Meter that is, I swear, not cursed. No really. Not cursed at all. Might be cursed at some other point in time, but not now.
I could try to explain what was going on with the curse, but I’ll leave it at this: it just… completely afflicted the resistance measurements and made me think a whole roll of SMT resistors were somehow open circuit right off the reel. Then another equally cursed resistor in the office suggested the same thing. Yeah, the only explanation for this level of synchronized brokenness is an ancient horrible curse.
I need a sign for the workshop door that says “It has been [slot to hang up a number tile] days since last unspeakable horrors beyond human comprehension”. I will not elaborate here as to why, but it’s now a matter of public record if you know where to look. FNORD!
It’s been way too long since I’ve updated anything here. I’m definitely burned out like one of those terrifying light bulbs and my work environment is really absolute blowage like a poorly balanced 5015 blower hanging off a 3d printer carriage and making the print look absolutely raunchy as its vibration slightly shifts the base of a bridge in the print as the GCode rolls off an M106 S255 to increase airflow. Not that I’d know anything about that. (I wonder if ebm papst makes 5015 size blowers? Their dynamic balancing is TOP NOTCH.) Yeah uh. In the last few weeks we upgraded the brains of our stupid robot camera pedestals and now they’re…. somehow less reliable. Cool.
Meanwhile I experienced a really dumb thing: after one of our new members of the engineering team was telling me about the features of his Prusa 3d printers, I realized I have a couple that were sidelined ages ago due to failures I didn’t really understand how to fix, and… Oops now I have too many working machines
Fun fact: the big delta had been previously, incorrectly assembled by a Tesla engineer and had never successfully printed anything. It works now!
Everyone in the room understood me when I said “oops I accidentally printed a Triscuit”. This is the result of accidentally using a stock ender 3 profile in PrusaSlicer on one of the two direct drive machines up on top here with an all metal hotend, that setup really doesn’t like the 5mm retraction distance! 1mm works fine.
Oops I forgot the bean dip
The Ender 3 is running Klipper now. This one has a Creality 1.1.3 mainboard which I should just replace – it’s fairly awful. The CPU on it doesn’t have enough storage for Marlin to use its latest and greatest bed mesh leveling tricks (the UBL features). That being said it’s also kinda short on pins….. but it isn’t! Note this unused EXT-A2 header in the middle with the capacitor stuffed in it. It goes to pin PA2 / 29 on the CPU. Marlin calls it 29, Klipper calls it PA2. Creality famously never provided schematics for this board so I stabbed it with a Fluke till I found it. I soldered on a header and put the cap back as well.
On a side note be very very careful if you buy a Creality branded Bltouch. Their ribbon cable has the wire colors completely wrong. Go by pin number, DO NOT TRUST THE COLORS. The only reason this atrocious board didn’t blow up from having its +5v rail shorted to ground by the Bltouch cable when I went by color code was that it is simply such a stubborn abomination with its loud ass A4988 stepper drivers that sound like a running toilet that it simply refused to be cleansed from the earth by a mere short circuit. Well that and think it essentially just has a LM7805 on there somewhere.
There’s also this post on Simon’s Tech Blog detailing some more intricate hacking of this board by repurposing an SD card IO line, though not the low hanging fruit there on pin PA2. I’ll be honest, it was kinda me seeking an *easy* place to land the BLTouch control wire that led me to look here.
I mean it about the running toilet noises. It’s kinda obnoxious. I remember my Monoprice mini delta printer* making these sounds too and…. ugh.
* probably a lost cause and it’s been thrown in my bin of crap to trade to a fellow tinkerer for something I actually want. On a side note I started looking at my old Monoprice Select Mini V2 last night and realized maybe I can revive that thing too.. But why? Or why not? Uhhh.
Anyway, now for an assortment of fine balderdash.
“hey, it’s warm in here, I wonder why?”
Thankfully this all just hosed off. This condenser is less than a month old.
Not pictured, sadly: the surprise indoor waterfall that occurred when an air vent valve on the chilled water air handler in one room at work blew up following a chiller failure. Squirt, squirt. 💦💦💦
Suddenly the logo changed on this one screen. I’m pretending not to notice. HhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH After that air conditioning meltdown you bet you’re gonna be able to lure me into a scene live on air with popsicles.
I forget if I’d mentioned just what fun it was to get this line separated and get the test adapter into place but uhhhhhh, it was a battle.
