The 5th Sense

Story So Far: A lamp has been made, a hot plate has been made, some buttons have been made or bought, a clock and an LCD screen have been bought. All has been wired up and programmed. Just need to give it all somewhere to call home.
TL;DR: First and last two paragraphs are on the project/blog, just saying what casing situation is. Everything in between is beyond the realm of tangential and well into just plain irrelevant – why acupuncture works and why smells make for more potently emotional memories than other senses can come up with.

As I’ve mentioned somewhere before, this is a completely hand-built, bespoke alarm clock and has a right to be aestheticised accordingly. The proposed design is below; glossy white plastic casing and a wooden veneer finish on the top panel. Unfortunately, to make that happen I need two things; the means to make those panels out of glossy white plastic, and the motivation to make an accurate sketch in CAD. Both of these things are beyond the horizon as I look through time from the present moment. Oh well.

Front and top view of proposed design. Tea should not be this colour.

In the meantime, there’s a pretty easy cop out. A base and four walls made from LEGO with a top panel made from an old floorboard. I like to think it makes up for being utterly tasteless as a piece of homeware by being a tasteful homage to the life-long engineering pilgrimage that has culminated in its creation – there’s something flirting with profoundness in the fact that the first project I’ve done as a qualified engineer is made from the toy that very probably predestined the entire journey. I think that whether the clock, in its temporary form, appears as flamboyant or garish really just depends on how camp the entire project is, on its ability to present itself immediately and unmistakeably as only having been created in the context of itself and the joy it might bring. Given that every post so far involves some sort of technical hiccup and a subsequent compromise, I’m not brimming with confidence that I have achieved good camp; it’s difficult to say exactly what camp is, but it certainly isn’t compromise¹. It also isn’t a goal to be achieved and anyone who has ever made it so has failed before they start.

So, what hope do I have of having made something good here? Well, one place there has been no compromise has been these blog posts – self-indulgent and conceited, almost to an onanistic extent, with very little irony. Perhaps then, the project as a whole can be construed as camp, and thus, the clock’s physical form construed as intriguingly vulgar, rather than nauseating and garish. Probably not though. And in any case, my opinion on the matter is the least important of all. Regardless, the Teamaster 2000 blog series is ending with this post, only to be appended to if/when I feel like it. It’s been a good run but, as I have had other ideas, I have developed cabin fever with this project as a framework for my writing. There’ll be a rearrangement of the entire site soon to accommodate different subject matters. For right now though, here’s some unabashed nonsense. Enjoy.

Like for like, if you compare an adequately caffeinated human with a horse, it would be accurate, if a little unkind, to call the horse an idiot. One thing that humans and horses can both recognise though, is that the sensation of the individual sinews in your leg muscles morphing into wound-steel guitar strings that scour one another with each muscle contraction is a sensation that’s probably best avoided. Primarily because it hurts, but also because it probably means that you’re about to shred those strings. In a bad way. But, with modern medicine’s miraculous mastering of human physiotherapy and horse euthanasia, is the risk of catastrophic fissuring worth it? Picture the scene; you’re a delusional jockey. You know your horse is the fastest, you know it can bring home the win, you’re just worried that it might suddenly become aware of the fact that it is tearing itself limb from limb in the process and that that moment of hesitancy before you can whip some sense into the dumb thing will cost you everything. What can you do to prevent this travesty? Well, you could rub your horse with chili peppers. As luck would have it, horses can only feel one of either; a dull, persistent pain (muscle pain, mild headaches, crushing etc); or a sharp, momentary pain (burning, stabbing etc) at any one time. The preference, for survival reasons, goes to the sharp, momentary pain (we can afford to forget about dull aches for the duration of a short sharp pain, but not being able to feel short sharp pains in a place where you have a chronic dull ache might mean you don’t feel it when you get stabbed, or bitten by an insect). So, what’s that got to do with chili peppers? Capsaicin, the “hot” chemical in peppers, is perceived as hot because its chemical structure allows it to bind with the receptors we use to know if things are (thermally) hot. These same receptors trigger an almost identical response to that associated with physical pain and the neural pathways which light up because of heat tend to be of the variety that represents sharp, momentary pain – the same variety which overrides (in a sense, provides relief from) dull aches. So, hear me out; we rub this Stupid Horse up and down with chilis, emulating its immolation, the pain prevents the animal from noticing that it is utterly eviscerating its own muscles, it runs like a creature possessed and ruptures every fibre of its being in doing so, the capsaicin loses its potency, a muscular cataclysm surges through the beast, the on-site vet tells you how much a horse’s lifetime of ketamine costs, the prize money won’t cover it, horsey gets trolleyed to the Temple Grandin temple and they drive a bolt into its head, that night you drink from the winner’s cup and argue with a man in an alleyway about how much ketamine costs. A winner.

Hell of a proposition, and also the reason capsaicin is an illegal doping agent in equestrian sports. The whipping, which is not only legal but crucial, has a similar “numbing” effect though. This also works on humans and is the reason pre-match changing rooms for a variety of sports wreak of deep-heat, and also why acupuncture and massages make you forget about your chronic back pain².

To my knowledge this Edna Milton quote is fictitious and Jockey Full of Bourbon equally so. It is entirely possible that this is not the case though.

