I got pulled over by highway patrol a while back while driving our little neighborhood electric vehicle. The cop was bitching about needing to have a license plate and registration. I told him it's cool this is a EV no need to register. He didn't agree and we went back and forth on it until he threw his arms up in the air and stomped back to his car. I didn't get a ticket. He couldn't give me one since I was on a side street (not a highway). Anyway I didn't drive the vehicle or charge it for two months and three of the batteries were shot. I swapped the dead flooded lead acids and switched over to some small gels I've been collecting. I'm slowly converting the vehicle to all gel batteries so it will be lighter weight and easier to maintain. My distance will be limited even further, but this town is so small that I cannot go over 2 miles in any direction anyway.
I've read that harvesting chamomile flowers in the morning is the best time of day to do it. I've been doing so every other day and storing just the flowers (no stems) in a paper bag to dry. I made tea with the fresh flowers which is unbelievably delicious with honey and relaxing.
The mesquite trees have flowered much earlier this year than last. My guess is that we will be harvesting pods by mid-June for flour and molasses.
Just racked our second pinot noir wine kit over to it's glass carboy. It still has three more weeks to go before we bottle it. When this kit is done that will be #10 for us. That means we have bottled (and drank with friends) over 300 bottles of wine in 1.5 years. Here is the crazy part:
Our cost is $2.75 a bottle: $825 for 300 bottles
Buying wine is at least $10 a bottle: $3000 for 300 bottles
Buying equivalent wine starts at $20 a bottle: $6000
We are saving $2000 - $5000 by making wine from kits and paying ourselves nearly $100 a hour to do it.
I damaged my one good bit while making circuit boards earlier this week on the CNC. Fortunately zentoolworks quickly shipped a box of 10 replacement tips. You can see how I nipped the tip off the old bit on the left. The new bits are .15mm (about 6 thousandths of a inch) in diameter. I'm hoping these tips will give my circuit boards the fine traces they need.
It's another windy day in TorC. Gusts are expected up to 60 mph. I went out this morning and took down our shade cloth over our porch and confirmed that the solar panels were tightened down. The part of the
forecast that concerns me the most is the 30 mph northwest winds anticipated for this evening. That is a big deal because those winds get right behind the solar panels. Mental Note: When you setup a PV
solar system do not use top of pole mounts if at all possible. Ground bases systems are inexpensive, easy to maintain and will not fall on your home.
Almost done with the schematic for my third generation of battery charger & desulfator. I have a ambitious goal to do the layout and print the circuit boards tomorrow.
Cut, soldered, and tested my first milled PCB today. Everything went smoothly and I think I have the hang of it. Getting good clean tracks came down to mounting the copper board securely. Alignment is
critical. If the boards height is off by a 1000th of a inch I get uneven cut depths with burrs in the copper.
I spent the afternoon making three pretty low quality circuit boards. I'm stilling figuring out the nuances of the circuit design software. The thing that is killing me right now is trying to get cut lines for the mounting holes and board edges. I'll figure out a work around tomorrow.
Wendy took a bunch of photos of this guy going against the river current using a umbrella. I think he comes here every year.
Big difference in todays cardboard cut out from yesterdays. I switched over to a V shaped carving bit (30 degrees) these cost about $2.60 apiece. Yesterday I had used an endmill which was just too large with its 40 mil diameter. Just look at the difference. I was able to even stuff the cardboard with components just to confirm their footprints were accurate.
I still need to figure out how to mark the edges of the board as cut lines in the gEDA/PCB software. I'm feeling ready to cut some copper.
Wendy transplanted out most of our seedlings this week and restocked our east facing kitchen window with 120 more seedlings.
We are always complaining about shoveling. Every project seems to need a hole or a trench dug by hand. Well I'd like to take a moment to complain about plumbing. Nothing requires more digging than running our irrigation lines. At the moment we have six zones in for our irrigation system (each one with it's own solenoid). We still need two more zones to get out of the hand watering business. Lot's more digging ahead to get those last two zones in place.
I designed a simple battery charging circuit for the CNC to cut out. Rather than go right to copper circuit boards I figured it would be best to do some tests with cardboard. The flute I'm using is 40 mills wide which is pretty damn big and causing some issues. I'll see what I can do to fix up the traces before going to copper.
These are the radishes wendy picked for todays lunch of sesame noodles and relish.
