Smoke, Flowers, Solar, Inlays and more Stuff

If you look down towards the feed mill at the end of my street you’ll see all of the haze we’re dealing with at the moment. That’s smoke from the Canadian wildfires and it’s so bad at the moment that they’ve issued warnings that its unhealthy to even be outside. When I go outside it frankly stinks like a trash fire. Someone on television said that being outdoors right for a day would be the equivalent of smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. Judging from the way it looks, smells and feels out there, I would think that is not an exaggeration.

There’s not much we can do about it. We have the house closed up tight, with three room sized HEPA filters running full out and the furnace fans circulating the air in the house through its filters. I’d love to be outside at the moment. Temperature is around 72 degrees, ideal for things like gardening, riding the bike, etc. But I had a severe case of bronchitis and/or pneumonia (they never did figure out which it was, exactly) some time ago and ever since my lungs were never the same so when things get like this I stay in the house as much as I can.

The EG4 12000XP is working nicely. Mostly. After getting the battery communications situation straightened out I have had a couple of curious issues with it that we’re working to resolve. More about that in a moment. Otherwise it’s been doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. In the photo above it’s hooked to a 2KW solar array. You’ll note that it’s only bringing in a little over 1 KW and that’s because of guess what? Yeah, the smoke. It’s amazing how the haze from the wildfire smoke causes solar production to plummet. Almost all of that power is going into the batteries in the photo up there because the house isn’t switched over to the inverter yet. The 21 W it’s currently showing is what the inverter itself uses.

I really like the display on this unit. It is so much easier to read and understand than the displays on the 6500EX units were. The 12000 shows pretty much everything I need to see right here on the main screen. With the 6500EX I had to scroll through a half dozen different screens to get the same information.

But the issues… Twice now I’ve had the inverter trip out with an “Overload” error message and my son and I are both scratching our heads over that because there was no overload of anything. At the time it tripped out the total load on it from the house was only around 2.5 KW total on both legs and this thing is supposed to be able to handle up to a 12KW load, 6KW on each leg. So what caused it to trip out?

I haven’t been able to do much experimenting with it because we’ve had so much cloudy weather of late. Hopefully I’ll be able to “exercise” it, so to speak, more fully once the weather clears up and we can track down what the problem is.

As you can see we’ve been harvesting onions and picking some of the young carrots. The onions are brought into the garage where they will be laid out on a screen for about two weeks to cure them. The curing process basically allows the outer layers of the onion to dry and harden which protects them from rot and mildew. They’re left to dry in a fairly warm, dry place for a couple of weeks to cure, then we pack them loosely into net bags and hang them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage. If properly cured and then stored they can last for months.

We also just peel them, dice them up and freeze them for use later in sauces, chili, tacos, etc. The texture does break down and they get soft but the flavor is still there. We do the same thing with cilantro, freezing it in blocks in ice cube trays in either water or olive oil. That works out really well. When we’re making chili or tacos or something we just pull out a cube of cilantro and throw it in the pot with the rest of the ingredients.

My wife and I both love cone flowers. They’re in all their glory right now. They put on a double show for us. First when the come into flower like they are right now, and then in the fall after the flowers have faded and the finches go after the seeds. We’ll get dozens of goldfinches coming to feast on the seeds in the fall. And best of all, it takes us zero work and expense to grow them. enough seed falls to the ground that they re-seed themselves and they don’t require any work at all in the gardens. They’re even quite drought tolerant.

I’m very, very lucky to have a very nicely maintained trail network just a few miles from my house!

Someone asked if I was still going out on the bike and the answer is definitely yes. I just don’t bring it up much here because I figured people were getting bored with it. I try to put on 10 – 15 miles a day, three or four days a week, and about 5 miles the other three or four days.

I have one of those Garmin fitness tracker thingies with built in GPS. I tried one of those fitness tracker aps on my phone but most of them are worthless and the ones that actually worked reasonably well deluged me with non-stop spam trying to sell me subscriptions and I don’t know what all else. All I want is something that records milage, shows my route, and that’s about it.

It’s a Garmin Edge 130. It’s a tiny little thing that clips to the handlebars of the bike. It has a fairly small, black and white LCD screen that displays things like elapsed time, speed, etc. It’s handy little gadget if ridiculously pricy. I think the dopey thing goes for about $200 these days. That’s like twice what I paid for mine a couple of years ago. I’m not sure why the price has damn near doubled since then.

I am not recommending you get one. I honestly don’t think it’s worth $200. It pairs with an app on my iPhone that gives me all sorts of data that I really don’t give a fig about, to be honest. I don’t know why people obsess so much about things like calories burned, cadence, respiratory rates, hydration and all that guff. If I were in training for the tour de France yeah, I might care. But I’m just an old duffer who likes to know how far he’s gone and can show the wife a map of where I went so she doesn’t think I’m cheating and only getting as far as the local pub.

When I’m out in the country on the bike I might bop along at 10 – 14 MPH but it’ll take me two hours to do 10 miles because I’m constantly stopping to take photos. Every time I come across a cluster of flowers or some interesting looking plants or hear an unfamiliar bird call I’m stopping and looking and listening and photographing. When you run into clusters of flowers like those up there in that photo how can you not stop and look?

And I’m still experimenting with the Falcon laser. I’ve been fiddling around experimenting with doing inlay and other things. I was wondering if I could get a sort of stained glass effect by inlaying translucent acrylic into wooden outlines and that seems to actually work in the simple experiments I’ve tried. I’m also going to try combining it with another hobby of mine, making epoxy resin castings to make decorative panels. If anything comes of that I’ll let you know.

Catching Up: GF Blows Up Inveters, Gardening, and Even More Stuff

Solar Stuff

Yes, you saw that right, I blew up the EG4-6500EX inverters on my solar power system. No, not on purpose.

Newly “decomissioned”. I.e. junked.

I am still kicking myself. Look, in addition to farming and everything else I’ve worked at over my lifetime, I’ve in the building trades as well for years, especially building maintenance. My first job after MrsGF and I got married was building maintenance where I did carpentry, drywalling,. plumbing, electrical, concrete work… Especially electrical. The first year I worked for that company I spent the entire summer on the roof, rewiring all of the Reznor rooftop air handling units and putting in new panels down in the basement to feed them, and the rest of the summer rewiring the lift station, irrigation pump and boilers. If it was anything to do with building or maintaining a building and its systems, I’ve done it. Over the years I’ve gone through literally hundreds of hours of training on electrical systems, plumbing, fire suppression systems, alarm systems, building codes, the NEC, etc. So I know how to do this stuff.

All of which makes me even more upset with myself because I did something really stupid because of a momentary lapse of concentration. I thought something was shut off that wasn’t, plugged something in that I shouldn’t have plugged in and BANG… I blew up about$3,oo0 worth of inverters.

There was no property damage, except to the inverters,. no one got injured or anything like that. But it never should have happened.

To make a long story short. I had to spend close to $3.000 to buy a replacement inverter. There is a sort of silver lining to this, though, because I replaced the two 6500’s with that beast over there on the left. That’s an EG4 12000XP off grid inverter and to say it is very, very nice and light years better than the 6500s is an understatement.

It was easy to install. It took longer to drill the holes in our poured concrete basement wall to put up the mounting brackets than it did to wire it in. I should add that it is very, very heavy, weighing in at over 100 lbs.

