CNC interest

There seems to be a lot of interest in diy CNC machines on Hackaday, and the Make Blog that has really gotten my interest in these machines piqued. I would like the ability to work on metal with a higher degree of precision than my hand affords me. I think that some of the MDF CNC plans would likely be enough to get me started making pieces of aluminum to upgrade to a more sturdy machine. I am only looking for about 24" square working surface, so it would be pretty easy to keep put away. I have been looking at these plans from CNC zone, and think that this style of Gantry is probably workable for my needs. Like everything it will need to be modified for my needs, but it is a decent touch stone for working this process.

For some reason I really struggled to get this post written. It is not for the lack of choices, but rather lack of completed affordable choices. There are lots of build logs with photos and ideas, but few that are great start to finish how to build articles with BOM's and parts schematics. The ones that are complete with Build of Materials are in Kit form and range in the $1000+ range. It seems that cognitive leap from idea to implementation requires that you extend the effort in brain exercise or monetary form. I have the left over part of a Ikea birch counter top that was bought for my wife's craft corner that I believe is sufficiently rigid for the task of being a router table and is attractive to be a long term tool. The rest of the machine will have to be aluminum and MDF. In all, I don't want to be much more than $800 in this project so we will see where that budget takes us.

Some interesting sources for information that are helping guide me at this point.

http://www.cncroutersource.com/
This site looks like it will grow over time, at the time of writing the site is updated several times a week and has some good thoughts on design, and talks about options rather than focusing on a single design and build. I think it could be a great source ones the links get laid out properly (I get enough page cannot be found errors to make me think it is a work in progress)

http://solsylva.com/
This site sells router plans and seems like a good resource for people that are interested in building, but not engineering their solution.

http://www.xylotex.com/
Excellent source for drive system and step motors.

http://buildyourcnc.com/
A CNC kit site that I like, they have great looking designs that are pricey.

Home made injection molding

This is the coolest piece of home made machinery I have ever seen. A custom injection mold with heating a cooling for the materials is more than my feeble hands could ever build.


via Hackaday

Conductive Epoxy is brilliant

Toolmonger is at it again tempting me with crazy products that get my little wheels turning. I don't have a specific project in mind for this, but seems like it would be as useful as something like the Dura fix.

Another thought improving Blekin lapdesk

The hits keep coming from the wellspring of ideas known as the make blog! So in this installment it looks like there are magnetic valves activated by heat. I realize that these have to be purpose built for the application, but it may be helpful for my crazy plan to improve the Belkin Lap Desk.

Improving the Belkin Lap Desk

Ever since I saw the Belkin Lapdesk I thought that it needed improvement. It needed either passive or active cooling of some form, and I was hopping to not add another thing that needed to be plugged into a wall outlet. This mod adds two active fans that are plugged in to a 12v wall wart, and while I definitely it improves the overall usefulness of the stand it doesn't meet my other goal of not wanting another device sucking power.

I saw an article a few days ago about Icyballs that may be closer to what I am hopping to use. It would require electricity as I am fairly sure I need to have a microcontroller to engage the heat element to reverse the natural evaporation process. I have no experience with this type of work though so I think I am going to need to find a chemistry nerd and probably a welding nerd to pull the whole process.

Cellphone Unlock?

Here is a web enabled deadbolt locking system that was featured on Tool Monger a while back and you can pick up at your Lowe's for about $200.
I am just not sure if I can bring myself to implement this in my own home, but I do love the idea. I think the break down for me is that it has a number pad backup. I just don't want the number pad (no matter how secured they believe it to be) as I believe that it is crackable in a given time frame, and that makes me nervous. Unless this system logs bad attempts and then sends me an sms alert about the failed attempt, I just cannot support the number pad being on the outside of my house.

Dura fix you say?

I have been interesting for some time in getting my feet wet in the metal working and have started taking baby steps by purchasing a pair of nibblers, a set of files, and Dremel accessories for metal working. All of this is well and good, for cutting down/destroying large pieces of sheet metal and aluminum stock, but none of these tools work for creating new structures with the lightweight metals that I have access to (steel is a little unwieldy for the novice ok). I recently saw a video for Durafix on youtube (it was a related video to god knows what it was I was looking at on youtube) and think that this would be an great solution for people who are not quite ready to commit to purchasing a welding setup, but are interested in some lightweight fabrication.

