Birdbrain

As always, the bird center was a lot of fun(but also a lot of work)! Been back home a few days now and I am slowly back working on the latest video.

We had about 4000 birds throughout the time I was there. Pretty good!

Here, have a long-tailed tit, the most common bird we caught during that time.

Mostly been long tailed tits and goldcrests this time around. But I have had a day on a previous year where I ringed some 600+ blue tits and back then there was certainly just a little bit of blood drawn by the end of the day.

Sometimes the bird center visitors ask which bird is the hardest to deal with...
Of the common species, eurasian blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus) are certainly one of the fiercest. Their pecks and bites hurt quite a bit and after ringing hundreds of them in a single day, one's fingers will be hurting!

A tawny owl held by the image author.

Something I have not talked about in my videos, but could perhaps be quite obvious from my "name" and avatar is that I quite like birds!

In-fact, I somewhat regularly still work with birds to this day. And so, I once again find myself volunteering at Kabli bird center!

Here, have a tawny owl <3

Ah, this motor is not going to be paired with anything fancy most likely. I already have a cheap chinese e-bike/e-scooter ESC that I will be trying to set it up with.

My DIY e-bike motor finally spins up for the first time! <3

Granted, it's not using the proper speed controller yet (which in turn is *totally* not controlled improperly through an Arduino... oops), which means it is running undervolted and in a much narrower speed range than it should.

3D-printed large scale replica of the Intel 4004 chip showing the metallization and polysilicon traces as well as the diffusion wells. Banana for scale.

While I wait for the epoxy of my new diy motor stator to dry, I spent some time making a kind of art piece to put up on the wall at home. It's around 1:100 scale 3d printed "replica" of the Intel 4004 chip silicon die... the world's first commercially available CPU.

3D printed motor chassis bulging out of shape by about a millimeter.

Unfortunately, what I was afraid would happen, did happen. 1cm thick 100% infill petg is just not rigid enough to fight against the >100kg of attractive force between the magnets on the rotor and the electrical steel in the stator. Redesign incoming, but means the video will be delayed further.

And yes, those hall effect sensors are exactly as jank as they look! <3

Today is the day. A project I have been working on on- and off for the past 2 years by now, is finally (hopefully) getting completed today. Hopefully it works as intended and I can get the video about it out in the not too far future!

Nah, just a cheap chinese e-bike ESC. At least, that's currently the plan.

Photo of a DIY axial flux motor stator.

It's finally happening! Epoxy cast for the diy e-bike motor stator was successful... First assembly and tests in the next few days!

Cheap pressure cooker + old membrane vacuum pump + random leftover tubing and parts = vacuum chamber for epoxy degassing!

Goldcrests, the smallest birds in Europe, regularly fly insane distances compared to their body size during migration. Ie. last fall a goldcrest we ringed at Kabli, Estonia, was caught 5 days later in Denmark, 850km away! Interpolated to human size, that'd be like traversing about 16000km in 5 days!