Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
A pre-Christmas sale brought a cheap SSD that rendered my oath not to install one in the Lenovo Q150 inoperative, so I had to figure out how to open the case. Removing the visible screws didn’t release the cover, but some exploratory prying eventually popped the internal snap latches. Knowing the latch & screw locations will simplify harvesting the SSD when that time comes…
Front (with USB & SPDIF jacks):
Lenovo Q150 – case latches – front
Rear (with all the other jacks):
Lenovo Q150 – case screws – rear
Top (with the heatsink outlet):
Lenovo Q150 – case latches – top
Bottom (with the mounting boss):
Lenovo Q150 – case latch screws – bottom
With the cover off, the inside looks like this:
Lenovo Q150 – interior overview
The two rubber blocks glued to the hard drive bracket (carrier / sled / whatever) conceal the screws holding that side to the chassis. However, removing the blocks and the screws didn’t release the bracket, because it had what looked like a black adhesive layer below the screw flanges:
Lenovo Q150 – hidden drive bracket screw
Gentle prying from the edge of the bracket eventually released it, showing that the black plastic was just an insulating layer. Below that, two thin foam strips had firmly affixed themselves to the PCB, despite not having any adhesive on that side:
Lenovo Q150 – drive bracket – foam strips
With the bracket on the bench, installing the SSD went exactly as you’d expect and reinstalling the cover was, quite literally, a snap.
The LED’s aluminum baseplate (perhaps there’s an actual “board” inside the yellow silicone fill) is firmly epoxied to a small heatsink from the Big Box o’ Heatsinks, chosen on the basis of being the right size and not being too battered.
The rather limited specs say the LED supply voltage can range from 9 to 12 V, suggesting a bit of slack, with a maximum dissipation of 3 W, which definitely requires a heatsink.
The First Light test looked promising:
COB LED Desk Lamp – first light
That’s driven from the same 12 VDC 200 mA wall wart that I used for the failed ring light version. Measuring the results shows that the supply now runs at the ragged edge of its current rating, with the output voltage around 10.5 V with plenty of ripple:
COB LED V I 100ma div
The 260 mA current (bottom, trace 1 at 100 mA/div) varies from 200 to 300 mA as the voltage (top, trace 2 at 2 V/div) varies between 10 V and a bit under 11 V. If you believe the RMS values, it’s dissipating 2.7 W and the heatsink runs at a pleasant 105 °F in an ordinary room. The wall wart gets about as warm as you’d expect; it contains an old heavy-iron transformer and rectifier, not a trendy switcher.
The heatsink mount looks nice, in a geeky way:
COB LED Desk Lamp – side detail
The left side must be that long to anchor the gooseneck; I thought about tapering the slab a bit, but, really, it’s OK the way it is. Dabs of epoxy hold the gooseneck and heatsink in place.
The heatsink rests on a small ledge at the bottom of the slab that’s as tall as the COB LED is thick, with a wire channel from the gooseneck socket:
COB LED Heatsink mount – Slic3r
The Hilbert Curve infill on the top produces a textured finish; I’m a sucker for that pattern.
The old lamp base isn’t particularly stylin’, but the new head lights up my desk below the big monitors without any glare:
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Mary wonders if the designers scaled the grips and spring tensions to suit women’s hands. Her experience shows that “tools for men” are too big and require too much grip strength for her comfort; applying pink plastic won’t improve them in the least.
The Suction Control slider on the handle of our shiny new Kenmore Progressive vacuum cleaner varies the speed of the howling motor in the base unit, rather than venting more or less air into the pipe. We like that, but it’s all too easy to inadvertently slide the control and never notice it, sooo I marked the default condition:
Although every vacuum cleaner we’ve ever owned has touted its “quiet operation”, we always wear 30 dB ear muffs and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between full throttle and not quite so fast…
A bag arrived from halfway around the planet, bearing five sets of cheap earbuds. There was no way to tell from the eBay description, but they’re vented on the side:
Cheap earbud – side vent detail
And also to the rear, down inside those deep slots below the chromed plastic cover:
Cheap earbud – back openings
The raised lettering is a nice touch; the other earbud has a script L.
The PET braid over the fragile wire should withstand a bit more abuse than usual. The strain relief isn’t anything to cheer, though, consisting of that rectangular channel with the wire loose inside. I figured I’d start minimal and fix whatever crops up; I have nine more earbuds to go.
The motivation for all this was having the Gorilla Tape peel off the helmet, leaving a hardened mass of glue behind, then snagging the earbud wires. This is the new, somewhat better protected, wiring:
Bell Helmet – mic-earbud wire – hardened tape adhesive
In a triumph of hope over experience, I applied more Gorilla Tape:
Bell Helmet – re-taped mic-earbud wiring
The helmet may need replacing after another iteration or two.
