Although the Big Search Sites no longer provide the keywords that select my posts (because they sell that data to their advertisers), a few snippets leak in from smaller operations.
People evidently have this problem a lot:
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The Kenmore 158 sewing machine crash test dummy has plenty of light:
Kenmore 158 LED Lighting – first light
Well, as long as you don’t mind the clashing color balance. The needle LEDs turned out warmer than I expected, but Mary says she can cope. I should build a set of warm-white LED strips when it’s time to refit her real sewing machine and add another boost supply to drive them at their rated current.
Much to our relief, the two LEDs at the needle don’t cast offensively dark shadows:
The DC-DC boost power supply for the LED needle lights has four mounting holes, two completely blocked by the heatsink and the others against components with no clearance for screw heads, soooo …
3D printing to the rescue:
Boost converter – installed
Now that the hulking ET227 operates in saturation mode, I removed the blower to make room for the power supply. Two strips of double-stick foam tape fasten the holder to the removable tray inside the Dell GX270’s case.
It’s basically a rounded slab with recesses for the PCB and clearance for solder-side components:
Boost converter mount – as printed
The solid model shows the screw holes sitting just about tangent to the PCB recess:
XW029 Booster PCB Mount
That’s using the new OpenSCAD with length scales along each axis; they won’t quite replace my layout grid over the XY plane, but they certainly don’t require as much computation.
I knew my lifetime supply of self-tapping hex head 4-40 screws would come in handy for something:
Boost converter in mount
The program needs to know the PCB dimensions and how much clearance you want for the stuff hanging off the bottom:
PCBoard = [66,35,IntegerMultiple(1.8,ThreadThick)];
BottomParts = [[1.5,-1.0,0,0], // xyz offset of part envelope
[60.0,37.0,IntegerMultiple(3.0,ThreadThick)]]; // xyz envelope size (z should be generous)
That’s good enough for my simple needs.
The hole locations form a list-of-vectors that the code iterates through:
That’s the first occasion I’ve had to try iterating a list and It Just Worked; I must break the index habit. The newest OpenSCAD version has Python-ish list comprehensions which ought to come in handy for something.
The “Z coordinate” of each hole position gives its rotation, so I could snuggle them up a bit closer to the edge by forcing the proper polygon orientation. The square roots in the second two holes make them tangent to the corners of the PCB, rather than the sides, which wasn’t true for the first picture. Fortunately, the washer head of those screws turned out to be just big enough to capture the PCB anyway.
A longstanding Xubuntu / XFCE UI problem has been single-pixel window borders that make click-and-drag resizing essentially impossible. The reason it’s a longstanding problem has been the developers’ unflinching response to any and all issues raised on the bug tracker:
I had never looked for the XFCE theme-building documentation (and, thus, never found any), because building a whole new theme would be a lot of work just to resize the damn borders. It should be feasible to tweak only the borders of an existing theme, but … I stalled.
Repeatedly. On every single version of Xubuntu that’s come along.
Fortunately, someone recently did the legwork and summarized the method, which I slightly adapted:
cd /usr/share/themes/
sudo cp -a Greybird-compact/ Greybird-wide
cd Greybird-wide/xfwm4
for f in bottom left right ; do sudo cp ../../Daloa/xfwm4/${f}* . ; done
sudo sed -i -e 's/C0C0C0/CECECE/' *xpm
sudo sed -i -e 's/A0A0FF/7C7C7C/' *xpm
sudo sed -i -e 's/E0E0FF/E0E0E0/' *xpm
The exact color mapping depends on which two themes you’re using. You can also specify GTK element colors, which seems like a better way to do it. Maybe next time.
Apparently, the corresponding PNG files contain transparency information for the XPM files, but I haven’t bothered to investigate how that works or what might happen if I tweaked them.
Then you select the new Graybird-wide theme and It Just Works.
My trusty 1050×1680 portrait monitor began resetting itself, which probably indicates failing capacitors in the power supply or logic board; eBay has capacitor kits, but it may not be worthwhile fixing the poor thing. I snagged a new 2560×1440 Dell U2713HM monitor, added a dual-Displayport PNY NVS310 video card, told Xubuntu 14.04LTS to use nVidia’s binary driver, and, somewhat to my astonishment, It Just Worked.
The xrandr report:
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 4000 x 2560, maximum 16384 x 16384
DP-0 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-2 connected 2560x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm
2560x1440 60.0*+
1920x1200 59.9
1920x1080 60.0 59.9 50.0 24.0 60.1 60.0 50.0
1680x1050 60.0
1600x1200 60.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1280x800 59.8
1280x720 60.0 59.9 50.0
1152x864 75.0
1024x768 75.0 60.0
800x600 75.0 60.3
720x576 50.0 50.1
720x480 59.9 60.1
640x480 75.0 59.9 59.9
DP-3 connected 1440x2560+2560+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm
2560x1440 60.0*+
1920x1200 59.9
1920x1080 60.0 59.9 50.0 24.0 60.1 60.0 50.0
1680x1050 60.0
1600x1200 60.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1280x800 59.8
1280x720 60.0 59.9 50.0
1152x864 75.0
1024x768 75.0 60.0
800x600 75.0 60.3
720x576 50.0 50.1
720x480 59.9 60.1
640x480 75.0 59.9 59.9