Category Archives: Projects/Topics

Texas Road Trip: The Historic Leakey Inn

Posted on by
2
The Historic Leakey Inn

The times of traveling all day and then stopping and finding a place to spend the night are becoming rare.  Places fill up, and it is now necessary to make reservations ahead of time, even for campgrounds, maybe especially for campgrounds during the travel season.  On this day however I was lucky.  Of the few hotels in Leakey TX, “The Historic Leakey Inn” still had a room available as I pulled up at around 6:00.

The reception desk was empty when I found it and so I waited, anticipating that someone would eventually notice me.  While I was there, the rustic fireplace lobby was filling with people, locals who greeted each other by name and seemed to be looking forward to some sort of event or activity.  A number of the women were wearing the same style sweatshirt, decorated with a yellow ribbon and declaring “Prayer is the Answer”.

Eventually the manager/owner/wife found me at the check in counter.  Her past training as a flight attendant probably contributed to her natural style, being very friendly and helpful as she located a room for me.  I learned that there was a large patio and dining room that was offering their nightly specials—drinks and a few food items.  This was what had attracted the locals to this time and place.  The host told me that they had hatched this idea a few years ago, but it had now become this popular “monster” that they had to keep up with.  Oh, the burden of a successful business!

After settling into my rustic but clean room with stone walls and too few outlets for my collection of digital gadgets, I went back to the patio lounge and ordered a margarita.  The young bartender had to check my ID.  Not for my birth date, but for membership.  Seeing my confusion, a man next to me explained that the Texas rules for small town liquor licenses required I join a private “club”, before they could serve me.  The man turned out to be the manager/owner/husband, and he went on to explain that this was one of several defects in the state’s liquor laws, which for some reason the governor had not seen fit to correct in a recent update to those laws.  The last thing I wanted to do was discuss politics in Texas, so I said (aware of my Yankee accent) “That’s interesting.” 

I am now a full-fledged member of the “Leakey Inn Club”.

I also ordered one of the food items offered that evening: “Tacos Tapatio” a descriptor I had to look up, which meant “tacos from the city of Guadalajara”.  Maybe the two cooks working furiously in the small kitchen were from there.  The tacos were unique rolled up tortilla tubes of carnitas, deep fried, then covered with lettuce and veggies in a white sauce like coleslaw, with sliced tomatoes on top.  Delicious!

In fact the Mexican food has gotten even better the farther south I go!  The previous night, in Llano, I enjoyed a burrito with beef, jalapenos, and other goodies.  This just kept proving there was more to discover.

The Texans in this rural area are hard to describe—they seem like ranchers, mechanics and laborers, often wearing seed caps, usually with short-cropped hair but many with extensive beards of various forms—full beard, chin beard, mustache, each trying to be distinctive if not distinguished.  They are boisterous, in a way that is both polite and rebellious, which, to my surprise, I found endearing.

Approaching the office at the Leakey Inn
The Angora room at the Leakey Inn
The patio at the Leakey Inn

previous | beginning | next

Texas Road Trip: Hill Country Eclipse Survey

Posted on by
3
A valuable reference for finding observing sites. No batteries or network connection required.

I spent the day driving southwest along the eclipse path visiting candidate viewing sites that I had researched prior to the trip. I found them with the help of Google Maps of course, and with the wonderful customization of it for the eclipse by Xavier Jubier. I also bought the most recent version of the DeLorme road atlas for Texas. I actively looked for the places closest to the center line with the longest totality duration. At the time I thought I was two years ahead of schedule, not two years behind! Here are the notes I made.

Continue reading →

Texas Road Trip: Start at the Top

Posted on by
2

I headed to the northernmost point of my eclipse path survey, to Poppy’s Pointe, an RV park with cabins on Buchanan Lake.  It reminded me, not pleasantly, of a place we had stayed along the Ontario shore of Lake Superior

As I drove in and located the office, I was met by a man in a golf cart.  I asked if he was the owner—no he was the maintenance guy, but he could take me to her, get in.  I got into the cart and he drove about 100 feet to her trailer.  She seemed a little annoyed but took me to her office in her golf cart, about 150 feet back from where we had just come.

