Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The topic of function generators came up at Squidwrench a while ago (Sophi was tinkering with LCD shutters) and I finally picked up one of those JYE Tech FG085 DDS function generators to see how they work:
FG085 Fn Gen – in case
Short answer: adequate, if you’re not too fussy.
The board arrived with a bizarre solder defect. It seems a solder stalk yanked one terminal off a ceramic SMD caps:
FG085 – Solder stalk – C26
The schematic and adjacent parts suggested the victim was a 10 uF cap, so I replaced it with one from my stash that worked fine.
However, after soldering enough of the switches to do something useful, the board wouldn’t power up. With a bit of poking around, I discovered the power jack had +15 V from the wall wart, but the center terminals on the DPDT power switch that should have been connected to the jack showed maybe 0.3 V. Jumpering around the failed via and a short trace on the bottom surface let the board power up correctly:
FG085 – Jumpered power trace
If you’re building one of these, solder one pin of each switch, push all the switch caps in place, shove the faceplate over all of them, tape it to the PCB, make sure all the switches are push-able, then solder the remainder of the switch pins. If you do them one by one, you’re certain to end up with a few mis-aligned switches that will either prevent the faceplate from sliding over them or wedge firmly against the side of their assigned hole. Just sayin’.
I tweaked the dimensions slightly to fit the (slightly larger, possibly new, maybe tolerance-eased) front panel, but the bottom mounting screw hole spacing depends on the front panel size, not a specific set of dimensions, leading me to relocate those holes by abrasive adjustment. I didn’t bother with the lid (which doesn’t clear the BNC jack anyway) or the printed plastic feet (having a supply of silicone rubber feet).
The fancy vent gridwork along the sides printed surprisingly well, even in PETG. I’d have gone with larger slots, although I doubt the thing really needs vents in the first place.
The DDS sine wave output is rough, to say the least:
FG085 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine
The spectrum shows oodles of harmonic content:
FG085 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine – spectrum
A closer look:
FG085 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine – spectrum – detail
Stepping back a bit shows harmonics of (and around) the 2.5 MHz DDS sampling frequency:
FG085 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine – spectrum – 10 MHz
For comparison, my old Fordham FG-801 analog function generator has nice smooth harmonics:
FG-801 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine – spectrum
Closer in:
FG-801 Fn Gen – 60 kHz sine – spectrum – detail
Of course, that crusty old analog dial doesn’t provide nearly the set-ability of a nice digital display.
Two of the external Li-Ion battery packs I’m using with the bike radios seemed to fail quickly after being charged, so I sawed them open to check the state of the cells. This time I used the fine-tooth cutoff blades, rather than a coarse slitting saw:
Li-Ion pack – sawing case
As before, a 2 mm depth-of-cut, done 0.25 mm per pass after the first millimeter, seems about right. I didn’t saw the front of the case near the jack, which proved to be a mistake; the interlocked case halves need cutting.
No cell trouble found, which leads me to suspect an intermittent short in the battery-to-radio cable that trips the battery protection circuit. The spare cables went into hiding during the shop cleanout, so I can’t swap in a known-good cable just yet; of course, the existing cable behaves perfectly on the bench. The suspect cable is now on my bike and, if the problem follows the cable, further surgery will be in order.
Four miles later, a blowout through a tread gash previously covered by the tire liner
A puncture flat directly through the tread
Basically, erosion from the (last remaining, I think) liner in the rear tire of Mary’s bike caused the first flat; I patched the tube and didn’t notice the gash. After the blowout, I patched the tube again, booted the gash (with a snippet from a roll of PET bottle plastic I carry around for exactly that purpose), stuck an ordinary patch atop the boot to cover its edges, and the whole mess has held air just fine for the last week. I’m reluctant to mess with success.
Not having a tire liner caused the third flat, this time on my bike. The wound looked like a nail or glass shard punched directly through the Kevlar armor behind the tread. Fortunately, it happened (or, more exactly, I realized I had a flat) half a mile from home, so I fired a CO2 cartridge into the tube and pedaled like crazy, which got me halfway to the goal and I rolled the rest of the way on a dead-flat tire.
Ya can’t win.
So I picked up a pair of Michelin Protek Max tubes, the weirdest things I’ve ever stuffed into a bike tire:
Michelin Protek Max Tube – carton
The bumps along the tread surface are much larger and uglier than shown in that picture:
Michelin Protek Max tube
The rubber forming the protrusions has the same thickness as the rest of the tube, so you’re looking at soft, flexible shapes, rather than thick bumps.
The “liquid” inside must be a thin film over the inner surface. I’ve never been a big fan of tire sealants, mostly because they’re reputed to ooze to the bottom of the tire into off-balance puddles.
For future reference, the Official Quasi-Instruction Manual / Blurb (clicky for more dots):
Given five meters of 40 conductor ribbon cable, the object is to make a 40 turn five foot diameter loop antenna by soldering the ends together with a slight offset. After squaring off, marking, and taping the cable ends, I stripped the wires:
LF Loop Antenna – wire stripping
Twirling those little snippets before pulling them off produced nicely twisted wire ends with no few loose strands. Separate the individual wires, wrap with transformer tape to prevent further separation, run a flux pen along the wire ends, tin with solder, repeat on the far end of the cable.
