Mauna Kea
End of the Road
A number of roads I once drove have been claimed by volcanoes over the years.
Crater Rim Drive literally collapsed into Kilauea Caldera, the road, viewpoints, trailheads… All gone. Highway 132, Pohoiki road, Kopoho Road, all buried during the 2018 eruption. Sections of Highway 130 near Kalapana, slowly covered by the Puʻu Oʻo eruptions flowing to the sea.
And the Mauna Loa access road, cut by the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption.
How many times did I travel this road? Quite a few… Trips up to set up my own telescope near the NOAA research station. Contracting work at the NOAA station in the wake of the pandemic. A couple trips up just to enjoy the scenery or do a little photography.
Then an eruption, the first eruption of Mauna Loa in near four decades. The lava flows cut the road in two places.
I had not been up to where the lava crossed the road since the eruption. That was until until this last weekend. I finally got up there… No reason, just enjoying the mauna on a pretty Sunday morning. I parked down below and rode the bike the last few miles up to the lava flow.
As expected the road just vanishes under the lava. An impressive pile of aʻa clinkers covers the road twenty feet deep. Three years later I am rather surprised the road has not been re-cut into the observatory.
Here it is, lava across the road, power lines dangling, as far as you can go unless you are willing to abuse yourself crossing 300 yards of jagged aʻa. I sent the drone for a look.
What is safe?
Designing and building equipment for aquaculture means I use controllers. Quite a few controllers, dozens upon dozens of them, little boxes meant to keep some parameter in range. Temperature, pH, water level, whatever, a little box with a display, a few buttons, and a relay in the back to turn something on when needed to control the outcome.
Industrial suppliers will sell you a controller for just about anything, there are catalogs full of them, from inexpensive to thousands of dollars you can buy the solution to your needs. Buy one, wire it in, adjust a few setpoints and you have everything under control.
Enter the STC-1000, a little cheap temperature controller found on eBay, Amazon, everywhere. It comes in a bunch of different versions, need readout in Farenheight or Centigrade? No problem. I have no idea who makes it, some asian factory somewhere. It is available in a hundred different brand names from hundreds of different sellers for somewhere between $12 and $25, all absolutely identical as far I as can tell.
The STC-1000 is cheap. Cheap enough that I am somewhat suspect of their reliability. I do not buy them for production line bioreactors and grow tanks, places where I cannot trust a cheap controller with a few thousand dollars worth of product. For critical uses I buy full industrial rated temperature controllers from a reputable supplier for around $100 each.
But for experimental setups? Temporary research hacks built with more limited budgets? There are a couple dozen of these STC-1000 controllers around the place. They are easy to use with simple configurations, seem to be accurate holding calibration, and I have not had one fail yet.
So how do you sell a device like this for about $15?
Time for a little deconstructive analysis…
Continue reading “What is safe?”Padding the Bottom Line
A number of recent trends in our commercial systems have created absurd results. Supply train disruptions, inflation, or in many cases corporate greed have distorted pricing in just about every sector of the economy. We are awash in examples of oddly high prices, shrinkflation, or outright price gouging.
In my role of head engineer/maintenance supervisor for a small company I get to see these price increases first hand. I do much of the purchasing, from screws and valves, to large industrial transformers. I have also been on the other side of the fence, in manufacturing, and have a good idea of the real costs of things, what plastic and electronic bits and bobs cost to make at the factory.
We have seen a lot of price increases as of late, and much of that is to be expected… Inflation, increased labor costs, and just plain shortages in a world that is must less stable than a few years ago. But some price increases seem more than a bit out of line with all of that.
Continue reading “Padding the Bottom Line”The Start
I somehow always miss the very start of the eruption.
For episode 9 I was just a couple miles away in another part of the park when the eruption broke out.
For episode 15 I had been on the rim for hours waiting for the expected start when I finally gave up and went to grab breakfast. The eruption started while I was waiting for my omlette at the Crater Rim Cafe.
This time I saw it.
Continue reading “The Start”Treasured Tools
I find I have a number of tools about that have a name on them, a name that is not mine.
No, I did not steal them!!
A couple of these names belong to people I once knew, guys that are no longer here to argue about ownership of these tools.
Yes, I have tools with the names of dead guys.
Continue reading “Treasured Tools”Fellows Nudibranch
Workbench Mess
Betwixt the Realms
For all of the many times I have done it, I have never gotten tired of typing a command, or clicking a button on a screen, and watching something happen in the real world.
An LED turning on, the click of a relay, or even a motor beginning to spin… These represent a moment when the seemingly ethereal digital realm of our computers interact with the physical domain.
I have spent my entire career dealing in the interface between the ethereal and the physical, working where the two meet. Turning sensor readings into digital, and then turning the digital into actions in the everyday world. I played with this interface as a teenager, learning the basics. My wisely chosen college degree was tailored to this task, an electrical engineering degree with a heavy dose of computer science. Professionally I have dealt with microcontrollers, high performance analog to digital systems, and programmable logic controllers, all straddling the boundary line from digital to physical.
Continue reading “Betwixt the Realms”M96 Group in Leo
