68: Chapter 68 This observation box is ugly, but it wants to capture the sky.

The shell of Observation Box V5 was very ugly.

Because it was a low-power collection node designed by Jiang Lin himself.

The small host, memory card, magnetometer, power management, and camera trigger module were integrated into a waterproof box.

The gray plastic waterproof box had its four corners reinforced with cloth-backed tape, and a non-magnetic bracket extended from the side to push the magnetometer probe away from the main circuit area.

The magnetic field spike generated when the bench drill started yesterday was still left in the log.

That spike was like a nail, nailing down Jiang Lin's original idea of casually hanging the observation box on the outer wall of the Stone House.

But the environment near the Stone House was not clean.

The wind turbine was spinning, the inverter was working, and the DC bus had current surges.

As soon as the bench drill started, the motor coils and cables would write a bunch of beautiful but false magnetic field curves in the surrounding space.

If the observation point was built here, every anomaly he saw in the future might just be garbage he created himself.

Therefore, Observation Point A had to leave the Stone House, at least fifty meters away.

But before carrying the observation box and going out, Jiang Lin sat in front of the stone table for a while.

But he had to figure out one thing clearly.

What on earth was he going to do with these things?

In the first five times in the Wasteland, he had never asked this question.

Those five times he held back a breath, focusing only on survival and study.

But this time, the sixth time, was different.

He had already laid a solid mathematical and physical foundation, and he believed he was qualified to start asking why the world was the way it was.

Therefore, he brought a workstation, a set of observation equipment, and a large number of related textbooks, materials, and literature.

The four words "questioning the Wasteland" had no meaning in themselves.

The Wasteland was too big.

Geology, ecology, soil chemistry, climate, atmospheric composition, radiation environment, biological communities...

He could choose any direction, and each one was enough for him to study for a lifetime.

So the question came, which direction was most likely to reveal the truth?

Geology and soil told him the past, what had happened in this world.

But the past was a silent piece of evidence; it was already set and would no longer change. All he could dig up were fossils and rock strata.

Ecology and biology told him the present, what this world currently looked like.

But ecology was a surface phenomenon; it was the result, not the cause.

Climate and atmosphere told him about cycles, how this world self-sustained.

But cycles were driven, not the drivers.

There was only one direction that could see the present, see the drivers, and also see the differences with Earth.

The sky.

Specifically, the night sky.

If there were stable, repeatable anomalies in the night sky after excluding ground pollution, then it could possibly lead the question toward non-surface processes.

The upper atmosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere, solar wind, or even the cosmic ray environment further out.

These processes were happening.

Their Physics had been studied deeply on Earth, and he had ready-made language to describe them.

If the night sky of the Wasteland was different from Earth's night sky, this difference was the fingerprint of the bifurcation point between this world and Earth.

And the night sky of the Wasteland was indeed different.

He had noticed it during the more than twenty years of the previous times in the Wasteland.

In the low northern sky, a pale red bright band would sometimes appear.

Its brightness was very low, sometimes present, sometimes absent.

At first, he thought it was an illusion of the retina after fatigue, but later he saw the same one on different nights and in different mental states.

During the first five times, he had no tools to question what it was.

He only had eyes, and eyes were the most unreliable observation instruments in the world.

The sixth time, he brought back a camera, a magnetometer, an anemometer, a workstation, and a complete set of observation boxes.

From then on, the red band was no longer a suspected phenomenon that he might have misseen, but the most specific, quantifiable anomaly he could catch with instruments.

It was the first clue this world was willing to leak to him.

If he could figure out this clue, he might be able to trace it all the way down.

Trace it to the ionosphere, to the magnetosphere, to the solar wind, and to the true source of why this world became what it was now.

If he couldn't figure it out, then he would come again.

Anyway, the Wasteland gave him time.

Having figured this matter out, Jiang Lin shouldered the observation box and went out.

At least fifty meters was not casually decided.

He had made a rough estimate last night.

