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first-ever successful plastic weld
Wednesday, April 17 2019
With Ramona nearby on her doggy bed this morning at work, I managed to diagnose and fix a fundamental error in my Electron app that had been plaguing me for days. Like most of the app's errors along the way, this was the result of features of the Python language that are absent in Javascript, requiring workarounds. The feature in this case was range(), and when cycling through a range, one is supposed to hit every integer greater than or equal to the start and less than the end. My migrated code was only hitting the start and one less than the end, which works okay so long as the range is just across two integers.
The fix was so momentous that I felt like I could just relax for the rest of the day. At some point I worked on a way to do file-based backup storage of configurations from a database (because the databases in this application are frequently overwritten). I'd brought some microcontroller components to tinker with in the Arduino environment, because I wanted to re-implement the code for my Ahmed Mohamed clock using an Arduino Leonardo and a MaxMatrix LED matrix. For some reason, that old clock code refused to work, but I was able to get a demo sketch working, sort of, though everything was rotated 90 degrees from the way it was supposed to be.
Tonight after Ramona and I got home, she took advantage of the nice weather and lay in the yard while I made myself a sandwich. I found some vegan "lunch meat" that had dried out and gone moldy, so of course I gave to Ramona. It was so hard that it sounded like she was chewing on a chew toy as she labored to break it into pieces small enough to swallow.
Later I got out my tools and tightened the air conditioner belt on the Subaru, which has been producing an embarrassing squeal of late. Unfortunately, I managed to break a 12mm socket trying to loosen the rusty old nut securing attachment of the slack-accepting pulley. Its steel had probably been contaminated with the tears of Chinese orphans.
Another successful household chore was using my compressor-powered plastic welder (it's basically a solder reflow gun) to melt the broken-off handle back onto a plastic measuring cup. The results were ugly, but the reattached handle seemed solid. That would be my first-ever successful plastic weld.
One final thing I did before taking 100mg of diphenhydramine and crawling into bed was was soldering together an I2C "backplane," which was basically four conductors, each with a number of pins connected to it. This would allow me to connect a microcontroller to multiple I2C devices for some purpose. The plan was to take it to work so it could help me re-create my Ahmed Mohamed or build some other project needing an LED matrix.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190417 feedback
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