It’s up and running, powering the entire house at the moment, and just purring along with no muss or fuss or headaches.

Not all was “plug ‘n play”, though. At first it wouldn’t communicate with my EGR-LL batteries. It didn’t even “see” that they were there even though it was getting power from them and would turn on.

Here I have to give a shout out to the folks at Signature Solar where I bought the inverter. I submitted a report to their customer service department via their website and within 12 hours I got back a very detailed response that explained what the problem was and how to fix it, including screen shots of the menu options on both the batteries and the inverter, pictures of the actual DIP switch settings, everything I needed to correct the communications problem. Within half an hour of getting the email from them I had the problems fixed and it was running exactly as it should.

Also I got in the mounting hardware for the new solar panels that are going to be going up on the garage roof. Close to 5 KW of new. bifacial solar panels are going to be going up there yet this summer. I should have a grand total of something like 7.5 KW of solar panels up before the end of the summer. Not sure when that will happen, though. MrsGF caught me about 25 feet up a spruce tree in the backyard hanging up a new antenna that one day early this year and now she won’t let me climb anything higher than a step stool so I’m going to have to depend on my sons finding time to get out here on a weekend and put the new panels up.

Anyway, more on that as things progress.

Gardening Stuff

This has been one of the best growing seasons so far that I can remember. Temperatures haven’t been too extreme, we’ve had regular rainfall and enough of it so that we’ve only had to water things once so far this year. And the plants out in the garden have responded by growing spectacularly. Here are a few photos to show you.

This photo is outdated. That little head is now over a foot across!
The cilantro has been going absolutely crazy. We’ve been harvesting the stuff since late May and it’s still going strong. None of this will go to waste. About half of it will be harvested and frozen for use in sauces, etc. during the year. The rest will bve allowed to go to seed for planting next year and for coriander.
Tomatoes with onions planted around the border. The onions are already being harvested pulled, allowed to harden off and will go into storage.
And the flowers this year are absolutely spectacular
Not a flower. A frog. Trying very hard to pretend he’s not being seen. I think he’s an Eastern Gray tree frog. Normally on a tree these little guys are darn near invisible but somehow he ended up on the railing on our porch and he doesn’t exactly blend in.

Other stuff

Yes, I’m still playing with the Falcon laser engraver and I am still enormously pleased with how well it works. I still think it is hands down the best 10W diode laser for the money on the market.

Solar Prices

If you’re in the market for solar panels right now you have my sympathy. All of the deals I was talking about earlier are now long gone and prices have gone up anywhere from 50% to as much as 100% or more. Panels in the 300 – 400W range which I was seeing for around $70 – $100 range are now up to around $150. The 400 – 450W bifacial panels I got back in February for $107 are long gone. Panels in the 400 – 500W range are now up to at least $175 – $200.

To give you an idea of just how badly we are being ripped off by our own government, solar panels we’re paying $200 for are selling for around $70 or less in the EU.

This is perhaps a good place to end this with the reminder that tariffs are not paid by the country of origin. Tariffs are a tax, on us. We pay it, you and I and anyone who imports or buys products from overseas. Not the country of origin. We do. This isn’t punishing China or Canada or whoever over unfair trade practices, this is punishing us, people already stretched to the breaking point by ever rising prices, stagnant incomes and a government that’s more interested in making up snarky memes to insult members of the opposition than it is in actually fixing our problems. Read some of the history of this country. We’ve gone down this path before and it nearly bankrupted the country.

Why Does Anyone Put Up With Broadcast Television?

I gave up on commercial television several decades ago and that was a decision that I never regretted. I’ve never seen Friends. I’ve never seen Seinfeld. I’ve never seen Big Bang Theory. Name any of the television shows over the last few years, and I can confidently tell you that except for possibly a few seconds accidental exposure, I haven’t seen any of it. And guess what? It hasn’t killed me, hasn’t resulted in me being ostracized from society and. indeed hasn’t had one single detrimental thing happen in my life. In fact one could argue that it’s been enormously beneficial. I read several books a week. I garden, I dabble with electronics, woodworking. computers, engraving, needle work. cooking,, photography, drawing…. And people don’t understand how I have the time to do all of that. It’s because I don’t waste years of my life watching the drivel being served up by the commercial television producers.

And having to sit through the evening news from one of the big networks the other day made me vividly remember one of the reasons why.

News starts. Teasers telling me of important stories that really aren’t all that important and don’t actually give any information in the hopes of making me keep watching. Lead story about the flood in Texas that lasts about a minute. Another teaser about an upcoming story. Duration about 2 minutes total before cutting to 3 minutes of commercials for prescription drugs and “supplements” that basically are nothing but snake oil.

Return from commercial. Thirty second blurb about something Trump said. Cut to 4 minutes of commercials for more drugs and a health insurance scam.

Thirty second blurb about something Rubio said. Cut to 2 and a half minutes of commercials for laxatives and two more drugs with side effects more terrifying than the illness they treat.

Thirty second blurb about Gaza. Cut to 2 minutes of commercials for more “supplements” and an ad for a drug.

One minute story about how hot it is. Cut to ad for scam Medicare Advantage insurance and two minutes of drug commercials.

Thirty second blurb about deportations. Cut to 3 minutes of commercials.

The “lead story” finally appears. An “in depth” story about tariffs that lasts all of a minute and a half before cutting to… you guessed it, more commercials.

Back to the 30 seconds of news followed by minutes of drug commercials…

In that entire half hour the actual amount of real information that was shown could have been presented in less than a few paragraphs of text that I could have read in about five minutes.

Dear sweet lord, why do people put up with this crap?

Can I Laser XXXX? Let’s Find Out!

So I have this nifty new laser engraver, the Falcon A1. Let’s see what it can do and see if there are some interesting ways you could make money with one of these in the process.

Can I Laser a Rock?

So I went outside and picked up a few rocks that would fit on the laser just to see what would happen. Let’s start with this one:

It’s not very big, about half in inch thick, maybe two inches wide and a bit longer. I think it’s basic limestone. Maybe? Can the Falcon engrave it? Let’s see what happens if I chuck it under the laser.

And the result is this below:

Well, okay, that’s cool. It will engrave rock. And it does a pretty nice job of it, too. It doesn’t just discolor the stone, it actually engraves it well below the surface.

I tried it with a different stone I found and got this:

If you absolutely have to have the settings I used on the Falcon A1, this was done at a speed of about 350mm at 100% power with air assist turned on.

So it absolutely will engrave stone (and presumably things like brick, cement, slate, etc.) The requirements are that it has to be thin enough to fit under the laser, and it has to have a relatively flat surface to focus the laser on. I’ve since tried it on other types of stone and got the same excellent results.

Judging from the crap I see for sale in the tourist trap shops up in Door County, engraved rocks are definitely sellable. Engrave a nice sized smooth rock of some attractive color with some pithy saying or meme or some touching image, maybe a cat licking it’s butt or something, and people will actually pay actual real money for a rock you picked up along the side of the road. Amazing, isn’t it?

Or you can do what I do which is start your own conspiracy theory. Engrave some rocks with mysterious symbols, odd latin phrases like “Anates titillare iucundum est” (tickling ducks is fun), etc. and leave them scattered around public places.

Will It Engrave Clear Acrylic Plastic?

Ah, well, technically no, but also yes. Sort of.

With your typical diode laser the frequency of the laser is such that it will pass directly through transparent materials like clear glass or clear acrylic plastic without doing anything at all to it.