My solid modeling hand has become stronger these days, so I should gimmick up a flat-ish wart anchoring the mic boom and all the wiring to the helmet shell.
The tiny posts on the fencing helmet ear grommet produced a remarkable amount of PETG hair, because the nozzle had to skip between four separate pieces on the platform at each layer:
So I told Slic3r to build each part separately:
Fencing helmet grommet – separate builds – first attempt
Due to absolutely no forethought or planning on my part, that actually worked. Slic3r defines a cylindrical keep-out zone around the nozzle that I set to 15 mm radius and 25 mm height, but those numbers are completely wrong for the M2, particularly with a V4 hot end.
To the rear, the nuts & bolts along the bottom of the X gantry sit 5 mm above the V4 nozzle, with the relaxed actuator on my re-relocated Z-axis home switch at Z=+1 mm:
V4 PETG – extruder priming
To the front, the bed fan doesn’t sit much higher:
M2 V4 Extruder – 24 V fans
As it turned out, the front washers built first, sitting there in front of the gantry and behind the fan, the rear washers appeared last, and Everything Just Worked.
However, even though the M2’s layout won’t allow for automated layout, I figured I could do it manually by building the parts from front to rear:
Fencing Helmet Ear Grommet – Slic3r layout
That way, the already-built parts never pass under the gantry / switch. For particularly tall parts, I could remove / relocate the bed fan to clear the already-built parts as they appear.
Come to find out that Slic3r, for whatever reason, doesn’t build the parts in the order you’d expect from the nice list on the far right side of the screen:
Sequential Build Order – Slic3r vs Pronterface
Worse, the Slic3r 3D preview shows the threads by layer (which is what you’d expect), rather than by object for sequential builds:
Slic3r – sequential preview vs build order
I don’t know how you’d force-fit a four-dimensional preview into the UI, so I won’t complain at all.
There’s no way to tell which part will build first; selecting the part will highlight its entry in the list (and vice versa), but the order of appearance in that list doesn’t tell you where the G-Code will appear in the output file. That’s not a problem for extruders with a keep-out volume that looks like a cylinder, so there’s no reason for Slic3r to do it any differently: it will manage the extruder position to clear all the objects in any order.
The Pronterface preview creates the objects by reading the G-Code file and displaying the threads in order, so, if you’re quick and it’s slow, you can watch the parts appear in their to-be-built order. The detailed preview (in the small window on the right in the screenshot) does show the parts in the order they will be built as you scroll upward through the “layers”, which is the only way you can tell what will happen.
So doing sequential builds requires iterating through these steps until the right answer appears:
Add all objects separately to get each one as a separate line in the list to the right
Using the More option to duplicate objects produces multiple objects per line = Bad Idea
Arrange objects in a line from front to back
Export G-Code file
Load G-Code file into Pronterface
Pop up the Pronterface layer preview, scroll upward to show build order, note carefully
Rearrange parts in Slic3r accordingly
That’s do-able (note the different order from the Slic3r preview):
Fencing helmet grommet – manual sequential build
But it’s tedious and enough of a pain that it probably makes no sense for anything other than parts that you absolutely can’t build any other way.
In this case, completing each of the bottom washers separately eliminated all of the PETG hair between the small pegs. The upper washers still had some hair inside the inner cylinder, but not much. If you were fussy, you could suppress that by selecting “Avoid crossing perimeters”, at the cost of more flailing around in the XY plane.
All those spare grommets will make a good show-n-tell exhibit…
Our Larval Engineer practiced fencing for several years, learning the fundamental truth that you should always bring a gun to a knife fight:
Fencing – taking a hit
It’s time to pass the gear along to someone who can use it, but we discovered one of the ear grommets inside the helmet had broken:
Blue Gauntlet M003-BG Helmet – broken ear grommet
The cylinder in the middle should be attached to the washer on the left, which goes inside the helmet padding. It’s a tight push fit inside the washer on the right, which goes on the outside of the padding. Ridges along the cylinder hold it in place.
Being an injection-molded polyethylene part, no earthly adhesive or solvent will bother it, soooo… the solid model pretty much reproduces the original design:
Fencing Helmet Ear Grommet – show
The top washer goes inside the padding against your (well, her) ear, so I chamfered the edges sorta-kinda like the original.
There are no deliberate ridges on the central cylinder, but printing the parts in the obvious orientation with no additional clearance makes them a very snug push fit and the usual 3D printing ridges work perfectly; you could apply adhesive if you like. The outside washer has a slight chamfer to orient the post and get it moving along.
The posts keep the whole affair from rotating, but I’m not sure they’re really necessary.
Printing a pair doesn’t take much longer than just one:
Fencing Helmet Ear Grommet – build
It doesn’t look like much inside the helmet:
Blue Gauntlet M003-BG – replacement ear grommet – installed
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 