Archive for category Software
Astable Multivibrator: NP-BX1 Base
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop, Software on 2018-12-12
Adapting the NP-BX1 battery holder to use SMT pogo pins worked well:
NP-BX1 Holder – SMT pogo pins
The next step is to add sockets for those 14 AWG wires:
NP-BX1 Battery Holder – Wire Posts – solid model
Start by reaming / hand-drilling all the holes to their nominal size and cleaning out the pogo pin pocket.
Solder wires to the pogo pins and thread them through the holder and lid:
Astable – NP-BX1 holder – pogo pin soldering
That’s nice, floppy silicone-insulated 24 AWG wire, which may be a bit too thick for this purpose.
The pogo pins will, ideally, seat with the end of the body flush at the holder wall. Make it so:
Astable – NP-BX1 holder – pogo pin protrusion
Dress the wires neatly into their pocket:
Astable – NP-BX1 holder – pogo pin wiring
Butter the bottom of the lid with epoxy, clamp in place, set it up for curing, then fill the recess:
Astable – NP-BX1 base – curing
While it’s curing, make a soldering fixture for the 14 AWG wires:
Astable – drilling strut soldering fixture
The holes are on 5 mm centers, in the expectation other battery holders will need different spacing.
Solder it up and stick the wires into the base:
Astable – NP-BX1 base – detail
Jam a battery in and It Just Works™:
Astable – NP-BX1 3.8V – 20ma-div – cap V
The traces:
- Green = supply current at 20 mA/div
- Yellow = LED driver transistor base voltage
- Purple = other transistor collector voltage
- White = base – collector voltage = capacitor voltage
The measurement setup was a bit of a hairball:
Astable – NP-BX1 base – current probe
For completeness, here’s the schematic-and-layout diagram behind the circuitry:
Astable – NP-BX1 base – schematic
I love it when a plan comes together!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
Six Gallon Can Lid Adapter to Platform Bird Feeder
Posted by Ed in Home Ec, Machine Shop, Science, Software on 2018-12-11
A House Finch suffering from Finch Eye Disease prompted me to sterilize our feeder, which meant providing a temporary feeder to keep the birds flying. Having an abundance of lids from six gallon plastic cans / buckets, this made sense:
Can Lid Feeder – installed
Which required an adapter betwixt pole and lid:
Can Lid Feeder – assembled
Which requires a bit of solid modeling:
Can Lid Platform Feeder Mount – solid model – bottom
The lids have a central boss, presumably for stiffening, so the model includes a suitable recess:
Can Lid Platform Feeder Mount – solid model – support structure
As usual, automatically generated support fills the entire recess, so I designed a minimal support structure into the model and cracked it out with very little effort:
Can Lid Feeder – support structure
The tangle off to the right comes from a bridge layer with a hole in the middle, which never works well even with support:
Can Lid Platform Feeder Mount – Slic3r – bridge layer
Didn’t bother the birds in the least, though, so it’s all good.
I loves me my 3D printer …
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
Imagemagick 6 vs. PDF
Posted by Ed in PC Tweakage, Photography & Images, Software on 2018-12-03
Come to find out Xubuntu 18.04 ratcheted the ImageMagick security settings up to a dangerous chattering whine:
convert p???.jpg "Machining D-bit Drills.pdf" convert-im6.q16: not authorized `Machining D-bit Drills.pdf' @ error/constitute.c/WriteImage/1037.
Fortunately, someone who understands this stuff encountered the problem before I did and posted a great description of the solution.
To forestall link rot, the process looks like:
cd /etc/ImageMagick-6/ sudo cp policy.xml policy.xml.base sudo nano policy.xml … change one line … policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="PDF"
It is completely unclear to me whether ImageMagick (as of ImageMagick 6.9.7-4 Q16 x86_64 20170114 ) requires or merely tolerates the vertical bar in place of commas, nor whether it’s in my best interest to replace "coder" with "*".
In any event, I can once again stuff bitmap images into PDF files.
Sony NP-BX1 Battery Holder: SMT Pogo Pin Contacts
Posted by Ed in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop, Software on 2018-11-29
The original camera battery test fixtures used contact pins conjured from hulking gold-plated connector pins and coil springs:
Canon NB-6L holder – contact pin detail
The Sony HDR-AS30V camera chewed up and spat out a handful of batteries, all tested in the NP-BX1 test fixture:
NP-BX1 Holder – show layout
Nowadays, SMT pogo pins produce a much more compact holder, so I figured I could put all those batteries to good use:
NP-BX1 Holder – SMT pogo pins
That’s the long-suffering astable multivibrator, still soldered to its CR123A holder.