But we’re dealing with energy here, and energy can be transformed and transferred. In the case of clear plastic we need some way to transform the energy of the laser beam into heat that will impact the clear material in the form of heat that will cause the plastic to melt, but only melt where we want it to melt.

Now if you go on Youtube or wherever you’ll see people offering up all kinds of odd tricks to get a diode laser to engrave clear plastic, ranging from special expensive films you adhere to it, special paints or coatings, etc.

Forget about all of that nonsense. All you need is a piece of black card stock.

I’ve been picking up this stuff below:

A 50 sheet tablet of about 8 X 11 inch black card stock for $5 from Walmart.

Seriously. This is all you need to ‘engrave’ clear acrylic. Forget about all those expensive sprays or ‘laser films’ or any of that crap. I’ve tried them all and while they sometimes will sort of work, maybe, they’re not worth the effort or the money. The easiest to use and the best and most consistent results I’ve gotten are using plain black cardstock.

First lay the paper down on the bed of your laser like it is up there in that photo.

Then take your acrylic sheet and peel the protective plastic film off both sides of it.

Be careful with this stuff when handling it once you peel the protective film off it. It can scratch very, very easily and you can very easily ruin a relatively expensive piece of acrylic if you aren’t careful!

Focus your laser on the paper not on the plastic. Then lay the plastic sheet on top of the paper. We aren’t engraving the plastic, we’re going to be directing the energy from the laser onto the paper. The laser will pass straight through the plastic and that energy is going to be transferred to the paper to generate heat which in turn will melt the backside of the plastic.

Yes, the paper will char and smoke. That’s normal. The heat from the paper absorbing the energy of the laser will cause the plastic to melt and we end up with an effect that looks like etching. You’re going to have to experiment to find that out the settings for your particular unit. Every laser is different. But for the record the settings I used on the Falcon A1 for clear acrylic were a speed 0f 1800mm at 30% power.

You are absolutely going to need to experiment to get the settings right. Every laser engraver is different. Heck, for that matter acrylic sometimes isn’t that consistent either. So you’re going to need to experiment with the speed and power levels.

I’ll warn you right away that when it’s done it is going to look horrible. Something like this, probably.

Ewww, nasty!

Don’t worry! All it takes to clean that up is put it under running water and scrub with a soft sponge or clean, microfiber towel. Don’t use paper towels! The particular plastic I’m using here is relatively tough but a lot of these plastics are pretty soft and even a paper towel will scratch them.

What I ended up with was this:

Ah, I didn’t tell you about the lighted sign thing yet, did I? I found these cheap edge lighted sign thingies when I was scrounging around on Amazon one day and stumbled across this:

They were cheap, looked interesting, and I decided to buy ’em and see what I could do with them. I’m a sucker for anything I can turn into a bad joke, and these had huge potential. I mean at worst I’m out twenty bucks. You get four of ’em, the lighted base with multicolored LEDs in it, a remote control, and four blank acrylic sheets, two oval, two square for $23. So a bit over $5 each. I mean heck, I can’t even get lunch at McDonalds for five bucks. And I’ve seen these dopy things in the tourist trap shops up in Door County going for $12 – $20 and people actually buy them. Seriously.

Can It Engrave Glass

Sure. Sort of. Kinda. But it’s the same thing with glass as it is with clear acrylic. the frequency of the laser in this thing is such that it passes straight through clear glass.

I think I showed you that plate over there on the left before. If not, well, there it is, glass engraved, sort of, with the Falcon A1.

Now I should point out that the laser isn’t actually engraving anything in the sense that it is cutting or gouging out a layer of glass. Nor is it melting anything as it does with acrylic.

What’s happening with glass is something I’ve been told is called micro-fracturing. The trick is to get a very small area of the glass to absorb the energy of the laser and convert it to heat. The intense heat in that tiny spot causes that small area of glass to rapidly expand and fracture causing the glass to basically shatter and fall away from the main body of the object you’re working with.

Now I don’t have video or photos of me actually doing that because this was an early experiment, but I’ll tell you how I did it.

Once again if you go to the (cough cough) experts on Youtube they’ll tell you about all sorts of exotic and ridiculously expensive products you need to buy to do this. And as was the case with using clear acrylic plastic, forget about all of that crap. You don’t need expensive films, special paints or sprays or anything. All you need is this:

That up there is all you need, dirt cheap, 84 cent black tempura paint from Walmart or Hobby Lobby or the dollar store or wherever you buy school supplies. That and one of those disposable foam brushes.

Unlike the case with acrylic where we’re actually working with the backside of the plastic, with glass we’re going to be working with the top surface, so you’d focus your laser on the top of the glass.

Squeeze some of the paint out onto the surface of the glass and smooth it out with the foam brush. You want to get a thin but opaque layer of paint over the entire area where you’re going to be engraving. Try to avoid getting ridges or thick and thin spots. Try to be consistent. If the paint is too thick in places you won’t get that nice frosted effect. If it’s too thin it won’t look good either. If you think it’s too thick after it dries, no problem, just wash it off and try it again.

Once it’s dried chuck it under the laser and go have fun.

Again, you’re going to have to experiment with the settings to get it right. You can get some ball park figures about speed and power by looking up your own particular laser on-line and see what’s recommended. But remember you’re almost certainly going to have to tweak the settings. What I used on the Falcon A1 for this plate was a speed of 800 and a power level of 80%.

Safety First!!!

One very serious word of advice here. When you clean that piece of glass after you’re done, do not rub the etched surface with your fingers!!! It absolutely can shred your fingers! This works by literally shattering the glass and flaking of small pieces, so that surface there is covered with razor sharp pieces of glass. I scrub this vigorously under running water with a Scotchbrite pad to remove any remaining shards of glass and to knock down the sharp edges.

Here’s another thing you might want to think of as well when it comes to safety. As I said this works by fracturing the glass. breaking it away from the surface of the object. That means you’re going to have tiny, even microscopic shards of glass inside of your laser engraver during and after this process. I would very strongly urge you to have one heck of a good extraction fan on your engraver during this process and to vacuum out the interior of the engraver with a vacuum equipped with a HEPA filter. That is perhaps being a bit on the paranoid side, but I personally do not want to be breathing in microscopic shards of glass.

One other thing. The best types of glass to use for this seems to be the cheapest, crappiest glassware you can get your hands on. That’s given me the best results. For just messing around and experimenting I head for the nearest thrift shop. They generally have tons of glassware on the shelves for next to nothing. Avoid crystal, borosilicate glass, thin, delicate glasses, etc. Thin glass absolutely will shatter if you’re not careful.

Can It Engrave Steel?

Um, well, kind of? Maybe?

I did a batch of custom stainless steel bottle openers not long after I first got the laser using a type of powder coating that worked extremely well. That’s the result over there on the left. The coating is a sort of spray on powder and when it’s hit with the laser it turns a rich black color and bonds remarkably well to the surface of the metal. Not even scrubbing with a Scotchbrite pad made a dent in it.

