* If you’re just here for kitty silliness, scroll down.
No one in particular: “Desktop 3d printing will revolutionize everything! We will have limitless access to rapid prototyping and production of vital parts where and when needed and the resulting advances in technology will be amazing!”
Really now?
Absolutely no one in particular: “But people will print untraceable weapons and… terror!!! aaaahh!”
So I made a bit of a silly mistake. I saw that Micro Swiss had this sexy new NG extruder for the Creality CR-10 and Ender 3, and I’d just bought this Geeetech A10M which had a COMPLETELY AWFUL extruder and hotend that had an incurable case of plasti-slobber that more or less made it incapable of skipping and resuming extrusion — retraction doesn’t even stop it AT ALL. I figured, hey, this would fit on the Geeetech too, right?
….the answer is, kind of, if you replace a LOT OF CRAP 😀
I do not recommend this if you’re not dedicated and/or kinda in need of a severe distraction from the trials and tribulations of the outside world like I am. Start with an Ender 3 instead if you want to get up and running on this sexy extruder system quickly. (As of when I wrote this the extruder is out of stock – I hope it’ll be back soon, because it’s SO NICE.)
So, what I found it needed:
* New belt. The belt comes up like 1/2 inch short.
this is a footlong not a bun length frank!
* New heater. Not only is the stock heater a weird size, but… it SUCKS!!! The stock heater is only 30 watts. I don’t understand why they did this but it explains why I was never able to get the thing to heat above 215C without timing out and Marlin screaming “Heeeeyyyy, I’m halting now and just wanted to let you know I might be on fire over here” at me. I replaced it with a 60 watt 24 volt heater which works just fine (don’t forget to PID tune again!)
* New fan. The shroud that comes with the Micro Swiss NG is sized for the 40mm fan on an Ender 3, but more importantly, the (20? 30?) mm sleeve bearing fans that come on the Geeetech are terrible. 😀
Amazingly, the print cooling fan which is a 4010 blower can stay – that is identical to what comes on the Ender 3 so it transfers over.
I spliced the wires on the fans to use the original JST plugs because they’re weird and I wanted to keep the neat little carriage board.
* Lots of random Metric screws!!
The original Geeetech mixing extruder is a hot sloppy soup sandwich of failure and it just had to go. This is what it looked like as I was disassembling it. Also, the “3dTouch” probe is a wobbly shaky mess with poor repeatability and has been replaced with a real BLTouch. Only buy the 3dTouch if you really really like having to mess with the Babystep Z function EVERY DAMN TIME you want to print something. Argh!
…also the default config for Marlin 2 on this mainboard does not enable babystep! WHY? Enable this!!! HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—-
And now……. the new, beautiful little extruder…..
Tool marks on the Micro Swiss
First off, I found it necessary to add washers and different length screws to secure the rollers to the carriage. The washers were needed because I guess the wheels Geeetech uses are thinner than the Ender’s wheels and the carriage scraped the rail.
Washer behind the roller
The spacing of the mounting holes in the carriage board on the Geeetech are the same as the mounting holes in the stepper. I mounted it around the top of the stepper with a couple of longer screws and spacers. Please note the pinout of the probe – this is documented exactly nowhere by Geeetech aside from a very poorly made video. The pinout from left to right (facing the heater plug) is brown, red, orange, black, white. Also note that the heater wire fell out, it was not tightened correctly at the factory and I’m sure that helped that 30 watt heater warm up even faster! Uh, no.
Remove Before Yeet
So, the Micro Swiss is kinda cool but boy, can it ever develop extruder pressure – if you have the first layer too high, it will buckle *violently*, catch on the nozzle, and result in the print getting yeeted right off the bed!!! So, if you get lumps, bumps, buckling, waves, etc, STEP UP! I’m used to the behavior of cheaper Bowden extruders where the extruder doesn’t have reduction gears and will just skip steps when the pressure gets high, combined with the spring action of the filament in the Bowden tube – you can get away with having the first layer too tight and it will mostly print accompanied by thumping noises. This one will not let you get away with it, the print will get yeeted! 😀
Anyway, that’s dialed in and it’s printing a tiny Waffle House. Good times.
Now, as for that feline silliness: This is Gingy being all like “HOW ABSOLUTE DARE” over having to share her dish with a wild turkey. The turkey would be absolutely fine with sharing, but Gingy doesn’t trust him.
