Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky

July 29, 2025 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.

Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.

Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

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Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station

June 26, 2025 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

A lot of people complain that driving across the United States is boring. Having done the coast-to-coast trip seven times now, I can’t agree. Sure, the stretches through the Corn Belt get a little monotonous, but for someone like me who wants to know how everything works, even endless agriculture is fascinating; I love me some center-pivot irrigation.

One thing that has always attracted my attention while on these long road trips is the weigh stations that pop up along the way, particularly when you transition from one state to another. Maybe it’s just getting a chance to look at something other than wheat, but weigh stations are interesting in their own right because of everything that’s going on in these massive roadside plazas. Gone are the days of a simple pull-off with a mechanical scale that was closed far more often than it was open. Today’s weigh stations are critical infrastructure installations that are bristling with sensors to provide a multi-modal insight into the state of the trucks — and drivers — plying our increasingly crowded highways.

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DIY Pipe Inspector Goes Where No Bot Has Gone Before

November 27, 2024 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

If you think your job sucks, be grateful you’re not this homebrew sewer inspection robot.

Before anyone gets upset, yes we know what [Stargate System] built here isn’t a robot at all; it’s more of a remotely operated vehicle. That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a very cool build, especially since it has to work in one of the least hospitable and most unpleasant environments possible. The backstory of this project is that the sewer on a 50-year-old house kept backing up, and efforts to clear it only temporarily solved the problem. The cast iron lateral line was reconfigured at some point in its history to include a 120-degree bend, which left a blind spot for the camera used by a sewer inspection service. What’s worse, the bend was close to a joint where a line that once allowed gutters and foundation drains access to the sewer.

To better visualize the problem, [Stargate] turned to his experience building bots to whip up something for the job. The bot had to be able to fit into the pipe and short enough to make the turn, plus it needed to be — erm, waterproof. It also needed to carry a camera and a light, and to be powered and controlled from the other end of the line. Most of the body of the bot, including the hull and the driving gear, was 3D printed from ABS, which allowed the seams to be sealed with acetone later. The drive tracks were only added after the original wheels didn’t perform well in testing. Controlling the gear motors and camera was up to a Raspberry Pi Zero, chosen mostly due to space constraints. An Ethernet shield provided connectivity to the surface over a Cat5 cable, and a homebrew PoE system provided power.

As interesting as the construction details were, the real treat is the down-hole footage. It’s not too graphic, but the blockage is pretty gnarly. We also greatly appreciated the field-expedient chain flail [Stargate] whipped up to bust up the big chunks of yuck and get the pipe back in shape. He did a little bit of robo-spelunking, too, as you do.

And no, this isn’t the only sewer bot we’ve ever featured.

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The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines

October 1, 2024 by Danie Conradie 17 Comments

Drones that charge right on the power lines they inspect is a promising concept, but comes with plenty of challenges. The Drone Infrastructure Inspection and Interaction (Diii) Group of the University of South Denmark is tackling these challenges head-on.

The gripper for these drones may seem fairly straightforward, but it needs to inductively charge, grip, and detach reliably while remaining simple and lightweight. To attach to a power line, the drone pushes against it, triggering a cord to pull the gripper closed. This gripper is held closed electromagnetically using energy harvested from the power line or the drone’s battery if the line is off. Ingeniously, this means that if there’s an electronics failure, the gripper will automatically release, avoiding situations where linemen would need to rescue a stuck drone.Accurately mapping power lines in 3D space for autonomous operation presents another hurdle. The team successfully tested mmWave radar for this purpose, which proves to be a lightweight and cost-efficient alternative to solutions like LiDAR.

We briefly covered this project earlier this year when details were limited. Energy harvesting from power lines isn’t new; we’ve seen similar concepts applied in government-sanctioned spy cameras and border patrol drones. Drones are not only used for inspecting power lines but also for more adventurous tasks like clearing debris off them with fire. Continue reading “The Challenges Of Charging Drones From Power Lines” →

Soldering, Up Close And Personal

September 14, 2024 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

A word of warning before watching this very cool video on soldering: it may make you greatly desire what appears to be a very, very expensive microscope. You’ve been warned.

