Gingy would like to remind you every time is the right time for petting your feline assistants.
The cool looking radar is sadly no longer in use. Anyway, as for the title, we’d been having issues with the big transmitter here for months and it just wouldn’t run on all three cabinets. Its intermediate power amp had been giving issues on one cabinet and our other engineers had been over the manual and talking with tech support for months, it just wouldn’t make wattage.
Finally the solution was to not trust the manual. It said the arbitrary “IPA Gain” number was supposed to be between 100 and 450. It was set on 100 and that led to only 9 watts drive to the IOT tube — 150 was needed. The solution in the end was … set the gain to about 520 or so. Amusingly, it only raised up from 9 watts once I went past 420.
420 blaze it
One of the other engineers had this Printrbot Simple Metal that he hadn’t gotten working so I took it back to play with it through the boring Thanksgiving morning shift. Despite it being a SOLID chonker, the carriage plate was bent up causing the hotend to hang at a weird angle, and some screws were loose or incorrect, so I fixed that and got it extruding. The only thing I wasn’t able to do which bugs me was to get a bootloader onto the Printrboard in there and load it with a newer version of Marlin supporting mesh bed leveling. This one is old and appears to take no parameters to G29 – it probes only three points. Weird. I couldn’t get Atmel’s FLIP utility to work and had issues with building Marlin for that particular cpu — it seems like you either have to use the toolchain for the Teensyduino++ or use PlatformIO, neither of which wanted to cooperate. Thus, it remains on old firmware.