I say all that to say that the science behind human senses is interesting and useful. I also say it because it’s rare to be in a social situation where I get the chance to. Anyway, the sense of touch/pain is fascinating of course, but the sense at the heart of this post is smell. This peculiar sense is uniquely poised to debase our rational-thinking cortexes and annul the “sapien” status we have endowed ourselves with. By this I mean a familiar smell is much more likely to trigger fits of pique than other sensations are³. To illustrate:

Cast your mind back to the last time you lost control – convulsive laughter, apoplectic rage, hysteric crying, etc, all just variations on a theme really. The theme being that even if God had given us free will, there’s still parts of us that have literally no concept of who the fuck we are and, as such, will never bend to that will. For most people, one such part is the limbic system, the captain of our emotions. Most interactions light up our whole brain and bounce around until they finally catch the attention of the cortex, the executive part of the brain, and the part where our sense of self is strong, in this way we can interact in a manner that is “in-character” for us. Some interactions though, make a B-line for our limbic system and before we can think about how we, our grandiose idea of ourselves, feel about something and then go about releasing chemicals to feel that way, our limbic system has already put in motion the production of the euphoric, aggressive, or depressive chemicals in our body. Things like somebody slipping on a banana peel, slapping us in the face, or mentioning a loved one will often trigger this kind of unconscious response. Also, things like smells. Turns out our olfactory system is uniquely linked to our limbic system, so that no matter who we are, or who we think we are, some smells will just make us feel things. Evolutionarily, this makes a lot of sense. People/proto-people who had an innate and immediate aversion to the smell of bear urine probably had a much better survival rate than those who’s biology allowed it to come down to personal preference. Although it is hard to imagine a huge difference between the two groups.

All sorts of things trigger a strong limbic system reaction, but not all of them end up with us curled up, cowering in the corner of the kitchen trying to remember the last time I cried like this? And is it usually this harrowing? And is it happening more often? Is it starting to define me? Did I see it coming? Can I see it coming? What if someone walks in? What if someone calls? What if this happens in front of someone? Is it over? That’s it? Well, okay. Maybe I’ll have a nap.

Well, the difference between a melancholy twang and an all out fit, is how capable your cortex is to retake/steer the reigns. This of course depends on many things, but the events that are truly capable of razing that little neuron nucleation point that endows us with “humanity” to the ground, are those that attack its foundations. The cortex’s entire métier is to rationalise the world through the sensibility of our ego. This allows it to do all sorts of things, most notably, predict the future (rightly or wrongly). Anyway, assuming my immediately-and-easily-proven-to-be-incorrect™ definition of it is correct, we can see that to sabotage our cortex there are two options. We can suppress our ego, which can lead us to be free of the pains of pre-cognition and prejudice and truly live in the moment (for some this is an intentional and spiritual ascent to the pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy, for others, it is a symptom of their unintentional and hellacious descent to the opposite end), or, the world around us can become entirely unrationalisable. Focusing on the latter and circling back to the sense of smell, as you are no doubt attentively waiting for me to do, the memory of a smell can be pretty difficult to contextualise, and contextualising is a pretty big part of how we rationalise the world around us. For example, seeing a familiar actor in a movie, a world where you don’t know who she is doesn’t make sense, it’s irrational, but you just can’t quite say you fully remember her. So, you contextualise the faint memory of her by going to her IMDB and seeing that she had a cameo in Friends one time. The frosted glass you were viewing the memory through clarifies. You turn off the movie that you weren’t that invested in anyway and switch to an episode of Friends you’ve seen more often than your actual friends this past year. The world makes sense again³.

We primarily perceive the world visually, and so context for memories is often synonymous with some sort of imagery. When we encounter a smell and commit it to memory, we also store an image of the source of that smell as context for it. This is then our memory of that smell. But, as time goes on and you encounter the aroma again and again, produced by different sources and in different surroundings, it becomes decontextualised in your memory. So, when you smell cheap plastic, it may remind you of a Kinder Egg, or a ball pit, or a LEGO set. If you still encounter any of those three things on a regular basis, your brain will immediately associate the smell with that item, and you can picture it. If, however, you’ve stuck to the societal norms of growing up, it’s likely some time since you last encountered any of the worthless treasures of your childhood, and a whiff of their characteristic plastic will inundate your brain with a familiar fragrance and the feeling of contentment that you haven’t experienced since you were a child at play. Your head will spin as the scent flares up a limbic system emotional response and the absolute bewilderment induced by the lack of context will only amplify the emotions, your brain has absolutely no idea which visual memory to attribute to this smell and you’re in limbic limbo until it comes up with something. Eventually, when you really try to pin it down, you will come up with a specific ghost of your past to lament over, this is not to say that the smell genuinely most resembled that item, but more to say that you were thinking about that thing, or things adjacent to it, most recently and were primed to land on it.

Put all of the above together and you’ve got a mess of a blog post. Put the bits about olfaction together and you’ve got a sense that not only takes a shortcut not available to other senses to illicit an emotional response. But also, a sense that can make sure that response lasts. Not only has your nose got a head start on your rational brain, but it’s also tied your brain’s shoelaces together.

Confusion, nostalgia, smells – an absolute crisis.

It’s worth pointing out that there are also smells that actually do conjure up a specific image, like if you only ever smelled that weird soft-yet-abrasive carpet that has a texture somewhere between the two sides of Velcro when you were a child lying on the floor of your local library. When you’re hit with that scent anywhere else, it will likely conjure up an image of that weird blue-yet-grey carpet that is almost certainly made from old bus seats in a process that is disconcertingly similar to how pigs (presumably along with other animals) get turned into Billy Bear ham (not a sponsor). This scent may well cause an overwhelming emotional response, but this response is more akin to seeing an old friend than the previously described frantic scouring of memory banks for an image to provide context to a familiar smell.