The Printrbot Simple Metal was a really cool design. It’s a Cartesian 3d printer built like a brick house by Printrbot out of Lincoln, California, who went out of business facing powerful competition from a lot of low-cost Chinese printers but recently decided to get going again. One of my coworkers had one that had an old version of Marlin on it (1.0.0?!) and I wanted to update it to improve on some features and add support for a heat bed.
oh she’s a brick—– house
It was available with or without a heated bed, and even if you didn’t have one, it can still be added easily using a stick on heater mat/thermistor like this. The connectors are present on the Printrboard controller for it. One cool thing about the Printrboard: it has two big beefy mosfets onboard, and the DC in connector just mates straight to a standard ATX12V connector on a PC power supply. All you’d need to do to power the Printrbot is go to the ATX motherboard connector on the supply and jumper the small green wire to one of the black grounds to make it auto start. On Rev. D boards, this was a 4 pin; on Rev. F, it’s 6 pin.
There is a solder jumperable pad, supplied OPEN, for USBPWR 5V. This will allow the board to power up from the USB host it’s plugged into. Don’t jumper this unless you have a very good reason to for your configuration. An onboard switching regulator will supply +5V to the components onboard once +12V is input to the ATX12V connector.
This is based on the RevF board, as that just happens to be what landed on my bench. Printers using the RevD are not uncommon too, apparently.
Steppers: The board supplies four Allegro A4982 stepper drivers, an improved version of the A4988. These do not have a heatsink on them like a lot of newer boards do, but I haven’t seen them get hot either. It certainly won’t hurt to add some stick-on sinks if you want. The datasheet suggests that the lion’s share of the chip’s thermal dissipation goes out the bottom though. The driver type in Marlin should be left on A4988 as the I/O behavior is identical.
Microstepping IS supported on this board – you will find a small solderable jumper pad next to each driver. If you solder bridge that entire pad, you will get 1/8 microstepping. On this particular printer, all four are un-jumpered and microstepping is not used. On a printer that was NOT built like a brick house, this would lead to it having a very loud sound about it. On the Simple Metal… it just sounds smooth and sweet. Don’t forget to change your steps per unit if you bridge the microstep pads! The VRef voltage that sets the stepper motor current comes off a DAC, making the motor current adjustable in software. I haven’t experimented with this yet or found any reason to move it off defaults – the motors and drivers stay cool and I am not experiencing any skipped steps, even when making the printer SCREAM at 150mm/sec! (it will DO IT with the stock hotend and not skip any steps, but you will lose detail. Dang.)
Updating Firmware: Before updating, if you’re doing this on an already functional machine, get your EEPROM settings with M503 and copy them into a text file. Otherwise you’ll wind up with defaults that may or may not be correct.
The CPU and serial interface: Another cool thing about the Printrboard: Unlike many ATMega based 3d printer controllers that came out at that time, the ATMega AT90USB1286 has native USB support. This will prove to be a double edged sword but won’t stop you from having fun with this board, read on. A Marlin build bug may show up when you’re trying to build as a result of this unique platform target. This is currently fixed in the nightly “bugfix” branch, so start from that if you are compiling Marlin yourself.
There is a “BOOT” jumper next to the chip. If you jump this and press the reset button, the chip will come up in DFU mode. It comes stock with a bootloader from Atmel that supports their FLIP utility for programming under Windows. (Todo: figure out what tools would be needed for this on other platforms.)
Dealing with Windows Being A Stupid Doodiehead As Usual: To program this chip, download Atmel FLIP and install it. On Windows 10 64-bit, get the version with the JRE included (as documented here). Tip the Printrbot over on its side and place a jumper cap on the BOOT pins, then press the reset button. You should see Windows detect the AT90USB in DFU mode— however, it may not properly install the driver. Open FLIP and click the USB cable icon in the toolbar, then choose USB connection. If you receive a message about a missing DLL, close FLIP again, and go into Device Manager. Right click the DFU device that’s showing up with a warning icon and choose Update Driver, then manually choose the location. The driver will have been dropped in C:\Program Files(x86)\Atmel\Flip [version]\usb. It should install ok, then Flip is ready to use.
To flash a file with Flip, go to File > Load Hex File. Click the USB plug icon and select USB connection. It should identify the AT90USB1286 if the chip’s already up in DFU mode. By default the options on the left will all be checked except Blank Check. That works fine… make sure it’s set to write out the Flash space and not the EEPROM space (the button in the top center toggles this), then click start at the lower left. It’ll take about 15 seconds to complete. IN THEORY, you should be able to reset out and run the newly programmed application in the chip with the button at lower right, but that doesn’t work for me – probably because the BOOT jumper is still set and it just loops back into DFU. Pull the jumper and press reset, and Windows should detect the
I have provided two compiled versions here at the end, one for printers with a heated bed and one for those without. The version for printers without a heatbed bed will work fine on those that do, you just won’t be able to heat the bed. The other way around, I suspect, would make it refuse to work with a MINTEMP error being thrown.
