I guess I’m Mrs. Slocombe now, I have wild colorful hair and always talk about my pussy.
Nyaaaaaa!
Category: Shameless Catposting
Ha! That’s three of us who can rock orange eyebrows!
I stole their look. They’re not even mad.
Thank you for admiring my ridiculous rainy colored and fuzzy nonsense.
Kitty happiness
Cassie is very much back to her usual happy self. She was sick for a few weeks and I think she’s finally all over it. Dare I say, though, she has somehow become even more cuddly. How does that even work?!
Ummm excuse me, that snoot needs a boop
Peace, Love, Shitposting
It me:
I have yet to get a picture of this because they just both get up, but lately Gingy and Scrappy have been curling up there like a little yin – yang of floofle. So precious.
The SNG truck that wants to try our patience— it just doesn’t wanna finish running all the emissions monitors so it can get a smog check. Supposedly it *only* needs to be driven 400 more miles. Uhhhhhhhhh.
If hhhhhhh in an empty forest, does it make a sound?
So once again I was asked to look at one of our transmitters as after it got split, reconfigured, unsplit, and put back on air, it was only making 75% power… then suddenly, 50%. Very weird. Faults showed an intermediate power amplifier not working, but why? After trying to swap it I noticed one of the power pins on this weird connector at the back had kinda fallen into the module. Here’s the connector and the back of the module.
The connector is a DB 5W5 which is modular and lets you field configure it for whatever floats your boat. In this case it’s four big high current pins and one RF connector.
After not having any luck swapping the module and noticing it seated kinda weird, I called up GatesAir support and was asked to inspect the matching connector on the backplane.
Well There’s Your Problem, they’re all BURNINATED.
Here’s the inside of the module from when I opened it to reseat the pin.
I told my director of engineering about what I found and I’m pretty sure his response was:
The parts quote was $1900 for the backplane and they still haven’t quoted me for the part on the modules. To be honest I don’t think they even like talking to me at all, even when I’m just being a proper friendly person just trying to make wattage.
Then I learned that my director of engineering just resigned. He’s going over to PBS. I’m really happy for him but trying to think of how we’re going to reorganize has me all
Anyway, an afternoon run up to the forest, a day off after spending so much time on that transmitter, and some kitty cuteness helped quell the possum hissing.
Other silliness:
Potentially useful reaction pic:
Transmitter bear, high up in the sierras:
A PissTek fan? No wait. Remember how I said I like how radio doesn’t have graphics systems? This video card’s fans both locked up and killed a big monitor wall. The video processor for this is a single point of failure (of course) and the wall is pretty much the entire news set (of course). These frameless fans are of an unobtainable size but I found that an 80mm x 10mm fan would fit here. These are also vanishingly rare but I was able to get some that Digi-Key still has…
Gingy and Scrappy love the cool, freshly pressure washed patio.
I guess I need to figure out what I did to those configuration files but my brain is on fire
First, these three pictures of early stage tri-color foaming wax
Yeah— so I did the config all wrong for this server. Virtual host declarations aren’t in the files they should logically be in and things overlap and I just accidentally found some way to get a horribly blank directory listing to load instead of this page! Very weird, I think I just need to make a backup copy and rewrite the stuff. My apologies if you catch things broken as I’m doing it.
Pictures from The Cloud:
This is the top of the tower elevator and the inside of the tower top hut on Transtower. The lower level is really weird and basically was built by and for Gumby.
My brother sends me regular updates on this kitty named Luna being a cutie peets.
So I made a previous silly post about this Weston 622 milliammeter… It’s pretty interesting. Inside that removable plug, sealed in place with beeswax, are some kind of heating element and one side of a thermocouple. The other side of the thermocouple is in the meter body. This is actually really similar to the platinum RTD RF power measurement technique that’s the gold standard for average power level measurements on signals that have a varying peak to average power ratio (PAPR). It measures the RMS, “heating value” of the input by….. measuring its heating value! I tested it with DC because that was convenient and the 60+ year old meter agreed with a modern Fluke DMM.
I haven’t come across a ton of info or any original manuals on this meter, but it’s a little different than most I’ve seen when just searching the web or looking at eBay listings (it’s fairly common!). Mine has the thermocouple and heater in an interchangable plug, whereas most have it buried inside the meter case. This suggests that at some point Weston intended it to be used with different detectors. I wonder if there was to be one with 50 ohm coaxial input? A passive thermal RF power meter would be pretty cute!!
Peetsies
Very important:
This important message brought to you by Tortie Ears Aerospace Corporation.
Additively manufactured shitpost
* 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!”
Absolutely no one in particular: “But people will print untraceable weapons and… terror!!! aaaahh!”
Me: “heehee it’s a tiny Waffle House.”
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.
* 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…..
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.
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.
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.
Mrow
This is a post full of cats.
My coworker, Amina, sent me these pictures of the station cats and I love them so much. I always wanna boop that little spotty nose but Scrappy always mooshes his whole face into my hand first!
And here’s Miss Cassie
Oh, and two turkeys. These have thankfully been wise enough to avoid sales department windows. We’re still waiting on replacement glass….