The local electromagnetic interference brought by motors, cables, and inverters would decay rapidly with distance, but the Wasteland had no standard shielding room, and ground metal debris was also uncontrollable.

If the distance was too close, pollution must exist; if the distance was too far, maintenance costs and power supply would rise rapidly.

At least fifty meters was an acceptable compromise for the first stage.

The sun had not completely risen yet, and the Wasteland was covered with a layer of dark red cold light.

The three candidate points were screened one by one.

The first one was on a gravel ridge sixty meters southeast of the Stone House.

The view was the best, but when the magnetometer scanned to the fourth step, the compass deviated by three or four degrees.

He scraped open the surface layer with an engineering shovel, and underneath was a severely rusted flat steel, which he didn't know what structure it once belonged to.

Maybe an old fence, or building debris rolled over by a storm, already half-buried in the soil, its surface wrapped in rust skin, almost unrecognizable to the naked eye without careful inspection.

Discarded.

The second one was in a lowland eighty meters further south.

The terrain was slightly lower, and the wind was a bit smaller.

But lowland meant it might accumulate water in the rainy season.

Although the Wasteland was very dry, he could not assume that extreme weather would not occur in the next forty years.

Moreover, the sky view of the lowland was blocked by a collapsed concrete beam on the west side.

Discarded.

The third one was in the northeast direction, about seventy meters away from the Stone House and about one hundred twenty meters away from the wind turbine tower.

The ground was a mixed layer of hard sand and gravel, with no obvious metal response.

On the east side, there was a wind-eroded rock half a person high, which could block some of the low-level wind and sand.

The view was not as good as the first point, but the north and zenith were unblocked. The red band he was looking for was in the low northern sky.

This point determined that the third candidate point was more suitable than the first one.

Jiang Lin walked around this point three times.

The compass reading was stable, the magnetometer had no sudden jumps, and there were no long metal components on the surface.

Tentatively selected.

He first stuck in four wooden stakes, pulled out a two-meter-square area, and then conducted a second round of scanning along the four corners.

Finally, he stuck a temporary marker pole in the center position.

[Observation Point A - Temporary]

[Coordinates: Taking the doorway of the Stone House as the origin, about seventy meters to the northeast.]

[Direction: About twenty-seven degrees east of north.]

[Status: Pending low-power trial run.]

Next was the bracket.

The observation box could not be placed directly on the ground.

The ground temperature changed greatly, wind and sand would bury it, and nighttime frost might also invade from the bottom.

The bracket also could not use a large number of steel parts.

Setting up a bunch of iron next to the magnetic field observation point was like sticking a pollution source right under the sensor's nose.

The non-magnetic materials Jiang Lin brought were limited.

Several fiberglass rods, a plastic board, a small amount of nylon bolts, and some old wood.

Wood was not a good material in the Wasteland; it would dry and crack, deform, and be worn down by wind and sand.

But it was cleaner than iron.

For the first-stage temporary observation point, it was enough.

He first drilled holes in the plastic board, and used nylon bolts to fix three fiberglass rods, forming a low tripod.

At a height of 1.2 meters, the all-sky camera's field of view would be slightly restricted, but the higher the bracket, the more severe the wind-induced vibration.

A bit lower, a bit more stable.

The magnetometer probe extended horizontally by one meter through another fiberglass rod, with a fixed direction.

Four stone press feet, three nylon guy wires, and the ground anchors were wooden wedges and stones buried underground.

After finishing these, Jiang Lin gently pushed the bracket with his hand.

There was a clear rebound, and it would definitely shake when the wind was strong.

This might not have a huge impact on the magnetometer, but it was a disaster for low-light cameras and sky background recording.

The red band he was looking for was already low in brightness. If the star points were dragged into short lines by vibration, any brightness contrast would lose its meaning.

He wrote in his notebook—

Bracket problem: obvious wind-induced vibration.

Temporary measure: reduce camera exposure time, increase image quality markers.

Long-term improvement: make a sand-and-gravel weighted base or a semi-buried observation pier.

