Honsetail

Horsetail is a peculiar plant. It's a reed-like herbaceous plant with hollow, segmented stems that many people confuse for a type of bamboo, and has the peculiar property of propagating via spores rather than seeds. It also has a running habit, sending out lateral roots that can sprout new plants many meters away from where it's growing, and these roots can regenerate even if sliced up into relatively small pieces.

All this makes for a rather obnoxious garden plant, despite its otherwise pleasant appearance.

And so this horsetail in front of my house needs to go.

Preferably before it takes over my entire yard.

You might think, given the above description, that this would be a difficult task. And it might be, if I were not armed with the gardener's secret weapon: a very sharp hoe.

Luckily I am indeed armed with a very sharp hoe, which made quick work of it.

Now I'm quite sure that this plant will try to come back as it's nearly impossible for me to remove every last bit of its roots. But the good news is that my hoe isn't going anywhere and I won't hesitate to use it to keep it knocked down.

With any luck it should be dead and gone by next spring at the latest, at which point the current plan is to plant some lemon thyme here, which should pair nicely with the rosemary bushes just on the other side of the hose reel.

Them's The Brakes

As I alluded to in an earlier post, Orthrus, my R65, needed a little work. I hadn't ridden it in a little while, but after changing the oil in all my bikes earlier this year I decided it was time to take it for a spin, so on a day where I was needed in the office I saddled up and started riding.

... only to realize that one of the brake calipers was frozen, and was in the process of locking up. Not good.

I managed to get it home and park it safely and then ride in to work on another motorcycle, but it was clear that there was some work to do.

Work which I documented in video form.

I was quite happy with the completed job, but there was one final task that I needed to clean up afterwards, which was fixing how the new, thinner brake lines fit through the grommets on either side of the lower triple clamp.

Without the brake hose solidly filling the grommet, the grommet itself wasn't really securely held in the clip, and so it could fairly easily fall out when the brake line moved due to the suspension compressing and extending.

The new brake line was approximately 1/4 OD, and the grommet (and old brake lines) were 3/8 ID. Luckily you can buy silicone tubing (which is UV stable) for really cheap, and 1/4 ID 3/8 OD is a common size.

I can't just slip it over the fittings and onto the brake lines, though. It's not nearly stretchy enough to do that, so I cut off a length and split it open so I could feed it on.

And now the grommet holds the brake line much more securely and, as a bonus, the brake line is protected from chafing against the lower triple clamp.

And it's a simple matter to repeat the process on the other side.

While I was working on the bike, I also wanted to see about fixing the turn signal indicators. The left indicator was working fine, but the right indicator had been giving me some trouble.

Unfortunately, I managed to order the wrong replacement bulbs.

It's not a big deal, though, as the replacement bulbs were cheap enough that I could just ignore the cost. It was also not a big deal because it turned out that the bulb wasn't burned out at all, it just had a little corrosion on the contacts and worked fine after cleaning it up a little.

So all's well that ends well.

Keeb On Truckin'

As I may have mentioned in passing, I recently picked up some mechanical keyboards to improve my typing life. One of those was a NuPhy Air75 v2, which I had been using as my daily driver for my work laptop.

I'd been using it via a bluetooth connection in order to keep the cable clutter down, and after a couple days of this it eventually ran down the battery far enough to power itself off.

So naturally I plugged it back in to charge it back up, and I observed the light on the right hand side blinking yellow to indicate it was charging. I left it plugged in for a few hours to hopefully get a full charge, then pulled the cord out.

And the keyboard immediately powered off.

I tried charging it a couple more times, in different modes (there's a switch on the back that lets you pick between BT, wired, and completely off) and nothing seemed to be able to squirt any charge into the battery. I even tried with multiple different USB ports, but no dice.

So I fired off an email to NuPhy support and, in the meantime, decided to pop open the keyboard to see if I could diagnose things on my own.

This process did not take long.

The battery, which is stuck down to the bottom tray of the keyboard, connects to the main PCB by way of a 3 pin Molex PicoBlade connector. On the left is the positive terminal, on the right is the negative, and in the middle is the NTC thermistor that's used to monitor battery temperature.

Or at least, that NTC wire is supposed to be in the middle.

But it clearly has other ideas about where it should be.

Without the thermistor connection, the charging circuit on the board won't be able to tell what temperature the battery is, and thus it won't initiate a charge cycle. This perfectly matches the symptoms I saw: the battery worked fine to supply power, but once it was drained it wouldn't accept a charge.

I sent another email to NuPhy support with this diagnosis, and they got back to me asking for a copy of the purchase invoice which I provided, and then they told me that they'd send out a replacement barebones keyboard, and I'd just have to swap the key switches and key caps over to it.

So, problem solved. Sort of. Now I had a new problem: figuring out what to do with this completely worthless pile of e-waste garbage that used to be a functional keyboard.

