@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

mcdanlj

@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

1st Fedora Project Lead. Co-author Linux Application Development. Sr. Director Engineering Pendo. Ex-{Linux Journal, Red Hat, rPath, SAS}. Christian. Father. Maker (including machining, 3D printing, and electronics). Books. Classical music. Aviation (inactive PP-Inst-SEL). https://musings.danlj.org/

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NedMan, to random
@NedMan@social.makerforums.info avatar

Bubble, bubble toil and trouble. Wha Ha Haaa! ⚗️⚡️

Just a little electrochemistry. Preparing a nickel acetate solution to do some nickel plating. 😁

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@NedMan Well, here's Clickspring on electroplating, though his focus on nickel is as a substrate for gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FmOid8bgLo

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

Today I hit a brick wall in the work.

I got the servo to quit singing when turned on by setting the secondary notch filter to 250Hz, which seemed close to the frequency I heard. So far so good. Bug...

When I power everything up and turn the spindle, the servo starts to turn, and then trips its alarm and stops. It does this even if it is not physically connected to the lathe gearbox, so it doesn't seem like it could reasonably be complaining about it taking too much torque to turn.

I guess I should go back to factory default settings and try again, but as far as I can tell I didn't change much. Steps/rev and the notch filter is I think all I changed.

As far as I can tell, the servo doesn't say anything more than "an error occurred" by lighting a red LED and asserting a signal, so I have no idea what error it thinks it ran into.

mcdanlj, (edited )
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@GustavinoBevilacqua I pulled the front off the gearbox tonight.

It was filthy in there. But while it definitely needs fresh oil, that's not the core problem. It's just stiff. And the axis of the feed bar is under the oil level, so it makes sense that it's stiff. I now have no expectation of making it run more freely so that my original arrangement works. I'm not going to be pulling the box off the lathe any time soon, so not measuring for making a replacement bracket either.

Therefore, when I put it back together with fresh oil, I'll put the gears back on until I do necessary work to run the servo much faster to multiply torque.

I'll probably use a gear drive instead of a belt drive because otherwise I have to make a pulley fit on the output shaft, and 3d printing a strong enough gear for the servo should be trivial. (Thanks !) I think I could use the 76-tooth original gear on the input; if I used a 19-tooth gear on the servo that would be 4:1, and that's above the 17-tooth recommended minimum for 20°PA involute gears.

I'm hoping that I can find a gear ratio in the box that gives me a lot more advantage, and which moves both the lead screw and the feed rod, so that overall I have enough mechanical advantage not to overload the servo. It's much easier to work this out while looking at the actual gears than treating it as a black box. I think I can follow the gear engagement and then work out the precise gear ratios based on the gear descriptions in the parts manual.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@GustavinoBevilacqua I wasn't necessarily thinking of replacing the gears with metal ones. I saw people replacing the POM gears on their mini-lathes with metal and they clearly didn't understand that the point of the POM gears was to break in case of a crash; they were intentionally sacrificial.

Both of the people who encouraged me to take the face off the gearbox had done so themselves because of bent shafts; one of them said it was from a crash. While I have a brass shear pin in the lead screw and a clutch on the feed rod, I'd think of a 3d-printed gear as sacrificial, and if I ended up cutting a gear, I might cut it from POM or nylon rather than metal.

If I decide to go for more than 4:1 mechanical advantage, I should instead use a timing belt, which is also not made of metal. ☺

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@GustavinoBevilacqua Cutting which metal did you have in mind?

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@GustavinoBevilacqua I got an answer from someone with a similar lathe. I should pull the front off before removing it from the headstock (and may not need to remove it at all), and it's not as intimating as it looks.

I should probably start pressing some new gasket paper flat before I pull the front off, though! 😀

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

I have a kid headed off to college who wants a @frameworkcomputer DIY 13" system to run @fedora on while studying CS. ❤️

What are the tradeoffs between the Intel and AMD variants, specifically for running Linux, specifically the next-generation systems (13th Gen Intel Core or AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) currently available for pre-order?

  • Webcam? (I don't know whether Frame.work are using Intel's proprietary, closed-source, non-upstreamed webcam implementation on their Alder/Raptor Lake systems.)
  • Battery life?
  • Performance?
  • Other technical considerations?

JTBC I'm not looking for anti-Intel or anti-AMD comments, just technical information, with a focus on good support from a fully open source install.

