Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
I know it’s still good, because the label has its 4 lb 7 oz refilled gross weight stamped into it, which is exactly what it weighs today.
Walter Smith Welding Supplies may still be in business, perhaps in Poughkeepsie, but their former 18 Downs St location in Kingston has become Noble Gas Solutions:
Noble Gas Solutions – 18 Downs St Kingston – 2019
Back then, you could call Smith Welding at a four digit phone number in Kingston: 5061. Nowadays, you must call Noble Gas with three more digits: 338-5061. As Charles Stross observed, something like 70% of the future is already in place, because infrastructure is so tenacious.
Heck, just look at that Quonset hut!
Keep calm and extinguish on:
Fyre Freez extinguisher – step 4
Two thoughts spring to mind:
Most kitchen fires start waist-high (it’s the late 1950s: where else would she be?)
She’s gonna lose skin on that metal tank
Seems to me a Fyre Freez will get cold enough to freeze skin while discharging, but I admit to not having actually tried it.
Anyhow, given the overall basement decor, the brackets have the right general style:
Fyre Freez extinguisher – bracket detail
Here’s hoping its future will be as dull as its past …
It’s easy to find the two front screws holding the top in place, although you’ll need either a bendy or offset screwdriver to remove them:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – front case screws
Pull up hard on the cord retraction plunger to remove it, revealing the two rear screws:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – rear case screws
Extract the wires and motor control PCB from their niches:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – motor assembly overview
Prying the latch in the middle of the rear panel (over on the right) releases the motor assembly, which you can then wiggle-n-jiggle upward and out:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – extracting motor assembly
Disconnect the wires, peel off various foam bits, and extract the motor from its carapace. Measure the blower diameter and cut a suitable plywood clamp for the bench vise:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – custom motor clamp
I loves me some good laser cutter action, even when the plywood crate the laser came in doesn’t have much to recommend it:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – failed plywood clamp
I vaguely recall reading the purple tinge comes from the bromine vapor used to dis-insect the wood during manufacturing, before shipping it halfway around the planet.
One area of the commutator looks like it’s in bad shape:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – as-found commutator
Clean the commutator bars in the desperate hope it’s just random crud, even though that seems unlikely, then connect a widowmaker cord to the motor terminals:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – widowmaker line cord
Use a Variac to spin the motor at a (relatively) low speed while watching the brushes and commutator:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – commutator sparking
Now, that is not a nominal outcome.
The cleaned commutator again shows signs of distress:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – scarred commutator
Indeed, measuring the resistance across the line cord terminals shows a shorted winding: 0.0 Ω with the brushes aligned on the bars just antispinward of the scars.
So the motor is definitely, irretrievably dead.
Extracting the brushes shows the arcs have eroded their spinward edges:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – eroded motor brushes
The dark smudge on the windings seems due to internal problems, rather than just the arcs, because the wiring crossing between the commutator and the smudge remains clean:
Sears Progressive Vacuum – charred motor windings
One can buy a used motor assembly on eBay for about $40, with no assurance it doesn’t also have a shorted winding.
The Hakko FX-888 soldering iron perched on the corner of my bench has a little red LED that lights up when it’s heating and goes off when it’s not. Unfortunately, while shutting down after fixing something, I sometimes glance at the thing while the LED is off, whereupon it will patiently keep the iron hot, sometimes for days, until I return.
A recent Squidwrench session gave me the opportunity to yoink that nuisance off the to-do pile where it has been pending since about ten minutes after I unboxed the iron a decade ago.
Some concerted rummaging failed to turn up the stash of bridge rectifiers, so I air-wired one from a quartet of discrete diodes:
Hakko 888 Soldering Iron pilot – bridge rectifier
Remember: the bigger the blob, the better the job.
For the record, the transformer produces 28 VAC, with the center tap 26 VAC from the left end and 2 VAC from the right end.
A 10 kΩ resistor stands upright at the far corner of the bridge, limiting the LED current to a few milliamps and making it bright enough for the purpose.