Tape one end to the ceramic tile. Align the other end with a one-wire lateral offset and the stripped sections overlapping, then tape it down. Slide a paper strip between the ends, passing under every other wire, to separate the top pairs from the bottom pairs, then tape the strip in place:
LF Loop Antenna – wire prep
Grab each left wire with a needle point tweezer, forcibly align with the corresponding right wire, touch with the iron, iterate:
LF Loop Antenna – top solder joints
The red wire trailing off to the left will become the center tap.
Slide a strip of the obligatory Kapton tape underneath the finished joints, slobber on enough clear epoxy to bond the insulation on both sides of the joints into a solid mass, squish another strip atop the epoxy, smooth down, wait for curing.
Untape from the tile, flip, re-tape, solder the bottom joints similarly, add Kapton / epoxy / Kapton, and that’s that:
LF Loop Antenna – complete joint
Prudence dictates checking for end-to-end continuity after you finish soldering and before you do the Kapton + epoxy thing, which is where I discovered I had 80 Ω of distributed resistance along 200 meters of cable. A quick check showed 40 Ω at the center tap and 20 Ω at the quarters (the black wires on the left mark those points), so it wasn’t a really crappy joint somewhere in the middle.
The joint and its dangly wires cry out for a 3D printed stiffener which shall remain on the to-do list until I see how the loop tunes up.
We agreed that repairing the failed flag ferrule made the trailer much quieter, but it still seemed far more rattly than we remembered. It just had to be the fender, somehow, and eventually this appeared:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – fractures
The obviously missing piece of the fender fell out in my hand; the similar chunk just beyond the wire arch fell out after I took the pictures. Yes, the wire has indented the fender.
The arch supports the aluminum fender, with a pair of (flat) steel plates clamping the wire to the fender:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – screw plates and pads
The cardboard scraps show I fixed a rattle in the distant past.
Being aluminum, the fender can’t have a replacement piece brazed in place and, given the compound curves, I wasn’t up for the requisite fancy sheet metal work.
Instead, a bit of math produces a pair of shapes:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – solid model
In this case, we know the curve radii, so the chord equation gives the depth of the curve across the (known) width & length of the plates; the maximum of those values sets the additional thickness required for the plates. The curves turn out to be rather steep, given the usual layer thickness and plate sizes, which gives them a weird angular look that absolutely doesn’t matter when pressed firmly against the fender:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – Slic3r preview
The computations required to fit Hilbert Curve surface infill into those small exposed areas took basically forever; given that nobody will ever see them, I used the traditional linear infill pattern. A 15% 3D Honeycomb interior infill turned them into rigid parts.
The notch in the outer plate (top left, seen notch-side-down) accommodates the support wire:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – outer
The upper surface would look better with chamfered edges, but that’s in the nature of fine tuning. That part must print with its top surface downward: an unsupported (shallow) chamfer would produce horrible surface finish and life is too short for fussing with support. Given the surrounding rust & dings, worrying about aesthetics seems bootless.
The original screws weren’t quite long enough to reach through the plastic plates, so I dipped into my shiny-new assortment of stainless steel socket head cap screws. Although the (uncut) M5x16 screws seem to protrude dangerously far from the inner plate, there’s another inch of air between those screws and the tire tread:
BOB Yak Fender Mount – inner
Given the increase in bearing area, that part of the fender shouldn’t fracture for another decade or two.
I loves me my M2 3D printer …
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
At some point along a recent grocery ride, the top half of the flag mast on the BOB Yak trailer went missing.
We had a general idea of where it happened, but, fortunately, I Have The Technology:
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The flag and pole ended up just off the road, only slightly the worse for wear. I hadn’t planned on riding two dozen miles on a rather hot and humid summer day, but so it goes.
The lower ferrule chafed away enough of the fiberglass pole that it could slip downward, eventually releasing the upper ferrule:
BOB Yak Flag – ferrule chafing
That split near the end enlarged the pole enough that the ferrule couldn’t slide off, so I contented myself with cross-drilling the whole affair for a 1-72 screw, packing epoxy into the hole, tucking more epoxy up inside the bottom end of the ferrule, then burying the screw and nut:
BOB Yak Flag – reassembled ferrule
While I had it on the bench, I replaced the somewhat shredded fluorescent orange tape just under the flag and added a strip of diagonally striped red-and-white retroreflective tape for an attractive barber-pole appearance.
Although you should remove the lathe from the chip pan and do it right, I gimmicked up a reducer for the long drill extension that, IIRC, came with the house:
LMS mini-lathe – drill bit extension
I figured that would be close enough, given the starting situation. The cast iron frame is perhaps half an inch thick at that point, with steel brackets bolted to the far side, so use the hole as a guide and don’t drill with wild abandon.
A long M4 screw serves to align the insert eyeballometrically perpendicular to the surface while the JB Kwik epoxy cured:
LMS mini-lathe – insert alignment
It definitely doesn’t look like it grew there and, indeed, looks like the obvious repair job it is:
LMS mini-lathe – insert epoxied
I thought about replacing all the screws, but decided it was so well hidden that, if I didn’t tell anybody, they’d never know:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 