New 3D Printer Hotend

Posted on 2015-05-03 by Nigel VH

I’ve had my 3D printer for a while now, and have been fortunate in that most of the parts used in it were given to me by a friend who had spares or samples companies had sent. While it worked, and worked well in a lot of circumstances, I was fighting to try and get the quality I wanted out of prints, as well as fighting the hotend to reach and maintain a temperature for some of the higher temperature materials like ABS.

I decided that I would replace the existing hotend with a new one from E3D. Specifically, the E3D-V6.

They’re pretty highly reviewed, and relatively inexpensive, so I ordered one up, and waited for it to ship over from the UK. Once it arrived, I got to have a nice little unboxing, and got to work on getting it installed.

IMG_1794

It took a couple evenings of work to get everything set up properly and whatnot, but pretty soon I had a new working hotend.

IMG_1796

And here’s a neat little time lapse video using the new hotend to print the top of the case I designed in my last post.

Posted in 3D Printing, Electronics, Technology | Leave a comment

3D Printed Case

Posted on 2015-02-17 by Nigel VH

I’ve previously posted about building and printing objects with my 3D printer, but I thought I would show a bit more of some of the steps involved in making an object. In this case, I have a circuit board (which I’ll discuss in another post), that I wanted to make a case for.

For the most part, for me this means that I’m going to design a case. If it were a common sort of device like a Raspberry Pi, there’s a million 3D printable case designs on thingiverse. Since this is a custom board, I’m going to need to make one. I can’t say I have a whole lot of experience with 3D CAD programs, nor am I willing to spend the dough on a professional one like solid works, so I use OpenSCAD, which uses a programming language type environment to define 3D objects.

I didn’t grab screenshots right at the start, but this is still fairly early on. I’ve defined the general shape of the box, as well as some standoff supports for the board.

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 11.40.49

This board will put off a bit of heat though, so I need to add some air vents. I’ll remove chunks from the longer walls of the box.

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 12.17.37

Of course, the box will need a lid, and we’ll make posts that reach down to mate with the supports on the bottom, to hold the board in place. We’ll also screw the lid down through the bottom to hold it in place.

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 14.01.05

Next, we need to add the holes in the lid for the connectors to fit through. Otherwise we can’t actually attach anything to the board.

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 14.44.32

Finally, lets add some mounting tabs to the case so we can attach the case and board to a board or something to keep it positioned where we want it rather than hanging in the breeze.

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 15.52.22

Finally, let’s print the thing!

The board in the bottom portion of the case with no lid.

IMG_1767

A view of the lid upside down before attaching it to the box.

IMG_1769

And finally, the box assembled with the board inside.

IMG_1773

Posted in 3D Printing, Electronics, Projects, Technology | Leave a comment

Saleae Logic Analyzer

Posted on 2014-12-31 by Nigel VH

Recently I found that Saleae released new revisions of it’s Logic line of logic analyzers, and decided it was finally time for me to pick one up. I hadn’t played with one before, though I had seen shots of their software in use, and was impressed with how easy it looked to be able to capture and decode various protocols.

Previous to now, I’ve muddled through with my oscilloscope that doesn’t have any storage functions, or using an Arduino to try and capture data and manually parse it out afterward. Needless to say neither of these methods is terribly friendly.

As I don’t usually need a ton of channels, I got the Logic 4. It came in a handy little soft case that has all the bits you’ll need to get going.

IMG_1587 IMG_1589

And then of course the device itself.

IMG_1593

Of course, then you need to hook it up to something and try doing a capture! I tested it out with a USB->TTL converter I had laying on my desk, and sent a quick serial string, and let the Logic capture and decode it!

Screen Shot 2014-12-12 at 2.24.33 PM

Pretty shiny! I’ve already been using it to do some work on decoding some amateur radio transmissions that don’t seem to be well documented. Even though there isn’t an decoding function for this protocol yet, being able to capture the whole waveform makes a significant difference in being able to understand what’s happening in a given transmission.

Screen Shot 2014-12-19 at 8.28.41 AM

I’d also like to take a moment to commend their staff. I ended up having a problem with a minor physical defect on the device, and their staff was extremely helpful and friendly in resolving my issues. Really appreciated them being so straight with me.

In summary, if you’re in the market for a logic analyzer, I have to say I’ve been pleased with the Logic so far!

Posted in Electronics, Projects, Technology | Leave a comment

Snow and Radios

Posted on 2014-11-30 by Nigel VH

Recently some snow has come to Washington, so I took the opportunity to head up to the mountains and get out a bit.

IMG_1430

Obviously it’s an excuse to have a little fun with the Subaru. Though in actuality those tracks aren’t mine, I added to them a bit later.

IMG_1440

Here’s the Gold Creek Pond at the start/end of the trail that circles the pond.

IMG_1445

Here’s a view from a stopping point midway around the pond.

Additionally, I’ve been working on some new radio modules, primarily aimed at the projects I volunteer with at UW, but it’s designed to be as agile as possible, so it has a lot of potential uses.

IMG_1390

IMG_1394

Unfortunately I don’t have them working quite right yet. They’re not being terribly friendly about accepting new program code, so it will take some more fiddling to make them work properly.

Posted in Electronics, Life, Projects, Vehicles, Weather | Leave a comment

OS X and Samba

Posted on 2014-11-30 by Nigel VH

One basic tenant of being a SysAdmin is that you must have some form of home server. Whether that’s an old Atari system that you hacked an ethernet interface onto is irrelevant. Following this tenant, I too run a home server, and one of it’s functions is to provide large file storage for the network. Archives of photos, music, movies, etc.

Samba is a open source bit of software that helps Linux computers interact with and provide file shares using the same protocol that Windows computers use. Apple originally also included Samba in OS X to support connecting to and providing these shares as well, but though various reasons that don’t really matter they decided to make their own version.

There has been quite a lot of discussion regarding performance gains/losses after Apple’s move to their own software for these services, but I had noticed particular problems after upgrading to OS X 10.9, and those problems continued in 10.10. Accessing shares was at times ludicrously slow, sometimes taking upwards of a minute just to show a directory with a dozen files in it.

However, it wasn’t the server, Linux or Windows clients were very responsive and worked well. So, it had to be something about how OS X was interacting with the server that caused problems.

Some internet posts suggested forcing a protocol downgrade by specifying ‘cifs://servername/sharename’ instead of the more usual ‘smb://servername/sharename’. I tried this, along with various permutations of config options on the server side to try and get OS X’s client to perform better. However, none of them seemed to really resolve the issue.

Eventually I found that OS X’s search function, Spotlight, indexes all connected devices, including network shares, by default. Spotlight was trying to access a million (hyperbole) files at once, and causing any other requests to be significantly delayed.

I’m not sure why it indexes things by default, but here’s how I turned it off.

Go to the Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Spotlight. Click on the Privacy tab, and click the + button to add your Samba share.

Doing this didn’t immediately stop spotlight from indexing the drive, but after a restart the issue was gone, and it doesn’t appear to have recurred in the last few days.

Hope this helps the apparently significant number of people facing this (based on the number of people complaining about Samba performance on OS X in the google results).

Posted in Electronics, Technology | Leave a comment