Took a wrong turn on the way to ADM and ended up passing through Abcoude and then stopping in Muiderslot for lunch.

Today I learned that I've been doing the Coppergate wrong and you're supposed to pick up two from the old row, not one, which really interconnects them even more strongly.

The planets and moon are positions close enough to accurate given that the whole system has a few percent error (and the arms aren't to scale). Jupiter will need to be recalibrated roughly every two years since it has the largest mismatch in gearing.

Now to write a little bit of javascript to compute the angles of the planets for a given date using the ephemeris tables, and then to convert the heliocentric ecliptic longitude to geocentric coordinates to allow calibration of the orrery's arms.

The slowest speed in "wheel mode" for the STS3215 servo is still much too fast for the orrery's 20 minutes per revolution and the position mode doesn't allow wrap around, so I've made an outer loop controller that runs wheel mode once every ten seconds for a few milliseconds and uses the position feedback to stop at the right spot.

This random aluminum is not making chips.

Starting on the big print for the base with a 72-tooth worm drive that will turn at 20 minutes per revolution to make the entire orrery rotate once per day.

"We're not assuming your age, but if you're buying ancient Pokemon cards from a vending machine we have a pretty good guess"

My new clock has an once per day hour hand and complications for the lunar phase, plus geocentric position of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter.

I did mess up the constraint for the gear diameter so the end support was too close to the worm wheel teeth. A little subtractive manufacturing atop the additive fixed it so I didn't have to print another test fixture.

Moving on to the drive mechanism, I'm testing the ST3215 continuous rotation servo turning a chonky 1.5mm worm gear and matching helical involute gear. The driver has an esp32-c3 built in so I can also use it for clock synchronisation.

now this is a useful set of measurements for the ST3215 servo compared to the vendor provided data sheet.

Datasheet authors: Please remember to actually include the dimensions for the mounting holes! I'm glad you told me the four hole pattern is M2, but what is the spacing?

Rational dress implies irrational dress, real dress, and imaginary dress.

Ortlieb has some striking color choices if I were shopping for a new drybag.

Apparently SoftBank has been doing Geese-themed briefings since at least 2020 when the Golden Goose was part of their turbocharger strategy. https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/2020/earnings-presentation_q3fy2020_01_en.pdf

I was actually looking up the etymology of "dickhead" to see if it existed in gollyplot's time and one of the citations was "The Adventures of Whittington and His Cat" https://hachyderm.io/@http_error_418/116806193816646688

Somehow I've only now learned about Dick Whittington's cat, which he bought for a penny and sent aboard a ship as his investment in the voyage. When the ship reached the Barbary coast they met a King who had trouble with rats and who bought the cat for more than the goods in the hold, thereby making Dick very rich. https://archive.org/details/adventuresofwhit00albaiala/mode/2up

Team Oranje's biggest fans. #HupHolland

One way to beat the heat