But what about just plain, bare steel? Let’s see, shall we? But I already know that it isn’t going to work because there’s no way a 10W diode laser is going to be able to engrave…

Uh, okay, wait a minute. It worked? Seriously? It ended up looking like this:

Remember I said that a 10W diode laser can’t engrave steel. That is absolutely true. It just doesn’t have enough energy to engrave steel. Yes, I got a result, but that’s not engraved. What happened is that the heat from the laser discolored the steel, it didn’t actually engrave it. So it sort of worked, but kind of didn’t, at the same time. And it doesn’t seem to be permanent, either. After vigorous scrubbing with a Scotchbrite pad under running water, the black marking began to fade significantly. So while it will sort of discolor steel, it won’t engrave it and the discoloration fades. So if you want to “engrave” steel and get good, long lasting results, you’re going to need to resort to using the powder coating method I talked about earlier.

Can It Engrave Colored Acrylic?

Oh, yeah. No problem there at all. Remember laser engraving is all about the transfer of energy from the laser beam to the object being engraved. Transparent acyrlic and glass don’t work without resorting to some tricks because the laser will pass right through it. But colored acrylic is is opaque, more or less, and will indeed absorb the energy from the laser.

Here I’m using a sheet of orange acrylic.

The laser is going much slower than it really needed to in that video up there but I wa just starting to experiment and I hadn’t figured out the proper feed rates yet. It will cut colored acrylic much, much faster than that.

But basically yes, it works just fine with colored acrylic with no special coatings or prep work needed. Just peel off the protective paper from the plastic and go.

But there are some “gotchas”. Working with colored acrylics can be a bit tricky because different colors will absorb the energy of the laser at different rates. The settings that cut one color just fine may not work well with a different color. You’re going to have to experiment ti figure out the settings for each color you’re working with and for your particular laser.

And that’s it for now.

Laser Engravers: Creality Falcon A1 Review.

So I want to talk about laser engravers, specifically this beastie down below, the Creality Falcon A1 10W diode laser engraver/cutter. It’s fairly new to the market and hasn’t been on general sale for very long, and except for a few “influencers” on Youtube who got pre-production models for testing or were given one of them for free right after they came out, there haven’t been any real, honest reviews of this thing by people who have actually bought one with their own money and are actually using it, and using it hard, in real world conditions. A lot of you who read this are hobbyists, crafters, woodworkers and the like who tag along here for the rare article that pops up about this kind of stuff, so let’s take a look at this thing.

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while, you know I dabble in a lot of things like wood working, wood turning, photography, drawing and sketching, and, yes, laser engraving. The last time I talked about it was some time ago when I was running the LaserPecker. I was using it to crank out little novelty things and it was fun, but it was seriously limited in both size and power and eventually the jobs I had for it dwindled, I lost interest in it and put it up on the shelf.

But recently some people got in touch with me and wanted some stuff done; misc. artwork and some novelty items, and being a sucker, I said I’d look into it. I dug out the old Laserpecker and immediately realized that it was going to be woefully inadequate. I needed something that could handle engravings that were much larger than what the LP could do, and more importantly, I needed something that could actually cut material, which the LP couldn’t do at all. On top of that, the LP was getting tired. It was obvious that the laser’s power was diminishing from the few test runs I did. And even worse, it was slow. Dear lord it was slow. I’d forgotten just how painfully slow it could be. There are much newer, improved versions of the Lasterpecker on the market now, and I briefly looked at the newer versions of the LP and nearly had a heart attack when I saw the prices. The one model that did come close to doing what I needed to do was pushing $3,000 for heaven’s sake!

To make a long and boring story a bit less long (but still just as boring) I ended up with that gadget up there. And by my standards at least, it looked very nice indeed.

It had a generous working size of about 15″ by 12″, which was exactly what I needed. It also looked like it was reasonably fast, simple to use, and the previews I saw were pretty good. And the price wasn’t bad either, about $600. So I bought one and so far it’s been handling everything I’ve been throwing at it and I’m quite satisfied with it so far.

A big plus is that it comes completely assembled. A lot of these lasers, even some of the expensive ones, come basically as little more than a bunch of bags full of parts and screws, and you have to spend hours putting the stupid thing together. No. Just no. With the Falcon I just took it out of the box, removed the packing material, plugged in the computer, the power supply and the air pump, installed the software on the computer, and it was ready to go. I did the first engraving with it literally in less than half an hour after taking it out of the box.

It is fully enclosed, with large, see-thru plastic panels made of material that shield the user from the laser so you don’t have to wear those stupid safety goggles whenever it’s working. There are safety switches on the door that shuts down the laser immediately if they are opened. There’s even a key lock to let you lock it down in case you have kids or others who like to fiddle with things they shouldn’t.

I already have a fume extraction system set up that is used with soldering, the 3D printer, the old engravers, etc. A big turbine fan with 4 inch ducts that sucks everything up and blows it outside.

And because it’s fully enclosed, with it’s own fume extraction fan, it means you don’t have to buy or build your own enclosure to keep it from setting off every smoke detector in the house. Which it will definitely do because laser = burning. You’re firing a high energy laser beam at wood, plastic, etc. It burns stuff. And burning makes smoke and toxic fumes. A lot of it. So you absolutely, positively must have some kind of vent system to get that stuff out of the house. I have mine connected to a high speed turbine fan with 4″ ducts to pull the smoke and fumes out of the Falcon and blow them outside. Unless you can place the unit directly in front of a window or some kind of vent you can run the included hose through, you’re going to need some kind of powered fume extraction system similar to what I have because the hose it comes with is only about 4 feet long when fully extended and the fan really isn’t powerful enough to push the fumes and smoke out when using it hard for burning through something like 7mm wood.

It has a generous working area, as noted above. It can work with material up to about 15″ X 12″. But at the same time it can do extremely accurate, extremely tiny engravings with no loss of detail as well.

Fourth plus, it’s reasonably fast. Much, much faster than the old Laser Pecker was. Let me give you an example. Here’s a video of the LP at work.

That disk it’s engraving is small, only about an inch and a half across. So yeah, that’s slow. Painfully slow. When I got the LP originally I was fairly new to this and didn’t realize just how slow it was. I know better now.

For comparison, here’s the Falcon A1 at work doing a fairly intricate engraving.

As you can see it is much faster. What it’s engraving up there is more than twice the size of what the LP is doing, and it is much, much more detailed. I didn’t sit down with a stopwatch and time things, but at a guess the Falcon could do three of those very fine, intricate designs in the time it would take the LP to do a relatively low resolution, simple design on that little disk.

It even cuts wood reasonably fast, faster than the old LaserPecker did engraving alone. Here’s another video showing it in action cutting. It just finished the engraving job in the first video up there, 12 key fobs for the brewery, and now it’s cutting them out.

It’s difficult to see because of the tinting of the plastic shield but if you look closely you’ll see clouds of smoke billowing up from underneath the wood.

Pretty slick. That’s not very thick wood, true, that’s only about 1/8″ thick plywood in this case, but it slices through it with no problem at all. Oh, and in case you’re interested, over there on the right is one of the key tags after it came out of the laser, before finishing. I just hang ’em up on some wire in the garage and put a couple of coats of a clear polyurethane. I get 12 of those out of a single sheet of 1/8 inch thick, 12″ x 12″ pre-sanded plywood.

I started wondering just how thick it could go and threw in a piece of white oak scrap 3/8″ thick for the heck of it, and it did that over there on the left. I admit that it struggled a bit to do it. I had to slow the feed rate way down, but it still did it. Most of the time. Depending on the density of the wood I sometimes had to do two passes, but it cut it. I didn’t think a 10W diode laser could do that.

It can’t perform miracles, of course. Wood much thicker than that piece over there on the left is going to be just about impossible to cut no matter how slow you go or how many passes you make.

