Life, The Universe, and Everything

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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Apr 13, 2018 6:22 pm

16' done, 32' to go...
20180413-1832-Roof-49.jpg
CurtisF helping on the new roof....


This needed substantial new rafter/supports, rework inside on the ceiling, insulation "at all" (no wonder it was hard to heat) and then...new roof sheathing and so on...next is tear down that panel rack
and get going on the rest. After some rest (it's going to rain, but we beat it this time).
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Apr 18, 2018 7:14 pm

But wait, there's more! Instead of two racks of 8 panels total - some of which were 35 years old and finally getting weak, it now looks like this:
20180418-1913-Solar-1.jpg
Progress, new panels

Bill, Curtis and I worked all day on this and got more of the roofing replaced with new metal, and these racks up and bolted down. A few hundred watts becomes what should be ~1200 now.
More shade on roof in summer plus power for air conditioning sounds like a win. These are off the roof a bit so as to allow snow to shed in winter, which is when they're actually the most valuable, as they catch low angle sun far better than ones south (on the workshop) closer to tall trees.

Left to do is roofing and insulation for the last 18', which includes my bedroom...pulling up the wood to do the insulation is a bear, but when it's done, we're really done.

I'm still pecking on the little issues with the fusor...I rewound the primary of the HV transformer since I was burning up the existing one, mostly I think due to skin resistance effects. Now it's essentially high current litz wire. We'll be testing that soon, then moving up the frequency range which is what the data is saying we should do.
Whew...this is a lot of work.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Bob Reite » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:02 pm

Litz wire should work quite nicely. Broadcast Electronics now winds the coils in their current production AM broadcast rigs with Litz wire instead of the big traditional silver plated coils. Takes up less room and I would imagine costs less now.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Apr 19, 2018 10:59 pm

I'll test and report back on the winding. I replaced 1 piece of #14 with 6 of #20, and lengthened the total winding length from about one inch to around 4" - which I needed to do to keep the #20's flat, which isn't quite like litz but...it's what would fit well.

I'd gotten smoke out of the old one, which I assumed was due to wire loss alone (as the wire going up there was also getting hot) but it seems there's a new pinhole in the sched 40 pipe this was inside, which means that there's probably also one in the > 3/8" thick plastic insulation inside the HV coild form. I've never knowingly gotten this above ~15kv, so IMO that should never have happened....sigh.

The new panels are wired but it was too cloudy to do more than check that they were wired up right today..more on that later.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Sun May 20, 2018 8:53 am

Some handy stuff. I've put some of my pi and arduino work together into a "full fat" pi image and put it up on google drive - at least until they decide to charge me more for that space/bandwidth.
Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2y99 ... i10ZTIzNjQ

User for the pi images is pi, password is dotdot except for the database root which is ditdit (morse for "I" in either case...).

Full fat has it all, the toys mostly all ripped out, the good tools installed instead, some crucial dox and so on.
Full arduino support includes esp8266 and esp32 (this was not trivial) as well as the usual and there are tons of sketches and examples.
You could actually use this as a daily driver, kinda.
It has xtightvnc (far superior to the realvnc normally provided). The machine name is new3 (I did this on a new pi 3 b+).
You will have to run it at least once with wired ethernet, display and keyboard to set up the wifi to not point at my WAP for example, but it can be run headless as is if there's a wired connection or you get it on a WAP of your own.
Supports 5ghz as well as the rest in a b+, but also runs on a "plain" pi 3.

Enjoy...
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Jun 06, 2018 12:26 pm

Well, the big thrash on infrastructure is done, and my health while not perfect, is improving with time (and some surgery for the messed up finger and the cancer on my forehead).

Time to get back on fusor. Finally!

The next batch of testing is going to determine a little bit about how the mass spectrometer/ion trap equations map to this geometry and ion density - which here is large and variable compared to an ion trap which has no significant space charge or plasma polarization effects in it. While yeah, some other stuff decided to burn up, we have gear in depth, and tomorrow we get going again.

