spectura

~Spectura the fennec fox ‎♡‧₊˚ Furry artist ✎⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ Sustainability engineer and Electronics repair nerd~

[beggars-opera]

[specturalabs]

endless and horrifying this spiraling deep hole of dread. Its icy cold grip wraps around my heart again, its smoky tendrils attempting to break in, try to flow in my blood and reach into my brain. Manipulate me like puppet strings, deliver these intrusive thoughts directly into my psyche. But my heart has armor, it shines and reflects like a mirror. When it is present, the heart beats softly, the tendrils sliced off at the root. But the armor isn't always there, imagine my surprise when I wake without it. realizing I'm all alone, and my heart is once again laid bare. The armor pleads to me to be worn again. But for some reason, against my better judgement. When i enter the dreamlike state, I cannot seem to stop myself from attempting to remove the it.

[specturalabs]

spectura-arts; who stares back from the void mirror

[specturalabs]

haha weed

[specturalabs]

Arduino readout for a cold cathode vacuum gauge

I’m building an ultra high vacuum system, and have been accruing parts over time. I just recently wrote my first arduino program, a program that takes the voltage from the gauge, and converts it to a pressure reading in torr via a logarithmic scale equation.

The code is quite simple, thanks to the help of PaulRB and the fantastic arduino community forums!

#include <LiquidCrystal.h> #include <math.h> // initialize the library with the numbers of the interface pins LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2); // the setup routine runs once when you press reset:    void setup() {      // initialize serial communication at 9600 bits per second:      Serial.begin(9600);      pinMode(A0, INPUT);              //A0 is set as input      #define PRESSURE_SENSOR A0;            lcd.begin(16, 2);      lcd.print("MKS  Instruments");      lcd.setCursor(0, 1);      lcd.print("IMT Cold Cathode");      delay(6500);      lcd.clear();      lcd.print("Gauge Pressure:");          } // the loop routine runs over and over again forever:      void loop() {      float v = analogRead(A0);        //v is input voltage set as floating point unit on analogRead      v = v * 10.0 / 1024;             //v is 0-5v divider voltage measured from 0 to 1024 calculated to 0v to 10v scale      float p = pow(10, v - 11.000);   //p is pressure in torr, which is represented by k in the equation [P=10^(v-k)] which is-                                       // -11.000 (K  = 11.000 for Torr, 10.875 for mbar, 8.000 for microns, 8.875 for Pascal)       Serial.print(v);       char pressureE[8];       dtostre(p, pressureE, 1, 0);        // scientific format with 1 decimal places             lcd.setCursor(0, 1);       lcd.print(pressureE);       lcd.print(" Torr");    }

The code simply sets A0 as a floating point unit for voltage, which is 0-5v from the voltage divider. Then it is calculated back up to a 10v scale and interpolated using an equation based on the voltage/pressure table provided by the manufacturer.

The equation is P=10^(v-k) where p is pressure, v is voltage on a 10v scale and k is the unit, in this case torr, represented by 11.000. It calculates that in floating point, then displays it on an LCD screen in scientific notation using dtostre.

This code was the first program I have written from the ground up, and it was pretty daunting at first, but it was made easy and super rewarding by the community! :3

[specturalabs]

Debunking a NASA denialist

I saw this interesting picture today on a website for credulous fools on how NASA apparently fakes mars images by modifying images of Greenland..

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2018/03/nasa-film-crew-caught-behind-rocks-filming-rover-in-mars-like-devon-island-greenland-3600935.html

Now, I called bullshit immediatley on this, as it looks quite obvious someone not related to nasa photoshopped the image on the right, as the image on the left cannot be found on any official nasa sites. However, you can see a part of a metal boom on the rover.

The metal antenna boom is not from curiosity, but if you look at pictures of the opportunity/spirit rover you can see it is the tip of the low gain antenna. You can also see a white blanket with black cross hatching, this is the original landing blanket when the rover first landed, seen below.

however, no images of the initial opportunity landing match the angle and color, so I then looked for images from spirit, opportunity’s now nonfunctional sister rover. Once I knew it wasn't opportunity, it only took a few minutes to find the original NASA image the superimposed rover was ripped from.