I eventually told her about the eclipse in 2024.  She said she was contracting the whole place to someone, they just had to agree on a price.  She also told me that she had been getting calls for four years.  The property is 750 feet from the eclipse centerline.  This was the moment when I realized that despite being here two years ahead, I was already too late!

One of the cabins at Poppy’s Pointe
The RV section of Poppy’s Pointe.

Poppy’s Pointe is a private RV park.  There are some other parks on Buchanan Lake which for some reason were not on my list to stop and visit.  I wish I had, because Black Rock Park also has camping (tents and RVs) and cabins.  It is part of the LCRA Parks system (Lower Colorado River Authority).  From their website, it looks like the reservation system goes one year out. 

There are numerous other resorts around Buchanan Lake.  Check Google Maps to find them; It may be possible to book them for the eclipse.

Continue reading →

Texas Road Trip: Getting There

Posted on by
2

There is a direct route from Minneapolis to the eclipse path in Texas—just take I35 to Austin and turn right.  It is not a terribly interesting route, and you’ll be sharing it with the trucking industry, but it is fast—at least where there isn’t construction. 

The cool rainy weather of early May in Minneapolis gradually became warmer as I drove south.  By Iowa, my jacket was no longer needed, and wouldn’t be again.  By the time I got to Texas, the temperature would be 100 degrees, and reached or exceeded that temperature every day I was there.

I was trying to cover the miles quickly, so I did not take on the overhead of overnight camping, instead staying at traveler’s hotels, where I still struggled to get a good sleep—perhaps the combination of too much coffee and caffeinated non-alcoholic drinks.  But I did get “free” breakfast and recharged my cooler with hotel ice and continued on, not quite reaching my destination goal each day.  I stayed at Emporia instead of Wichita, Waco instead of Austin.

As I drove along the interstate, I noticed that the roadside rest areas, which are reliably spaced every 50 miles or so in Minnesota, became infrequent, and then completely absent after Iowa.  Missouri and Kansas had none, and Kansas Interstate 35 was a tollway!  It had “service islands” for gas and snacks, but I didn’t find them very appealing and did not stop at any.  I saw one rest area in Texas, but by the time I saw the sign, it was too late to exit.

Near the Oklahoma border with Texas, I stopped for a ham sandwich at a local stop.  Outside was a sign listing mileage to cities in TX and OK.  No entry was there for Austin.  I asked the two women running the shop “Why no Austin?”  In her distinctive (and pleasant) Oklahoma accent, one replied, “Maybe no one wants to go there.”

Continue reading →

Eclipse 2024 Reconnaissance

Posted on by
10

A road trip to Texas, May 2022

Introduction
In May, I made a solo road trip to Texas in order to do “reconnaissance” and to plan for the upcoming total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024.  I had made similar explorations of the western states prior to the 2017 Great American Eclipse which turned out to be very helpful in preparing for it.

You may ask “why Texas?”  It is not my usual road trip destination, but celestial mechanics is oblivious to human-drawn political maps.  It is also oblivious to weather, so to optimize the likelihood of clear skies on eclipse day, we need to be as far south and west along the eclipse path as possible.  Here is a chart of the cloud cover for the time in April along the eclipse path.

The various colors indicate the average cloud coverage at 2 p.m. Eastern time between April 3 and 13 based on ERA-Interim data from 1979 to 2016 collected by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).  (Dr. Brian Brettschneider)

I’m not sure if this chart represents how much of the sky is covered, or how often the sky is covered, but it is apparent that Mexico is the best place to observe the eclipse.  Not eager to drive through Mexico, I am limiting the search to the US, which takes us to… Texas.

It turns out that the eclipse path runs through a pleasant part of south central Texas known as “Hill Country,” that contrasts with its flatter or harsher or more urban or more desolate areas.   For Texans, it is the equivalent of what Minnesotans call “Up North”, a place to escape the city, or to relax on vacation.  To me, it is not quite as nice as the North Woods, but I may be biased.

