Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
However, the desiccant packets for the most recent pair of boxes (intended to simplify changing the desiccant in the collection feeding the MMU3 atop the Prusa MK4 3D printer) produced this:
Polydryer – as-received desiccant
The silica gel in the left cup looks OK-ish, maybe a little dark, but the fresh-from-the-bag beads in the right cup are crying out for regeneration after having adsorbed about all the water vapor they can.
If you were using that silica gel in its original DO NOT EAT bag, where you can’t see what it’s telling you, you might wonder why it wasn’t doing such a great job of drying the box + filament. The same could happen with a bag of non-indicating gel, along the lines of what I was using a decade ago.
So I dumped both in the Needs Rgeneration bottle and filled both meters with 25 g of fresh silica gel.
Spotted on the way around one of the myriad strip malls (different from “strip clubs“) sporting a “Recently Renovated” sign out front:
Renovations – overpainted sign
You just know what those signs said, right? Must not be important any more.
Around the corner, the painters couldn’t get to where they needed to go:
Renovations – paint underspray
A Streetview image from seven years back tells the tale:
Renovations – Street View 2018
So the most generous interpretation would be something like overspraying those signs was a mercy killing. I’m impressed they could get that much paint behind the UPS drop box!
Out front there’s another triumph of hope over experience:
A long-lost repair finally made it to the top of the list:
Bicycle Mobile – bottom view
The original string had long since rotted out, but everything else was in a plastic bag just waiting for this occasion.
The colorful cylinders are stacks of laser-cut 6 mm disks with a 2 mm hole, held to the wire & string with a tiny dot of high-viscosity cyanoacrylate glue at each end:
Bicycle Mobile – detail
The disks came from acrylic leftovers:
Bicycle Mobile – laser-cut acrylic
The motion you can’t see makes the shiny bikes much more visible out there:
The weight ball had a 2 mm hole filled by a wood plug which I cleaned out piecemeal with a 1.5 mm drill bit in a pin vise; a short length of wood skewer holds the new string in place.
Because the upper arms support more weight, their disk stacks need fewer disks for the same leverage. The original mobile had (at most) four 6 mm chromed plastic balls at each level, so I started with eight 3 mm disks, adjusted the stack length as needed, glued them in place, then removed the surplus disks by crushing them with a Vise-Grip.
An email from Electronic Arts arrived in an email account I haven’t used in over a decade:
Welcome to your EA Account! Your EA Account serves as an all-access pass to everything EA, from websites and mobile apps to console and PC games.
Seconds later:
Your EA Security Code: <<< redacted, not that it matters >>> If you didn’t request this code, please go to your My Account page and change your password right away. For assistance, please contact EA Help.
Thanks for helping us maintain your account’s security.
Not ever having had an EA account nor being in the process of signing up for one, I did nothing.
After a few more seconds:
Dear EA Insider,
Thanks for signing up. We’re looking forward to bringing you the latest news and information on your favorite games.
All the emails look to be genuinely from Electronics Arts, not scam emails routed through the usual sketchy / compromised servers.
Four days later:
Dear Customer,
We are contacting you regarding your EA account.
We wish to notify you that we have found your account to be in violation of our User Agreement or our Terms of Sale, and due to the nature of this violation we are left with no option other than to permanently close your account with immediate effect.
Which looks much more impressive in email HTML:
EA Account Closing
Although I did not respond to the Security Code message, the scammer surely used a phone number under his (it’s always a he) control, because “2FA” really means “pick an authentication method that lets you in”.
Just for the amusement value, I fed that email address into the EA sign-in page, hit the “Forgot my password” button, and got a Security Code just like the scammer didn’t. I suppose I could change the password and discover / change the phone number, but that would put me in full ownership of an account used for nefarious purpose.
I sometimes wonder what else happens using my identity.
A good prosecutor could nail me for Third Party Retro-associative Complicity and, if I didn’t already live in Poughkeepsie, send me up the river.
A small sewing notions cabinet, once my mother’s, now holds some of Mary’s supplies and, a few days ago, had one of its drawer pulls fall off. While preemptively tightening all the screws, I found one no longer held onto its pull:
Notions drawer pull – parts
They don’t make drawer pulls like that any more!