Original NASA image:

So, just to compare. Below is the non-nasa fake:

as you can see, there are a lot of dickheads out there trying to convince people NASA is fake. It doesn't take much to debunk them, just diligence. watch yourself out there.

[specturalabs]

A finished museum-quality recreation of the Mysterium Xarxes as of 4E 201

If you are interestred in museum quality aged elder scrolls parchments/maps please see my etsy https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpectrHzLabs

[specturalabs]

The remains of the Mysterium Xarxes, 4E 201

[did-you-know]

Scientists invented fabric that makes electricity from motion and sunlight. To create the fabric, researchers at Georgia Tech wove together solar cell fibers with materials that generate power from movement. It could be used in “tents, curtains, or wearable garments,” meaning we’d virtually never be without power. Source

[fridjitzu]

[scarletgoldenthorn]

Y'all are fucking idiots. Clean energy will NEVER be enough to replace the energy we have now. We’d have to tear down DOZENS of forests just to fit enough windmills and solar panels to get even a QUARTER (probably less, tbh) of the energy we can produce now.

[deniedmysign]

Yeah, sure, when they’ve already calculated that a few square miles of panels in the empty ass Arizona desert could power the whole nation. But ok, fracking and the diminishing petroleum supply is worlds better.

[inushiek]

Nevermind that windmills are often most efficient off the coast. There they take up no land, impact no trees, don’t pollute the water, and are conveniently located where winds are often strongest anyway.

And solar panels can literally be built into roofs of buildings and in empty areas like deserts. The sun strikes the Earth with the same amount of energy in an hour that our civilization uses in a year.

But yeah, it would be impossible for us to ever have enough energy from clean sources.

Durr hurr technology is bad and I would rather light shit on fire than have clean energy

[mllemusketeer]

I can also testify to the Arizona desert being empty ass. And the California desert. And the Nevada desert. 

[greaseonmymouth]

also…no forests were cleared to make space for Denmark’s windmills and yet they regularly produce so much power that it covers almost all of the country’s power needs. Oh, and then there’s the times when the windmills generate 140% of Denmark’s power needs. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Friendly reminder that oil pipelines are a scam.

[ribstongrowback]

Remove pipelines, replace “are” with “is”.

[mao-tenno]

ALSO this technology is improving all the time, and rapidly too. Batteries can store energy from solar panels for longer, We’re developing more efficient windmills, shit Geothermal is still a thing if you’re so worried about impacting the environment.  But you know we can just keep using our dirty fossil fuels. nermind there increasing prices and the cost of extracting them is often far more then monetary. 

[xx1xx2xx3xx]

I am so sick of the misinformation going around about Standing Rock. To begin with DAPL was set to go through a town called Bismarck, a town that is mostly white. The people of this town expressed concern for the pipeline leaking, and said they didn’t want it.

When the pipleline was re-routed, it was set up to go through land that belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux. For those who don’t know what I mean by “belongs to” because “Oh me oh my, this is American land,” no, it isn’t. Not all of it. There is land that belongs to different Native tribes. Including part of the land that the pipeline will be going through. This was not done with permission. How was this done? This was done by bulldozing up the graves of ancestors. (If that doesn’t bother you, read it as the graves of our veterans; the graves of our presidents’ families; the graves of your family.)

Outside of the media finally watching us for the last six months, the camps have been there before that. I know someone who was there on April 1, 2016. That’s well before the media started paying attention in August. Well before. The camps have been self-sustaining. Yes, there have been donations. Yes, donations were made in physical items, money for items, and money for legal funds. That money and those items went to keeping something beautiful alive.

People who were arrested had numbers written on their arms, they were kept in dog cages. Protectors who were peacefully in prayer had untrained dogs set on them to attack. There are photos floating around of one trainer who couldn’t keep her dog, who had blood in its mouth, under control. In sub-zero conditions in the early morning protectors were hosed down with freezing water - this includes the elderly and children. (Yes, there were children. Guess what, they were getting schooled there. Self sustaining.) Police shot bean bags, rubber bullets, and flash-bang bombs into the crowds. A woman had her arm blown to pieces because of this. 