There was no single step that was perfect; every step carried subsequent patches.

This was the true state of the Phase I project of the Outpost.

At 11:00 AM, the observation box was connected to a small battery, started up, and the equipment self-test passed.

Jiang Lin did not treat the first piece of data as environmental data, but instead began to do artificial interference tests.

He approached from ten meters away with a small magnet.

Ten meters showed no change, five meters showed slight change, and two meters showed an obvious deviation in the curve.

He recorded the test distance, magnet position, and direction completely.

Then, he placed his personal tool bag next to the bracket.

The curve deviated immediately.

There were steel wrenches, screwdrivers, and a small knife in the tool bag.

Jiang Lin stared at the screen for a few seconds and rewrote the warning.

During the maintenance of the observation point, all ferromagnetic tools must not enter a two-meter range.

Thinking about it, the rule needed some margin, so he changed it to three meters.

At noon, Observation Point A completed its first round of one-hour low-power operation.

The magnetometer data had small fluctuations, but there was no such exaggerated spike as when the bench drill started.

At least it was not directly polluted by the Stone House machining area.

But this distance was still far from reliable observation.

Jiang Lin shut down, took out the card, and replaced it with a spare card.

On the way back to the Stone House, he walked along the future maintenance route once.

There were two gravel slopes on the ground, a shallow crack, and a sharp rock flake formed after wind erosion, which was very easy to trip over at night.

He marked them with wooden stakes.

Building an observation point was not considered finished just after construction.

Whether one could arrive safely, whether it could be maintained at night, and whether it could be found back after a sandstorm were all part of the system.

If he went missing on the road to the observation point on a night after a sandstorm, this equipment and the red band it was chasing would all become meaningless.

In the afternoon, he looked at the data on the small host.

The magnetic field data was so clean that it felt unreal.

His first reaction was not joy, but checking whether the sensor was stuck.

Even if it was dead, it was a clean line.

Recalling that the small magnet test just now had a response, it wasn't dead.

The temperature rose by 0.6 ℃ in one hour, which was reasonable.

The air pressure barely moved, the humidity was close to the sensor's lower limit, and the voltage drop was weak.

Preliminary effective.

Create new Git commit.

Day4: Observation Point A temporary deployment, 1h low-power baseline and interference test.

After committing, he opened the three-day records of the old wind turbine.

The correspondence between the wind turbine voltage sag and the high-frequency peaks of yaw friction was becoming clearer and clearer.

But there were a few sections in the middle that did not correspond, indicating that the fault chain was not a single cause.

Jiang Lin drew three possible paths on paper.

Yaw jamming dominated, insufficient old battery buffering dominated, and abnormal low-temperature response of the controller.

He decided to add a test.

Attach a simple temperature probe to the yaw bearing housing.

If the housing temperature showed a delayed rise after the high-frequency friction section, it could support the hypothesis of the mechanical friction heating chain.

Before dusk, he climbed up the wind turbine tower and attached the probe to the yaw bearing shell.

While doing this, he felt as if he were attaching a thermometer to a gravely ill old machine.

Fifteen years of wind, fifteen years of sand, fifteen years of low temperature and thermal expansion and contraction had ground it from a rough but powerful tool into a weary system that issued warnings everywhere.

wind turbine no. 2 had to be put on the agenda.

But tonight, his mind was still on the observation point.

At night, Observation Point A started its first all-night operation.

Jiang Lin returned to the Stone House and designed the formal bracket in front of the table.

The temporary tripod was too light.

He needed an observation pier that was low, heavy, non-magnetic, and capable of repeatable positioning.

Steel wouldn't do; copper was too expensive and unnecessary.

Aluminum parts were too light, and thermal expansion and contraction were also obvious.

Stone was best; there were stones everywhere in the Wasteland.

He drew a sketch.

The bottom was half-buried with stones for weight, the middle layer was a wooden frame for vibration isolation, and the upper layer was a plastic mounting board.