I say all that to say that I was feeling overwhelmingly nostalgic when I used LEGO to build the casing for this alarm clock. I also say it because it’s rare to be in a social situation where I get the chance to. This post started as a commentary of my emotions and memories as I sat fulfilling a childhood fantasy; playing with LEGO by light of a head-torch, well into the night, cross-legged on the garage floor. But the narrative fell apart pretty quickly so I deleted it all and wrote the above. I’ll be honest, the entire build didn’t work out terribly well. It doesn’t look at all like I envisioned, and steel was a horrible material choice for the hot plate. The steel cuboid will one day be an aluminium (I think) cylinder, and the LEGO/floorboard housing will be superseded. That sentence might well be the full extent to which I write about those updates though. I still enjoy the thought of the build, but I’m over writing about it.
Thanks for reading. While I can’t give any timescales for anything, I can give some details on what the future content of this site will be. As you’ll have noticed, I have a penchant for biology, this will be developed on. I also intend to write short pieces inspired by other stories I’ve heard, either in books or in music or in some other form. As a special case of this I intend to make a page called “Helsabot Fanfiction”. “Fanfiction” here being very tongue-in-cheek.

1 – Please read Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, a “paper” published in the 1960s. Very good read.
2 – I’ve got nothing against jockeys. Also racehorses are generally very well looked after and the events detailed are an exaggeration of the highest order. Horses were indeed “doped” with capsaicin so they wouldn’t feel pain, but if it would be possible for one to run so hard that it gives itself injuries that warrant being put down, I don’t believe so, but I don’t really care to look. I’m very happy to be naive on this issue.
3 – All of this stuff may be entirely wrong, at a high level and at a low level. It’s all accurate as far as I know, but I have a chronic and severe case of Dunning-Kruger-itis.

30th Jun 2021 0

Do You Have Ppe for Drilling Steel?

Story so far: The light circuit is working, so I can simulate a sunrise. The tea-making aspect remains to be seen to.

TL;DR: I drilled into a steel block and put a cartridge heater inside, the block is now a hot plate.

Following from the flaming failure of a first foray into hot plate building, a complete rethink was thunk. Now, I shall simply drill a hole into a steel block and insert the cartridge heater. The heater can do its thing until Tha Block is Hot and then the block can heat a cup of tea for breakfast. Seems reasonable?

The first step is to drill a cartridge heater sized hole in a steel block, that is, drill a cylinder of about 0.5cm diameter and 2.5cm depth. For reference, imagine a standard antibiotic pill in your hand, you know, half red, half yellow capsule full of feel-good, perfectly reasonable to be swallowed whole, as per its design. Now imagine the obtrusively sized, obtusely designed choking hazard that it morphs into the moment it leaves your sight and enters your mouth; that’s about the size of the cartridge heater.

A steel block and small heating element — The drilled hole and the heater, both lined with thermal paste.

Drilling a hole that size into steel with a hand drill is no routine procedure. Learning the correct method required substantial trawling through the unchartered waters of random forums and subreddits, where each comment further verifies the Big Fish Theory; expert metal workers are exposed as mere novices by increasingly snide remarks of “Um, actually…” that are as lacking in self-awareness as they are in relent – at least until someone mentions Hitler. Unsurprisingly, the omnipresent Mariana Trench of knowledge, YouTube, was also explored. One of the titans of the platform, Gus Johnson, was there to provide his trademark well-founded, rational and at times even cheekily comical interpretation, just as he has done for the trials and tribulations of the working man in America; the toxic lack of empathy that infects the landscape of Google reviews; and the decaying state of our natural world as we stray further from God. The video I speak of, though, is of course “Gus Johnson Sings an Entire Conway Twitty Album”.
Bus croons:

You want a man with a slow hand
. . .
You want somebody who will spend some time,
 Not come and go in a heated rush

This pretty much sums it up. If you use a very high speed, you’ll initially drill through by scraping lots of very fine steel filings away, however, eventually you’ll end up with a thick, impenetrable layer of these filings at the bottom of your hole and all you can do is move them around and get them into a heated rush – blunting your drill bit in the process. What you want to do is keep the rpm low and apply as much pressure as you can downward through the drill bit. You’ll know you’re Doin’ it Right when the steel you’re cutting away starts to slither up the thread of your drill bit as continuous and spiralised serpentine articulations – acquiesced entirely to their charmer.

It really does require you to spend some time with it, baby. The hole I drilled took around 2 hours and it wasn’t light labour either! At first, I tried summoning every ounce of force I could muster from my arms and pushing down on the drill, whose response was to summon the spirit of Laura Les and subject me to the harshly shrill, yet somehow enchanting dissonance of the bit turning in place fruitlessly – thus reminding me that my arms are indeed like very roast-able little cigarettes. Ultimately the only way I could pile enough force behind the cutting edge of the drill bit to make it carve through the steel was to lie myself atop the heel of the drill and push my weight through it. While this was effective, every force has an equal and opposite reaction, and here I am pushing down through my sternum with enough force to continuously carve steel. You’d think with a name like sternum it’d be made of sterner stuff but turns out this process got pretty painful pretty pronto. So, if you ever want to attempt something similar make sure and check the checklist below.

PPE For Drilling Steel:

Goggles (Fine particles and smoke from burnt lubricating oil are both pretty bad for your eyes.)
Gloves (Brushing away metal swarf with bare hands is pretty much the exact same as rubbing a cheese grater.)
Chest Cushion (Place between sternum of driller and heel of drill to avoid bruising your chest the way you did after watching Tarzan for the first time.)