#framework #fedora

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@ruurd @frameworkcomputer @fedora I recognize that you wanted to be helpful, but... It's a little weird to see this assumption that Linux doesn't "[provide] all the basics [they will] need for day to day office life" from "a CS professional" — I may be biased as the person who kicked off "The Fedora Project" within Red Hat lo these many years ago, but I have not chosen the OS for my kids.

This one chose the Frame.work. They already live day-to-day in Linux, mac not required. They confirmed with the CS profs that having only Linux installed would work for everything at school. Multiple current CS students said they had only Linux installed and had no problems with school requirements.

Linux natively hosts Linux VMs without a problem; no particular reason to run them under a slower OS. No particular reason not to run, say, Ubuntu in a VM under Fedora.

Ultimately Asahi will probably change this for people who want Apple hardware, but not everyone is in that camp.

The Frame.work keyboard layout and no-physical-button trackpad at least mean that I personally am very very unlikely to buy a Frame.work system. I am clearly not the target audience. But this system isn't for me, and I'm not going to try to talk them into changing their mind. I applaud what Frame.work has done even if the systems they make now don't meet my specific needs.

"Just buy a mac" isn't nuanced.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@machenni They are both x86_64 — an instruction set that AMD introduced as "AMD64" and that Intel eventually (and as far as I can tell somewhat reluctantly at the time) adopted as Itanium ("Itanic") flopped. Are you thinking perhaps of ARM? Frame.work doesn't sell any ARM systems today, to my knowledge.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@jontyms Sadly, webcam isn't one of the features listed on that Linux Compatibility page. I'm glad the page exists, but it doesn't address the IPU6 webcam question. 😢

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@jontyms Ah, thank you! In their case, they currently have a nearly decade old and heavy but still functioning T440p, so we do have flexibility.

fenruspdx, to random

maker experts, I'm looking to see if there's a recommendation for a decent but not outragously priced 4th axis kit for a CNC. Something like https://www.sainsmart.com/products/4040pro-4-axis is almost perfect, except for the unspecified (proprietary?) connector. I've seen many kits that don't have the nice base plate that keeps the front and back pin aligned, which is less nice obviously.

A second thing I'd need with it of course is some sort of stepper driver that ends up talking USB to my controller PC

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@fenruspdx Oh, not full lathe mode! ✅

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

How would you, generally, synchronize A with XYZ if they are on separate controllers?

(For where I'm thinking about A axes, I'm going to run LinuxCNC on a rPi to replace the smoothie clone I ripped out of my CNC mill, which will make it easy to add as many axes as I want. But that's a few projects out still.)

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@fenruspdx Yeah, true for many things. I think that @stewart has the same limitation for kiri:moto slicing with an A axis, and it covers lots of use cases.

There are some things that you really want full-on lathe mode for; in general if you want a sharp inside corner on a spiral feature. It's why I've sometimes regretted buying a semi-universal dividing head instead of a full-universal dividing head for my mill; I did that before I learned about the difference. Anyway, that's why my mind went to the more general use case. That and using a lathe. 😀

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@fenruspdx Do you have another axis available on your controller? I would be more likely to replace my controller board with one that can support another axis than to end up with two separate controllers, one for XYZ and one for A...

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@fenruspdx A completely separate controller for only a single acid might cost just as much as a new controller that can handle four axes.

Do you have integrated or external stepper controllers on your current controller board?

trevorflowers, to random
@trevorflowers@machines.social avatar

Hey, shop people. If you wanted a 1200x1200mm sheet of this kind of rubbery craft cutting board material, where would you look? That's what I want on top of my center bench.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@trevorflowers @sxpert Quilters sometimes want really big cutting mats, so that might be a good place to start searching.

https://www.mybinding.com/rhino-self-healing-large-cutting-mat-no-grid.html is available in 4'x8' so would give you one replacement surface. It's white PE, so maybe not "rubbery" enough for you?

They used to have linkable 2'x4' modular self-healing cutting mats but those have been discontinued.

https://usartsupply.com/products/usa-cm-40x60-gb is 40"x60" so not quite right, but would it be good enough?

Other than that, I also thought of rubber (not vinyl) anti-static mats; should resist oil fine. I think mine was 2' by 4', and I think this is what I bought and the seller from whom I bought: https://www.ebay.com/itm/282247916572

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

This was a satisfying three. Second guess knocked it down to two likely words (in my estimation) of which one had already been used.

Wordle 703 3/6*
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟩⬜⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

However...

The splash screen has now finally infected me, as of a few days ago. Instead of refreshing the page and starting to play immediately, I have to click through a "see stats" page, refresh, click play, then finally start playing. Annoying.

That diminishes my joy, and might be what ends up driving me to stop playing (my weird version of) Wordle. I'm not going to play forever, and at least once I have hit my goal of having more threes than fours.

Today makes my streak 200 wins. Wordle records 483 games, which doesn't include the roughly 10 days between backup and hard drive death last fall, so I'm getting close to 500 wordles played.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

Today, I didn't do wordle right away after getting up, and it felt freeing. So I think I've decided to Marie Kondo it.

While I do enjoy playing squaredle, I think I'll keep leaving my streaks broken rather than trying to play it every day, and I don't think I'll share about playing it generally.

If I do occasionally play a game of wordle, I expect I won't share my game here and won't maintain a streak.

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

I have a child graduating from our home school high school. It was decided that the diploma needed a logo, and that representing the mathematical focus of our home school (my wife is a math PhD), an image of an icosahedron should be part of it.

I ended up using the Pyramids and Polyhedrons workbench, finding the most pleasing projection (according to the graduate), pulling it into a Tech Draw workbench drawing, and importing that image into Inkscape.

That was easier than the artistically curved Semper Librum Portate school motto that had to fit into the drawn image in the logo.

When my now nearly-finished-with-college child was in preschool, I used Scribus to lay out a school newsletter. Now that same child used Scribus to lay out a diploma that looks better than what the local public school system gives. And I remembered, from about 18 years ago, that we couldn't import SVG directly, but had to change format; this is still true today.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@trevorflowers Thanks!

That work bench is what I used for the icosahedral intransitive dice project some months ago, too! 🙂

trevorflowers, to random
@trevorflowers@machines.social avatar

Morning thought: A device that lets old EEs know when their designs make the high pitch squeals that only young people can hear.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@smellsofbikes @trevorflowers I used to hear well to 40khz but mercifully the highest end has started to fade despite me babying my ears my whole life. I understand why my car needs to sing so I deal with it... 😁

danderson, to random
@danderson@hachyderm.io avatar

Finally gave up on "real" CAD. Now I have a a parametric sketch in FreeCAD that I'm using purely to capture my initial measurements and then query derived values (e.g. "how long is this fence that I didn't measure, but whose dimension is fully constrained by the drawing").

Then I just re-drew it all in Inkscape, with grid snapping and a grid of 1mm on paper = 1in in the world. Annoying to have to draw it all twice, but... ends up being faster than finding better CAD.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@danderson Does this help?

https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=29951

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@danderson I thought you could export a sketch as SVG...

kevin, to random

@jwildeboer Do you have a hashtag for delicious food that will be eaten later but has not been made yet, and thus can't be pictured (not even post-consumption)? 🙂

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@kevin @jwildeboer Is this when you take a picture of your shopping list on the kitchen whiteboard?

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

Google News decided that I wanted to read https://www.naval-technology.com/features/darpa-silent-mhd-magnetic-drives-for-replacing-naval-propellers/ — it was interesting, but how can an article talking about MHD drive and explicitly referencing submarines not reference Hunt for Red October?

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@dougl Ah, LLMs are definitely renowned for a nuanced ability to separate fact from fiction.

No, I rather suspect that a reference to fiction was below the dignity of the author.

But I would have added something like "introduced to popular consciousnesses in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October" somewhere in the article, because it wouldn't be beneath my apparently lower dignity. 😁

trevorflowers, to random
@trevorflowers@machines.social avatar

Hello, friend. I heard you like chucks so I put a chuck on your chuck so that you can turn while you turn.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@trevorflowers I put my mini-lathe chuck in the chuck on my dividing head once, though I no longer remember why that stack-up seemed like a good idea...

mcdanlj, to random
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

Super excited to start testing ActivityPub support for Discourse!

https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794?u=mcdanlj

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

I found a few things that will keep me from turning it on for Maker Forums right now, but that's temporary. They are releasing a MVP plugin first and then iterating, which is awesome. ❤️

trevorflowers, to random
@trevorflowers@machines.social avatar

What do you use for way oil at home? At work we use Mobile Vactra No. 4 but I haven't found a place to purchase it in small quantities.

mcdanlj,
@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info avatar

@trevorflowers I use "Zurnoil ZURN WAYLUBE 80-NE, Premium Way Lubricant" which is supposed to be a Vactra 2 equivalent, but it now looks more expensive than Vactra 2 itself, so probably something else for my next order. I don't need 5-gallon pails nor 55-gallon drums...

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