Well, Donovan, the real problem was that my hollow point
did get dipped...
Given that the great recession was in large part caused by stupid investments enabled by easy money, and then papered over with yet more, which led to the current fragility in the economy...not that this blow is a minor one..sure, more of the same is what we need, right? We just get a bigger truck! Of course those who have been privatizing the profits and socializing the losses are demanding we recognize that without their financialization, we'll have short term pain, perhaps to distract from their role in incentivising the causes of long term pain? Sadly, I do have to pay a little attention to the world of finance to keep food on the table and this whole setup financed (good so far, but looking at the mess is icky). At least this time all the central banks are in it together, so we all get to Weimar or Zimbabwe as a group. That makes it better, right? And where's my check?
So, sometimes all you can do is laugh.
I think we just had the last freeze, and it'll be much more reasonable to heat up the shop and get back on "fusor2" which is really "ion trap for characterization of smearing and polarizing effects as we go from a few charged particles of all one polarity to more of a denser plasma" to see what we can see there. Maybe it leads somewhere, but so far, this is the only thing that has come to mind as having not been really investigated - it's kind of like the turbulence issue in hydrodynamics in that sense, there are only gross characterizations of it, not predictions of "whorl here, of x intensity".
Meanwhile, I have a winter project (or few) that have gone long, one of which is setting up an induction heater using one of those cheap Chinese FET oscillators, and some less-cheap accessories, like the 48v 20 amp supply, water cooling, various instrumentation and control stuff, fixtures....I think it'll be more than just a way to anneal rifle brass, some of that graphite rod I have would make real nice crucibles if bored out. And this will work in vacuum.
Funny, in my youth, just learning how to tweak and design 5 tube wonder "All American special" superhet AM radios, the idea of taking 120v 60 CPS (there was no hertz unit then), voltage doubling it to ~300vdc, using a variable duty cycle switch to create 40 or so kc signal at major power to push through a ferrite transformer, then re rectify it, filter it, use it in a loop to control the switching, then use the final DC to run a Royer oscillator to drive a crazy high C, low L tuned circuit at round 100kc to heat stuff up...
Would have made me ask "can I have some of what you're smoking? What color is the sky on your planet" or something similar, and I was already at the point of reflecting on the changes witnessed by my paternal grandma, born at the end of the civil war...
Predicting is hard, especially about the future...(YogiB)
And some things so boring I haven't been posting about them. My homestead data aq and control systems have been getting upgraded for reliability and maintainability, some have actually failed and been replaced. There were a bunch of raspberry pies, some with arduino help, running and reporting on this and that. That number is being reduced dramatically to one per active building, with ancillary ESP8266's, which requires writing a lot of code and a bit of re-architecting. Instead of each pi having its own database server, it's all getting pushed into one, which gets totally backed up to a NAS nightly (I'm using Odroid HC2's with 4 tb drives, running Linux, it's a very nice thing, and doing staged backups of my now-huge shares and each other on them - one runs the DB server for the fusor stuff, it's super fast and capable), and which will eventually also serve all the plot and controls pages (while it also streams jazz off the network and a few other things - and at that, it's loafing).
I guess I felt that the stuff was kind of boring, and better written up once done rather than scatter shooting it all as various lessons were learned in the process. Some of it is just thrashing to get a replacement up before tearing down the original, for example, the battery box machine now in use. There's now an ESP8266 in the box too, reporting to the main database, and as yet, no plotting from that set of sensors...and of course, rather than just diddling the existing code, it occurs to me to make the reporting software a lot more flexible to only show the plots I need now rather than a ton of windows of them...like I said, kind of boring until it's at the stage of being able to show it off.
Right now it takes a whole another multipane browser instance to show this stuff. See pic. And the data isn't as complete as I'd like. For example the battery plots only show net current. You'd have to know I plugged in my Volt to charge it, and that those other down spikes are my morning cup...nothing shows how much insolation (that's going to be that bottom window...) and so on.
- Just now.
Keepin on keeping on.