Logitec comfort lapdesk needs to be remixed

I am sure most people have seen these little desks, I think Belkin makes something similar too but I think that this plastic is or leather design that everyone comes up with will only protect my legs not the laptop from the heat that baby is kicking off. I think that the Logitec one could be improved by replacing that plastic fin with an aluminum one. I am not sure how to pull off the rigid base for the fabric to be attached to, but I will post updated shots of a prototype.

Computers in Plain sight

The Sheeva plug got me thinking about the idea of computers that are innocuous enough to be left in plain sight, but still deliver significant enough computing power to potentially reshape daily life. The Sheeva is powerful but lacks one of the important things that makes computers useful, an interface for humans. The transformative nature of this type of technology comes from interaction, so lacking an included meaningful interaction method we have a computer. I rarely browse Think Geek, but a random link click brought me to their pages where I found the iGala digital photo frame. When I saw it I was posotive that it had to be running at least a little bit of embedded os, and that it had to have some potential for an always on general purpose computer with wi-fi and a touchscreen. One Google search later and I was proven correct that someone else thought the same thing and even went so far as to get shell access for you. When this go back on sale, I am pretty sure that I want one no all I need to know is if ucLinux supports webcams.

My current ideas are controllin a usb Webcam for survellance (or baby monitor), adding audio out for touch screen audio streamer, or using it as a touchscreen controller for home automation. I have to imagine that these are cheaper than anything Crestron has thought of building. Other thoughts include always on Torrent seeder (slow I know, but so low power) capped at 5 connections or something similar. I think that there is a lot of potential here for people with interface design experience.

Finally back to breaking things

After a long winter of not working on any projects, the house is finally mostly setup as I want it, and the job is settling into a productive routine; basically its time to start breaking (modifying them if you will).

First up getting that worthless La Fonera running DD-WRT.

For the last year this little toy has been sitting under my dresser as a testament to my lack of fixing ability (my poor delusional family thinks I am the savior of all things running on electricity, when I am little more than a middling hack(sic)).

Certainly it doesn't sound like a hardware hack, but as one of the magnanimous(sic) Fon shoved an update down on it that left it mostly not functional, and on a firmware revision that prevented me from following the instruction here on updating to DD-WRT. There are other guides, but this one had the most pretty pictures for wannabes like myself to follow. Anyway, since the software route didn't appear to be working(at least it wasn't the last time I tried it) I decided to follow this guide to adding a serial port to the Fonera and flashing it over the com port.

So quite some time ago, I ordered one of the Dallas DS275 line powered level converters, and started trying to wire it up using the instructions on the aforementioned page. Needless to say (because I suck) I was unable to get the router to display information over the com. Nearly ready to admit defeat I went back to the uselesshacks guide and notice that the page had been updated sometime since I first tried to upgrade the fon some 2 years ago, there was a hard reset option that took my firmware back to v0.7.1 r1. From there the instructions are very easy to follow, and worked perfectly.

Small success, but it was a project that was holding up the Server in a UPS case project.

Not Dead just slow

Well since I the last time I posted I have been a busy boy, unfortunately very little of it hacking up hardware. I have been making (slowly) a sweet charging and music playing dock for my Cellphone (Audiovox SMT-5600), the glue seems to always be drying, and always seems to just need one more coat.

Once completed this will let me set my cell phone in the doc for charging, and play music to a 3.5mm headphone jack. I cut down a seat of 2.5mm headphones for the prong and picked up the mini jack at Fry's. The plastic base station came from some cheapo usb camera from Radio Shack (Flat Foto) I picked up on closeout I bought it for a cheap camera to tear to pieces, but the dock so far is much more interesting.

The rest of my time has been dedicated to getting my parents new house up and running with cool gadgetry. The house is a huge 4500Sq Ft with nere a data cable to be seen, too far in the sticks for DSL, and Adelphia the Local Cable Co couldn't even find the house on a map (or with a driver even though we are 7 miles and four turns from their main campus.)

I have wired up the house for the satellite they apparently have to get, and brought a cluster of wires that looked like crap to the inside of the house where it can easily be worked on by yours truly. Run a few lines of data to the office, and set them up on a 3G card from Cingular getting 1.0mbs(reported) Less than 380k sustained (actual). I updated the driver that doesn't support server 2003 officially, copied registry settings from the xp machine, and moved dll's and sys files around until the card began to send a receive data using information gathered by watching the install with total uninstaller.