Granted, most people don’t really need to get this up close and personal with their soldering, but as [Robert Feranec] points out, a close look at what’s going on when the solder melts and the flux flows can be a real eye-opener. The video starts with what might be the most esoteric soldering situation — a ball-grid array (BGA) chip. It also happens to be one of the hardest techniques to assess visually, both during reflow and afterward to check the quality of your work. While the microscope [Robert] uses, a Keyence VHX-7000 series digital scope, allows the objective to swivel around and over the subject in multiple axes and keep track of where it is while doing it, it falls short of being the X-ray vision you’d need to see much beyond the outermost rows of balls. But, being able to look in at an angle is a huge benefit, one that allows us a glimpse of the reflow process.

More after the break

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Tiny Prisms Let You See What Lies Beneath A BGA Chip

May 1, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Compared to through-hole construction, inspecting SMD construction is a whole other game. Things you thought were small before are almost invisible now, and making sure solder got where it’s supposed to go can be a real chore. Add some ball grid array (BGA) chips into the mix, where the solder joints are not visible by design, and inspection is more a leap of faith than objective proof of results.

Unless, of course, you put the power of optics to work, as [Petteri Aimonen] does with this clever BGA inspection tool. It relies on a pair of tiny prisms to bounce light under one side of a BGA chip and back up the other. The prisms are made from thin sheets of acrylic; [Petteri] didn’t have any 1-mm acrylic sheet on hand, so he harvested material from a razor blade package. The edge of each piece was ground to a 45-degree angle and polished with successively finer grits until the surfaces were highly reflective. One prism was affixed to a small scrap of PCB with eleven SMD LEDs in a row, forming a light pipe that turns the light through 90 degrees. The light source is held along one edge of a BGA, shining light underneath to the other prism, bouncing light through the forest of solder balls and back toward the observer.

The results aren’t exactly crystal clear, which is understandable given the expedient nature of the materials and construction employed. But it’s certainly more than enough to see any gross problems lying below a BGA, like shorts or insufficiently melted solder. [Petteri] reports that flux can be a problem, too, as excess of the stuff can crystalize between pads under the BGA and obstruct the light. A little extra cleaning should help in such cases.

Haven’t tackled a BGA job yet? You might want to get up to speed on that.

Telepresence Robot For “Doing The Rounds”

October 3, 2021 by Danie Conradie 10 Comments

When you are responsible for maintaining devices at a client’s location, software tools like remote desktop and SSH are great, but sometimes they are not enough. For some problems, you need to get eyes and hands on the device to figure out what’s going on and fix the problem. This is a challenge [Will Donaldson] from EDM Studio is all too familiar with. They develop and maintain interactive museum exhibits all over the world, so they created Omni, a modular telepresence robot for inspection, maintenance, and a variety of other tasks.

The Omni uses a set of three omni-wheels under its base, powered by DC geared motors with encoders, each controlled by a separate motor driver and Arduino Nano. A similar arrangement was used by Mark Rober for his domino art robot. The main controller is a Raspberry Pi 4 running ROS2 (Robot Operating System), which takes inputs from a 360 LIDAR sensor, high-quality camera module, and IMU.

All the components are mounted on a series of plates separated using threaded rods. This arrangement allows for maximum flexibility and space, especially the open-top plate, which has a grid of holes machined in to allow almost anything to be mounted. In this case, a robotic arm is mounted for manipulating the environment. Another neat feature is the charging station connector, consisting of two parallel metal strips on the outside of the robot.

Omni’s mission is very similar to that of Spot, the robotic dog from Boston Dynamics intended, among other things, for Industrial Inspection. What practical purposes would you use Omni for? Let us know in the comments below.