I have that same microscope. It's.. basic as far as the camera goes, and I long for the days when I had access to a stereoscope - but it works okay. Annoying to try and remember what the default directx webcam app is.

 

I did not try it on my win or linux machines, but it is PnP on Mac OS. Basic yes, but in my case invaluable at $20 for scrutinizing PCBs. I was impressed with the DoF on it for the price- expected much less. This a 45° tilt off the face of the PCB:


straight on penny detail:

 

That looks a lot clearer than mine, same body different guts I guess.

 

So...heading in on Tuesday for arthroscopic surgery to clean up what is hopefully just some scar tissue and not damaged cartilage in my left ankle. Will be in a walking boot for 6-8 weeks after that.

Anyone had success operating a clutch with a walking boot? Not sure my wife is going to appreciate driving me back and forth to work for 2 months.

 

I've done it while wearing the XXL boot (size 14), and while it takes a little while to get used to not having ankle movement, it's definitely possible.

 

Sooo. I need a software consultant/rewriter/undoer. Pays. PM me.

This message will self destruct.

 

Saw your other post. What platform & OS does this code run on?



In unrelated news, it turns out that Bitcoin isn't merely useless as a currency, it's also a major polluter:




BITCOIN MINING GUZZLES ENERGY—AND ITS CARBON FOOTPRINT JUST KEEPS GROWING
AUTHOR: ERIC HOLTHAUSERIC HOLTHAUS
SCIENCE
12.06.1709:00 AM





If you’re like me, you’ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin phenomenon for years — because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and I should both start paying attention now.

Last week, the value of a single bitcoin broke the $10,000 barrier for the first time. Over the weekend, the price nearly hit $12,000. At the beginning of this year, it was less than $1,000.

If you had bought $100 in bitcoin back in 2011, your investment would be worth nearly $4 million today. All over the internet there are stories of people who treated their friends to lunch a few years ago and, as a novelty, paid with bitcoin. Those same people are now realizing that if they’d just paid in cash and held onto their digital currency, they’d now have enough money to buy a house.

That sort of precipitous rise is stunning, of course, but bitcoin wasn’t intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself—a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.

But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What’s more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it’s getting worse.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin provide a unique service: Financial transactions that don’t require governments to issue currency or banks to process payments. Writing in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson calls bitcoin an “ingenious and potentially transformative technology” that the entire economy could be built on — the currency equivalent of the internet. Some are even speculating that bitcoin could someday make the US dollar obsolete.

But the rise of bitcoin is also happening at a specific moment in history: Humanity is decades behind schedule on counteracting climate change, and every action in this era should be evaluated on its net impact on the climate. Increasingly, bitcoin is failing the test.

Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power. As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called “mining”) get more and more difficult—a wrinkle designed to control the currency’s supply.

Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the US for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers combined.

The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge—an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.

That sort of electricity use is pulling energy from grids all over the world, where it could be charging electric vehicles and powering homes, to bitcoin-mining farms. In Venezuela, where rampant hyperinflation and subsidized electricity has led to a boom in bitcoin mining, rogue operations are now occasionally causing blackouts across the country. The world’s largest bitcoin mines are in China, where they siphon energy from huge hydroelectric dams, some of the cheapest sources of carbon-free energy in the world. One enterprising Tesla owner even attempted to rig up a mining operation in his car, to make use of free electricity at a public charging station.

In just a few months from now, at bitcoin’s current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what’s available, requiring new energy-generating plants. And with the climate conscious racing to replace fossil fuel-base plants with renewable energy sources, new stress on the grid means more facilities using dirty technologies. By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.

This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can’t continue.

There are already several efforts underway to reform how the bitcoin network processes transactions, with the hope that it’ll one day require less electricity to make new coins. But as with other technological advances like irrigation in agriculture and outdoor LED lighting, more efficient systems for mining bitcoin could have the effect of attracting thousands of new miners.

It’s certain that the increasing energy burden of bitcoin transactions will divert progress from electrifying the world and reducing global carbon emissions. In fact, I’d guess it probably already has. The only question at this point is: by how much?

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-...keeps-growing/

 

Corporate just sent out an email to the whole company, telling us not to use company computers to mine bitcoin Whoever was doing that, was a genius, at least till they got caught. Disclaimer, it was not me.

 

Did they specify just Bitcoin?

 

Oddly enough, yes. *Ethereum mining intensifies*

 

Question for all you home-owning peeps. Can anyone tell me what this is for?





It's clearly a pump.