At every point since the beginning, there has only been peace on our end. No rioting, no fire, no weapons, no alcohol, no drugs; nothing but peace. And from the end of law enforcement has been violence. Even residents had been violent, and police did nothing to them. But they sure as hell arrested people from camp for praying - a nonviolent act.

If you are not Native, you don’t get to dictate what happens on our lands. I don’t give a damn if the government does. The government is breaking a treaty right now, ignoring tribal sovereignty. Just because they do it, does not mean you get to. I don’t care how tired you are of hearing about it. We’re tired of having our lands stolen and having our rights violated. 

[sofarawayy-deactivated20210922]

Please boost this. I’m tired of the propaganda being spread with the intent of bigots and settlers to erase Native voices and justify colonial violence. Also realize alot of this even beyond the pipeline, is settlers acting out of pure anti Native hatred. People don’t understand unless they have lived in the Midwest, just how deep white supremacy is there.

[david]

Proud to join friends, colleagues, and fellow New Yorkers at Terminal 4 today

[staff]

To everyone alongside us at JFK today, to everyone who brought their passion, their anger, their pride, and their legal expertise to airports around the country: Thank you. Thanks to your efforts, the ACLU has successfully sued to temporarily block parts of this unconscionable abuse of executive power.

There’s plenty more to do, and plenty of ways to do it. If you want to do something right now, consider a donation to the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or sign this petition (started by the great George Takei!) to stand up for Muslims in the U.S., and stand against the fear and xenophobia that threatens our community, our nation, and our world. 

History will remember how we responded. Don’t give up. 

[specturalabs]

This is a high science project done out of my sheer wish to learn. I desire no monetary gain, this is not a college project nor is it aimed at any specific goal. This is a personal project that was simply started out of my desire to understand the nuance and complexity in the various subjects of physics you typically only get to see in universities.

I learn in many ways, but actually doing physical projects that require me to expand my abilities teach me the most. I took interest in this project some years ago after seeing a video of Ben Krasnow’s on an ultra high vacuum system used for an electron microscope which he has also used for DIY sputter coating to make conductive glass. This project was very far outside my realm of possibilities and experience at the time, so I decided to start my own project from the ground up, engineer every part and work out every issue on my own to expand my knowledge of engineering and science. You don’t just learn from the research I want to do with this project, you learn so much about engineering which you can apply to other parts of your life.

Other people have done projects like this before, but I want to do this as professionally as possible, as if I was doing this in a university setting, so I can learn as much as possible, on a very meager budget.

This project is intended for multiple uses, and is designed to be partially modular to enable a variety of experiments to be carried out. The first proof of concept experiment of this system will be a Farnsworth Hirsch Fusor. This system will be able to achieve a very high level of vacuum capable of making a very functional fusor. The Vacuum chamber’s upper window will be exchangeable to set it up for different experiments, for example, when set up as a fusor there will be a high voltage feedthrough in the upper window for the inner grid and Deuterium gas backfill.

Another use for this project could be for coating glass with metal via the sputtering process to create DIY LCD panels. Creating thin film transistors, or partially silvered and fully silvered first surface mirrors for use in laser systems.

 This Ultra high vacuum system utilizes a retired 4 inch water cooled Daia DPF-4z oil diffusion pump and 2 stage rotary vane pump to achieve very high levels of vacuum. The Diffusion pump is majorly overkill for this project, but it was found for a great deal on ebay, and was impossible to pass up.

The Rotary vane pump is a harbor freight special pump, made by US general. It isn’t the highest quality pump, but it will be operated relatively rarely, and only used to pump air, and not refrigerants as it was originally intended.

A Varian 841 vacuum Ionization gauge was acquired on ebay for a small price is questionable condition, with the intention of repair as sub small project. Repairing old equipment like this and integrating into your designs are a great way to learn about how to fix electronic devices and engineer your own!