Some drilling equipment — The required PPE, plus a good example of the fine swarf you want to avoid creating. You can’t avoid it entirely. Bonus: Always have a hammer on hand.

Of course, all that list protects is your body and the many emasculating mistakes made along the way raise the question: Do You Have Ppe for Self-Esteem? Well, personally, I vacillate between immersing myself in music where I can imagine myself as the audacious and brazenly immodest protagonist and lamenting over music where I can think, “well, at least I’m not that guy”. Each the type of music that concerns itself so singularly with one pole of the human experience, disregarding disaffirmations so indiscriminately, that to tell someone you enjoy it is to sully their notion of you with an apprehensive perplexity regarding the lucidity of your perception.
Music to count marbles to for those who don’t get it, music to hide marbles to for those that do.

Anyway, that’s the heating block done, in a very uneventful series of events I coated the heater in thermal paste and shoved it into the hole then turned it on. The block got very hot and all seems good. Onwards.

A cup on top of a steel block — The “finished” product. If you’re thinking “wait that block is far too big for efficient heat transfer!”, you’re right. I’ll address it when I’m good and ready to face up to my mistake.

10th Dec 2020 0

Turning on the Bright Lights, Part Deux

Story so Far: See Story so Far and TL;DR sections of Part 1.

TL;DR: My circuit needs another resistor or it will continue frying everything. It claimed another few victims before I realised this though.

After the traumatic experience it had endured I decided to give the laptop a break for a while and instead maybe check up on my circuit wiring. We were well into the evening now and the garage was engulfed by the umbra of the garden hedges, but I had been using the head torch all day, so had to switch it to the dimmer mode to save energy. The dimmer works exactly how I described dimming LEDs in “The Impossible Dim” except badly done whereby the flicker is pretty noticeable, giving a slight stroboscopic effect. It was annoying, but still better than being stuck in the dark before I finished. I rewired my circuit and gave it juice, same problem as in part 1, light comes on but just stays at full brightness. I had pretty much exhausted my troubleshooting list at this point, so I let the lamp stay on and willed the problem to make itself known. The “warm” white lamp really gave a much more homely feel to the workstation than the migraine inducing “Transfiguration of Christ brilliant” white headtorch LEDs.

The cooker hood bulbs being used in the lamp meant it gave off that special hue of light that is enriched with nostalgia. Nostalgia for all those nights having went straight to hurling training after school and arriving home battered, bruised and seeking comfort. Finding it wrapped in foil on the stove top. A home-made dinner that had watched on while everyone else enjoyed their meal and discussed their day; during post-dinner clean-up it was lovingly wrapped up in foil so as to capture a healthy serving of the Family Table spirit under there with it. Then as I land home, I am welcomed by the working-class cloche basking in the warm glow of the cooker hood bulb; a glittering, scintillating treasure trove. I approach the light through the darkened kitchen, with each step forward my shoulders bob up and shrug off more of the day’s tension, and with each breath inward the scents of the kitchen build hope for what might be waiting. I reach the stove. Quick breath in. Hold it. Lift the foil . . . pork chops. Stuff that I’ll have porridge.

Yep, the light being given off by the bulbs was lovely, but I wasn’t so keen on the smell – the smell?! . . . suddenly the illusion of homeliness came crashing down as the scent of melting plastic made itself known. I glanced down to the workbench and the strobe of the headtorch made the pixie smoke¹ cast a large, jittery shadow, giving the illusion of a much larger plume of smoke billowing out than there was. I’ll blame the ensuing overreaction on that.

I immediately switched the supply off and for absolutely no rational reason whatsoever began ripping my circuit apart. I believe I believed I was protecting the components from being harmed by the now disconnected and harmless power supply. All very silly behaviour. The only component really in use was the FET (the “dimmer switch” that the Arduino was supposed to be controlling). Now, there’s a couple of conditions where a FET will get very hot inside and try to get rid of that heat through its back panel; I had created one such condition². To get rid of dangerous levels of heat the small back panel of a FET often requires a larger heatsink³ stuck on to it, I didn’t have such a tool attached, that is, until I tried to grab the FET and disconnect it. At that moment, my hand became the additional heatsink and the FET did its utmost to utilise it, sending whatever heat it could into my fingers. Very painful. Very very stupid. Very very very educational.
So, in summary, things fried in an attempt to build the simplest part of this alarm clock:

Laptop’s USB port
FET
My fingers
My brain
Voltage regulator chip on the Arduino

The last of which was what had actually been producing the pixie smoke earlier. It takes the 12-Volts from the supply and steps it down to 5-Volts for the bits that like to work at 5-Volts. The only one of which I was using at the time is the pin controlling the FET. I had pretty much shorted said pin to the ground which meant it was trying to draw Unlimited Power (infinite current more specifically but Star Wars). That power was (obviously) too much for the wires in the voltage regulator to carry so they started trying to get rid of it by heating up their plastic casing. Which melted.

Slick patches on “AMS 117” chip are the bits that melted especially well.

The fix is very simple; add a resistor to the wire. All this is like dropping a watermelon off a 45-metre tower. As it falls it will get faster and faster, creating self-destructive carnage when it lands. Adding the resistor is like giving the melon a parachute, it limits the amount of speed the melon can gather on its way down to the point where you can drop it all day and not see red.

My short-sighted shorting had one more side effect; it had actually caused a failure inside the FET which meant it no longer operated as a dimmer switch and instead had become just a lump of metal, or a dimmer switch stuck at its maximum brightness⁴ hence the issues I was having. I suspect things got quite hot inside the FET and some tiny bits melted together, only to be cooled down by passing their heat off to my fingers.