This thing is pretty cute. There’s a long wire that goes up its hoistway and the control panel in the cab, powered by a rechargeable battery (please don’t forget to plug in the charger!) inductively couples to it to send control tones to the box at the bottom and audio to the cab intercom. Somewhere in this system there’s a 2-way radio, I have no idea where, but the Morse code ID from the news department repeater sometimes blasts out of the intercom at the tower base and spooks the hell out of me because I never expect it.
Alas it doesn’t work because somewhere up the tower, a limit switch circuit broke. I’m not sure where but that’s finally supposed to be fixed this week, after which we can have a tower crew figure out what went arcy sparky 1600′ up. The fault is 1700′ from where the test equipment was connected, but that’s subtracting the 100′ or so horizontal run before it meets the tower and goes up.
What.Old weather radar, no longer used but still standing.
So speaking of things blowing up, I love it when people send me pictures of PTek gear, it cracks me up to see, uh….
Not a watt comes from that whole stack. Conversely:
That’s a nice amount of power from an amplifier that’s turned off! Oh hi. #fnord
Some dodgy looking smoothie robotTCFWSo that’s why ellipsoidal lights tend to generically get called Lekos…Demonia, I love your boots but can you please make them a little more durable so I don’t have to keep regluing that fake unstitched Goodyear welt and pinning it under the dummy load to cure?Really neat Japanese software magazine cover from around when I was born. Welcome to the future.
It occurs to me that someone, no one in particular, may look up my callsign and land here, so rest assured what you’ve found is pure silliness, as follows:
I’m pretty sure the nasty all in one would make the nice turquoise fade out to dead grass green, but I dunno. I have never let anything that foul touch my elegant rainbow.
I’m pretending to know what I’m doing with makeup, if this raises any questions please refer to the following meme
It’s Flat Fuck FB FridayPoor Todoroki isn’t looking so great after spending a while on my transmitter site keys
So everyone was preparing for the return of most of our staff to the office when senior management was in a meeting and heard an enormous bang….
That WAS a double pane window. Then a wild turkey in rapid flight came along, and both were no more.
We don’t know where this video footage will be used. I mean– what
I excluded the dead bird from these pictures. Do not continue reading this post if you don’t want to see it. I’ve included some unrelated safe images so you won’t see it accidentally.
This *was* a headlight connector and bulb, it all just disintegrated into weird gray ash and burned a few inches back down the wire. Oh gee where have I seen this before?
A glorious meme I stole. Kinda want that dress….
After months of neglect, I redyed my hair. Interestingly it seems like the blacklight at my workbench has become…. a dim purple light. The UV emission appears to be mostly gone. I’m not surprised as this has always been a common failure mode of uv led emitters. A lot of plastics that are common in other LED carriers will degrade from the UV and begin to absorb it, letting through only the visible blue/violet color, if much at all. The bulb has been on 24/7 pretty much ever since I started doing rainbow hair so it’s given a good service life. It occurs to me that one of my coworkers who just came back to the office today has never seen me with rainbow hair before, and he didn’t say anything about it…… but he suddenly decided he’s now tired of only wearing black clothing! Well then… I’m glad to be bringing more color to the world. :3
There are visible black spots on top of the LED emitters in the “filament” now. I don’t remember if they’re that way on these bulbs new but I’ll compare them when I get a new one. That is assuming I don’t just get some UV LED tape for my workspace where I sit and yell about things like these cursed faders in a JLCooper audio controller.
The “be glad you have a service plan” specialOy, when they said no user serviceable parts they very much meant it
A lot of equipment with motorized faders has pretty similar faders, but these are all weird and look almost like a totally custom bizarro construction. They’re not Alps, Penny & Giles, or Midas, they’re just weird and we kill them every year and change. Uh, okay.
In a previous post I accidentally dropped in a link to a Tiktok live stream that had ended. Unfortunately, live videos on Tiktok work differently than they do on Facebook or Youtube – they’re ephemeral things that don’t play back from archive… and I say unfortunately because the video in question was a bunch of very happy capybaras hanging out in a bath.
So, to make up for the lack of capybara content, here are some adorable giant rodents.
First stop on the Hup! Train: Nagasaki Bio Park’s TikTok – this is where the live video was from. Follow them for more, they quite routinely put up lives of the capybaras as well as some very cute birbs and other creatures.
An adorable neighborhood landscaping crew in Argentina:
