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
After powering my Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera for nearly all of this year’s riding, the Batmax NP-BX1 lithium batteries still have roughly 90% of their original capacity:
Batmax NP-BX1 – 2020-11
Those are hot off the Official Batmax charger, which appears identical to other randomly named chargers available on Amazon.
They’re holding up much better after a riding season than the DOT-01 batteries I used two years ago:
Sony DOT-01 NP-BX1 – 2019-10-29
Empirically, they power the camera for about 75 minutes, barely enough for our typical rides. I should top off the battery sitting in the camera unused for a few days, although that hasn’t happened yet.
Of course, the Batmax NP-BX1 batteries I might order early next year for the new riding season have little relation to the ones you see here.
That’s the 5 mm punch, where being (at least) half a millimeter off-center matters more than it would in the 32 mm punch.
Unscrewing the painfully awkward screw in the side releases the pilot:
Neiko hole punch – punch tip debris
The debris on the back end of the pilot is a harbinger of things to come:
Neiko hole punch – damaged spring debris
Looks like whoever was on spring-cutting duty nicked the next coil with the cutoff wheel. I have no idea where the steel curl came from, as it arrived loose inside the spring.
Although it doesn’t appear here, I replaced that huge screw with a nice stainless steel grub screw that doesn’t stick out at all.
Chucking the pilot in the lathe suggested it was horribly out of true, but cleaning the burrs off the outside diameter and chamfering the edges with a file improved it mightily. Filing doesn’t remove much material, so apparently the pilot is supposed to have half a millimeter of free play in the handle:
Neiko hole punch – undersized pilot
That’s looking down at the handle, without a punch screwed onto the threads surrounding the pilot.
Wrapping a rectangle of 2 mil brass shimstock into a cylinder around the pilot removed the slop:
Neiko hole punch – cleaned tip brass shim
But chucking the handle in the lathe showed the pilot was still grossly off-center, so I set it up for boring:
Neiko hole punch – boring setup
The entry of the hole was comfortingly on-axis, but the far end was way off-center. I would expect it to be drilled on a lathe and, with a hole that size, it ought to go right down the middle. I’ve drilled a few drunken holes, though.
Truing the hole enlarged it enough to require a 0.5 mm shimstock wrap, but the pilot is now pretty much dead on:
Neiko hole punch – accurized results
Those are 5, 6, 8, and 10 mm punches whacked into a plywood scrap; looks well under a quarter millimeter to me and plenty good enough for what I need.
Adding a bit of trim to the bottom of the LED spider makes it look better and helps keep the strut wires in place:
Astable Multivibrator – Alkaline – Radome trim
It’s obviously impossible to build like that, so it’s split across the middle of the strut:
Astable Multivibrator – Alkaline – Radome trim
Glue it together with black adhesive and a couple of clamps:
LED Spider – glue clamping
The aluminum fixtures (jigs?) are epoxied around snippets of strut wire aligning the spider parts:
LED Spider – gluing fixture
Those grossly oversized holes came pre-drilled in an otherwise suitable aluminum rod from the Little Tray o’ Cutoffs. I faced off the ends, chopped the rod in two, recessed the new ends, and declared victory. Might need better ones at some point, but they’ll do for now.
Next step: wire up an astable with a yellow LED to go with the green and blueboosted LEDs.
Having helped grossly over-fund the Atreus Kickstarter earlier this year, a small box arrived pretty much on-time:
Atreus keyboard – overview
I did get the blank keycap set, but have yet to screw up sufficient courage to install them. The caps sit atop the stock Kailh (pronounced, I think, kale) BOX Brown soft tactile switches; they’re clicky, yet not offensively loud.
Removing a dozen screws lets you take it apart, revealing all the electronics on the underside of the PCB:
Atreus keyboard – PCB overview
The central section holds most of the active ingredients:
Of interest is the JTAG header at the front center of the PCB:
Atreus keyboard – JTAG header
I have yet to delve into the code, but I think those signals aren’t involved with the key matrix and one might be available to drive an addressable RGB LED.
For future reference, they’re tucked into the lower left corner of the chip (the mauled format comes from the original PDF):
Atmel 32U4 – JTAG pins
The alternate functions:
SCK = PB1
MOSI = PB2
MISO = PB3
I don’t need exotic lighting, but indicating which key layer is active would be helpful.
Love the key feel, even though I still haven’t hit the B key more than 25% of the time.
No CUPS server setup can be considered complete without sending a print job to the wrong printer:
HPLJ1200 – CUPS Pinball Panic – detail
Which wouldn’t be quite so bad if the printer weren’t ever so much faster than I am:
HPLJ1200 – CUPS Pinball Panic – output pileup
It turns out an ordinary clothes iron can flatten those pages. Set it to “silk”, spread packing paper on the ironing board to intercept the toner, iron a few millimeters of pages at a time, and feed them back into the printer.
Back in the day, laser-specific printer paper came with a grain arranged so it wouldn’t curl when you fed it into the printer with the proper side up. Those days are gone; I’ve tried both ways and they both curl.
Protip: When CUPS thinks it’s done with the job and the Web interface shows nothing’s going on, it’s handed the job to the server’s printing subsystem, which continues spooling data to the printer. Choking off the bitstream requires one command-line invocation on the server connected to the printer:
cancel -a
A paper jam gives you enough time to figure all that out.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 