It's located in a utility closet on the ground floor of a 4 story house in Chicago. The lowest part of this house is level with grade (no basement), so it's not a sump pump. The house is equipped with a conventional water heater and forced-air HVAC system. There is no hydronic (radiant / baseboard) heating system. The home was constructed in 2005, so it's not an ejector pump. The 1/2" pipe running off to the lower-right of frame goes to a floor drain, and the quarter-turn valve inline with it is closed.



This is bugging me.

 

Booster pump to get to a top floor? It looks to have a pressure regulator on it maybe as to not over pressure the top floor. Now that inlet to that pump looks to be 1/2" out of the right wall? Or is it 1" into the ground, can't tell? If it's 1/2" and it goes to 1" that's kinda a fail. This picture also makes it look like the outlet is on the motor instead of the pump housing.

 

The 1/2" section looks to be either provisions to drain the line (for service on the aft pump stage) and/or a pressure relief valve of some kind (although the ball valve doesn't quite compute with that). I take it this is a cold line, yes?

 

Quoting from my post above:
Yes, the 1/2" section is a drain line. All lines were cold when I felt them. I wish I'd have gotten better photos of the pressure gauges, but my recollection is that they were both within the range of 1-2 bar above atmospheric.




You may be right, in that this may be a booster pump. Assuming the large-diameter tube is the main feedwater line into the home, the arrangement of the piping and valves would place the pump inline with the supply feed when the quarter-turn valve is open and the multi-turn valve is closed, with the multi-turn valve serving as a bypass across the pump in the event of failure.

This puzzles me. I live on the 3rd floor of a building in the same neighborhood as this house, and my late-night sleuthing of the mechanical spaces has not revealed any booster pumps. The average SFH in this area is 3 stories, and at least 50% of them predate WWI (some of them predate the Spanish-American War), so I can't imagine that the local water supply is insufficient to serve a 3-4 story home.

 

Call the bomb squad.^

 

So my next questions are, does the pump run? Bonus question, when does it run and what triggers it to run? If it doesn't run, or we don't know what triggers it, open the gate valve, shut the ball valves and see what the water is like. Also, what is on the top floors that requires water?

Most municipal water systems can supply enough water pressure during peak hours which will reach the 3rd story easily. You may just be in an area which has a water tower or some pressure / supply system that does not supply enough. I've seen well water systems that have multiple in line booster systems to provide a good pressure throughout a homestead. We have a few booster pumps in some locations of some of our plants just to get a little more pressure on certain tanks for mechanical agitation.

 

It did not run during the time which I observed it. This was during an open-house, as it was for sale at the time.

Probably still is for sale, and will be for quite some time. *Really* shitty layout. Very small bedrooms, and not one but two "bonus" rooms which are essentially useless.

Horrible house.

EDIT: this is the place: https://click.mail.zillow.com/f/a/K4...ndtofriend-hdp

Tragic.





The kitchen is on the second floor. The bedrooms are on the third floor. The entirety of the fourth floor is a bonus room which contains a wet bar:






The last building I lived in was 56 floors, and it had its own water system.

The building I'm in now is 4 floors, and so far as I've been able to find, it does not have its own water system and / or booster pumps.

However, based on analysis of the plumbing, I believe this is in fact a booster pump.



Pity. The place had some really great views off the two decks.

 

It could be a hot water recirc pump. We use them on ships due to the size of the piping systems, if we didn't have them I would never get hot water to my room (being on an upper deck). Normally the pump will be running all the time so when you open a hot water tap, you get hot water quickly. Given the bathrooms in this house are on the third floor, the owners might have figured out having a recirc pump would save time and money on their hot water bill.

 

Well, FTC robotics season is over for us. Yesterday's competition at regionals was fierce, and we couldn't catch a break. 5th place in points, if we only could have won a match. As it was, we finished near the bottom. As only 3 teams out of 24 go on to super regionals, we just weren't good enough to keep up with the top dogs. A lot of future engineers in these teams, and a lot of real talent, too.

All this with a team of mostly 7th graders (most teams are comprised of high school students), and half of them girls. We came out swinging, and crushed the field in the first match. Second match, everything went wrong, but we finished mid-field anyway. This time we came close, but it all is for nothing if you can't hold your own against the best. I am proud of my kids; they all worked hard. But I have to say I'm almost glad we didn't move on, as this whole thing has taken way too much time, and I grow weary of it.

 

It is awesome you work with a FTC team. My fiancee is a judge for FRC. She started out as a mentor years ago and has slowly worked her way up. I have always enjoyed going to the events and seeing what the teenagers can come up with.