I was mostly annoyed by the driver telling me that it didn't support server03, when clearly they chose to limit the installer for an ideological reason other than a practical one. The card does not have the "Accelerated" mode, because I didn't get the application that is bundled to run on the server, (more because of time crunch than lack of ability). This is really sad for the parents though as with the accelerated profile, they pull at a reported 1.8m and 386k actual. I think that longterm the choice of server03 is the right one for them, as this box will have no benefit of a Nat firewall to protect them from misc. internet baddies.

Broke the picture frame, time for a rebuild

Finally finishing up with my move to the new house, and in unpacking I discovered a sad thing, the heatsink retention clip on my the picture fame pc broke during the move.

Tragic. (or maybe just a little sad)

either way, must be time for a new project.

Make vs Buy

I think that we are entering another Buy instead of Make trough. Why would I build my own piece of Kit when Dell offers Entry level server cases with 2 80gig sata drives, dvd-rom, 1gig (2x512) 533mhz, Pentium D(2 x 2.8ghz) for <$500? For the sheer joy of it? That is all I have got left Fry's, Dell, and everyone else is just driving the prices so low I cannot build, I must buy.

Tags: Make vs Buy Convictus Dell Economics

The guts and dirt of digital picture frame 2.0

Well the digital picture frame has been on my wall now for little more than a month, and humming along not so silently. The stock fan on the heatsink I decided to use was really annoying me so I took it off and replaced it with a bigger, slower quieter one. While it was off of the wall I thought I should document the innards for posterity.

The original hard drive idea of using a laptop drive died somewhere in my get it done frenzy, and really should be revisited, as I don't like the overall layout when the full side Hard disk is in.

I had to add a slim usb pci card because the onboard usb 1.0 header, is giving me a some servious trouble. The header layout is not well documented, so I cannot tell which pin is one, and only has six pins instead of the normal seven (8 with 1 not in use for a "key") The provided cable is not terminated on both sides, just one so I would have to crimp, or solder the other end.

The wireless ps/2 mouse/keyboard I am using seems to pick up some kind of signal makes the pc think the mouse is being moved. This is not convienient when you are using a screen saver as your "picture frame". As a fix I disconnected the mouse part of the wireless keyboard mouse hookup.

Ordinarily this setup would not even need to have a keyboard/mouse at all, but I have a FON router, I have to logon before the computer can access the internet. Kind of tedious, but the movement is worth a little suffering.

Cleaning and Polishing Heat Sinks

P6130260
Originally uploaded by convictus.

I have some heatsinks for a server board that were looking a little sad, so I decided to clean them up before I put them on a new set of processors.

A little time and effort, and the heatsink on the left looked nice.


Tags:Convictus Heatsink Hacking

New Media Center Setup

So to try to overcome the stress on the media center I have been building dual proc media center with a raid 0 ~400 gig array to up the storage for all the TV we record. I am not sure if it is just me or the hardware I choose to use, but I cannot seem to get the media center OS to the array on a promise 133ut2 pci raid card. Apparently I cannot even configure the array the way that I have with previous promise pci raid cards. This seems unfortunate as I was hoping to configure 3 drives (2 200's and 1 160gig) into a big old array for OS and all the media that we have to put on it. So I am kind of back to the drawing board and looking through the scrap heap for another pci raid card. Very sad.

Kind of fun getting to show my little brother the process of building a computer the looking for parts and testing each component to ensure that failures are isolated and removed. I am kind of an electronics graveyard so somethings work, others or questionable.

Any how, I am diligently working to complete this "dry run" so we can put the TV tuner cards in and give this baby a spin. Works out great that the wife went to the Chestival (Some country music festival) at the Seahawks stadium and my brother was at a friends wedding all day. Even after a firmware upgrade the pci card didn't give me the option to configure the raid, so I am tediously reading the manual to see if it even supports what I am after.

Tags: Convictus Media Center DVR PC Building

Need something to do.

Moving on from the digital picture frame and looking for something new to tear apart and make my house a mess, I saw a post about a "Portable Media Center Extender" on hackaday. It immediately excited me as my house hold is becoming a bunch of media center whores and severly over burdening the el cheapo media center I put up. All in all the box has performed brilliantly and I am very happy with the set and forget nature of the beast. Unfortunately for us and our ever increasing number of religiously watched shows, the "season finally" season almost put the nails in the coffin of my media center and nearly got me killed.