The miniVNA pro I got does work, and well mostly, but a glitch in the attenuator when used in the generator mode instantly fried our Tadiran 50W 100khz-100mhz broadband amplifier. Ow! (I bought some proper attenuators and some NOS mrf183s transistors). Don't forget that dummy load. This appears to have been the protoype of this AR piece that's so expensive they won't list the price (I asked and got a racing stripe on my undies from the answer). Maybe the AR one has more robust internal protection, it's certainly a lot larger physically.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Jun 15, 2018 7:54 pm

Believe it or not, this is improvement. Still one surgery to go on finger, but I've nearly fully caught up on infrastructure around here, and am back on it re fusor with some RF work and results soon to come (well, I hope).
Solar, check - extra most of the time, I can joyride the Volt off grid - finally...
Water system LAN of Things - new rev installed and working great.
Roof...well then, I have a new one that is insulated and doesn't leak.
Shop - getting back in there, doing a lot of anti-pack-rat work, I'm sure someone in the disposal area is going "WTF is this stuff and why in the country?".

Maybe I can get some new teeth after the finger, and it looks pretty good for the melanoma (well, it looks nasty but I think it's gone now).
All gravy - that was one rough period of time...
IMG_20180615_151224.jpg
Now it only feels like being hit with a baseball bat last week instead of 5 min ago. Whew.


Gettin' old must be real hard on sissies....
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Donovan Ready » Sat Jun 16, 2018 1:08 am

Hey, it's hard on everybody.

I've been pretty lucky with skin cancer, though. All of mine turn out to be basal cell carcinoma, not very invasive. Nice scar though, Doug. ;)
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Doug Coulter » Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:22 am

This was basal too, second time.
What baked my noodle...
The first time they "insisted" I go get radiation treatment...I went to the consult ($400) to find out they wanted me to commit to >$80k before starting - guaranteed it was gonna cost at least that (a few hits of 9MeV betas). Nice lady but I don't buy them a Cadillac without a little more relationship.

As it turned out, it would have been a complete waste of resources - the surgeon did a good job (same guy) and no remission in 2 years so...the rads of course would have missed this one entirely. I pointed this out to the insistent surgeon this time who was really wanting me to do the rads.

If I have to go bankrupt and give up all my life's work to become a parasite on society, what indeed did you do for me for *maybe* a few more days of life? Why would I want extra of a life not worth living, with a complete loss of self respect?

These guys live in another world...you could see the gears turn when I said this. These are people who can't even tell you what something costs on the way out of the office, as if you could run a biz without knowing paychecks rent and materials. Nope, we bill insurance at 10x our guess, get paid 1/3 of that usually,l and somehow live. If you're a cash guy we add 100% more because some won't pay. They of course never skip a meal.

I could, should I choose, do boron neutron capture therapy, seems I own a pretty decent and controllable neutron generator right here. Neutrons are expensive otherwise, which is why you don't hear more about that technique. Turns out many boron compounds (I did homework) are attracted to cancers. Neutrons make them go "bang" and give off some hot heavy particles, which are just enough to kill that one cell...
Boron-neutron-reaction.png
Well known to fusor types


The looks on their faces if you hand them a BNCT research paper are priceless (see what I did there?). You're not supposed to know more than the average practitioner!

I suspect that some who don't have insurance or would like to skip a lot of it and don't know how to mangle the system would appreciate this very excellent treatise on how to only pay the ~87% discounted price the government gets...if you don't need it, get a copy anyway, most of us have friends.
This one's real eye opening. All it took was a glance at it to get some of my med bills cut by 8 to 1. They say they don't know, but you can bet the office manager/billing supervisor does know...
Negotiate.odt
Written by a friend who was in the biz
(233.59 KiB) Downloaded 405 times
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything

Postby Donovan Ready » Sat Jun 16, 2018 1:49 pm

If you can trap the neutrons before you're sick from the treatment.. You know Boron is really toxic, so how do you target cancers? Via ointment for skin, but pretty useless elsewhere, I'd think. But I guess if you can produce enough Lithium, you wouldn't care too much.. :lol:

Every time I get a new doctor through my insurance, it takes at least two visits to convince them that I'm not like most of their patients. I've got Gray's anatomy in hardbound on my bookshelf, and have 1/3 of my extended family in nursing or telephone triage at 2:30 am..

Most of the rest are lawyers and law enforcement. :roll:
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