Tag: Improvements

Making the world a better place, one piece at a time

MPCNC: Belt Tensioners

The GT2 / GT3 belt specs call for 10-ish pounds of tension, but I don’t yet have a good feel for the actual MPCNC belt tension … and it’s hard to measure in-situ. So I picked up some spring tensioners and yanked one with a luggage scale:

GT2 Belt Tensioner – 4 kg

You’re looking at 4 kg = 8-ish pounds of tension. When they’re relaxed, the arms sit at roughly right angles.

I installed them on the far end of the belts, although that’s a bit snug under the roller:

GT2 Belt Tensioner – installed

An endstop switch will eventually add some clearance and it’ll be all good.

Even though they’re neither linear nor precisely calibrated, they’ll serve as a reminder to check the tension every now and again.

Install them with the same casual disregard you reserve for fish hooks and you’ll emerge unscathed.

2017-12-02
MPCNC: Makerbot-style Endstop Switch Modification

The Protoneer CNC Shield has headers for two endstops on each axis, although they’re wired to the same Arduino input pin. I installed a pair of Makerbot-style endstops on the Y axis, plugged them in, triggered one, and … the Arduino crashed. Hard. As in, a complete loss of power and reboot.

Some fiddling around produced absolutely baffling symptoms, as I replaced each endstop board and their cables to no avail.

Perusing the schematic (the “full instructions” link is dead, of course) eventually revealed the problem:

Makerbot style endstop – schematic

Got it?

Although there’s a pullup on the COM switch terminal, the switch’s NC terminal is connected to the +5 V supply, shorting across the both resistor and the LED+resistor. With two endstops in parallel, triggering one crowbars the other’s power supply to ground. I’m sure it made sense at the time, perhaps by ensuring no possible noise source could interfere with the pullup.

The solution is simple: disconnect the NC terminal from the power supply. As it turns out, the PCB layout routes +5 V on the bottom layer, up through the via around the NC switch terminal, thence to the LED and resistor, leaving only one choice:

MPCNC – dual MG endstop hack

Yup, amputate the NC terminal and be done with it.

After that, the pullup resistor lets the endstops cooperate like you’d expect: triggering either one lights up both LEDs.

2017-11-30
Sandisk 32 GB High Endurance Video Monitoring Card
Despite my misgivings, “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com” suggests I could return a Sandisk 32 GB High Endurance MicroSD card if things turned out badly:

MicroSD 32 GB – Samsung EVO and SanDisk High Endurance

Unlike the Samsung cards, Sandisk charges a substantial premium for not buying through Amazon.

Verifying the card using f3probe produced the same results as with the earlier 64 GB card and copying the existing files from the Fly6 card (on the left) went smoothly:
```
rsync -rtv /mnt/Fly6/ /mnt/part
```
“High Endurance” means it’s rated for 5000 hours of “Full HD” recording, which they think occurs at 26 Mb/s. The Fly6 records video in 10 minutes chunks, each weighing about 500 MB, call it 1 MB/s = 8 Mb/s, a third of their nominal pace. One might reasonably expect this card to outlive the camera.

As with the AS30V, we shall see …
2017-11-28
MPCNC: Endstop Mount, Now With Recess

There being nothing like a new problem to take your mind off all your old problems, now there’s a cable tie latch recess:

X min endstop – recessed cable tie latch

A sectioned view of the model shows the layout:

MPCNC MB Endstop Mount – latch recess

On the other side, a ramp helps bend the tie toward the MPCNC rail:

X min endstop – recessed strap

Which looks thusly in the realm of applied mathematics:

MPCNC MB Endstop Mount – strap recess

I’ll leave the OpenSCAD code to your imagination, because the endstop block turns out to be a bit small for the recesses. Eventually, they need a dust cover and some cleanup.

So, there!

2017-11-27

Raspberry Pi Swap File Size

As part of some protracted flailing around while trying to get GNU Radio running on a Raspberry Pi 3, I discovered Raspbian defaults to a 100 MB swap file, rather than a swap partition, and everything I thought I knew about swap management seems inoperative. The key hint came from some notes on gr-gsm installation.

Tweak the /etc/dphys-swapfile config file to set CONF_SWAPFACTOR=2 for a 2 GB swap file = twice the size of the Pi’s 1 GB memory.

