Flightless Angels

So I’ve done a couple of conversions with the current setup and it’s apparent that I need to make a few changes.
The first is the camera; my digital SLR took about 18,000 frames for 2 films and that’s really bad for the mechanical systems. So I’m now using this Samsung NX200 mirror less unit. It’s around 20 megapixels and has an APS-C sensor.

However, it doesn’t have a remote shutter connection (which I should have checked out) so I built this mechanical actuator.

It’s a block of balsa which fits snugly over the camera. On the top is a relay and solenoid which mechanically activates the shutter.

I need to document this a little better. I’ve been working on an 8mm film to video converter for some time. Here’s a quick look.

I just got the board running and it’ll be shooting a particularly boring movie overnight to make sure my timing is ok.

So called because that’s what’s printed on the PCB, this is one of the units I received a few weeks back.

Here’s the underside of the Throwie showing a couple of rare earth magnets glued into some Sugru.

Sadly I think I was a little enthusiastic pushing everything together in the case and I damaged the LiPo battery, which swelled up and wouldn’t hold a charge. I swapped it out for a larger one I had and put them in heatshrink.

The new units I ordered behave slightly different from my first one and I’ll have to modify the code anyway.

Here’s the ATTiny45 installed into the camera case, “dead bug” style. Btw the code for this is available at my Github repo.

We’ve all seen this before – the ‘broken spoke’ which seems to me to be the most common failure of the contemporary umbrella, from the $4 street corner specials to the $20 upmarket models with the ‘lifetime guarantee’, which I assume means the lifetime of the average housefly.

This is particularly aggravating to me because although the metal can be recycled the lifetime of an umbrella is incredibly short considering how often it is actually used. In my case my umbrella had not even been in the wind; it’s just so poorly made that part of it broke.

Here’s an internal examination of the problem, which in this case is a complete break of the outer spokes away from the core. It’s really very sad.

And also very aggravating because the root cause of these problems is the bottom-dollar riveting used

This metal is so soft in the cheaper models that I can dent it with a thumbnail. Even the expensive models such as this one (no names but it rhymes with “boats”) they obviously aren’t’ up to the job.

There is hope however, if you have a pair of pliers and an Ebay account- these are ‘barbells’ used in piercing and body modification. I bought a few because they’re so cheap (about $1.50 per) and I imagine that more rivets will fail. They’re made of stainless steel and have a threaded ball at one end.

So, using your pair of pliers, pull out the old rivets and replace them with the barbells. I recommend a dab of Loctite to keep the ball from coming unthreaded.

It’s a little bit fiddly but once it’s done the umbrella is returned to full working order and you can walk with a little spring in your step that you’ve kept your umbrella out of the landfill for a little while longer.

I discovered that one corner of the base is 1.5″ too high do the walls aren’t square. There’s enough flexibility for me to pull it into place, luckily.