The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Improvements

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

Epson R380 Printer: Cutting In a Continuous Ink Supply System

The continuous ink supply system on the Epson R380 printer developed a slow air leak in one cartridge, which may have contributed to the nozzle problems, so I just installed another system from the usual eBay supplier: prefilled with ink and $30 delivered.

As nearly as I can tell, Epson designed a number of features into the R380 specifically to thwart CISS installation, including the awkward bridge across the middle of the printer that interferes with the flat tube feeding ink to the flying cartridges. I managed to route the previous CISS tubing around the bridge, but this time I figured enough was enough.

So I tucked a shop rag inside the printer, put a vacuum cleaner nozzle near the operation, and applied a fine-tooth pull saw to the bridge:

Epson R380 – bridge removed

That certainly simplified the rest of the installation…

2013-02-19
Kill A Watt: IEC Adapters

I should have done this a long time ago:

Kill-A-Watt – IEC plug and socket

It makes measuring PC power consumption much easier!

I picked up some cheap AC plugs and sockets, cut a short IEC extender cable in half, and wired ’em up. If the IEC extender link breaks again, search amazon.com for something like “computer power cord extension” and rummage around.

IEC color code hint: brown = hot, blue = neutral (unless they cheat).

US NEMA 5 plug / socket hint: the blade marked W is neutral. More expensive hardware will have dark brass = hot, light brass = neutral, but don’t bet your life on it.

2013-02-13
Force-fitting a PCI-E Video Card in an Optiplex 780 SFF

I bought an off-lease Optiplex 780 in the Small Form Factor (SFF) version to replace my ancient Pentium D; it’s also available in Small Desktop Tower (SDT) and Ultra-SFF variations. The SFF box has two PCI slots and one PCI-E slot, which let me install a half-height dual-output video card, with results described yesterday. I innocently believed the PCI-E slot would have enough clearance for the video card, what with these things being standardized and all.

Turns out that the heatsink collided with a flange on the hard drive carrier, with about 5 mm of overlap. Fortunately, the bracket is plastic and I have no qualms about chopping up the hardware. A few minutes of Quality Shop Time removed a section of the offending flange and gave the video card just enough clearance:

Optiplex 780 SFF drive bracket

The heatsink reflects in the shiny surface of the carrier, with the scar from the missing flange just above that. The small dark-gray disk on the far left is a grommet holding a pin that supports the drive; it installs through the larger circular opening and snaps leftward.

You must install the video card and then snap the drive carrier into place. The heatsink protrudes above the flange, with the left side just barely clearing that grommet.

2013-02-10
LAW Lifetime Member Plaque: Rejuvenation Thereof

The brass plate from this plaque rattled down the basement stairs(*) a while ago:

League of American Wheelmen plaque

As you might expect, the adhesive failed and has been replaced at least once. This time, I drilled a pair of 2-56 clearance holes in the plate, match-marked the wood with a punch, drilled a pair of tapping holes, and put it all back together.

There’s not much to see, but I’m pretty sure that plate won’t fall off ever again:

League of American Wheelmen plaque – detail

The lacquer finish has begun disintegrating, but I wasn’t in the mood to strip-and-restore that. The tile remains firmly affixed; when that falls out, it won’t be pretty.

The LAW long ago morphed into the League of American Bicyclists, after deeming Wheelmen as too gender-specific for the modern era.

(*) We hang plaques, certificates, diplomas, and suchlike on the walls beside the basement stairs. Every time we pass by, it’s an Ego Trip…

2013-02-05
Driveway Drain Pipe Grate vs. Chipmunks

Known to be true: chipmunks love drain pipes!

Chipmunk peering from drainpipe

Obviously, an open pipe attracts rodents.

That didn’t matter with a three-foot pipe attached directly to the downspouts, but, as part of the driveway project, I routed the house storm drains and wall footing drain pipes about 20 feet down from the new retaining wall, with the two joining into a single outlet. There’s a cleanout plug on the storm drain line, but the footing drain consists of about 50 feet of corrugated and perforated tubing that would be just about the finest possible chipmunk habitat.