Building Marlin: I used PlatformIO and the Build Marlin addon tool. You can also use the Arduino IDE after installing Teensyduino. (Board type will be Teensyduino++ 2.0!). My configuration files are at the end of this post; my changes were mostly to invert the inductive probe output behavior (which MAY have been different for Rev. D boards!) and to add bilinear bed leveling with a 16 point probe. I tried using the new Unified Bed Leveling architecture but it caused the code size to exceed available memory. Bilinear is working fine on the machine here, so I’m just using it 🙂
Yes, you can buy that funky UBIS hotend and parts for it. The distance between the nozzle and probe center-to-center is 25MM, I’ve checked this and included it in the configuration file.
I have a sneaky suspicion that the example configurations for Marlin 2.0 just haven’t been touched since shortly before/after(?) Printrbot blinked out of existence and the example was only built and tested for the Rev. D Printrboard. A bit of searching around online suggests that the big change between D and F was the addition of a buffer transistor for the input from the inductive probe, which was prone to damage on Rev. D. If you have Rev. D, the stock config should be fine, but I think the buffer basically inverts the input. The way to tell will be to try homing the printer with G28. If the Z axis rises, pauses, then rises again, but never comes back down, use M119 to test the endstop input states. If the Z axis is not at the bottom and the LED on the proximity sensor is out, it should not say TRIGGERED for the Z endstop. Place a metal object under the probe so its light comes on and check again, it should say TRIGGERED. If you get the opposite behavior, you will need to toggle that state. The relevant lines are #define Z_MAX_ENDSTOP_INVERTING and #define Z_MIN_PROBE_ENDSTOP_INVERTING. These must match or it will toss an error on compilation.
Verification and Final Settings: Once you have the firmware loaded and running, open your terminal of choice. You can use Pronterface, the G-Code terminal in Octoprint, RepetierHost, whatever works.
Send M115 to get the firmware version.
If you previously had an older version of Marlin installed, send M502 then M500 to load the defaults from the firmware to the EEPROM space and save them. If this printer had an LCD (it CAN be added!) it would prompt you to do this from the front panel on first boot.
PID autotune: I usually start the fan first with M106 S255. This may not be necessary but I find it helps on some platforms.
Start the tuning routine with M303 S215 C8 U1
(8 cycles to 215 degrees C, and the U1 flag will save the values to RAM)
M500 to save the results to EEPROM for later use
Bed leveling: If you have a heatbed, heat it first to a normal use temperature (say, 50C for PLA) and let it stabilize a minute before continuing. The hotend temp won’t matter for now as it’s not going to affect the inductive probe.
G28
(this will auto home all three axes)
G29
(a magical dance will begin)
If you already have a working Z probe offset value from your old settings, enter it now
M851 Z-0.7 this will vary by your printer and build surface
M500
Once G29 is done, it will output a small table of the measurement values. Save the results with M500. Re-home with G28
Test the Z height by heating the hotend to a normal use temperature, placing a sheet of paper on the bed and sending G0 Z0. It should kinda just grab it. If you need to adjust it, check these instructions.
If your extruder is stock, well…. for the FIRST TIME EVER… and that is to say I have literally NEVER seen any other Chinese printer I’ve worked with factory calibrated correctly…. YOUR E-STEPS ARE PROBABLY CORRECT!!! See, this was why you paid extra for a Printrbot. Thing’s hardcore. If you want to verify/calibrate, go here. Otherwise it should Just Work.
this ‘tiny house’ trend is getting ridiculous
If you have Rev. D and these binaries don’t let the printer home right, let me know – I don’t have that version to test on and I’m curious about that probe behavior…
WiGLE added Bluetooth device scanning and database functionality to their Wardriving app a year or so back. Originally, I would see a few things pop up in it, usually headsets and car entertainment systems.
Now, it seems like everything comes with Bluetooth and no fecking power switch.
This is the result of just leaving scanning active overnight as people and their Bluetooth devices move past. The newer BLE stuff has…. kinda terrifyingly long range.
