Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The user community asked for toned-down buttons, in place of my rather garish color scheme. A bit of twiddling with the Hue parameter produced these buttons:
Kenmore 158 UI – Pastel Buttons
Which look pretty good in context:
Kenmore 158 UI – Pastel buttons
The Bash script, which includes Unicode characters that may confuse your browser:
As we expected, the remaining temple of Mary’s Silhouette glasses broke, a bit over a year from the previous repair, and this repair proceeded along the same lines as the previous fix.
I don’t recall having to do quite this much filing to make the screws fit, but they don’t call ’em “needle files” for nothin’:
Silhouette temple repair – filing screw holes
Trim the tube to the proper length by chucking it in the Sherline, rotating the spindle by hand, and filing a notch just below the jaws:
Silhouette temple repair – trimming tube
Then file the end flat, countersink it just a bit, and ream out the hole to fit the broken end of the earpiece. This one didn’t quite fit the tubing, but we’re talking a few mils of tolerance on a bent piece of titanium. Rough up the end of the earpiece, degrease everything, and a few dabs of epoxy suffice for another Steampunk repair:
Silhouette temple repair – finished
The original fix continues to hold, but … this can’t go on.
While replacing the well-worn sprocket / chain / chainrings on Mary’s bike, I finally got around to repairing some damaged paint tucked in an inconvenient spot…
Over the years, a flaw in the paint underneath the strap connecting the chainstays on Mary’s Tour Easy let in enough moisture to dislodge the paint over a considerable area. I chipped off the loose paint and used Evapo-Rust to convert the oxide to phosphate; there’s not much damage to the steel parts, despite what it may look like in the pictures.
A top view from the right rear, minus the wheel & fender, looking toward the left chainstay:
Tour Easy – rusted chainstay strap
Two epoxy fillets in the concave sections where the strap meets the chainstays should eliminate problems in those sections forever more:
Tour Easy – chainstay strap – epoxy fillet
Some rusty-metal primer and a few coats of red paint conceal most of the ugliness:
Tour Easy – rear fender bracket – installed – top
It’ll never be mistaken for showroom quality, but our bikes are tools, not art objects.
The obviously 3D printed red block in the middle of the strap holds the fender in place, about which more tomorrow…
Well, another year, another deep-cleaning session, another break in the strut holding up the drawers in the Whirlpool refrigerator:
Whirlpool refrigerator drawer strut – clamped
This time, there’s a fixture positioning the tab in the proper orientation while the solvent evaporates. The two bottom clamps hold an aluminum plate against the top (far side) of the strut, with the top-center clamp holding the tab against a steel block shimmed with cardboard to get the correct angle. The other two clamps squash the tab against the joint, which is well-soaked with IPS 4 adhesive.
I replaced the right-side guide plate, originally made from phosphor bronze strip, with some thicker steel strip. The bronze strip collapsed into the worn section of the plastic bump that appeared in the previous post:
Refrigerator strut – worn retainers
I’ve written bigger caution messages on the top of the strut in red letters, but we think it’s getting on time for a whole new refrigerator…
The trick depends on specifying the colors with HSB, rather than RGB, so that the buttons in each row have the same hue and differ in saturation and brightness. The Imagemagick incantations look like this:
Disabled: hsb\(${HUE}%,50%,40%\)
Unselected: hsb\(${HUE}%,100%,70%\)
Selected: hsb\(${HUE}%,100%,100%\)
For whatever reason, the hue must be a percentage if the other parameters are also percentages. At least, I couldn’t figure out how to make a plain integer without a percent sign suffix work as a degree value for hue.
Anyhow, in real life they look pretty good and make the selected buttons much more obvious:
The LCD screen looks just like that; I blew out the contrast on the surroundings to provide some context. The green square on the left is the Arduino Mega’s power LED, the purple dot on the right is the heartbeat spot.
The new “needle stop anywhere” symbol (left middle) is the White Draughts Man Unicode character: ⛀ = U+26C0. We call them checkers here in the US, but it’s supposed to look like a bobbin, as you must disengage the handwheel clutch and stop the main shaft when filling a bobbin; the needle positioning code depends on the shaft position sensor.
Weirdly, Unicode has no glyphs for sewing, not even a spool of thread, although “Fish Cake With Swirl” (🍥 = U+1F365) came close. Your browser must have access to a font with deep Unicode support in order to see that one…
Having run off four quick prints with identical settings, I measured the thickness of the skirt threads around each object:
Skirt Thread Consistency
They’re all slightly thicker than the nominal 0.25 mm layer thickness, but centered within ±0.02 mm of the average 0.27 mm. Tweaking the G92 offset in the startup G-Code by 0.02 would fix that.
The 0.29 mm skirt surrounded the first object, which had a truly cold start: 14 °C ambient in the Basement Laboratory. After that, they’re pretty much identical.
Some informal measurements over a few days suggests the actual repeatability might be ±0.05 mm, which is Good Enough for layers around 0.20 to 0.25 mm.
The larger skirt suggests that the platform has a slight tilt, but the caliper resolution is only 0.01 mm.
When I realigned everything after installing the V4 hot end, the last set of thinwall boxes looked like this:
I also tried using the camera in its B&W mode to discard the color information up front:
Necklace Heart – circle detail
It’s taken through the macro adapter with the LEDs turned off and obviously benefits from better lighting, with an LED flashlight at grazing incidence. You can even see the Hilbert Curve top infill.
The object of the exercise was to see if those tiny dots would print properly, which they did:
Necklace Heart – dots detail
Now, admittedly, PETG still produces fine hairs, but those dots consist of two layers and two thread widths, so it’s a harsh retraction test.
A look at the other side:
Necklace Heart – detail
All in all, both the object and the pix worked out much better than I expected.
Leaving the camera in full color mode and processing the images in The GIMP means less fiddling with the camera settings, which seems like a net win.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 