The front of the case has plenty of vacant space in its upper corners, so I drilled a hole and poked a blue LED:
Hakko 888 Soldering Iron pilot – heating
That’s shown with the iron heating.
Here’s an action shot with the temperature at the setpoint:
Hakko 888 Soldering Iron pilot – stable
Nowadays all soldering irons have digital readouts with no need for a pilot light.
Of course, two days later I found the bridge rectifier stash, but there’s no point in opening the patient again.
Our house dates back to 1955 and features several fancy items not found in contemporary dwellings. Take, for example, the Thermador in-wall heater in the front bathroom:
Thermador In-Wall Heater
It has a finger-friendly design apparently intended to admit a small finger through the grille, where it can easily contact the resistance heating coil, so while we were moving in I snapped a GFI circuit breaker into that slot in the breaker panel. We advised our (very young) Larval Engineer of the hazard and had no further problem; as far as I know, that breaker never tripped and no fingers were damaged.
Back then, while adding that breaker and cleaning the first half-century of fuzz out of the thing, I evidently blobbed silicone rubber on the screw terminals of the switch:
Thermador In-Wall Heater – switch contacts
They don’t make switches like that any more.
For reasons not relevant here, we’ll be using it for the first time since we moved in, so I spent a while cleaning / blowing / brushing another two decades of fuzz out of it.
Minus the fuzz, the heater no longer smells like a house on fire:
The usual measurements of voltages and currents assume a constant load impedance, where the power varies with the square of the measured value. In this case, the laser tube is most definitely not a constant resistance, because it operates at an essentially constant voltage around 12 kV after lighting up at maybe twice that voltage. As a result, the power varies linearly with the measured voltages and currents, so the usual Bode plot “20 dB per decade” single-pole filter slope does not apply.
Because the laser tube power varies roughly with the current, I’ve been using the current as a proxy for the power, so the half-power points are where the current is half its value at low frequencies.
The controller’s analog voltage output is linearly related to the tube current and power, so the same reasoning applies.
That reasoning is obviously debatable …
Anyhow, it seems the PWM digital output is the primary signal source, with the L-AN analog output filtered from it. If you had a use for the analog voltage that didn’t involve sending it through a second low-pass filter, it might come in handy, but that’s not the case with the laser’s HV power supply.
Looking across the graph at the tube current’s half-power level of 12-ish mA shows 150 Hz for the L-AN output and 250 Hz for the PWM output. That’s roughly what I had guesstimated from the raw measurements, but it’s nice to see those lines in those spots.
In practical terms, grayscale engraving will operate inside an upper frequency limit around 200 Hz. Engraving a square wave pattern similar to the risetime target requires a bandwidth perhaps three times the base frequency for reasonably crisp edges, which means no faster than 100 Hz = 100 mm/s for a 1 mm bar.
It may be easier to think in terms of the equivalent risetime, with 200 Hz implying a 1.5 ms risetime. The rise and fall times of the laser tube current are not equal and only vaguely related to the usual rules of thumb, but 1.5 ms will get you in the ballpark.
The usual tradeoff between scanning speed and laser power for a given material now also includes a maximum speed limit set by the feature size and edge sharpness. Scanning at 500 mm/s with a 1.5 ms risetime means the minimum sharp-edged feature should be maybe three times that wide: 5 ms / 500 mm/s = 2.5 mm.
The sine bars at 400 mm/s come out very shallow, both rectangular bars have sloped edges, and the 1 mm bar on the left resembles a V:
Sine bars – acrylic – 400 mm-s 100pct
At 100 mm/s, all the features are nicely shaped, although the sidewalls still have some slope:
Sine bars – acrylic – 100 mm-s 25pct
In all fairness, grayscale engraving with a CO₂ laser may not be particularly useful, unless you’re making very shallow and rather grainy 3D relief maps.
Intensity-modulating a “photographic” engraving on, say, white tile depends on the dye / metal / whatever having a linear-ish intensity variation with exposure, which is an unreasonable assumption.
The L-ON digital enable also has a millisecond or two of ramp time, so each discrete dot within a halftoned / dithered image has a minimum width.
