Projects!
It's been an interesting time lately.
Last weekend I went up North to see everyone and to find a cheaper solution to Mandy's "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (she doesn't get enough light and is therefore depressed in the winter). Light boxes are on the market to help alleviate SAD, but they are on the order of $200 a piece. All they do is emit full spectrum light to trick your body into producing more seratonin. I know that full spectrum flourecent lights are on the market as well. So I grabbed Mandy and we went shopping at home depot. We got a pair of 32 watt T8 flourecent tubes and a fixture to put them in as well as some big assed 3M sticky wall hangers. Total was under $50 and most of that was because the cheaper fixtures looked like they belonged in a garage, not a bedroom.
We got back to Potsdam and I unboxed the fixture to find out that it didn't have a plug on it. A quick trip to Kinney's got us an extension cord that I could cut off the end and wirenut onto the fixture's terminals. Unfortunately I forgot which color wire and which prong was hot on household wiring. A stop off at a sparkie's riverside got me the color but not the prong. They had an old industrial power strip there but no multimeter to test for continuity. I managed to test with a 9 volt battery and an LED (they were amazed). For future reference, the black wire and the smaller prong are hot.
Went back to Mandy's and stripped off the end of the extension cord and wired it up. Did a quick test to make sure everything was ok, then a prolonged test to check for overheating. All was good.
I put the fixture all back together again with some string coming out of the hook points in the back and strung it up on her wall on the 3M wall hangers. So now it was over her window facing into the room instead of down. I put it on a timer and replaced 2 of her dull incandecants with bright "daylight" CFL bulbs too.
We flicked them all on and her housemate across the hall started hissing. Apparently Vampires don't like light. If that doesn't fix her SAD I don't think anything will.
Project 2 was churning out the first few parts on out new CNC lathe at work. The code is a bit of a hassle to figure out, but I'm learning it faster then I did for the mill. Joe and I have butt heads a few times already over the lathe. Apparently he says that I shouldn't try to "invent" a new type of threading to prevent our tooling from chipping because the old way is good enough. But the next morning he comes up with a new way to cut the threads that's even more convoluted then mine.
Project 3 was fixing Nicky's LCD monitor. It would turn on alright but would shut off after 10 seconds. I tore it completely apart and found that one of the 2 backlights wasn't working. Flipped the lights and the other wasn't working. So both lights were good but one of the ports wasn't. Looked through everything and finally found a bad solder joint on a toroid inductor on the back of the power board running the top backlight. Reflowed the solder on that joint and both started working fine and past the 10 second mark. I figure that the main board wasn't receiving any feedback from the top light and assumed it was a fire hazard and shut it off after the first 10 seconds.
Project 4 was a quick fix and will be ongoing for a little while. Red asked me to see what I could do about extending the range of her *cough* remote. I found the antenna coil on the PCB and soldered on a little 4 inch piece of enameled copper wire I had sitting on my desk. The range has gone from 2 feet to at least 20. What I need now is a frequency counter to figure out how long I need to cut the wire to make a 1/4 wave antenna. The next step is to get a DC/DC converter so I can yank that crappy 12 volt battery and replace it with a AAA and still get my 5 volts, and run the thing off of a microcontroller to see if I can get it to do anything more then on or off.
I've also applied for a position with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Apparently they need a broadly skilled mechanical engineer to work with their Alvin group. The best part is that the position also sets me up for training to become an Alvin pilot. I could definitely live with being on a boat for 4 months around high tech nautical equipment in 80 degree waters and working around Alvin (for those of you who don't know, Alvin is the red topped deep submersible that landed on the Titanic in 1986), and then get 2 months of vacation afterwards. I applied last Sunday night and haven't heard back aside from the HR department telling me that my application has gone to the hiring manager of the Alvin group. This above all other things has got me excited all week.
And for one final note. Redbull now makes a 16.9oz can. That's half a liter of redbull in one sitting. I feel wired and can now type like a madman, but I've only got a heart rate of 68. I think my cardiovascular system is immune to caffeen.