It makes me think… If WiGLE is scanning this for nerds like me, there’s gotta be some shady-ass analytics company using Bluetooth to track everyone without their consent and selling that data.
Personally I use maybe three Bluetooth devices regularly, and they are all switched off when not in active use. Without trying to correlate addresses to vendors or anything, I’m just going to empirically blame Apple’s crappy AirPods for a lot of these potential tracking beacons.
Stop the fan and tip it with your hand. Don’t hit the ceiling.
Move it slowly and watch as it rocks and settles down. The high side needs a balance weight.
As suggested by the title, I stuck a quarter up there with a double sided tape pad from the junk drawer.
Adjust / repeat as necessary.
* may also work with a penny, dime, two quarters— your mileage may vary. Probably won’t work on “hugger” style low profile fans as easily as you can’t tilt them – just try the weight on each blade until you see the best improvement then fine tune by moving it in and out on the blade.
It’s not uncommon among broadcast equipment that it contains a small off-the-shelf embedded PC, often running Linux.
It’s also not uncommon that the equipment will just up and die one day for no seemingly good reason, however, while the reason is a maddeningly silly one— it’s easy to get it running again!
So here’s the most common one I run into. This is on an SSL (Solid State Logic) NetBridge, which is part of their system that— well, I’ll admit I have no clue what it does.
The problem: After unplugging the box and plugging it back in, it never started up right. A front panel LCD lit up and indicated something weird like it was waiting for connection to the host, but never did anything beyond that point.
Remove about 64 screws aaaaaand…
VIA Mini-ITX motherboard
Believe it or not… nothing too special here. This is an off the shelf VIA Mini-ITX platform motherboard. If you had to, you could track down a replacement entirely. The RAM is just standard RAM, so if it went bad you could swap it. I forget what’s on the other end of that ATA cable but it was probably a CompactFlash card in an adapter.
Now, look under that multiport serial card’s corner. See the coin cell battery standing at attention in the vertical holder? Well, it was more like… a dead parrot nailed to its perch.
You can just see one wire connected to the header for the front panel LEDs and buttons. In this case I think it was on the reset pin. There is nothing on the power switch pins.
The way this box left the factory, it was configured to expect that it would never actually shut down. It was expected that the box would just lose power, and the BIOS settings were set to “resume after power failure”. Worked fine until… the battery died and the settings went byebye.
The fix was simple: Open the box, connect a keyboard and monitor, short the pins on the front panel header for “power button” to wake the board up, enter the BIOS settings and configure them appropriately, then put all 64 screws back in the thing.
I dunno, maybe it wasn’t actually 64, but it was a LOT, man.
I’ve seen the same kind of setup used also with a capacitor across the power button pins as described in this car PC article; a certain type of satellite receiver used in radio stations (I forget the make/model!) and the Comrex Access rackmount units used this as well. I believe on those it was more a backup measure to ensure the box still started if the settings got lost, though.
It probably wouldn’t hurt to keep a spare motherboard around for these units. In some cases the software is very dependent of the hardware being JUST so. In advanced and, frankly, ridiculous cases, the software may have a license key linked to the MAC address of the onboard network card, and you may have to swap a surface mount serial EEPROM. (a pox on your house to anyone who implements this…!!!!)
Also, any easily removable storage device may be backed up for future recovery if needed. My usual solution is to just take an image of the whole drive from a Linux system. You’ll probably have to do these as root.
sudo dd if=/dev/sdx of=backupFile.img to create the file (insert appropriate device node of course)
sudo dd if=backupFile.img of=/dev/sdx to restore it (contents of the device will be overwritten!)
If you use a similar size or larger media as the replacement, it should work fine – I’ve never seen anything care that blocks exist beyond where the partition map says they do.
A lot of FM broadcast transmitters (and who knows, maybe even TV, AM….?) use a tetrode or pentode tube based power amplifier. Control of the final output power is achieved by metering the output and adjusting the voltage to the screen of the tube, thus adjusting the amplifier’s gain.
A woman loves a man with a great big old Johnson.*
On a lot of transmitters this gets done electromechanically. In this case this is done using a Variac or variable transformer, but in some smaller rigs (2.5, 2KW, and below?) a rheostat voltage divider may be used.
In the above picture, the screen voltage is all the way up for maximum gain. This occurred as the result of the tube wearing out and its cathode emission going soft, so the automatic power control kept trying to run the gain up higher and higher to maintain the desired power output until the poor little motor tanked.