Well, if you know me, you probably know what's coming next. I'm going to do engineering to it.

So, to fix this connector, we first need to depin the center contact from the connector housing. The metal of the crimp had hardened enough during crimping to make uncrimping it pretty unlikely, but I could at least fit the end of the wire into the larger jacket crimp.

My poor iPhone doesn't take amazing quality shots at this zoom level, so let's get a closer look.

With a dab of flux and a little kiss from my soldering iron, the conductors are secured to the pin, both physically and electrically.

Never mind that little melted whoopsie on the edge of the case.

And again, microscope for clarity.

Just in case you're wondering how big this connector is, here's my fingertip for scale.

Back into the connector it goes.

And if we plug it in and check the voltage we see...

It is indeed charging! Success!

The keyboard snaps together pretty easily, and is secured by 8 screws.

And then it's back in business.

Of course, that does leave the question of what to do with the new "replacement" keyboard when it arrives. What to do, what to do indeed?

Once Upon a Cube

I did a little work on Orthrus recently (more on that later) and decided to do a shakedown run up to the cube atop Mt Um.

I'm happy to report that it survived the ride up.

And even happier to report that it survived the ride back down.

Roses are red, at least when they're new

After a pretty bold bloom earlier in the spring, the blossoms on my rose bush were starting to look a bit second hand, especially with the recent heat wave.

So it was time to haul out the tarp and pruning shears and get to dead heading. There were a few groups of new buds showing up already including some that had opened, so the timing was just about perfect to clean things up.

The result looks a bit less rosy, at least for now, but certainly much, much cleaner.

Now I just need to wait for the next wave of blooms.

Sticky Ears

For a little while now, my trusty Sennheiser headphones have been slowly descending down the tragic path of sticky-plastic-syndrome. They originally came equipped with that velvety soft-touch plastic, and as we all know, that material has an expiry date.

But on top of that, the vinyl of the ear cups has also been slowly coming apart more recently, shedding flakes of black plastic onto my ears and shoulders.

I had been willing to ignore these failings for a while, but most recently another, more serious, failure cropped up. The headphones would no longer charge when plugged in.

These issues are, of course, fixable individually. But, there's also a method with which they can be fixed all together at once.

Sennheiser for whatever reason doesn't make this style of headphone anymore, so I went with Sony instead.

These are the WH-CH720N, which is a product name that could have probably gone through a few more brainstorming sessions.

But names aside, they're lightweight, comfortable, sound alright, and aren't obscenely expensive. They also have USB C charging, which should be a bit more durable than the USB Micro-B port on the Sennheisers.

And they don't look half bad, either.

Of course while I was packing the old headphones back up to stick in the e-waste drawer that everyone has but nobody acknowledges the existence of, I noticed that apparently a little bit of ear-related humidity had built up inside of the headphone case over the years.

I have to admit: I didn't know a USB cable could rust like that. (For the record, this isn't the cable I was using to try to charge the headphones)

The Age of Enlightenment

A while back I bought a little battery powered work light from the House of Bezos. It wasn't half bad, but at the same time wasn't really half good either. One of the problems is that it just didn't last all that long on a charge; and while I'm sure the efficiency of the LED driver circuitry probably left a little to be desired, the big problem was that there was just a lot of empty space inside the chassis that wasn't filled with batteries, since it was only equipped with a 1S2P pack from the factory.

But fortunately for us, larger battery packs are not entirely all that expensive.

While I could have fit a 1S6P battery pack into the case, it would have been a bit of a squeeze and, to be quite honest, it's pretty hard to find them prebuilt in a 2x3 arrangement, and it's a bit of a pain to have to buy a spot welder to weld one together myself. So I settled for 1S4P instead, which cost me all of $10 or so from AliExpress.

Now I was fully expecting this pack to be composed of one real cell and 3 wooden slugs, but the weight of the pack almost exactly matches what I would expect from 4 real cells, comparing it with the old pack (which I had deskinned somewhere along the way while I was experimenting with some stuff). So chances are there's actually 4 real 18650 cells in there. They're probably still of questionable quality, but whatever, it's just a work light.

Anyway, the new battery pack has a nice JST connector on its leads, so I grabbed a pack of JST pigtails to plug it into, as the original battery pack was just soldered directly to the board.

And of course it's backwards. Well, luckily it's not that hard to depin the connector and reverse it to match up properly.

Putting the new pack on the bench supply showed it charging up with a reasonable curve, so everything was looking pretty good.

So now we just have to put everything back together again, starting with soldering the JST pigtail to the board.

And it looks like I managed to solder it correctly, so that's good.

Then we secure the battery inside the case. A little hot snot will do the job just fine.

You can see here how there would technically be room to squeeze another row of cells in there. But it might get a little crowded and I would potentially have to extend some of the leads a little bit.

And finally, we bolt everything back together.

Let's hope this battery pack works better than the last one.