Last weekend I went up North to see everyone and to find a cheaper solution to Mandy's "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (she doesn't get enough light and is therefore depressed in the winter). Light boxes are on the market to help alleviate SAD, but they are on the order of $200 a piece. All they do is emit full spectrum light to trick your body into producing more seratonin. I know that full spectrum flourecent lights are on the market as well. So I grabbed Mandy and we went shopping at home depot. We got a pair of 32 watt T8 flourecent tubes and a fixture to put them in as well as some big assed 3M sticky wall hangers. Total was under $50 and most of that was because the cheaper fixtures looked like they belonged in a garage, not a bedroom.
We got back to Potsdam and I unboxed the fixture to find out that it didn't have a plug on it. A quick trip to Kinney's got us an extension cord that I could cut off the end and wirenut onto the fixture's terminals. Unfortunately I forgot which color wire and which prong was hot on household wiring. A stop off at a sparkie's riverside got me the color but not the prong. They had an old industrial power strip there but no multimeter to test for continuity. I managed to test with a 9 volt battery and an LED (they were amazed). For future reference, the black wire and the smaller prong are hot.
Went back to Mandy's and stripped off the end of the extension cord and wired it up. Did a quick test to make sure everything was ok, then a prolonged test to check for overheating. All was good.
I put the fixture all back together again with some string coming out of the hook points in the back and strung it up on her wall on the 3M wall hangers. So now it was over her window facing into the room instead of down. I put it on a timer and replaced 2 of her dull incandecants with bright "daylight" CFL bulbs too.
We flicked them all on and her housemate across the hall started hissing. Apparently Vampires don't like light. If that doesn't fix her SAD I don't think anything will.
Project 2 was churning out the first few parts on out new CNC lathe at work. The code is a bit of a hassle to figure out, but I'm learning it faster then I did for the mill. Joe and I have butt heads a few times already over the lathe. Apparently he says that I shouldn't try to "invent" a new type of threading to prevent our tooling from chipping because the old way is good enough. But the next morning he comes up with a new way to cut the threads that's even more convoluted then mine.
Project 3 was fixing Nicky's LCD monitor. It would turn on alright but would shut off after 10 seconds. I tore it completely apart and found that one of the 2 backlights wasn't working. Flipped the lights and the other wasn't working. So both lights were good but one of the ports wasn't. Looked through everything and finally found a bad solder joint on a toroid inductor on the back of the power board running the top backlight. Reflowed the solder on that joint and both started working fine and past the 10 second mark. I figure that the main board wasn't receiving any feedback from the top light and assumed it was a fire hazard and shut it off after the first 10 seconds.
Project 4 was a quick fix and will be ongoing for a little while. Red asked me to see what I could do about extending the range of her *cough* remote. I found the antenna coil on the PCB and soldered on a little 4 inch piece of enameled copper wire I had sitting on my desk. The range has gone from 2 feet to at least 20. What I need now is a frequency counter to figure out how long I need to cut the wire to make a 1/4 wave antenna. The next step is to get a DC/DC converter so I can yank that crappy 12 volt battery and replace it with a AAA and still get my 5 volts, and run the thing off of a microcontroller to see if I can get it to do anything more then on or off.
I've also applied for a position with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Apparently they need a broadly skilled mechanical engineer to work with their Alvin group. The best part is that the position also sets me up for training to become an Alvin pilot. I could definitely live with being on a boat for 4 months around high tech nautical equipment in 80 degree waters and working around Alvin (for those of you who don't know, Alvin is the red topped deep submersible that landed on the Titanic in 1986), and then get 2 months of vacation afterwards. I applied last Sunday night and haven't heard back aside from the HR department telling me that my application has gone to the hiring manager of the Alvin group. This above all other things has got me excited all week.
And for one final note. Redbull now makes a 16.9oz can. That's half a liter of redbull in one sitting. I feel wired and can now type like a madman, but I've only got a heart rate of 68. I think my cardiovascular system is immune to caffeen.