, but I couldn't figure out a good context to introduce it. So, here it is. It's pretty fun and delightfully tiny.