Life on the Rocks
Happy 4th of July
The state just enacted some stiff new penalties for illegal fireworks, effective immediately. This is in response to a really bad explosion at a house on Oahu last year that left a couple local families greiving. Wondering if this will have any real effect on the huge amount of illegal fireworks that get lit in our neighborhood for the 4th and New Years.
A few more patches…
Yes, this particular inner tube now has seven patches. Local roads are tough around here.
A Productive Weekend
I usually try to accomplish something each weekend, something I can look back upon and tell myself I did not waste my days off.
This weekend I accomplished a bit more than usual.
I did start the weekend with a fairly long todo list, one that still has unfinished business despite a good run at it. And, of course, a couple more items got added to the list as the weekend progressed.
Continue reading “A Productive Weekend”Land of Fogbows
The Saddle is the land of fogbows, they inhabit nearly every morning fog…
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”