Start it up:

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo dphys-swapfile setup
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

And verify it worked:

cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:         949580 kB
MemFree:          194560 kB
MemAvailable:     594460 kB
Buffers:           85684 kB
Cached:           377276 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           600332 kB
Inactive:         104668 kB
Active(anon):     250408 kB
Inactive(anon):    20688 kB
Active(file):     349924 kB
Inactive(file):    83980 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:       1918972 kB
SwapFree:        1918972 kB
Dirty:                40 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        242072 kB
Mapped:           136072 kB
Shmem:             29060 kB
Slab:              33992 kB
SReclaimable:      22104 kB
SUnreclaim:        11888 kB
KernelStack:        1728 kB
PageTables:         3488 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     2393760 kB
Committed_AS:     947048 kB
VmallocTotal:    1114112 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
CmaTotal:           8192 kB
CmaFree:            6796 kB

Then it became possible to continue flailing …

2017-11-24

Samsung EVO Plus 32 GB MicroSD Cards: Verification
A pair of known-good MicroSD cards arrived direct from Samsung at a surprisingly slight premium over the junk available on Amazon:

Samsung EVO Plus MicroSD – 32 GB

f3probe reported they’re OK, which is no surprise:
```
sudo f3probe --time-ops /dev/sdc
F3 probe 6.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

WARNING: Probing normally takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes, but
         it can take longer. Please be patient.

Probe finished, recovering blocks... Done

Good news: The device `/dev/sdc' is the real thing

Device geometry:
	         *Usable* size: 29.81 GB (62521344 blocks)
	        Announced size: 29.81 GB (62521344 blocks)
	                Module: 32.00 GB (2^35 Bytes)
	Approximate cache size: 0.00 Byte (0 blocks), need-reset=no
	   Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)

Probe time: 2'04"
 Operation: total time / count = avg time
      Read: 51.79s / 4197134 = 12us
     Write: 1'10" / 4192321 = 16us
     Reset: 1.41s / 1 = 1.41s
```
These will go into Raspberry Pi projects, where their huge capacity won’t produce any benefit. It seems one can’t get known-good, small cards these days.

I don’t see much point in buying known-crap counterfeits on Amazon, given their commingled-storage problem as pointed out by their helpful FBA advice:

Use the manufacturer barcode to track inventory

By default, your seller account is set to use the manufacturer barcode to track your eligible inventory throughout the Amazon fulfillment process. You can change this default barcode preference at any time. You have the option to change your barcode preference for each offer you create. You can also change your barcode preference for a product when you change a listing from Fulfilled by Merchant to Fulfilled by Amazon.

Important: Items in your inventory that are identified and tracked using manufacturer barcodes are commingled with items of the same products from other sellers who also use manufacturer barcodes for those items.

If you choose to use manufacturer barcodes, when customers purchase a product from you, Amazon can send the item that is closest to them, even if you didn’t send it to the fulfillment center. When that happens, you get the credit for the sale, and we transfer an item from your inventory to the seller whose inventory was used to fulfill the order. In addition, if you use the manufacturer barcode, you don’t have to apply an Amazon barcode to each item yourself.

Even though inventory tracked using the manufacturer barcode is commingled within the network, the source of the inventory is tracked by our fulfillment systems and is taken into consideration if inventory problems arise.
2017-11-22
Makerbot-style Endstop Power Adapter for Protoneer Arduino CNC Shield

The Protoneer Arduino CNC shield (*) has a row of 2-pin headers for bare endstop switches. Being a big fan of LED Blinkiness, I have a stock of 3-pin Makerbot-style mechanical endstops that require a +5 V connection in addition to ground and the output.

A crude-but-effective adapter consists of half a dozen header pins soldered to a length of stout copper wire, with a pigtail to a +5 V pin elsewhere on the board:

3-pin to 2-pin Endstop Power Adapter

A closer look:

3-pin to 2-pin Endstop Power Adapter – detail

The pins get trimmed on the other side of the bus wire, because they don’t go through the PCB.

Installed on the board, it doesn’t look like much:

3-pin endstop adapter on Prontoneer board

Looks like it needs either Kapton tape or epoxy, doesn’t it?

Three more endstops at the far end of the MPCNC rails (for hard limits) will fill the unused header pins.

(*) It’s significantly more expensive than the Chinese knockoffs, but in this case I cheerfully pay to support the guy: good stuff, direct from the source.

2017-11-21