The magnetometer probe extended horizontally by 1.5 meters, far away from the main box.

Camera on an independent small pillar, mechanically isolated from the magnetometer.

Batteries buried in a shallow pit for insulation, but must be moisture-proof.

Data SD cards cold-backed up, retrieved every three days.

The risk column listed four items: burial by sandstorms, decline in battery capacity due to low nighttime temperatures, impact from wildlife or blowing sand, and contamination from ferromagnetic tools brought in during manual maintenance.

When writing about wildlife, Jiang Lin paused to reflect.

Over these years in the Wasteland, he had seen very few living creatures; most were Moss, low herbs, and a small number of insects.

However, observation equipment was not human; it would neither fight back nor dodge.

A piece of gravel rolled over by a gust of wind could destroy it.

He added next to the sketch: "Non-metallic protective cage, pending design."

At nine o'clock in the evening, the four-hour trial run of Observation Point A ended.

He went out carrying an iron-free tool kit.

The night sky was very bright, the wind was smaller than during the day, and the stars spread densely overhead, far clearer than in Jiangcheng in the Real World.

It still carried that subtle tremor.

Walking to the observation point.

The bracket had been blown crooked by about three degrees.

It was not a disaster, but it was enough to contaminate the camera orientation data.

Returning to the Stone House, the data was imported.

The magnetic field curve was generally stable, but there was a slow drift at the end of the second hour with a small amplitude lasting about ten minutes.

Jiang Lin's first reaction was not to suspect an abnormality, but to check the metadata.

During that period, the bracket's orientation might have been pushed by the wind.

The temperature also dropped by about 0.8 ℃, the power supply voltage did not drop suddenly, and there was no automatic reboot.

Without the record of the bracket orientation drift, this section of data would be very tempting, looking very much like a true environmental disturbance.

But now, it could only be marked as—

Candidate contamination: Bracket posture change, not entering natural anomaly candidates.

The first night ended.

The red band he was chasing failed to enter the credible dataset tonight.

But he had gained one more rule, knowing that in the future he could not trust any curves given by brackets without posture records.

On the fifth day, Jiang Lin began moving stones.

Observation Point A needed a heavy base.

He picked eight relatively regularly shaped wind-eroded rocks, the largest of which was close to twenty kilograms, with natural depressions on the surface suitable for embedding into the ground.

Half-buried and tamped down.

Before installing the observation box, he conducted a magnetic scan again.

The stones themselves should not carry magnetic anomalies, but in the Wasteland there was no should.

If some rocks contained magnetite, they would still contaminate the data.

The magnetometer probe circled the base three times.

There were no obvious spikes, which was acceptable.

Before noon, observation box V5 was fixed to the mounting plate, with the camera and magnetometer separated.

The low-illumination industrial camera was mounted on an independent small pillar, with the fisheye lens facing the zenith.

The magnetometer probe extended horizontally by one and a half meters.

The temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensors were placed in a small plastic cover with louvered slits.

Two methods were used for posture calibration.

The compass determined the north direction, and the shadow method verified it.

The two results were not completely consistent.

The compass was affected by geomagnetism and the surrounding environment, while the shadow method was affected by time recording and solar altitude calculation.

In the Wasteland, whether the sun was completely identical to the real Earth could likewise not be presupposed.

The two could only serve as initial references.

There was only one anemometer.

Where to install it—he thought for a few minutes.

Turbine diagnosis required the wind speed near the tower, while sky observation required the environmental wind speed of the observation point.

He could not satisfy both goals simultaneously.

He drew two sets of plans.

Finally, he chose Observation Point A.

The reason was very simple—the old wind turbine would be gradually replaced by wind turbine no. 2.

The baseline data of Observation Point A was part of the sixth long-term scientific research framework.

Turbine diagnosis could temporarily rely on voltage, current, temperature, and auscultation.

If observation data lacked local wind speed from the very beginning, it would bury a much bigger pitfall for the future.

