Extreme Product Testing
Have you always wondered what would happen to a Backwoods Logger Mini if it were crushed under your own body? No, neither have I, but today I found out anyway. I took out one of the newly-assembled Mini prototypes for a trail run, stored securely in a plastic case in my hip pocket. I wish I could say I was chased down a cliff by a mountain lion or something equally exciting, but the truth is that I tripped on a sidewalk crack before I even made it to the trail. I was running downhill and moving pretty fast, so I went skidding and bumping down the sidewalk with pieces of my hands, knees, elbow, and hip left behind on the concrete. As I hobbled back home, I heard some ominous rattling noises in my pocket. Not good…
Further examination releaved the sad truth: the Mini took a direct hit when I fell, with all my body weight coming down on it, crushing it between my hip bone and the concrete. The plastic case was completely destroyed and smashed to pieces. The OLED glass was crushed, and part of the ribbon connector ripped off. The NEXT button was flattened and the spring mechanism killed. On the back of the Mini, the header pins were bent nearly 90 degrees over, the negative battery terminal was ripped straight off the board, and a bit of wood got stuck in the RTC crystal.
No, it does not still work.
I’m upset at having lost a prototype, since they take considerable time to assemble and the parts aren’t cheap. At least this makes a more interesting story than losing a prototype to a soldering error!
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Glad you survived it. I know someone who end up in a wheel chair from a remarkably similar event.
Yikes! I’m not seriously hurt, but I’ve got lots of scrapes and bruises all over.
More photo problems: viewed on the iPhone, all these photos appear oriented incorrectly and squashed with odd aspect ratios. The original photos were rotated and cropped with MS Paint before being posted here. I think the iPhone is somehow extracting the original orientation and aspect ratio from the photo metadata, and combining them with the pixels from the edited photo, to create some Frankenstein result. I’m not sure if that’s an iOS bug or an MS Paint bug or something else.
The photos look fine in Firefox. However, if I save them to disk the GNOME file viewer shows them rotated clockwise 90 degrees and the metadata says “Orientation: Right-top”, “PixelXDimension: 2592”, and “PixelYDimension: 1936”. Looking at some other images, it seems the orientation usually says “Top-left”. At the very least it appears that MS Paint is not updating the resolution in the metadata after resizing/cropping, which might lead to the strange aspect ratio if the rotation isn’t being properly handled.
If all you have is MS Paint to edit with, you might try saving as a .bmp file (which should strip the metadata), then reload the .bmp file and save again as .jpg. Copying and pasting into a new image might also work.
Looks like that’s going to be painful for several days. Hope you heal up fast!