After making sense of everything I ordered a new Arduino and repeated the experiment, now incorporating an appropriate resistor and new FET, the lamp works perfectly, dimming and brightening at will.
Incidentally, I referred to the Arduino as an “Uno board” in early blog posts, said posts were written before this Series of Unfortunate Events, at a time when I was using the Oosoyoo Uno (a knock-off of the Arduino Uno) which now, as you know, has a burnt-out voltage regulator. After the events detailed above, I figured I’d like to splash out on the real deal Arduino model. Started From The Bottom Now We’re Here.

1 – See previous post “Mouth Function Malfunction” for etymology of “pixie smoke”. Suffice to say it’s a quirky term for smoke from electronics.

2 – FET == MOSFET for the sake of this blog. My FET wasn’t for microcontrollers – the gate voltage should have been much higher than 5V to fully turn it on. Since I was only giving it 5V it was only partially turned on and still had quite a large resistance. Thus it was a resistive heating element, melting itself and giving off heat. It is now switched out for a “logic level” FET. 5V turns it on all the way – assuming my pwm frequency isn’t ridiculously high, apparently this can lead to the gate not having time to fully activate every cycle.

3 – A heatsink is just a block of metal that absorbs heat from a component faster than the air around that component can. It then has a large surface area in contact with the air to pass that heat on to the environment effectively. It then keeps on wicking heat away from the component. The more surface area exposed to air it has the better at its job a heat sink is – this is why they almost always have a finned design.

4 – I know that’s not quite right as the FET isn’t a dimmer switch in the classical sense (a potentiometer) but it’s accurate enough. More accurately the FET became just another bit of wire in a circuit with a 12V source (wall wart) and a 5V source (digital pin) powering 2 LEDs.

Just a reminder this is what the end circuit will now look like. Except the pins aren’t accurately labeled and there’s a grounding wire omitted. I think the omitted wire is superfluous anyway though.

25th Sep 2020 1

Turning on the Bright Lights, Part 1

“Turning on the Bright Lights, Part Deux” is also live.

Story So Far: Heater prototype didn’t work, waiting on alternative parts. Playing with using pwm (unimportant technical term) to control some LED bulbs for the lamp.

TL;DR: I set up a dodgy circuit to test the lamp part of the alarm clock. Plugged said dodgy circuit into my laptop and gave the PC a fairly debilitating case of agoraphobia. Shock therapy not advised.

I think experimenting with the lamp made for a high-octane chain of disasters so I think I’ll use a sort of dramatic retelling to detail how I transcend the limits of my single-headed human form to fit so much stupid in. How Does That Grab You, Darlin’?

While waiting on new parts for the new heater I figured I could work on the lamp, this would have to be addressed at some point anyway and it would be a nice proof of concept for the heater circuit as they are identical in all the ways that matter. So, out to the garage I went, full of misplaced complacency and bright ideas about this lamp. I set up a very simple circuit¹ which is stylised to be even simpler below.

Left: Stick person controls dimmer switch for light bulb, powered by car battery
Right: Arduino controls current flow through a MOSFET (3-legged box which I forgot to label) to control the lamp circuit, powered by 12V supply

After having set up the hardware I had to tackle the minor issue of the software; just a little bit of code to make the lamp brighten/dim brighten/dim repeatedly. My laptop had been enjoying a well earned rest up until that morning – it’s a coin toss between it and the kettle for hardest working appliance throughout my final year of uni – nonetheless it sprung to life right spritely like and was ready for a new project; like an over-zealous sheepdog pup; keen to impress.

Brightness of the lamp is on a scale of 0 – 255 so I set about writing code that would peruse said scale up and down at intervals of 5, updating every second.

Once the code was written, I began uploading it to the Arduino. The Arduino blinked intensely and thoughtfully while it tried to comprehend its instructions and commit them to memory, then, once it felt it had a grasp on them it returned to its steady state; a bright-eyed thousand-yard stare². This vapid expression concealed a mind that was furiously rehearsing the instructions which now constituted its entire raison d’être. The only thing that could interrupt this fervent meditation was the command to effectuate these orders and begin actually making the world a brighter place – just waiting on the word “GO”. Like a well-disciplined (read indoctrinated) soldier, not yet jaded by combat. The word “GO” in this case was me hooking the Arduino up to the big ol’ 60-Watt power brick. Using a 60-Watt supply to run a circuit this modest is a bit like using a forest fire to dry your hair but I’m told that the Arduino knows exactly how to keep its distance and not get set alight so I went ahead and gave the order anyway.

The lamp came on immediately when connected and was beaten only by my celebratory smile for brightest thing in the room. However, for every second that passed without the lamp getting any dimmer, my expression picked up the slack; finally my face was furrowed and frowning in equal measures at the failure. My first guess was that there was a bug in the code and the brightness level wasn’t updating as it should. So, I opened the laptop and started rewriting the code in a more obvious, less succinct way. Just by habit at this point I had also disconnected the lamp from the Arduino.