Now a word on folksonomies and genericized trademarks. You may notice I capitalized Variac. This was originally a trademark held by the General Radio Company with first use in 1933. It was allowed to expire, probably by the end of 1994. Variac, however, kind of became a household word (if you could call a variable autotransformer a household item?) like Band-Aid, Xerox copy, Jello, and the like. Within the folksonomy of electronics there are a few things that have become genericized like this and it may be easier to categorize information involving them by an old brand name. Other examples would include “Black Beauty” capacitors which were a Bakelite encased oil and paper cap, Vactrol for light variable resistor type optocouplers usable for audio and analog signals…. Sorry for geeking out worse than usual here. Anyway, with the Variac / variable autotransformer…
Shown here, a Harris HT 25 FM. This is very very similar to the FM 25 K series and was made like this for years, because once Harris had a design that worked very well, there was no reason to make big changes. I bet they made thousands of these transmitters and many of them are still happily thrumming along to this day.
The mechanism is simple but prone to issues, especially if the automatic power control is used. Here’s the problem: Every change in line voltage, even a change in output impedance caused by rain or ice hitting the antenna, may cause the power to fluctuate. The controls compensate by moving the mechanism, and eventually something gives.
The original mechanism used this unusual bidirectional synchronous motor geared down to 0.5 RPM, running on 120 volts AC. This motor is discontinued by Hurst, though they’re still around and still have a somewhat similar product. However, it has to be custom manufactured with a lead time of 14 weeks, and nobody just has stock of ’em.
The solution: get to hackin’. First, a control system to step this down to a commonly available DC gear motor:
Constructed:
And now comes the fun part. The DC motor’s shaft is fatter and shorter, but it’ll work! Here’s the original shaft coupling it goes into and the Variac. Off to the right is the transformer that steps 240VAC up to 1000VAC. Or maybe it’s 707VAC if it just uses the peaks. I dunno, man. It Just Works.
There’s also a silvery looking band wrapped around it with one of the two end stop screws. More on that later. I removed all the grubscrews for safe keeping.
The bronze coupling drills like a hot knife going through butter, albeit with a disturbing squeaky sound.
This is how the stop screws are installed from the factory. They hit the micro switches under the mounting plate to limit the motor’s travel.
Now, you’ll notice the new motor’s shaft is shorter. Under the silver band there’s another pair of set screws that clamped the old motor’s shaft. However, the hole the stop screw is in is tapped exactly the same as that set screw hole.
Flippity flop ’em.
The silver band will just cover up the set screw down the upper hole once it’s all assembled.
Trust me— it works fine.
And no, of course the silly thing didn’t spin in the vise, what ever made you think that? No, of course not! DURRRRRRRRR
Here’s the mounting plate. I expanded the hole where the original shaft went down to 1/2 inch, and wound up just drilling two new mounting holes and using the side mounting holes in the gearbox.
This motor also provided three tapped screw holes in the bottom, but I didn’t wind up using them. If I had this to do over I’d probably do it though. They’re Metric and I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what the screw sizes are. M2? M3?
And it’s up and running.
If I had it to do over I might slightly revise the motor mounting as I don’t entirely like the amount of slop the rubber grommets induce in the system, but it works– and it doesn’t hunt back and forth. The Variac requires a very small amount of torque to turn it (I could grab that axle with two fingers gently and turn it throughout its full range). The DC motor I used is impossible to turn by hand so I brought a 9v battery to hold against the terminals as an assembly aid to reach all the set screws. 😉
And now I need to redo my nails.
*
So I’m trying to get SSL certificates working for kg4cyx.net and am currently having little luck. I’ll revisit that later. For now you can get here by https but get a huge certificate mismatch error all up in yo’ grill and I don’t even know– probably has something to do with the fact certbot can’t figure out my vhosts. According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.
Just got my first package from HackerBoxes and I’d originally planned to make an unboxing video but that just wasn’t gonna happen unfortunately–
So I’ll spill the secrets of what was inside…
Waaait up is that
Is that…. A PENGUIN?
Clearly I have made a very good decision here.
Holy moly I love this already.
This is the “Cellular Metal” box. Next to the breadboard is a small GSM(?) cellular modem. I haven’t looked up the info just yet. The black cable is a u.fl to SMA pigtail to connect it to the small antenna. There’s also a SIM card.
A pack of breadboard jumpers and components are present, as well as an Arduino compatible board, a USB to TTL level serial adapter, an Atmega328 (as used on the Arduino) and an ATTiny.
The card, meanwhile, does double duty. Flip it over and…
Pinouts!