In principle, one would simply glue a grate into the final fitting and be done with it, but leaves from the gutter will pack behind the grate, so it must be removable. Leaving the grate loose means it’ll pop out at the slightest provocation and, most likely, roll another hundred feet down the driveway into the street.

Rather than coping with that, I drilled a clearance hole in the elbow and tapped a matching hole in the grate:

Drain pipe grate – hole tapping

I have a few white nylon 1/4-20 cutoffs from the bike fairing clamps, so I wrecked the threads on one and jammed it into a black nylon thumbscrew:

Drain pipe grate – thumbscrew

Now, of course, the critters can still climb down the drainpipes from the gutters and set up housekeeping in the plumbing, but I’m not putting grates where I must climb onto the roof to clear them. A chipmunk dropped from two stories will scamper away; I’d never walk again.

We shall see how this works out…

2013-01-28
Windows 7 Home Premium Remote Desktop: The Missing Link

The tiny Lenovo Q150 has become the dedicated Windows box for running TurboTax this season. In earlier years, I used the Token Windows Laptop through a remote desktop session that appears on a Xubuntu desktop, but the Q150 runs rings around the old laptop.

This time, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t connect to the Windows 7 desktop on the Q150 from my Xubuntu desktop. The usual search results suggested Windows configuration settings that didn’t quite match what the Q150 provided; a bit more searching revealed that Windows 7 Home flavors of the OS (this one is Home Premium) lack the Remote Desktop Protocol server required to export the desktop. The Q150 could act as a client that controlled another machine’s desktop server, but not the other way around.

The suggested solutions required applying patches, in the form of EXE files downloaded from sketchy websites, or dropping in replacement DLLs obtained from similar sites. All that seems like Bad Practice, particularly for a Windows box used to prepare our taxes, and I was unwilling to proceed along those lines.

Instead, I fetched UltraVNC, installed it on the Q150, and it works perfectly. Remmina occasionally requires a resize-window-to-match-server at startup and then it’s all good.

From what I hear, Windows 7 doesn’t display the classic Blue Screen of Death nearly so often as before, although I did manage to lock it up during the course of this adventure. That’s OK, I can still use my favorite Windows wallpaper image:

Windows 7 Home – UltraVNC via Remmina

2013-01-18
Lenovo Q150 VESA Mount Hackage

A permutation of our *cough* computing resources put the diminutive Lenovo Ideacentre Q150 flat on a desktop, where it was at risk of falling off due to the weight of the cables. It came with a VESA monitor mount bracket designed under the assumption that monitor manufacturers would provide an unused VESA socket and a completely separate desk stand mount, which turned out to be incorrect for all of the monitors in my collection. The IBM (pre Lenovo) monitor it was now driving, however, had exposed screws on its VESA mount, so I adapted a quartet of hulking standoffs to hold the Q150 far enough away to clear the desk stand.

One end had 4-40 tapped holes that I drilled out to clear the VESA mount’s M4x0.7 screws; I sawed the heads off four M4 screws and epoxied them in place. The other end had 8-32 studs that I cut down to fit inside the Q150’s dished mounting bracket:

VESA Mount – standoffs

Working around the mount, one standoff at a time, avoided having to lay the monitor flat on the desk:

VESA Mount – standoffs on monitor

A bit of jiggling put the bracket on the standoffs, held in place by the 8-32 nuts:

Lenovo Q150 VESA Mount on monitor

And then the Q150 snapped into place:

Lenovo Q150 – on VESA Mount

It’s captured by a thumbscrew in the bottom left corner (visible in the previous photo), so it can’t fall out.

Took longer to take the pix and write this up than to finish the project… probably because there wasn’t a trace of CNC in sight.

2013-01-17