I was a little disappointed to find it was a wireless extension of the XBMC. Undetered, I loved the idea and want to make a true wireless Xbox Media Center Extender.

A Few product idea for use:

Video Sender/Reciver
8" LCD TV
Maybe something Like this for a big battery

Tags: Convictus Media Center Portable wireless

Digital Picture Frame 2.0 part 2

Oh bollocks to Linux. So after too much headache trying to make the drivers for the ZD1211 chipset on my el cheapo airlink+ 802.11g usb adapter. I knew windows would work and saw the post on Make using Slickr to dynamically pull images I decided to go back to what I know rather than flounder with obscure 'make' errors.

It took me 52 minutes to install XP Home, 4 minutes to make a flickr account and 10 minutes to download, install and configure Slickr.

You hear that Linux, 4 weeks of you vs little more than a hour of windowz. Granted that is where the majority of my experience lays, but still.

Pictures to follow....

Digital Picture Frame 2.0 part 1

So, the new and improved digial picture frame is nearing completion. I have been busy, with life and not had time to document the work that I have been doing with my various projects.

I have changed Jobs and been on vacation for the last little while, turned down what could have been an interesting Job with Gshop.com, and made Lemonchello out of Everclear and a lot of lemons.

After all of that, I have finally gotten around to ordering one of the very small ATX power adapters for my Aaeon motherboards, and am egarly awaiting its arrival. This size will allow me to fit everything, LCD, motherboard and powersupply in the case I build on the back of the picture frame.

In my testing I figured out that the motherboard is not compatible with modern powersupplies. It does not have a power switch header on the board so I will be soldering the green pin and ground to a power button salvaged from a different computer case. For a hard power break I will have an on/off switch on the bottom of the frame for when I need the power off immediately.

I was thinking something like this would be a good layout:




The os is still going to be Damn Small Linux and I am still going to use Dalbum for the slideshow and power the website with Xammp. I knew that Damn Small was easy to use, but until I did a click and run install of samba, I had no idea how easy it was.

I choose to stick with this combo because I still believe that it is a really flexible solution, and robust enough to run all the time. I will have a pictures directory open as a samba share and my wife can add photos, and browse to the reindex page after she adds photos.

First try Digital Picture Frame

Every where I read there seems to be a digital picture frame popping up, home made from a laptop, or new product release from a company. Well this is the sad story about the former.

To begin with I picked up the husk of a Toshiba tecra 8100 latop that was about to find its way to the recycle pile. Not much, but from these humble beginings I saw a world of digtial photos rotating by that could be added to via wireless networking. So easy to work with, I could let my wife play with it and never worry about it again.



I went ahead and tore apart the Tecra with gusto and here is what was left



I purchased this lovely photo frame partly because it was huge enough to hide any enourmous boxes that I might attach to the back of the frame, and it was nice to look at (aka the wife approved).



This is the unfortunate end of the photo stream. Though the frame was completed and fully configed, the disk controller failed on the board and I was forced to throw out the laptop and hit the drawing board for version 2.0.

The tecra 8100 had a 500mhz proc and 128mb of ram, and I believe a 5gb hard disk. For an os I went with a hard disk install of DSL 2.0 and installed xampp (formerly known as Lampp) The photo software was DAlbum.

Xampp gave me all the simple config of apache and php, and DAlbum was very easy to install after I ran the Xampp auto config scripts. I followed the DAlbum sites instructions on enabling the Slideshow and created an album and index. At first I started looking for ways to force DAlbum to only show slideshows by default, but after searching the the DAlbum Forums I came across someone asking to have DAlbum Slideshows Launch in a new window. The siteadmin explaination of how to open a slideshow in a new window was short, but very insightful. In short I used some of their ideas and created a solution that works well for DSL. When the system first comes up it pops up a dillo webpage with some info, so I edited the config file and pointed it at my on custom launch page that opened my slideshow full screen. All that was left to do was some small edits to the slideshow.php file and this was a very functional slideshow of my photos.

This solution was completed, and Working for little more than 48 hrs. I got cocky and wanted to show people at work what I had done, well typical Seattle for you it rained and got my baby wet. After I get it inside the building and dried off I started to recieve disk controller failure Messages. The drive was fine, but the conroller on the board was done, and since it was a Laptop and doesn't have a 2nd channel I was forced to surrender.

Version 2.0 will be much more robust.