At this point I had both the big ol’ power supply from the wall and a USB lead from my laptop going into the Arduino and as I reconnected the lamp circuit it came on with that same, persistent full-beam of failure . . . the garage didn’t seem all that much brighter. Not metaphorically or anything. It was because my laptop screen had gone to sleep at the same time. I hit the space bar a smack to wake it up again (and perhaps vent some anger at my incompetence), but the screen remained black. Interesting. Immediately I ripped the USB lead out from the laptop. Intuitive. I turned all off and began CPR on the laptop. On-button compressions triggered a gasp of air through the fans but it still remained unresponsive, after 40 minutes of poking and prodding we had him back and fully lucid. The diagnosis was that a rush of current from the Arduino into the laptop’s USB port triggered some sort of safety feature that protects the motherboard; this feature cuts the machine off from the outside world until a certain secret knock on the power button lets it know the coast is clear. While researching it I discovered “USB killers”; pen drives that when plugged in, give a massive shock to the motherboard to try and fry it and brick the target machine, honestly, that’s their only purpose – a perfect, pocket-sized example of man-kinds malevolence. I’m glad they exist though because if they didn’t the safety feature I triggered might not exist and my laptop could very well be toast right now.

“Turning on the Bright Lights, Part Deux” is now live to conclude this part of the build.

1 – If you’re technically inclined, the actual circuit I ended up using is drawn and carelessly discussed below. In the picture of the physical circuit up above though you can see I only have one resistor in *spoiler alert for part two* it’s not the important one.
2 – Arduinos actually do have an LED that blinks while they load up with new instructions and then switches to a fixed on state to show it has accepted the new code. This isn’t just me rambling. Let me try again. This isn’t just me rambling.

Blue box = Arduino
Red box = MOSFET
Basically Vin will put 12V across the LED light when the MOSFET is set as a short circuit. The MOSFET will be set as a short circuit when its gate pin has a voltage applied to it (when pin D2 is high [It won’t be pin D2 in reality, it’ll be one of the pwm pins to allow variable brightness]). There’s a 10 K-ohm resistor from gate to ground on the FET to avoid floating states. The two 220 ohm resistors are just current limiting resistors. D1 will be polled continuously, if the button is pushed, D1 receives a signal from the 5V rail and the Arduino toggles the state of the lamp (fully on/fully off) as long as it isn’t already in the middle of brightening the lamp for the morning routine.

24th Sep 2020 1

The Impossible Dim

Story so Far: Original heater concept is a no-go as copper tubing can’t absorb/hold/make use of enough heat. Currently awaiting steel block as alternative. Sunrise lamp is unaddressed as of yet but parts are present.

TL;DR: Digital screens let you keep writing when there’s no space left, this can get messy. Digital screens flicker but our brain blurs the world around us to suit itself. Time is pretty crazy, right?

Notice: This ended up very long and took an age to write. Future posts to be planned out better and split into smaller, more frequent ones. Just a bit carried away with the subject matter is all.

Ever tried to take a photo of a digital screen? How come your eyes see 08:20 but your photo is just a blank screen? Or how come there’s black lines going through your photo of a TV screen? Well, Let Me Blow Ya Mind. And also take a meandering route to explain how I’ll make “non-dimmable” bulbs dim/brighten. Basically, a digital clock works like:

>>Check time

>>Clear screen

>>Reset cursor

>>Display time

>>Repeat forever [Forever ever? Forever ever?]

Clearing the screen is absolutely essential every time in case the time changes – if you try to write a 7 in a position where there’s an uncleared 6, it’ll end up as an 8; eventually the entire screen will just read 88:88 forever and this broken clock won’t ever be right, never mind twice in a day.

Resetting the cursor is another crucial part, it’s the same as pulling the carriage return lever on a typewriter except there’s no satisfying mechanical process or rewarding ‘ding’ to announce to the world that you have crafted yet another page-width of art. Typewriters also include a lock that prevents you from typing on at the end of a line and ensures you actually hit the carriage return lever, without such a lock us idiot humans would likely try to type on at the end of a line and shift the carriage to the left one too many times. That would fling the carriage from the typewriter, casting it out of its homely cradle and into oblivion and you better believe it won’t go quietly either, dragging your page of so-called art with it – a spite-fuelled punishment for your ignorance.
Now the type hammers will still strike the ribbon and stamp out their impression in thick, black permanence but there’s no paper to print on. And so, the letter-shaped manifestations of viscosity are projected into the wind, at the mercy of Aeolus. At their most ruinous these letters may land on a nearby book and construct upon it destructively, ruining the literature’s original meaning. At their most harmless, they may land on the reem of paper next to the typewriter, attempting to author a composition of their own.

Point being, digital screens don’t have such a lock. If you attempt to keep writing after the end of the screen is reached, the program will just throw the letters wherever it pleases. Their new allocated address could represent a random spot on the screen, which isn’t so bad, however, if the program is feeling especially malicious it could write them to a part of the memory which houses something important. Something like how long I want the program to run the heater for – for obvious reasons, this would be a disaster*. So it’s important to reset the cursor to the left [to the left].

The problem created by all this is that digital screens spend a not insignificant amount of time not displaying what they’re supposed to be displaying. Cameras with a high enough shutter speed have a fair chance of catching the screen while it’s blank or in the middle of being populated. TV’s do something similar but split their screen into smaller, more manageable horizontal strips and refresh each of them with their share of the next frame. That explains why TVs can appear to have black stripes across them in photos. I’m pretty sure there’s more at play than that but this is where my interests end with it for now. How come we don’t see screens refreshing with our eyes? This is the interesting bit, it’s also where my writing gets a little scatty because I’m overwhelmed with the implications of the topic, I will return to this topic with a more coherent narrative some day.