As I see things, it can be forgiven for losing its grip after nearly a century.
Thread the screw in as far as it will go and lay the pull flat on the bench vise anvil:
Notions drawer pull – hammering setup
A few gentle whacks with a pin punch on top and bottom, plus a tap on each side, compressed the pull’s remaining threads around & into the screw:
Notions drawer pull – reshaped
Put it back in its drawer, snug the screw, and it’s all good.
That should suffice for at least the remainder of its first century …
The next step involves creating a corresponding set of LightBurn layouts to burn those holes out of colored paper sheets to produce layered paper art:
Random Blocks – framed
I know it’s art, because that’s what I was thinking when I made it.
Setting up the LightBurn layouts requires enough manual effort to make the whole thing impractical except as a testcase to see how it all worked out. An overview of the LightBurn workspace:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn layout overview
The little bitty grid in the upper left quadrant represents the 700×500 platform of my laser and each of the blue squares is 159 mm on a side. I tend to not delete the intermediate steps, because they serve as some sort of documentation the next time I wonder how I did that thing.
So, we begin.
Import the Inkscape SVG file:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn SVG import
The blue outer square and the blue text identifying it are on LightBurn’s T2 tool layer, with the black squares on the C00 layer. All of that happens automagically, because I used colors from the LightBurn palette in Inkscape.
The lonely square in the upper right is the template from which the other 256 squares were cloned, but it has no further purpose in life.
The 16×16 grid consists of sixteen overlaid groups, which need sorting out for ease of access, so drag each one off into a more useful arrangement:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn sheet separation
Note that each of the 256 possible positions has a square in only one of those groups.
Each of the 16 groups corresponds to a sheet of paper, with the squares indicating holes exposing the sheet below it. The color of each square, as seen from the top of the stack, comes from the first sheet in the stack without a hole. Perforce, every sheet above the one without a hole must have a hole, which means you must merge all those sheets.
Line up (duplicates of) those 16 groups in the vertical line forming the left column in this arrangement:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn array duplication
The top group is the layer I named H000 in Inkscape, with the others in order down to H337 on the bottom. You can see why labeling them is pretty much required.
I should have equalized the vertical spaces between the groups in the left column, but it doesn’t really matter.
The rest of the triangle comes from duplicating each group using LightBurn’s Grid Array tool with a convenient space between each copy. Make 15 copies of the top group for a total of 16 H000 and no copies of the bottom H337.
Hit Delete Duplicates to get rid of all the overlaid outer squares
If you’re fussy, Duplicate the line of blocks and move it up
Group each block individually to keep all the little squares together with the outline
Thusly:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn combined layers
Combine each of those blocks with the sheet cutting template, tweak the binary sheet identification holes, and group the result:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn cutting layouts
The leftmost block has All The Holes, the next one is missing a few, and so on across the line:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn cutting layouts – detail
So the leftmost block corresponds to the black mask atop all the layers. Because it doesn’t have alignment holes in the corners or a binary sheet number, you get to align it by eyeball after gluing up the rest of the stack.
The rightmost block has no cutout squares at all and goes on the bottom of the stack. It also lacks a sheet number, but it’s easy to identify.
Set the LightBurn speed / power values for the layers to cut your stock of colored art paper.
Position the Letter Page Holder template to put the center of the sheet cutout at the center of the platform:
Random Blocks – 16×16 – LightBurn fixture template
Drop the fixture on the platform, use magnets to hold it down, then do a Print and Cut alignment on the corner targets so the template matches the fixture.
Then:
Click to select one of the blocks
Hit Ctrl-D to duplicate it
Hit P to slam it to the middle of the template
Hit Alt-S to Fire The Laser
Hit Del to delete the block
Iterate until done
I used a stack of paper in rainbow order roughly corresponding to the Inkscape layer colors, but you could stack them backwards or even use random colors and nobody would ever know:
Random Blocks – framed detail
I kinda like it, but wow that took a lot of prep work …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