It can’t engrave metal. No low power, 10W diode laser can do that no matter what the advertisements may claim. It can’t cut even thin metal foil. You can use special coatings to get results like that over there on the left. That’s a stainless steel bottle opener. I did some of those as promotional items for the brewery down in Milwaukee. Yes, it was done with the Falcon, but that’s not engraved. It’s a type of powder coating. A special coating is applied to the steel, then the laser is run over it to melt and fuse the ceramic particles with the steel underneath. It is an extremely tough coating, too. Even scrubbing that with one of those abrasive “Scotch” pads won’t hurt it. It works way better than it has any right to, but it is not “engraving” as such.

The software that comes with it is reasonably decent, but could be much better. It can handle the basics of controlling the laser, but as a design environment it leaves a great deal to be desired. That’s fine for me because I use PhotoShop or Adobe Illustrator for all my design work anyway. You can do simple drawings, text, etc, import images and vector graphics, with the software it comes with, but it’s pretty basic stuff. You’re probably going to want to have an actual, real drawing program, something like Illustrator or something similar, to design/edit your graphics and then import them into the Falcon’s software to do the engraving/cutting.

There is a camera built into the lid of the machine which… Oh, heck, I was going to say it was a gimmick but it can be useful for aligning your drawing with the material you’re using. Sort of. You still want to use the good old fashioned “frame” function to have the laser head physically outline the engraving area before you actually start the engraving to check the alignment because the camera isn’t exactly the most accurate one I’ve ever seen. Even after going through the camera alignment procedure several times, it is still not 100% accurate, especially when close to the edges of the working area. So even when the camera is being used, you’re still going to want to use “frame” to check the alignment before starting a burn.

In order to work efficiently lasers need to be focused. The height of the laser above the item being engraved or cut needs to be set so the maximum amount of energy is delivered to the smallest possible area. As is the case with most of the lower priced laser engravers, this is done on this one by loosening those knurled knobs there on the right and manually raising or lowering the entire laser head up or down. Creality includes a little stepped alumium block specifically to help with the focus. Just lift the head up, lower it down until the nozzle touches the desired step on the block and tighten the knobs. Takes only a few seconds.

Let’s talk about that baseplate for a moment. Some people call it a “crumb tray” and I suppose it is, in a way. It catches bits of whatever it is that you’re cutting. It is also there to protect the table you have the engraver sitting on from the laser, and to help contain smoke and fumes to make it easier to extract them before they get into your house/shop. Even though the base plate is screwed down when it comes from the factory, you’re going to want to remove the 4 screws that hold it down so you can remove the tray easily for cleaning. You’ll also need to remove it and install risers on the base of the machine if you want to use the rotary attachment.

If you take a close look at that base plate or crumb tray, you can’t help but notice how beat up it looks. It’s charred, burned, covered in cooked on carbon and tar from burning wood and is just plain nasty. The reason why is because when cutting wood, that laser beam burns straight through the material and directly impacts that plate. One thing I ding Creality for is not including a honeycomb work platform like the one below with the A1.

If you’re going to be cutting anything with a laser, you absolutely need something like this, or something like this extruded aluminum one below that is what I’ve come to favor more.

Notice the scorch marks, carbon build up and even outright damage that’s already been done to that aluminum grid up there from just a few hours of use with only a 10 watt laser.

And you absolutely need something like this if you’re cutting material with a laser. It helps to prevent flashback that can damage your material, helps with fume/smoke extraction, helps dissipate heat that might cause your material to warp, etc. Especially flashback. This is where the laser burns through the material, hits the underlying surface, and reflects back up to damage the backside of the material you’re working with.

IMO every laser that is capable of cutting material should come with one of these. I’ve come to prefer the extruded aluminum one but the honeycomb version works just as well.

Okay, let’s wrap this review up. You have probably realized that I really like this unit. I’ve been using it and using it hard since I got it. It’s got dozens of hours on it already in just the few weeks I’ve had it, and it’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it.

The good:

  • It come fully assembled, nothing to bolt together. Just unpack it, connect the wires and tube for the air pump and go.
  • It’s simple to operate. Even a novice should be able to get it up and running within an hour or so of unpacking it and setting it up.
  • Build quality is excellent. Fit and finish is superb. It’s made of quality materials and is very sturdy and well designed. No squeaks, no rattles, nothing. Everything was square and level right out of the box.
  • While it’s rated at 10W of power, it works far better than its wattage would indicate. It easily handles cutting dense plywood up to 1/4″ thick and was able to cut through 3/8″ thick solid white oak for heavens sake. I have to slow the feed rate way down, of course, but that it cuts material that thick cleanly is impressive for a 10W laser. Of course the air pump helps enormously with that. It makes a huge difference. But a 10W laser cutting thick wood that easily is still impressive.
  • It is fully enclosed which makes both fume/smoke extraction and eye safety far easier. Safety switches prevent the laser from operating if either of the covers are open, so you don’t have to wear eye protection when it’s in operation.
  • It is reasonably fast, at least as fast as any other laser in its price range.
  • Laser positioning is extremely accurate and the thickness of the kerf (the amount of material actually removed when cutting) is so tiny that finger joints when making boxes were so tight the box up there on the right didn’t need glue to hold it together. This also results in extremely fine engraving lines.
  • It is LightBurn compatible. LightBurn is the software that most professionals use to run laser engravers/cutters. Some makers, for reasons I’ve never understood, try to make their equipment as proprietary as possible, locking you into using their software and their’s alone. I don’t use it myself, the basic functions of the software it comes with are just fine for me and will be for most people. But being compatible with Lightburn is a big plus.
  • So far it has been absolutely rock solid dependable. I got this thing back on April 10. It is now May 23 as I write this and the Falcon has been running 4 – 7 hours a day, almost every day, since I got it, without missing a beat. That’s probably far more usage than it would get from the usual crafter or hobbyist user. It’s been a real work horse so far.

The bad, and yes, there are a few things.

**Last Minute Edit**

I said that there is no manual for the software originally. That’s recently changed. They now have a manual for the software online at: https://wiki.creality.com/en/laser-engraver/software-manual Even better it isn’t actualy horrible. Mostly. It’s at least good enough that you’ll get the basics down before you start using it. You’ll still need to do some experimenting I suspect.

  • The lack of error reporting, either via a display on the unit itself or at least via the software, is troubling. There is basically no way to figure out what’s wrong if something does glitch. About four times now the unit has not responded when trying to engrave something. it just sat there beeping. I have absolutely no idea why. In each case turning it off, waiting a couple of minutes, then turning it back on, cleared whatever the problem was.
  • while I give them credit a built in fan and a vent hose to provide some fume extraction, the fan built into the unit really isn’t strong enough and the provided hose isn’t long enough to do you much good unless you have the unit parked right in front of a window. If you can’t put it in front of a window, you’re going to absolutely need some kind of supplementary fume extraction method to get the smoke and toxic fumes out of your workspace.
  • It absolutely should come with a honeycomb bed for cutting. This is, IMO, an essential item and it should come with one out of the box, it shouldn’t be an extra cost option.
  • Calibrating the camera is a pain in the neck, and requires you to waste an entire 12X12 sheet of wood or cardboard. Even worse, even after following the instructions explicitly multiple times, the camera positioning still is not accurate, especially when you get farther away from the center of the workspace.