And what he was chasing did not allow for any bigger pitfalls.

The anemometer was installed at Observation Point A, about two meters away from the magnetometer probe, and the cables ran along a wooden trough on the ground.

The software configuration was updated, and a column was added to the sampling table: wind_pulse_count.

Git commit.

Day5: Add anemometer channel to OBS-V5 config for Point A.

Night fell.

On the way back to the Stone House, the sky became completely dark.

The pale red in the northern low sky appeared again.

It was clearer than the previous few nights, like an extremely thin red fog pressed against the horizon.

If it were before, Jiang Lin would probably watch for a while and then go back to continue his own business.

If it were the day he had just obtained that copy of "Plasma Physics", a slight urge might have welled up in his heart.

But tonight, he only looked for a few seconds.

Because the camera was fifty meters away, the magnetometer was fifty meters away, and the anemometer was fifty meters away.

The data would come back.

His eyes did not need to speak for the instruments.

Early on the sixth morning, he walked towards Observation Point A with a spare battery and an empty SD card.

The bracket was still there.

Layer one of good news.

A layer of fine dust covered the fisheye lens cover.

The fine powder left by the nighttime sandstorm would reduce image contrast.

Layer two of problems.

The bracket orientation had no obvious deviation, and the semi-buried stone base was effective.

Returning to the Stone House, the data was imported.

From 3:00 to 3:40 in the early morning, the wind speed increased significantly.

During the same period, the camera starlight trailed, and the magnetometer had a slight disturbance lasting eighteen minutes.

Jiang Lin did not immediately connect it to the red light band in the north.

Check wind speed: increased.

Check temperature: decreased.

Check power supply: slope slightly changed.

Check image: starlight trailing.

Check bracket: nighttime transient vibration could not be ruled out.

This section of magnetic field disturbance could only be marked as—

Candidate contamination: Strong wind/temperature/power supply/bracket vibration none ruled out.

The value of the first night's data did not lie in what was discovered, but in how easily anomalies could be counterfeited.

Wind would counterfeit starlight changes, dust would counterfeit background brightness, temperature would counterfeit sensor drift, battery voltage drop would counterfeit electronic noise, and bracket shaking would counterfeit synchronized disturbances of the camera and magnetometer.

Without an anemometer, voltage records, image quality markers, and morning bracket checks, at least three places in this night's data would tempt him to think about spatial environmental anomalies.

Now, they were all pressed back to the ground.

For the first time, he clearly felt that what he was facing was not the sky, but a system whose ability to generate false signals far exceeded its ability to discover true signals.

In the afternoon, he added a ring-shaped wind shield to the lens, made of plastic sheets and old transparent film.

He also hung a small aluminum piece suspended by a thin thread on the bracket as a vibration marker.

When returning to the Stone House, the wind rose at the horizon again.

The sound of the old wind turbine became sharper.

Jiang Lin looked at the temperature probe data.

The temperature of the yaw bearing housing slowly rose first, and the voltage sag only appeared a dozen minutes later.

This sequence was different from before.

Under certain circumstances, frictional heating was not the result of voltage sag, but rather yaw jamming occurred first, the wind turbine's wind-tracking deteriorated, and then the output declined.

The failure chain was more complex.

At night, Jiang Lin opened "Plasma Physics" and read the first two pages of the introduction.

The fourth state of matter, collective behavior of charged particles, Debye shielding.

What is plasma, why the collective behavior of charged particles cannot be simply equated with the motion of gas molecules, and why macroscopic electromagnetic fields conversely constrain microscopic particles.

These things were very beautiful.

When he read the word Debye shielding, a very sharp metal squeal came from outside the house.

He closed the book.

Today did not belong to plasma; it belonged to wind turbine no. 2.

He still needed a closed-loop power system to support the entire observation system before he could truly ask what that red band was many years later.

The luxury of theory had to be built upon the reliability of engineering.

Unboxing.