Return the laser power supply’s IN terminal (and the purple wire to the oscilloscope) to the Ruida KT332N controller’s PWM output:
Ruida KT332 – PWM laser control wiring
Engraving the pattern in grayscale mode at 254 dpi produces 0.1 mm pixels and makes each bar 1 mm wide:
LightBurn – bandwidth test pattern setup
Engraving at 50 mm/s = 50 Hz lets the laser current once again hit full scale:
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 50mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
The traces:
1 X axis DIR, low = left-to-right (yellow)
2 L-ON laser enable, low active (magenta)
3 PWM digital signal (cyan)
4 tube current – 10 mA/div (green)
The PWM signal runs at 20 kHz and presents itself as a rather blurred trace, but you can see both the general tendency and the discrete steps between the vertical gray bars. As far as I can tell, the signal never reaches 0% or 100%, most likely to prevent the PWM filters from saturating in either condition.
The tube current drops from 23.8 mA to 13.8 mA, just over the half-power level of 12 mA, at 200 Hz:
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 200mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
So the PWM bandwidth is a little over 200 Hz, slightly higher than the analog bandwidth of a little under 200 Hz.
All of the measurements as a slide show:
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 25mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 50mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 100mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 200mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 300mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 400mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – PWM bandwidth – 10 sine – 500mm-s – 10ma-div – 254dpi
Now, with all the measurements in hand, maybe I can reach some sort of conclusion.
As before, with the Ruida KT332N controller’s L-AN analog output connected to the HV power supply IN terminal:
Ruida KT332 – analog laser control wiring
This time the scope traces include both the controller’s output voltage and the laser tube current:
The traces:
1 X axis DIR, low = left-to-right (yellow)
2 L-ON laser enable, low active (magenta)
3 L-AN analog voltage (cyan)
4 tube current – 10 mA/div (green)
At 50 mm/s = 50 Hz both the L-AN analog voltage and the laser current hit full scale:
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 50mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
The laser current resembles a damped RLC oscillation when started at nearly full scale and is entirely chaotic when started from zero, but behaves reasonably well for the rest of the cycle.
The power supply’s current bandwidth is definitely smaller than the controller’s voltage bandwidth, as shown by all those sampling steps simply vanishing.
As expected, at 200 mm/s = 200 Hz the L-AN analog voltage is down 3 dB:
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 200mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
At that frequency the tube current is down 8 dB, from 23.4 mApp to 9.4 mApp, showing how much the power supply’s PWM filter contributes to the rolloff. Since we’re interested in the overall bandwidth, the tube current is down 2.4 dB to 17.8 mA at 100 Hz, suggesting the -3 dB (16.6 mA) frequency is just slightly higher:
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 100mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
However, I think that’s the wrong way to calculate the -3 dB point of the laser power, because the tube operates at essentially constant voltage, which means both the analog voltage and the tube current are linearly related to the laser tube power, rather than being proportional to its square root.
If that’s the case, then the analog output voltage is down by ½ at 300 Hz and the tube’s half-power point occurs at 23.4 mA/2 = 11+ mA, closer to 200 Hz than 100 Hz. Given the resolution of the measurements, this doesn’t make much difference, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
Applying a 100 Hz PWM pulse (thus, a sharp step) to the power supply shows the laser tube current has a risetime (and falltime) around 2 ms, about what you’d expect from a single 200 Hz lowpass filter inside the power supply:
As far as I can tell, the controller’s “analog” output is just its digital PWM output passed through a 200 Hz low-pass filter. It would be useful as an analog input to a power supply without an additional PWM filter, but combining those two filters definitely cuts the overall bandwidth down.
All of the measurements as a slide show:
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 25mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 50mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 100mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 200mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 300mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 400mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
Tube Current – analog bandwidth – 10 sine – 500mm-s – 10mA-div – 254dpi
To round this out, I must measure the laser tube current bandwidth using the controller’s PWM signal. Because PWM passes through only the power supply’s lowpass filter, the bandwidth should be slightly higher.
Overall, though, the bandwidth seems surprisingly low.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 