Conclusion – I’m sort of nitpicking here with the “con” listing. None of those things are really a deal killer. Creality got a lot right with this thing. The price point and capability of this aims it squarely at people who are at the point where they’ve outgrown the cheap, slow, open frame beginner’s engravers that are really not good for much except for messing around, and who are ready to move up to something that is a serious tool that can do serious work, but who can’t afford or who aren’t ready yet to drop a couple of thousand dollars on a professional level laser. I don’t know how well the Falcon A1 would hold up in a professional production situation, but I’ve been using this thing hard since I got it, working it far harder than the average hobbyist would, and it’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it.

The Usual Disclaimer: I get no financial compensation from Creality or any other company. I purchased the Falcon A1 at full retail price with my own money. I’ve had no contact with the company at all.

Catching Up: Spring, solar, lasers, Oh My

Well it’s spring, or so they tell me. And judging from the lack of posts here it seems I’ve been hibernating most of the winter, doesn’t it?

After a ridiculously warm winter we’ve had a ridiculously cold spring. It isn’t until now, early May, that we’ve gotten reasonably warm temperatures during the day, although it’s still plunging down to near freezing at night. Anyway, the daffodils are in full bloom, even some of the irises are popping open which is always delightful to see.

MrsGF has had her seedling operation going in the basement for some time already. We have tomatoes, brussel sprouts, peppers and I don’t know what all else popping up in the little greenhouse down there. We have onion sets ready to go out as soon as the weather improves. The garlic she planted seems to be thriving. She only put in about a dozen garlic cloves and somehow all of them seem to have survived the winter and are now about 8 inches tall out behind the garage near the solar panels.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I love bicycling, and by this time of year I should have been going out almost every day. But thanks to the cold weather that hasn’t been happening. I’ve managed to get out exactly twice since mid-April. It is very frustrating.

Solar Stuff

I think I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of solar panels with the intention of getting them up on the roof of the garage to supplement my rather pathetic 2KW of panels leaning up against the back of the house. Alas, that hasn’t happened either because of the poor weather. Hopefully soon. MrsGF has a fit when she sees me up on a ladder or on a roof, so getting those mounted is going to have to depend on when my sons can get over here to work on it. And I suppose I better actually order the mounting hardware, shouldn’t I?

I just got done completely rewiring the entire AC side of the solar power system to bring it up to snuff so it will pass an inspection. It’s configured a bit differently this time. The inverters struggled to keep the central air conditioning running, to the point where we couldn’t run on solar if we had to use the AC. That meant that whenever the weather got hot, we were entirely on the grid, which was not a good thing. The system has been rewired now so that both the AC and the electric clothes dryer are always connected to the grid while the rest of the house can be switched over to the solar system. So we’ll be able to keep cool and do laundry while running the rest of the house off solar.

Also this brings the system into compliance with electrical codes and it’s passed inspection.

Laser Stuff

This is one of the reasons why I’ve been so busy that blog posts have been neglected. If you’ve been following grouchyfarmer for a while, you know that I’m sort of an artist/electronics geek/computer geek/maker/… Well, you get the idea I suppose. Years ago I got a deal on a cheap, flat bed laser engraver. While it was fun to play with, it was also woefully slow, cranky, fiddly, annoying, had zero safety equipment, zero smoke control, inaccurate, but fun.

And it sparked some ideas as well. Commercial ideas that eventually developed into actual products. I eventually got a much better, much faster, much more accurate and much more useful laser, and I started cranking out things like company logos, art projects, things like that. I didn’t do a lot of it because despite what you may see on YouTube, there really isn’t any actual money in doing this kind of thing unless you’re willing to invest the time, money, and especially the equipment, into going into it almost at an industrial scale. What mattered to me was that I was enjoying it, it gave me an outlet for this need I had for artistic expression and all that high minded guff, and it gave me an excuse to play with a lot of high tech equipment.

I thought that part of my life was pretty much done with, though. I was getting a bit tired of it. Technology was moving on, if I was going to continue doing it I was going to have to get serious about learning Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator at a level that was deeper than I really wanted to get involved with. And to top it off my laser engravers were starting to show their age.

And then stuff started happening. People I’d made things for before started asking about doing more, the brewing company told me that all of the joke coasters I’d done for them had been stolen and they wanted more and oh, could I look into doing a few promotional items for them like maybe branded keyfobs or bottle openers. And then I was getting the urge to make “art” again…

Okay, to make a long story short, i got a new laser engraver/cutter and I’m back in the business again. And yes I’m going to bore you with all of the details, but not in this post. I’ll reserve that for a different time because to cover everything I want to talk about is going to take some space.

That’s about it for now. It’s actually nice out today, so I’m heading out to put a few miles on the bike.

Random Thoughts & Stuff

Ah, the joys of insomnia! Well I’m not sure if I should call it insomnia or not. I have no trouble falling asleep at all. The problem is I wake up after about 4 hours. And I mean wake up. About 3 AM rolls around and I wake up, fully, totally awake, not tired at all, fully alert, with sleep the last thing I want to do. I feel as if I’ve had a full, complete night’s rest. By about 10 or 11 AM I’m starting to feel a bit tired, take an hour nap or so, and I’m good for the rest of the day. I’m not sure what the heck is going on, but that’s the way things have been going here for the last month or so. Occasionally I’ll sleep to 5 or 6 AM, but that’s rare.

So what does one do at 4 AM when the rest of the world is asleep? Well, stuff like this….

I draw stuff, sometimes. When I’m in the mood. I fire up Photoshop on the big computer and drawing tablet and start fiddling around with a combination of sketching and filling and mix in some AI stuff and I end up with things like that up there. I start sketching things out, fill in bits and pieces with the AI thingie, fiddle around with smoothing and blending, adding more detail and eventually I end up with something that I, at least, like.

Book Pricing

So they got me working on pricing books again, this time children’s books. It’s fascinating. The price ranges on some of this stuff is fascinating. I was looking up that book over there on the left just a short time ago. The Berenstain books are considered “classics”, I suppose, like Seuss’s books. But they printed these things in the millions. It isn’t like they’re collector’s items or something.

But damn, some people try. If you look that one up over there on places like eBay you’ll find people asking mind bogglingly huge amounts of money for it. The highest price I found someone asking for this book was $240.

Seriously. Someone was asking $240 for that book up there. Another was a more “reasonable” $190.

If you dig around further you’ll find that the real selling price for that book, in reasonably good condition, is about $3.

The sellers of these high priced versions must think that there is someone, somewhere out there, who is stupid enough to pay $200 or more for a $3 book?j

Once in a while I run into a gem. I found one rather obscure Little Golden Book, a first edition with a very rare cover color, that was legitimately selling for big $$$. In pristine condition it was going for well over $100 for some reason. Alas, the one we had was not in pristine condition. In that kind of condition it was going for $40 or so. So by our standard policy we charge about 1/3 of what the retail price is, so I should probably put about $10 – $12 on it. But who’s going to pay that kind of money for a kid’s book around here? Oh, well. Not my problem. I slapped a not on it explaining it to the manager and I’ll let her decide what to do with it.

Solar Repairs and Theft???

The weather is fantastic out there right now, in the mid-50s, almost 30 degrees warmer than it was this time yesterday, so I took advantage of that to make some repairs to the solar panels. A couple of weeks ago I got up and looked out the window in the dim light of dawn and saw what looked like one of my solar panels laying face down in the middle of the yard?? WTF?