Gamers will know that humans view the world at about 60 frames per second** – that is, our brain takes a sample of the landscape of light around itself, using our eyes, every 60^th of a second (Not quite true, see**). This is fast enough to make us think we’re seeing everything, all the time. Yet we don’t see screens flickering on and off all the time. Well, the screens flicker much faster than every 1/60 seconds and when that happens, all the things in between our samples ‘blur’ together. You can demonstrate this with your phone – decrease the shutter speed and photos can be made to appear blurrier, which is useful to capture motion, blurring something moving fast or blurring the background to convey movement in a still image is no doubt something you’ve seen and appreciated before.

Slideshow: ‘Sea’ the effect of decreasing shutter speed while photographing a video of waves. Longer exposure time means more of the frames blur together and the sea appears smoother/calmer (picture 2 vs. picture 3). Picture 1 shows a very fast shutter speed capturing the horiszontal lines of pixels which are being cleared/altered to show the next frame. Picture 4 shows what happens with a very slow shutter speed. Too much light is blurred together and it just appears as a bright mess.

So, when a light (or screen) flickers on and off faster than 60 times per second, the in-between bits blur together.*** For example, if you flicked a light on and off very quickly, your brain would blur the on and off states between samples and actually see a light that was on all the time but only at half brightness. Similarly, as long as a screen displays what it’s supposed to most of the time, that’s what you’ll ‘see’. This is very useful. See, my LED lamps which I want to use by gradually brightening them, mimicking a sunrise, well, they state explicitly on the box that they are “non-dimmable” – which also means they are non-brightenable; bummer. However, by switching them from full brightness to zero brightness very quickly I can make sure they blur to look like they’re at a certain in between brightness. By varying the ratio of the time the bulbs spend fully on to the time they spend fully off (duty cycle for the initiated), any brightness can be exhibited – assuming the bulbs are observed by a human. Of course, I can’t do this manually but my Arduino, which controls the lights, can flicker them for me very quickly – quite possibly up to millions of times per second if I ask it to. I believe it switches them a few hundred times per second when I don’t make any special requests though and that’s good enough. A good camera might have shutter speeds fast enough that when it snaps a picture of my bulbs they will only ever appear as either fully on or fully off, with the probability of each varying based on the duty cycle. The brighter the bulbs, the more chance of snapping a shot of them fully on****.

It’s pretty crazy that we only observe the world at 60 frames per second, but imagine a world where we truly saw everything in front of us all the time, a world where we didn’t blur the in-between bits. Just a petrifying amount of information at all times entering our brains through our eyes – you would essentially be viewing the world in slow motion. But you still wouldn’t be able to think any faster – birds see in “slow motion” so they can observe and dodge obstacles while flying all gas no brakes style, for us slow-moving humans though, it isn’t really that useful of a tool.
It’d be pretty cool if we could give ourselves an adaptive shutter speed by blinking though and process visual stimulation as we see fit – slow our perception down when driving at high speeds, speed it up when looking at something frighteningly chaotic but harmless – could turn a flashing light into a constant light and avoid photosensitive epilepsy incidents. This would mean blinking 59 times a second to match our current speed of vision, however. Still a nice thought experiment.

Still, the prospect that the “shutter speed of your eyes” determines your perception of time is a very interesting area, particularly since it varies from person to person naturally – research is also trying to pin digital screen use to slowing down our shutter speed – it’d be interesting if that has anything to do with other research claiming reaction times are getting worse since digital screens became so commonplace. The technical term for the “shutter speed of the eyes” is the “flicker fusion threshold” or “critical flicker frequency” by the way. I’ve only just been introduced to it while researching how my LEDs worked for this very blog post but I am enamoured with the concept. Once I make it through a few papers/articles/videos on the topic and finish writing about this alarm clock project you can bet there’ll be a full-on post based upon it. I did say in a previous post that I would find a better, more abstract way to discuss people’s unique perception of time and a story loosely based on flicker fusion thresholds might be it. It does beg the question “what about blind people?” but I don’t have the answers to that yet. Obviously, optical stimulus isn’t the only thing we react to and gauge time from but it is pretty intrinsic to how we (people privileged with the sense of sight) perceive the world.

Food for thought: Higher shutter speed means less light enters the lens to be blurred together. Perhaps a lower critical flicker frequency (shutter speed) means observing the world as a more vibrant place with more light in every frame. Conversely, a higher value means a dimmer world view – flies have a critical flicker frequency 4 times that of humans – is that why their eyes are made up of so many lens-like panels and bulge out? A complicated biological balancing act?

*I’m not sure what exactly happens when writing to addresses that don’t exist, but I’d be confident it’s at least theoretically predictable. I feel like all memory is fair game but maybe not. Might be conflating using pointers and addresses cautiously with writing to peripherals cautiously and that might not be accurate, I’m not sure, but I’ll err out of apathy and err on the side of caution.

** 60Hz is troubling. I don’t think we actually sample our environment at 60Hz. I think we actually sample at 25Hz but certain other quirks of the optical sensing system make it appear as 60Hz. The entire scientific field is insanely complicated, what I’ve said would hold water in a conversation but keep an open mind to people expanding on/correcting it.

***Things might need to flicker faster than just “faster than 60 Hz” I think. Pretty sure Nyquist-Shannon sampling theory would come into play meaning for proper blurring to take effect it would need to be 120Hz – but also the 60Hz figure may take that into account, from context I think it does.

****I realise I’m talking about using pulse-width modulation as if I’ve just discovered fire but I’m trying to convey just how cool it actually is when you don’ take it for granted.

11th Sep 2020 1

Mouth Function Malfunction

Story so Far: Alarm clock build parts arrived, currently experimenting to get the heater part working in order to prepare a cup of tea. A cartridge heater being used to heat copper tubing which is spiralled into a hot plate is the current technology.