Obviously, the battery holder should grow ears to anchor the 14 AWG copper posts and would look better in black PETG:
NP-BX1 Battery Holder – 1.5mm pins – solid model
The battery lead wires get soldered to the ends of the pogo pins and are recessed into the slot in the end of the fixture. I used clear epoxy to anchor everything in place.
Fits perfectly and works fine!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
Kindle Fire Picture Frame: Copying the Pictures
Posted by Ed in Photography & Images, Software on 2018-11-26
Being a bear of unbearable consistency, I save edited picture files with a description following the original camera-assigned sequence number:
IMG_20181108_190041 - Kindle Fire Picture Frame - Another Test Image.jpg
Yup, spaces and all.
Kindle Fire Picture Frame – Another Test Image
I store my general-interest pix chronologically by year, in subdirectories for interesting categories, so copying all the edited (a.k.a. “interesting”) pictures to the Kindle Fire becomes a one-liner:
cd /mnt/bulkdata/Cameras find 20?? -iname \*\ \*jpg -print0 | xargs -0 cp --parents -t /mnt/part/Pictures
The --parents parameter tells cp to recreate the directory structure holding the picture in the target directory, thereby keeping the pix neatly sorted in their places, rather than creating one heap o’ pictures.
Come to find out I’ve edited slightly over 7 k general-interest pictures in the eighteen years I’ve been using digital cameras, of maybe 27 k total pictures. Call it a 25% hit ratio; obviously I’m not nearly fussy enough.
Then there’s another 16 k project-related pictures, of which 10 k were edited into something useful. With an emphasis on utility, rather than aesthetics, a 60% hit ratio seems OK.
Which works out to half a dozen pictures a day, every day, for eighteen years. I loves me some good digital camera action!
LinuxCNC 2.7 vs. Logitech Joggy Thing
Posted by Ed in Machine Shop, PC Tweakage, Software on 2018-11-22
The old Atom running LinuxCNC for the Sherline finally stopped booting, so I popped the Optiplex 760 off the stack and did a live-USB trial run. The latency / jitter worked out around 25 µs, slightly worse than before, but still Good Enough, and the StepConf utility coerced the motors into working OK.
What didn’t work was the old Eagle-to-HAL code defining the Logitch Gamepad as a Joggy Thing to allow smooth joystick jog control. Well, stuff changes over the course of eight years, but, in this case, the fix turned out to be a one-liner: the probe_parport module isn’t needed nowadays.
With that out of the way, it runs fine:
LinuxCNC – Sherline Mill – Logitech Gamepad
The INI and HAL files defining the Sherline configuration as a GitHub Gist:
Icecast and Ezstream Configuration
Plugging a 64 GB USB stick with directories full of MP3 / OGG files into an always-on Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole, one can use Icecast to stream them for clients on the LAN, so as to avoid over-the-Intertubes streaming issues.
The only changes in the /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml file cover passwords, the number of source streams, and the hostname. It’s that simple, really.
Given a directory of files, generate a file-per-line playlist:
find /mnt/music/goodmusic/ -name \*mp3 | sort > /mnt/music/goodmusic/playlist.m3u
Then set up a corresponding Ezstream XML file, perhaps imaginatively named goodmusic.xml:
<ezstream>
<url>http://localhost:8000/goodmusic</url>
<sourcepassword>make-up-your-own</sourcepassword>
<format>MP3</format>
<filename>/mnt/music/goodmusic/playlist.m3u</filename>
<shuffle>1</shuffle>
<stream_once>0</stream_once>
<svrinfoname>Good Music</svrinfoname>
<svrinfourl>pihole.local</svrinfourl>
<svrinfogenre>Good Music Streaming 24x7</svrinfogenre>
<svrinfodescription>Techno Dub</svrinfodescription>
<svrinfobitrate>128</svrinfobitrate>
<svrinfochannels>2</svrinfochannels>
<svrinfosamplerate>44100</svrinfosamplerate>
<svrinfopublic>1</svrinfopublic>
</ezstream>
Fire off the source stream in /etc/rc.local:
ezstream -c /home/pi/Icecast/goodmusic.xml &
The ampersand tells Bash to fire-and-forget the process, so it runs all the time. One could, I suppose, put it in crontab to start after each boot or puzzle out the corresponding systemd incantation, but …
Add the station to your streaming media player:
'KEY_KP5' : ['Good Music',False,['mplayer','-playlist','http://192.168.1.2:8000/goodmusic.m3u']],
And then It Just Works™.
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