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
Using different card colors makes it easy to find your program deck in the Comp Center’s output bins:
Punched Cards – paper color vs smoke stains
The smoke stains on the bottom orange card came from the same LightBurn settings used with the purple (violet?) and blue (teal?) cards: 400 mm/s, 35% power, and assist air enabled.
The conventional wisdom is that you *do not* use assist air while engraving, to avoid pushing the smoke / soot down onto the material, and I’ve generally followed that rule. Apparently evaporating holes in the other colors doesn’t generate much smoke and I had no reason to notice the air was enabled.
The upper orange card differs from the lower one only in having the assist air turned off, so I have definitely learned my lesson!
Readers of long memory will recall the dual-path assist air setup that pushes 2 l/m through the nozzle when the LightBurn layer has AIR disabled, specifically to keep smoke out of the nozzle and away from the lens; that gentle breeze doesn’t push smoke into the paper.
FWIW, that’s why I run a set of test cards before I do anything fancy for the first time.
The rods (a.k.a. tubes or poles) holding & guiding the quilt top / batting / backing fabric on Mary’s HQ Sixteen longarm quilting machine span the eleven feet of the table:
HQ Sixteen – table overview
The two end plates are 1/4 inch steel plate with four punched holes for the rods / tubes, which look remarkably like EMT. The machine is two decades old and Mary is (at least) the third owner, so it’s no surprise the rods long ago wore through the white powder-coat paint on the plates and, during the course of a long quilting project, now deposit black dust on the table.
Black dust not being tolerable near a quilt-in-progress, Mary asked for an improvement.
The tube OD is 28.7 mm (so it’s probably 1 inch EMT) and the plate hole ID is 31.2 mm (likely a scant 1-¼ inch punch), leaving barely a millimeter of clearance all around. I wanted to make a bearing from suitably slippery Delrin / acetal, but figured 3D printed PETG would suffice for at least while.
The proper term is “bushing“, because it has no moving parts:
Rod Bearing Sleeve – solid model – show view
On the right side, the bushing rim must fit between the sprockets and the plate:
HQ Sixteen rod – right front
The spring-loaded pin holding the tube in place (visible on the inside bottom) sets the maximum length:
HQ Sixteen rod – right outer
The left side has none of that, so I made the bushings a little longer:
HQ Sixteen rod – left inner
The left-side bushings will need a better design should normal back-and-forth sliding push them out of place.
A touch of silicone grease around the plate holes makes those bushings / bearings turn sooo smooth.
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After considerable faffing, a few of the fifteen layers look like this in GIMP:
Apollo 11 Patch – eagle layers
Each layer is a connected white region defining the cut perimeter, which will expose some part of the layer(s) below it in the stack. The small squares in the corners provide a bounding box to make all the layers snap to the same location.
Put outlines on a cut layer, corner squares on a tool layer
Burn each layer separately
Testing the concept with packing paper looked surprisingly good:
Apollo 11 Eagle – layer test piece
A few key layers on punched cards:
Apollo 11 Eagle – card partial test piece
The changes for each of those iterations required tweaking the original layer images to eliminate obvious-in-retrospect problems, recreating the SVG files, and importing into LightBurn. This is a relentlessly manual process.
Then I ran a full-up test of all fifteen layers on cards punched with the Apollo source code.
Cutting the head layers from face-down cards made them sufficiently white, although it’d be nice to have a different beak color and darker eyes :
Apollo 11 Eagle patch – layer test – head
I must arrange the cards with text to put more holes in the wings, although too many will cause fragile feathers:
Apollo 11 Eagle patch – layer test – wing
The white tail should be also done with face-down cards, more holes, and the three-way joint between the cards shifted under the tail layers to its left:
Apollo 11 Eagle patch – layer test – tail
The feet and olive branch were a total faceplant, as successive layers did not register accurately enough to overlay the leaves:
Apollo 11 Eagle patch – layer test – feet
Not to mention those ug-u-lee claws.
The wing layers need more rounding along their edges, perhaps with some thin cuts to emphasize the feathers.
A brace of cheap HD USB cameras may improve the scenery around here during video meetings. They were $16, marked down from an absurd $130:
HD USB Camera price history
Some poor schlubs certainly dropped more than twice the price of a Genuine Logitech camera on these critters, but a nearly total lack of demand must have had some effect.
They do take their stylin’ cues from Logitech, although the speckled pattern on a shiny plastic sheet is amusing:
HD USB Camera – styling vs Logitech C920
Unsurprisingly, the lens is fixed / manual focus. What looked like focus rings were in different positions on the two cameras:
HD USB Camera – lens focus notches
It turns out the rings were not glued in place, perhaps because they have absolutely no effect on the camera’s focus. Maybe there’s another camera model where they rotate the lens in a threaded socket, but this ain’t that.
The front panel has three pores:
A red Power LED is always on when it’s plugged in
A green On the air LED lights up when the camera is selected; I have no idea what the WiFi-ish glyph is supposed to represent
The “advanced noise canceling microphone” sits behind a pore offscreen left; the claim seems dubious.
Because these may go into smaller spaces, I dismantled the base to see what was involved. Most of the screws lie underneath thin foam sheets:
HD USB Camera – ball mount interior
The lower plate has a tripod mount and a folding bracket:
HD USB Camera – baseplate interior
The camera body has a ball mount with a few degrees of movment:
HD USB Camera – ball mount detail
Reassembled and stuck inside the laser cabinet with some good double-sided foam tape, it definitely produces a better image than the previous camera:
Platform camera view
Whatever noise cancellation the mic may provide is irrelevant in there: nobody’s listening.
Changing the lens on the laser requires unscrewing the nozzle after removing the assist air fitting that collides with the focus pen holder:
Laser head – assist air vs focus pen
All the 12 mm open-end wrenches in my Drawer o’ Spare Wrenches being much too large, I finally got around to making a custom wrench:
Air fitting wrenches
The plywood wrench came from a traced scan of a similar wrench, then adjusting the jaw opening to 12 mm. It served to verify the overall shape & size, then became a template for the real wrench atop a scrap of 1/8 inch aluminum sheet with flaking paint.
Some bandsawing and filing later:
Air fitting wrench – at nozzle
A little wrench makes swapping the lens somewhat less tedious, which is a Good Thing™.
Whereupon the tube remains nicely tubular on both ends and aligned along the chuck axis:
Ortur YRC-1 – chucked cardboard tube
Which is why you save all that scrap material …
Yes, it’s the core from a toilet paper roll, which is way cheaper than burning through tumblers / mugs / shot glasses / whatever while figuring this stuff out.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 