The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Author: Ed

Parking Advice: Avoid Drive-Through Spaces

After driving for five hours I’m never at my best, so I parked with atypical abandon at the motel: on the downhill side of a pull-though parking space. Usually I park off to one side of the lot, directly under a lamp that lights the car and shadows the interior, with the hatch backed against the pole. I claim the stupid excuse.

The next morning we hiked out for breakfast and returned to find emergency vehicles scattered all over the motel’s lot. Even from a distance, we knew this might not have a good outcome for us: that’s our van going nose-to-nose with the EMS Medic’s SUV:

EMS Medic parking – overview

Up close, the situation turned out to be much much much better than I expected:

EMS Medic parking – bumper detail

The siren was just kissing the front bumper of our van. I think the SUV rolled forward an inch when they released the brakes after slapping the tranny into Park and bailing out.

For what it’s worth, those fancy pusher bars on the front must be strictly for looks, because the siren & its control box really do stick out far beyond the bars. At the first serious contact they’ll crush back into the grille and do about a kilobuck worth of damage to the front end.

I think the driver wasn’t fully aware of how much snout that SUV has. It looks to be shiny-new, so perhaps this was the first close quarters parking experience:

EMS Medic parking – position detail

I left a polite note on the driver’s side window pointing out that another two inches would mean we’d be filling out paperwork until noon.

They were gone by the time we left. The siren snagged the corner of the license plate and bent it out as they departed, but that’s not the first bend in that particular bit of sheet metal.

If any of you have a friend on the York PA Medic / EMS staff, give ’em a friendly heads-up for me, OK?

Memo to Self: Always park off to the side, dammit!

2011-07-21
Windows 7 First Boot

OK, this resembles dynamiting fish, but I can’t help myself. A cute little Lenovo Q150 with a D525 dual-core Atom and nVidia ION graphics just arrived, which, perforce, has Windows 7 preinstalled. The first step is to get Windows activated, updated, and settled down… the second step being, of course, to shrink that partition to a nub and install Linux for actual use.

After a bit of huffing & puffing, reading (*) & clicking of many EULAs, and the first round of updates:

Windows 7 – You must restart your computer

Every time I see that, I think of the old dialog box joke:

Mouse motion detected. Windows NT must reboot to apply this change. [OK]

Then it had to update .NET, which produced this unbelievable body count of changes:

Windows 7 – Applying update operation

And then another few rounds of updates, the last of which evidently crashed & burned. The Get help with this error link was, mmm, unhelpful; it simply reported they hadn’t the foggiest idea what went wrong. Rebooting and retrying the automated updates presumably worked:

Windows 7 – Some updates were not installed

Doing all of that while puttering around with other stuff occupied the better part of a day, after which one owns a PC with an operating system installed. Yeah, you do get a UI that exposes IE 9, but if you want to do something with the PC, well, that requires installing applications.

I loves me my default Windows desktop background, from a long-ago crash inside a VM:

BSOD – fatal app exception

(*) Yes, I do read them, mostly for comic relief. The general practice of forcing you to scroll through a sheaf of typewriter-formatted pages in a 2×3 inch peephole centered in a huge monitor suggests that they really don’t want you to know what’s going on. Anyone who suggests buying commercial software because it has a reputable company standing behind it has obviously never gone to the trouble of reading the relevant EULA.

2011-07-20
Mind the Overhang!

Crane treads overhanging flatbed

Spotted this one in a rest stop along I-84. I suppose it’s perfectly safe, but those anchoring hooks really don’t inspire much confidence, even if the only way you could jounce that crane sideways would involve flipping the flatbed. Right?

Yes, it was hanging over the other side just as far.

Come to think of it, the tractor that towed this assembly wasn’t present. Perhaps someone discovered / was informed it really isn’t a Good Idea / legal to haul an excavator at 65 mph in this configuration?

At least the driver didn’t do that…

2011-07-19
Drilling a Drainage Hole in a Plant Pot

We divided an ancient Snake (a.k.a. Mother-In-Law’s Tongue) Plant and discovered the pot had no drainage hole, which is not to be tolerated.

It turns out that an ordinary carbide glass drill works just fine on glazed clay pots. Use a low RPM and very slow feed, flood the scene with water, and drill from the other side after the point breaks through.