I bundled up and went out. Sure enough, one of the panels was laying out there, with the MP4 connectors ripped right off of the cables. At first MrsGF and I figured a gust of wind had caught it. They’re just leaning up against the side of the garage after all. But if that was the case why only one? Those panels are all wired together. If the wind caught one, the wires and connectors would be more than strong enough to pull several of the others along with it.

So I checked the historical data from the weather station in the backyard and we had almost no wind at all that night. The biggest gust we had was only 5 MPH for the previous 24 hours. So obviously it hadn’t been the wind.

So I went out and looked around again and… There wasn’t much snow out there, only in parts of the yard, and there were what looked suspiciously like the footprints of someone cutting through the backyards of my place and the neighbors’ yards. I figure some nimrod was stumbling home half drunk or something, went “Ooo, free solar panels!” and it wasn’t until after he’d ripped one free he realized that trying to lug around a 5 foot tall, 3 foot wide, 40 lb solar panel at two in the morning wasn’t a good idea and just dropped it.

Anyway, I hate trying to do wiring in cold weather. My fingers are clumsy enough as it is. Besides, the weather was so cloudy we hadn’t gotten enough sun to bother switching over to solar anyway. But today being bright and sunny and even warm, I spent a half hour trying to find where I’d put my MP4 connectors, crimping tools, etc. and then went out and got everything hooked up again.

Then held my breath, kept the fire extinguisher handy just in case I screwed up, switched everything on and… and it worked? Yeah, it worked.

So we got the solar going again, just in time for the spring sun. Even with some high haze I’m pulling in enough sun power to run the whole house off the panels. We’re pulling in 1.8KW at the moment.

Then, of course, I have the new panels sitting in the garage waiting. Getting those up is outside of my control. MrsGF won’t let me go on the roof any more for some reason. Not that I pay any attention to that when she’s not around, of course. She caught up up the spruce tree in the backyard one day stringing up antenna wires. Ooo, was she mad…

Anyway, we’re back on solar again, finally!

Catching Up. Bored… So bored… Records. And Solar Update

Wow, has it been that long since I posted anything? Sheesh… Well the fact of the matter is that there really hasn’t been much to talk about until now. Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters we’ve been… bored… so bored…

That started to change though beginning with this nonsense just below.

Yeah, snow. I know, I know, this is Wisconsin and snow is something we just live with. Or, rather we did. Snow has been a scarce commodity around here until just this past week. Winter resorts are literally going bankrupt because we pretty much haven’t had a real winter until this past week.

But then in the middle of February, now first we get hit. We got close to a foot and a half of snow in just about a week, and then the cold hit, with wind chill temperatures down around -35F and still air temperatures of around -10.

The local St. Vincent dePaul society where MrsGF and I both volunteer has been keeping me busy, though. Our primary fund raising method is a thrift store that the organization operates. We get donations of gently used clothing, furniture, appliances, cookware, etc. which we, in turn, sort, clean, and turn around and sell to the general public in the store. So they put me to work sorting, grading, cleaning and pricing a variety of stuff, including books, video games and vinyl records.

We don’t get a huge amount of vinyl records in. I suspect that most of them come from someone cleaning out Grandmother’s house after she moved into an assisted living center or has passed away, and they don’t know what to do with the stuff. We don’t mind.

You’d think it would be dull work but it’s actually quite interesting, especially the records. I’m not a collector or music fanatic or anything like that, but I do appreciate good music and I have a small collection of vinyl records and an excellent turntable. So I do like my music. My tastes wander all over the place from stuff ragtime, jazz and dance music from the 1920s and 30s, up to more modern stuff. I’m a creature of my generation, though, so my preferences run towards pop/rock music from the 60s and 70s.

My job is to sort through all of this stuff, check the condition of each record to make sure it’s playable. A lot of them aren’t. I’d say about 20% of them or more are so badly scratched or otherwise damaged that they go straight into the bin.

If they do look playable, they get run through that yellow thing over there on the right. If you dabble in used vinyl records at all you need one of these, or at least something like it. That’s a record washer. It’s filled with filtered water to which a record cleaning solution has been added. The record slides down into the tank just keeping the label out of the solution. It’s then clamped between two microfiber pads soaked with the solution and rotated around a few times. Dry it with a microfiber cloth or let it stand on a rack to air dry. It removes not just the dust and all that, it removes finger prints, dirt embedded in the grooves, etc. I’ve taken records that were unplayable and after running them through that thing they’ve come out sounding almost as if they were brand new.

Then I play them. Well, not all of them. I mean some of those records are the stuff of nightmares, depending on your musical tastes. But enough to determine if the record is in good enough condition to sell.

Then there’s pricing. We’re a thrift store, not an antique shop. We have a limited amount of storage and retail space, so we need to move product through the store as fast as possible. Plus we aren’t out to try to make a killing on some “rare” collectable. The rule of thumb we follow is that we take the average price an item sells for on the used market, and we charge 1/3 of that price. So if a record’s average selling price is, oh, $10 on eBay or one of the other pricing sources we use, we mark it at $3.

Not that I really need to worry about anything like that. The most expensive vinyl record I ran into so far was a rare special edition jazz recording from the early 1960s put out by, of all things, a high end paper manufacturer. The B side was pleasant, generic, 1960s style smooth jazz. The A side was something entirely different. Each track started out with a recording of a different printing press in operation, and then the musicians would come in, matching the tempo and tone of the printing press’s mechanical noises, blending into a smooth melody and eventually the mechanical noises would fade into the background leaving only the music. It was unique and actually worked surprisingly well. The album jacket was designed for a 2 disc set, but the second pocket wasn’t for another disc, it was for paper samples from the paper company. Alas, those were not in with the recording itself. I had a devil of a time finding any information at all about it. For a moment there I thought we might have something that might justify going to the trouble of putting it up for auction, but eventually I tracked it down and found that the last recorded sale of it was for only about $35.

The other day the manager of the store presented me with a whole stack of video game manuals. No games, just the manuals. I didn’t think they were worth anything. I was wrong, she told me. There apparently is a thriving market for just the game manuals. Oddly enough, sometimes the manuals alone sell for more than the actual game disc sells for.

And books… So many books… Modern mass market paperbacks and even hard covers just get shoved on the shelf for a set price. But we get a lot of very old, antique books as well. You’d think that a 120 year old book would be worth something, but most likely it isn’t. So many authors and titles that I’d never heard of before, and for good reason. Either our ancestors were very easily pleased, or publishers were putting out just as much pure crap as they are today.

Occasionally I’ll run across a gem, like a first edition of a popular author like Agatha Christie or something like that. But even those aren’t worth that much no matter what you might see on Antiques Road Show.

Solar stuff… You’re going to be hearing more about this later once the weather gets better. A big ass truck showed up at my front door yesterday and dropped this off:

Solar panels. Lots and lots of solar panels. Damn, those suckers were heavy. That pallet there weighs around 700 lbs. Fortunately the driver very graciously helped me wrestle it up the driveway and into the garage. Even better, all of the were intact with no shipping damage!

This spring or early summer the entire solar system is going to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Those are 430W bifacial panels that I got for a ridiculously cheap price, $109 each from Signature Solar. I don’t really care about the bifacial part, it was that price that got my attention. Even MrsGF told me I was nuts if I didn’t grab a bunch of them for that.