Low-speed permanent magnet generator, fiberglass blades, hub, tail rudder, controller, rectifier bridge, dump load resistor, and a few packs of factory bolts that looked very reliable but must be re-checked.

The manual called it a one-kilowatt small wind power generation system.

Jiang Lin did not believe this name.

In the Wasteland, anything with the word system attached to it meant that it could not be used right after being assembled, but had to be taken apart, doubted, verified, and tamed first.

The generator's rotating shaft had a magnetoresistive stutter feel, but the stutter was uneven, with slightly greater resistance in a certain section.

It could be the permanent magnet slot effect, uneven bearing preload, or transportation impact.

Measuring the resistance of the three-phase windings, B-C was slightly higher.

Ordinary multimeters were inherently inaccurate at measuring low resistance; switching to the constant-current four-terminal method, B-C was still on the high side.

The test bench was ugly.

Two channel steels, a thick steel plate, a bench drill as the drive, and a soft belt connection.

Rather let it slip than hard-transmit the impact.

It didn't look like new energy equipment, but more like an interrogation rack temporarily assembled from a pile of industrial debris in the Stone House.

The interrogation subject was that generator.

Energized at low speed, the no-load three-phase voltage B-C was still low.

Check the terminals.

The factory cold-pressed terminals of the three lead wires had no problems from an external view.

He gently pulled each terminal, and the third wire was slightly loose.

Internal crimping was loose.

This kind of defect was disgusting.

Static resistance measurement only had a tiny deviation, and it seemed to still work under low power, but once a large current passed through it for a long time, it would heat up, oxidize, contact resistance would continue to rise, and finally burn the entire terminal into charcoal.

Cut it off, strip the wire, re-crimp, reinforce slightly with solder, and put on heat shrink tubing.

Measure again, the three phases were symmetrical.

It wasn't a matter of manufacturer error.

It was very normal for low-priced civilian wind turbines to have this kind of crimping quality; what was truly abnormal was treating the merchant's outdoor waterproof, reliable, and durable claims as engineering facts.

The rectifier bridge was connected.

Low-speed DC had ripple, and the frequency and amplitude were within expectations.

Connecting a small load, keeping the rotational speed at 300rpm, the voltage dropped, the current rose, and the rectifier bridge heated up.

Switching to a large load, the sound of the bench drill became deeper, and the belt began to slip.

The generator's electromagnetic load had already strained the driving end.

The test bench was not a limit test rack, nor was the bench drill wind.

He did not continue to add load.

In the afternoon, he weighed the blades one by one.

The maximum difference between the three pieces was 29 grams.

One piece had two transport bumps on the leading edge; he applied temporary protective tape and marked it for subsequent epoxy repair.

At night, the dump load resistor thermal test.

The function of the dump load resistor was very simple: when the battery could no longer absorb energy, it turned excess electrical energy into heat.

People in the Real World easily felt this was a waste, but Jiang Lin in the Wasteland knew that this was the price of system safety.

Energy that could not be consumed safely would eventually return in the form of accidents.

Placed on the outside of the stone wall, cushioned with ceramic pieces, with no combustibles within one meter around.

Low power reached 69 ℃ in thirty minutes, medium power reached 91 ℃ in ten minutes.

The controller manual had no over-temperature input.

The cheap small wind turbine controller only cared about voltage switching and did not understand heat.

This was the boundary of the commercialized black box.

He added an independent temperature alarm.

90 ℃ early warning, 120 ℃ danger.

The buzzer sound was harsh, and the red light shone dazzlingly.

He deliberately placed it so that it was hard to ignore.

Late at night, the temperature probe data of the dump load module returned to zero, and the buzzer did not sound.

Jiang Lin sat back down in front of the stone desk, looking at the data from Observation Point A that had been pressed back to the ground that night.

He knew he had done two things today.

wind turbine no. 2 began entering bench interrogation.

Observation Point A completed the screening between falsehood and truth for the first time.

The two things seemed unrelated, but they ultimately led to the same place.

The extremely low-brightness red bright band in the northern low sky.