As I said, Texas is not my usual road trip destination.  I have not been to the state for decades, and, having observed Texas politics from afar, I am a bit intimidated.  But eclipse-viewing is something that can be enjoyed regardless of political view, so I packed up some observing gear and headed south. 

In the next series of blog posts, I’ll describe what I encountered along the way. If you enjoy my travelogues, or if you just want to glean information that might be relevant to your 2024 eclipse plans, I invite you to subscribe (meaning that you will get an email notification when I publish a blog entry). Don’t worry, I’m not prolific at this, and you can unsubscribe at will.

next

Relay Resurrection

Posted on by
1
The restored relay clock, in its original glass case

I have renovated the components of my nearly 50-year-old digital clock. The next step was to assemble it all back together. Would it actually work?

The old broken and abused internal plexiglass chassis was replaced by new plexiglass, providing an opportunity for me to learn the technique of plastic welding, where a syringe injects solvent into the edge of a surface-to-surface joint and spreads by capillary action to the full contact area, partially dissolving the plexiglass, which then forms new polymer bonds between the pieces. It takes a few minutes for it to start hardening, which gives some time to prop the parts in the desired position (use a square to get the angles right). It is completely cured in 24 hours and is truly “welded”. Like a good metal weld, a good plastic weld will break elsewhere if enough force is applied.

Continue reading →

The Relay Clock Display

Posted on by
2
Digital readouts, probably from an aviation display

I recall seeing displays similar to this in elevators when I was very young, but it appears that these digital readouts came from a cockpit display or some other instrument. It seems rather impractical to me today, but digital displays were difficult to make back then, especially for the rugged environments found in aviation. I found a display similar to this being offered at a surplus site.

A front and rear view of a surplus aircraft readout. There was only one available, at a price of $150!


The basic idea is that there are ten light bulbs for each display digit. One of them is energized and lights up. It projects a numeric image onto a screen.

In this clock, the relay contacts direct a voltage to select a display digit. The relay coils operate at voltages of 12V, 24V, and 110V, but the display uses light bulbs that run at 6.3V, a common voltage used for vacuum tube filaments and pinball machine lights. You can see why 6.3 was a popular voltage, right?

Continue reading →

Wiring

Posted on by
3

[

The back end of two three-digit display modules. On the right, the bundled cable wiring has been replaced by flat ribbon cable with insulation displacement connectors. The remnants of the old ribbon cable from the relays are seen on the left, individually soldered to the display lamp wires.

I had planned to replace the inadequately designed power supply for the clock, and I had figured out how to update the signals to the relay coils, but I had really hoped that I could avoid re-wiring all of the individual connections between the relay contacts and the display bulbs (10 + 6 + 10 + 6 + 10 + 2 of them).  I had figured out the connections and how they could be used with the new power supply without having to completely rewire them.

In 1973 I was using some of the latest technology, including “ribbon cable”, an evolutionary step from a tied cable bundle.  Individual wires were laid side-by-side and cast in place with an insulating plastic bond.  They were also called flat cables.  Once again, my source of this unusual wiring system was from my dad’s ham radio shack. 

I found them particularly appealing because they were color-coded with the series used to identify resistor values-  black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white to represent digits 0, 1, 2, … 9.  They include the colors of the rainbow, and I recall thinking how nice they will look in the finished clock, which motivated me as I connected them to the stepper relays. 

Continue reading →

Early Integrated Circuits

Posted on by
3
Two 7490 integrated circuits. The date code tells us that they were manufactured in September of 1972.

Although I was unaware of the new integrated voltage regulator circuits when I built this clock, I was familiar with an early series of integrated logic circuits, the 74xx TTL chips (TTL stands for “transistor-transistor-logic”). Again, the ability to replace multiple circuit boards of discrete components that implemented a specific logic function with a single integrated circuit chip, was revolutionizing electronics.