Glass drill for plant pot hole

The glaze inside the pot already had a flaw that let the water into the clay, from whence it seeped out through the unglazed lower rim. I suppose saturating the clay can’t possibly be good, but I’ve done this to many glazed pots over the years and none of them have ever complained, so it’s all good.

2011-07-18
Thing-O-Matic: Webcam Pole Mount

Webcam pole – in action

Some upcoming presentations on 3D printing need a way to show what’s going on inside the box. I’ve had various webcams affixed to various parts of the Thing-O-Matic, but nothing worked quite right: the camera was either in the wrong spot, at the wrong angle, or just flat-out in the way.

The helmet mirror project produced a trio of three-draw telescoping shafts that looked promising, so I drilled suitable holes in two chunks of ~~scrap~~ make-from plastic and produced a pole mount for a Logitech camera without doing a bit of machining. The camera wants to clamp onto a notebook and works fine atop a block of acrylic, with the cable secured to the base of the pole to prevent the whole thing from falling over at the slightest tug.

I briefly considered printing a nice clip to hold the cable to the pole, then came to my senses and used a cable tie. After all, that’s what they’re for, right?

A dot of clear epoxy in each hole prevents the blocks from rotating on the shafts; they’re sufficiently un-round to give it a decent grip. I clamped the pole in a V-block to keep it perpendicular to the base while the epoxy cured:

Webcam pole – clamping

The white LEDs under the Z-stage produce far too much glare and reflect in the Kapton tape; a switch to knock ’em off for video viewing seems in order.

(If anybody else is keeping track, this is Post 1000. Although we humans love numbers with plenty of zeroes, Post 10000 will pose a challenge…)

2011-07-17
Thing-O-Matic: Uncommanded Z Motion After Homing

After printing the Barbie Pistol, I discovered that moving the Z stage to anything less than the absolute maximum was a Bad Idea, so I changed end.gcode to simply home the Z axis to the top. That worked fine in RepG 24, but after printing a few things with RepG 25, I discovered that the Z axis now has uncommanded motion after that homing step: a G0 F4000 X0 causes the Z stage to drop by anywhere from a few millimeters to half the total travel.

Of course, the uncommanded Z motion depends on something imponderable, but it’s consistent for any given setup. This chunk of G-Code causes about 10 mm of downward Z motion:

G21       (set units to mm)
G90       (set positioning to absolute)
(- coarse home axes -)
G162 Z F1000   (home Z to get nozzle out of danger zone)
G161 Y F4000   (retract Y to get X out of front opening)
G161 X F4000   (now safe to home X)
M132 X Y Z A B   (fetch home offsets from EEPROM)
G0 F4000 X0 Y0 Z30        (pause at center to build confidence)
(- draw square)
G0 F4000 X-45 Y-45 Z10   (to front left corner)
G1 Y45 F4000
G1 X45
G1 Y-45
G1 X-45                   (return to front left)
(- move to eject position)
G162 Z F1500   (home Z to get nozzle away from object)
(G0 F4000 Z113) (this would work fine)
G0 F4000 X0       (center X axis)
G0 F4000 Y40   (move Y stage forward)

There’s a RepG ticket for that.

As nearly as I can tell, homing an axis trashes its coordinate value, so the only thing you can do next is set the axis coordinate value with G92 or M132. Given that those values are now stored in EEPROM, maybe it’s be a good idea to simply use them, without requiring another command after each homing command?

You’d want home offset values for both the maximum and minimum limits, to accommodate printers with limits on both ends of the axis, rather than the single offset now stored. The two homing commands (G161 and G162) could pick the appropriate offset, if a valid one was stored, and leave the coordinate unchanged (but not trashed!) otherwise.

There’s a RepG ticket for that.

2011-07-16
Peacock in Deployed Mode

I tagged along on a Master Gardener trip to Weathersfield and found this fellow confined to a cage:

Peacock – stowed view

His companion was a pure white (leucistic, not albino) female:

Leucistic Peahen

Shortly thereafter, he deployed for action. Part of the dance involves rattling all those quills:

Peacock – side view

I had no idea peacocks have wooly white underwear!

Peacock – stern view

The female remained utterly uninterested throughout the entire show; evidently, one can get used to anything if it happens often enough.

Raj, our correspondent from India, surely has these things like we have turkeys: enough to be a nuisance.

2011-07-15