TL;DR: I tried using the copper spiral as a hot plate with wood around it to insulate. The wood caught fire. I tried without the wood, the heater got aggressively red hot. I conclude that I want more thermal mass – ordered a block of steel into which the heater can be inserted.

Test number 2 of the prospective heater set up was a resounding failure. I had the heater inserted into its cradle and a metal cup of water placed on the copper spiral of a ‘hot plate’. Before testing though I figured the near-constant draught in the garage might become a problem. My thinking was that while heat should find it easiest to move from the copper into the base of the metal cup and heat the water, a constant flow of cool air around the heating set up will absorb a significant amount of that heat. To limit this, I surrounded the heater in wood; now the heat had two options for where to go: a metal cup or a wooden block; in my head this was a no-brainer . . . my head is a no-brainer.

I plugged the heater in and flicked the switch. “Hmm nothing’s happening, well, presumably the heater is working away, and I’ll just keep my ey – something smells good; like Christmas – no, something smells bad; like a burning project.” Something like that went through my head as the scent of pixie smoke and crushed dreams began to fill the garage. Pixie smoke? You might ask. Well, when you buy something like an Arduino, which is basically a little computer, there’ll be lots of little black boxes on them with circuitry that performs a specific function, allowing the little computer to work. These little boxes can contain some fairly complex circuits that do very simple things, however, doing simple things a few million times every second can trick us slow-thinking humans into thinking they’re doing very complex things. People that understand these tiny black boxes in an intimate way are very rare but people that use them every day certainly are not. Usually, when these boxes stop working it’s as a result of something getting too hot inside and melting which also melts the black plastic enclosure and gives off some very nasty smoke. So for all those people that use and break these boxes often but have no need or desire to learn how they work inside, the traditional pseudo-explanation is that they’re all simply enclosures for different kinds of magic pixie smoke which does a specific job. If that pixie smoke escapes, the little black box stops working. Some engineers and hobbyists are cool, though.

One such little black box, the slick looking patches are where the pixie smoke escaped from. Look forward to reading about this failure in a future post.

Having put this particular large wooden box together myself I was frustratingly aware of the fact that this smoke signal for failure I was accidentally sending out was not in fact a cloud with mystical properties, rather, it was the result of insulating a heater capable of reaching 300°C with wood. Wood, as luck would have it, generally catches fire at around 300°C. The more you know.

The heater was in the copper spring type part, which was in the wooden block. More wood was used to insulate the bottom of the spiralled copper but it escaped unharmed. Clearly the wooden block pictured though has indeed been very much on fire.

So, frighteningly aware of the fact that this smoke meant I had started a fire, I turned the heater off. Smart move. Smoke and burning persisted though. As you probably know, fire needs two things to burn – fuel and air (oxygen). It was only the inside of the wooden block which was in contact with the heater, so only that part was on fire at this early stage and the snugness of the fit meant that air flow to the embryonic blaze was pretty limited – even though it was surrounded by wooden fuel on all sides; ironically, it was this abundance of fuel that was preventing it from burning by limiting its access to oxygen. Had I Let It Be, it would have suffocated fairly quickly and died off. I didn’t, so it didn’t. Instead I decided to give it CPR, but, in my defence, you blow on a candle to put it out and I’m not sure I’ve ever had to fight a fire in any other situation. So, when I saw this small flame with ambitions of cooking all the food in my freezer (and the freezer too), I instinctively blew on it. It, in turn, instinctively flared up in exultation as it could finally take the breath it had been gasping for since its inception. I decided not to do that again. My second smart move of the day. Instead I watched the fire slowly suffocate and armed myself with a wet sock to finish the job if required, like some kind of sadist. The smoke brought a tear to my eye, but the death of the fire brought a smile to my face – nervous and disconcerted as it was.

Sometimes people that know CPR, that know mouth to mouth, just like me, should keep to themselves.

I did another very quick and cautious test with no wood around the heater and saw it glow red hot almost immediately, which I didn’t like. The problem is that I thought the heat could just go immediately from heater to copper tubing to cup to water. In reality there’s a lot of lagging at every stage and what I need, apparently, is something with enough “thermal mass” to capture and hold the heat from the heater until the cup is ready to accept it. Basically, I need a bigger block of metal as a hot plate and more of it should probably be in contact with the heater too.

I have spent a few days now trying to get copper blocks or aluminium blocks with the exact right dimensions, but they just don’t seem to be available. After hours of sickening myself looking for the perfect block to use I had a moment of weakness, I saw a block of steel that was roughly right and bought it immediately. Immediately after that I realised it was the wrong size entirely and now, even more sickened, I’ve bought a slightly larger one that is actually about right. The problem, though, is that it’s a large block of steel and I haven’t done nearly the amount of research I should have into whether it will be up to the challenge in order to justify buying it. But that’s a problem for when it arrives.

The reason such blocks of steel exist is actually for use as tiny anvils which jewellers use as a work surface as they hammer bits into shape. Some, like what I’ve bought, are just blocks but others are stylised as actual anvils and would make a pretty cool paperweight. But honestly, what even is a paperweight? If you want a desk toy because it looks cool buy a desk toy because it looks cool, not everything has to have a purpose outside of looking cool.

Case and point: Spoilers on your road car. They might never have to actually affect air flow or fulfil any other purpose but they don’t have to. Because they’re just so good at DEFINITELY looking cool, and hey, making you look cool while they’re at it. What an incredibly cool looking thing.

24th Jul 2020 1