The actual vacuum chamber is a CF flanged tube from a larger system also acquired from ebay, but as we do not need a large chamber volume, this small chamber will work perfectly.

There is also a cooling system for the pump, various electrical work, an adapter plate that needed to be machined to interface the pump to the standard CF flange chamber.

The most integral part of this system is the diffusion pump, used to increase vacuum levels farther than mechanical means can achieve. A roughing pump, the US General rotary vane pump pulls the initial rough vacuum needed in the chamber and the diffusion pump, and the diffusion pump then activates as the second stage, increasing to the final vacuum level.

This specific diffusion pump operates on the oil diffusion principle for gas molecule removal, by which in the bottom of the diffusion pump, oil is boiled and vapor travels up the chimney, and the vapor is ejected out to capture as many gas molecules as possible, and fired downwards towards the outlet of the pump to carry the gas to the mechanical vacuum pump. Now, we do not want this oil splashing into the main chamber, so there is a liquid cooled baffle used to cool and condense the oil before it can get into the chamber.

To mate this Japanese made pump to the standard CF flange chamber, I needed to engineer an adapter plate out of aluminum. I used a CNC machine to mill out a plate of MIC-6 toolplate to keep a perfectly flat surface, as the o-ring mating surface needs to be perfectly flat, while supporting the weight of the pump and chamber.

The system after being adapted then needs to be mated, the pump head has an o-ring groove for sealing against the bottom of the plate, and the plate has a groove machined to seal against the bottom of the vacuum chamber. High vacuum grease is used to properly seal the o-rings against the mating surfaces. The diffusion pump then had its outlet tube modified to connect to the roughing pump.

This diffusion pump is large, and subsequently liquid cooled, so a water cooling system must be utilized. I made a water cooling loop by modifying and reusing an old office water cooler, and adding a pump and cooling lines to connect up with the diffusion pump. This water cooler has a stainless steel bucket that contains the liquid, in this case methanol, with the copper refrigerant coils wrapped around it, and a ceramic pump that pumps the cooled liquid around water jacket of the diffusion pump, and then returns it to the bucket to be cooled again.

The water cooler was picked up from its way to the dump, and was modified in the following ways, the entire cooler was shortened to half its height by folding the coils over on the back of the unit, and the entire system was cut in half, removing the water filter unit. A small water pump from eBay was installed, and plumbed into the system. The electrical system was then modified to power the pump when the cooling is on, and the thermostat turned down to prevent overcooling.

Research Project in Ultra High Vacuum Physics Part 1 This is a high science project done out of my sheer wish to learn. I desire no monetary gain, this is not a college project nor is it aimed at any specific goal.

[specturalabs]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x1DvtaL0T8)

[loghains]

last night I dreamt that there was like a new meme/slang and it was ‘bode’ as in like bodacious so like ppl would zoom in on pics of rlly fat cats and it would just say ‘BODE’

[feedmerightmeow]

[gravegospel]

[cinematech]

[yeah-yeah-beebiss-1]

[mediamattersforamerica]

The so-called “alt-right” are neo-Nazis by any other name, and that’s how the media should address them.

[the-future-now-deactivated20170]

A seaweed diet could help cows fart less, which could majorly impact climate change

Cows’ burps and farts speed up climate change, but a recent discovery from researchers in Australia could lessen the problematic cow gas and potentially reduce greenhouse gases by up to a whopping 99%. 

Switching the cows to a special seaweed diet could have huge effect on the amount of greenhouse gas cows emit. After testing multiple types of seaweed, researchers found that a certain species of seaweed named Asparagopsis taxiformis reduced methane production by 99% during lab testing. follow @the-future-now

[downlo]

This excellent visual representation of that old scam, “trickle down economics”, has been all over Twitter recently.

[baby-revenge]

And then the glass on top gets too big and too full and all the other little glasses below it break and then they all shatter.

[aquarian-sunchild]

And the big glass blames the little glasses for not working hard enough to hold it up.

[thehistoryoftheladder]

*SLAMS THE REBLOG BUTTON*