This is just as cool as the business cards from Marlin P. Jones Associates that have an electronics color code/resistor code guide on the back.
Soon I shall be looking at their online documentation to see what possibilities are in store for all this.
And…. Finding a suitably awesome spot to put that penguin in. I mean— it’s Tux with “Hack The Planet” written on it—!!!!! Soooo perfect.
First off, our radio knobs were too easy to turn, causing them to get unexpectedly muted or knocked off channel.
Second, I fail so hard at shitposting. I always want to just fire up WordPress and drop a useless shitpost on here then I think of something actually useful and informative. What follows is a failure to shitpost.
I’m still not exactly calling this a great post because I’m too lazy to edit the images.
Step one: pull the knobs off. Pull straight up. The knob may be tight on the shaft, just don’t apply excessive force in any direction if it is. Be patient. On this Hytera it was pretty easy to pop off.
The recess here is what we’ll be modifying. Cut two little circles out of craft foam, mouse pad, inner tube… Whatever rubbery thing you have handy… Or use rubber o rings. It don’t matter.
If there’s no hole in them yet, fold in half and cut a slit.
Press it down the shaft and all the way into the recess.
Reinstall the knob. Test to see that it moves and has more resistance. If there’s no effect, add another layer. If it doesn’t fit back on there, remove it and try a thinner material.
This took me about two minutes per radio I did it on and eliminates annoyance like nobody’s business.
The first time I did this mod was on a Baofeng, so I’m gonna add the shitpost tag. You’re welcome.
Flip dot signs are kinda awesome. They’re sunlight readable, and noisy. You’ve probably seen them in a bus somewhere or other. They usually have neon green or yellow pixels.
Let’s take a look. This is a Luminator GTi series circa 1990.
Here are the dots. They’re swiveled by the thin metal prongs on the ends. Note that this sign has a test message left on it, and retains this without power…
Each dot is a small, magnetized sandwich of metal. Note the small black dot visible through the cutout. This is significant.
Each pixel sits on a U shaped yoke of metal with a low magnetic coercivity. One side of that yoke is the dot you saw above.
I’ve seen different variants of how the dots are electrically driven. On this one, there is one coil per dot. Other variants I’ve seen used two, one for black and one for yellow (green? white?…) On this one, what you get is a function of the polarity of current applied.
Um, okay, it was 1990, we can forgive this uninspired light source for nighttime use.
Here’s the driver. Bottom section converts 24vdc to 12 and 5 and also has a switch for that florescent lamp’s power. Top section takes data over RS485 and makes pretty pointillist pictures.
The Micrel chips are shift registers with integrated source and sink drivers. Each row and column appears to be connected, respectively, to a pair of their outputs allowing “push-pull” drive.
Socketed 8 pin ic: rs-485 line driver. To its right: 80c51 CPU, GAL chip that interfaces it to the shift registers, RAM, ROM, other logic bits…
So what can I do with this sign? Right now, nothing. It was made to work with a Luminator master controller that contained all the data to be displayed.
My next step is to try to figure out how to drive the matrix. I’m a little nervous with this one though as it is possible to short +12 to ground by turning on the respective outputs of two of the shift registers that are connected to the same output… However, to flip dots, you have to turn on two shift registers – one for row, one for column. I don’t know which is which and it’ll require analyzing the board layout more to figure it out. My plan is to put about a 25 ohm resistor in series with the +12 line while testing – the dots may not flip like that, but neither will the tops of those cute little driver arrays either. Oh, how I wish they were TPIC6C595 with their short protection. 😉
But this thing can take a flying leap. LED tape shall be applied.
So a week or so ago I found a really nice leather jacket at a thrift store. It was kind of weathered soft, and fits me like a glove.. I mean, perfect… But just one thing…
It was brown.
I’m too old school goth for brown.
Therefore, it needed to look like rusty old metal.
Initial testThe back of the jacket. Please excuse the cluster foxtrot workshop.The front. It's not asymmetrical like a biker jacket; it's just hanging all derpy because I needed to get behind the collar.Inside the collar.
I was originally just going for a rusty appearance but when Dominik of Slaughterhouse Apparel told me the red looked bloody I went with it. It’s got the look of something worn by a post apocalyptic mechanic; the red bits kind of reminding us that in an apocalyptic world, Shit Gets Real sometimes.
The funny part of all this? One of my coworkers told me this will probably look best with brown pants. Thankfully my wardrobe isn’t entirely black otherwise.