An example is the 7490, a small 14-pin device that implemented logic that could count to ten. I used two of them, configured to count to 60 and then start over. I fed it a clock input that was derived from the household AC line, 60 cycles per second, and it delivered a logic pulse once a second to the first relay in the clock.

I wanted to keep this relic of a circuit in the renovated clock, and so I adapted its input to the AC signal from the new power supply. But I had forgotten the rules for using the ancient TTL logic, which required much higher current than is used today. Modern CMOS logic uses almost zero electrons to do their magic, which is why your phone doesn’t discharge within a few minutes, blistering your hand with the heat.

My first attempt to trigger the old timekeeping logic resulted in paralysis. No ticks.

Continue reading →

The Relay Clock

Posted on by
11
It may not look like it, but this is a clock, one of the world’s first digital clocks, circa 1973.

When I was twenty or so, I built a clock. It was a clock that used electromechanical relays to count the seconds, minutes and hours. I was early in my electrical engineering studies and barely understood Ohm’s law, but I was aware of electromagnets, and how they could be used to make mechanical movements. Some of us call them solenoids, coils of wire that magnetically push or pull an iron piston to make and break switch contacts.

My dad, in his ham radio hobby quest for cheap electronic components for whatever future project he might undertake, had acquired various relay mechanisms. He showed them to me and explained how they used electrical pulses to move a metallic wiper to a series of successive contacts. These were telephone relays, used when you “dialed” the phone. One relay, responding to a single rotary dial action could connect you to ten possible neighbors. Cascading it with another set of relays would allow calling up 100 neighbors. More phone digits would extend it even further, you get the idea. I barely understood how to deliver current to energize a relay coil, but I could figure out how to connect the contacts to make a sequence that counted.

Another item from my dad’s ham shack inventory of salvaged components was a numeric display, something you might see in an elevator (60 years ago) indicating the current floor. It used incandescent light bulbs to project a numeric figure on the screen. Ten separate bulbs, each behind a number glyph mask; one of which was selected for the current digit value. I figured out how to connect the telephone relays to the elevator displays to make a clock.

I was quite pleased with the result and when I got it working, I showed it off to my friends. But it had several drawbacks. First, it was noisy. Relays are mechanical devices that magnetically pull metal contacts against each other, resulting in a click-clack noise as they activate and release. The relays counted seconds, so there was a click-clack noise every second. And at ten seconds there was an additional click-clack, as the next relay responded to the carry pulse. And at 59 seconds, there was a carry to the minute-counting relay. As the carries propagated to the hours, a peak acoustic disruption occurred as the clock transitioned from 12:59:59 to 01:00:00.

The other drawback was that the clock got hot. As I said, I did not yet understand the relationships of voltage, current, power and heat. I just hooked up the components to make the displayed result I wanted. The numeric display, comprising light bulbs, used quite a bit of power. And the relays required power too, and my power supply was terribly inefficient. As a result the clock, in the glass case I made for it, built up an enormous amount of heat. I tried to ameliorate it by installing an internal fan, but this seemed only to make things worse (the fan used power too).

I kept the clock as a curiosity piece, displayed on a fireplace mantel in our home. It was intolerable to run continuously, so I would switch it on to show visitors that it actually worked, and then shut it down to stop the noise. Eventually, the clock got packed up during one of our moves and stayed so.

The boxed-up relay clock was in storage for at least 30 years, but I would occasionally encounter it hiding among my workshop parts and supplies. I recently ran across it. It had endured the desecration by (and excrement of) rodents, the decay of electrical components, and the binding of mechanical joints. I wondered why I had saved it all these years.

Well, the idea of resurrecting a contraption that I built half a century ago carried a certain appeal to me. Having since learned the principles of electricity, maybe I could bring it back to life and its former geek glory!

In the next series of posts, I will describe the process of restoring this pioneering clock.

Some “before” pictures showing the deterioration of my relay clock

next


If you find my “life notes” of interest, I invite you to subscribe and get an email note when I make a post. Don’t worry, I am not very prolific in this art, so there is no danger of flooding your inbox.