The south facing roof of the garage is going to get covered with those, the existing 2.2 KW of existing panels are going to continue living on the backside of the garage, and when all is said and done I should have about 6 or more KW of solar panels out there, which ought to really piss off the utility company because I should have enough power coming in now to be able to shut off the main breaker and run the house entirely on solar.

Since all of the existing PV wiring is going to have to be pulled out anyway, we’re going to scrap all of the existing wiring and re-do all of it. it’s going to be a pain in the neck but if we’re to meet building codes it has to be done. We’re going to need larger PV wiring, larger circuit breakers and fuses, run new conduit, etc. anyway so we might as well re-work everything, re-route the conduit into more convenient locations, etc.

Random Stuff: Rockets, Pi5, Fake Milk, AirPods and More Wierd Weather

Artemis Delayed Again:

R.I.P. SLS?

Once again NASA has delayed the next launch of Artemis, the space agency’s program that is supposed to take astronauts back to the moon using what is one of the most complicated and, frankly, bizarre schemes that even NASA has ever come up with. Artemis, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Orion space craft that is supposed to carry astronauts is riddled with problems that include gas leaks and heat shield failures. (Nice job there, Boeing) It’s attempt to use it to send astronauts to the ISS ended in failure and when seirious leaks and other problems were discovered after it docked at the ISS and the astronauts were stranded had to wait for a flight from SpaceX to get back home. And the rest of the moon program is even worse. NASA still doesn’t have a lunar spacesuit, doesn’t have a lunar lander, doesn’t have the “mini” space station that will orbit the moon that it says it needs, doesn’t have… Well, it doesn’t have anything it needs to make this work, really. According to NASA’s original time table, the agency should already have astronauts on the moon or be nearly ready to land them there. In reality, we’re looking at mid-2026 before the Artemis is even ready to fly again thanks to numerous problems that have including gas leaks and issues with the heat shield, and it’s going to be years beyond that before anyone actually gets to the moon

And as for the SLS itself, it is so much over budget and will cost so much to launch, that no one knows how the program can even continue. I’ve seen estimates of as much as $2.5 billion per launch. Rumor has it that there’s about a 50/50 chance the whole program will be scrapped. Considering the progress SpaceX has made with its Starship program, it’s going to have similar heavy launch capabilities for a fraction of the cost, so why is NASA even dumping all that money into that black hole in the first place?

Apple AirPods Pro

I love music of all kinds and probably have spent way too much on speakers, turntables, albums, etc. in my life. I’ve had Apple’s basic AirPod headphones, one of the first versions, for a long time but didn’t use them all that often because I found them awkward to use, they fell out of my ears frequently, and while the sound quality was surprisingly good, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as what came out of my stereo system speakers. But along came Black Friday and there was a huge discount on the AirPod Pro. So I got a set for a Christmas present for one of my sons and at that price I couldn’t resist getting some for myself as well.

I’m no expert on headphones. As I said my only experience with these things were the original AirPods. So when I plugged these things into my ears it was quite a shock.

First I thought I’d gone deaf because suddenly I couldn’t hear anything. Not the kitchen exhaust fan, not the furnace fan, not the air filter, not the cat’s water fountain, nothing. There was almost utter, total silence. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurbs for the things because if I had I’d have realized that the Pro model comes with noise canceling technology. And it works so well it’s almost scary. Noise canceling can be turned off, or it can be set to let in some ambient sound and things like that. But at first I couldn’t believe how quiet it suddenly got.

Then I fired up Amazon Prime Music and started going through my playlists. Holy sh*t… I’d never heard anything quite like it before. How the hell do they get something that small to sound that good?

Then there the other goodies, like being able to take phone calls with the things (paired with my phone), interact with Apple’s Siri, and other goodies I haven’t had a chance to explore yet. There are built in microphones for phone calls. There are accelerometers that can sense when I nod yes or shake my head no to respond to Siri, pressure sensitive switch in one of the stems to switch modes or to pause music or switch to the next track.

Like I said, I’m no expert on headphones. Far from it. But damn, these things are good. I might write about them later after I’ve had a chance to use them more.

Pi5 SSD

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while you probably know I love the Raspberry Pi computers. Basically the Pi 4 and 5 models are full blown computers costing less than $100, running a version of Linux. Just plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and you have yourself a pretty darn nice little Linux computer that can do just about anything you need to do with a computer, except for things like hard core gaming, video editing, etc. that requires a huge amount of processing power and/or memory. Plus it’s easy to connect to the outside world to work as a controller for robotics and other goodies.

One of the biggest pains in the butt when it comes to the Pi computers has been its reliance on micro SD cards for booting/data storage. Micro SD cards are a serious bottleneck. They have a limited lifespan and for modern computing needs they’re woefully slow. But the new Pi5 can handle modern SSD drives with the addition of a simple plug in board, making it much, much more reliable and much faster. You can roll your own, or you can get one complete with a 250 gig SSD and the add on card, with Rasberian (the Pi’s version of Linux) already installed and ready to go from Canakit for about $200. And I got my hot little hands on one.

I only just started playing with it, so this is something I’ll probably bring up in the future once I have a chance to put it through its paces. But my early impression is that wow, this thing is neat. I wouldn’t have though it would be that much fast than the Pi5s I have that run off the SD card, but yeah, it is. Much, much faster. Using a real SSD instead of that micro SD card makes a huge difference.

Fake Milk

I’m not a big fan of things like almond “milk” and all that stuff. Most of it is, frankly, crap. Horrible taste, non-milk like textures, and the only reason they can claim it’s “healthy” is because the manufacturers shovel in vitamins and minerals from external sources because the tiny, tiny amount of actual real nuts in that “milk” have very little nutritional value.

But over the years I’ve become increasingly sensitive to dairy for some reason. I can’t eat ice cream any more, for example, without experiencing a great deal of gastrointestinal distress. Nor can I eat cold cereal with milk. A bit of cream in my coffee doesn’t bother me. Much. Cheese isn’t a problem. But drinking milk? No way in hell. My eldest son is even worse than I am.

I don’t normally make product recommendations like this, but I have to bring this one up.

So I’ve kind of been keeping an eye out for some kind of fake milk that is reasonably close to the same texture as real dairy milk, and I think I’ve found one. That’s it over there on the left. I picked it up as an impulse buy when I was at Walmart the other day.

The texture, mouthfeel and all of that is pretty similar to a rather rich whole milk. And while it doesn’t taste anything at all like dairy milk, the flavor is pleasant. And even more impressive, it’s a reasonably good substitute for the half and half I normally put in my coffee. And it’s good enough that I might even be able to start eating cold cereal once more. I told my son about it and he picked some up and he loves the stuff.

If you absolutely need to have some kind of milk-like substance for your cereal or coffee or cerealor whatever and can’t handle dairy milk, you might want to give this a try.

Weird Weather

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It’s no secret that the weather has been weird for some time now. After the warmest winter we ever had last year, one of the warmest summers we’ve had, and one of the warmest autumns we ever had, temperatures abruptly dropped to well below zero for a few days with some light snow, then abruptly jumped up to 40° with rain… Then we had dense fog for a couple of days.

The brief period of cold resulted in a lot of lakes in the area developing a very thin layer of ice, and people being people, the DNR and the sheriff’s department has had to issue warnings to people to stay the hell off the ice. I’ve heard news stories almost every day of idiots venturing out onto ice that’s still way, way too thin, falling through and having to be rescued.