|
|
|
|
Alex Faveluke |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||
Hobbies, Interests, and Random Stuff"Random Stuff" means kind of a blog here: 2011-1-10: "Selectable Line Voltage Inverters" Patent Patent 7852650 This finally granted. Marketing really wanted a field-configurable 208-480 inverter. It took a little cleverness to make the "field configuration" practical... Looking back, at the time and place, the 208/480 made sense. Of course, they're building single voltage outputs now on the larger inverters, and I think have mostly superseeded the product that this went into. Other than that, not much going on this winter. Up to my ears in work, Solextract has taken on some contract work to keep the lights on, and we got a followon/rev 2 design from work done last year. As usual, can't say anything about it due to NDA, but it has been interesting. It is turning into somewhat of a product.. although we don't own the rights, we're better set up than the client to manage the manufacturing.. and they like our responsiveness.. so it looks like we're going to have a piece of the action for the near term anyways. So this is a good thing. I've been neglecting this little blog in favor of Facebook.. it's just a lot easier. In keeping with the "wierd shit I've fixed" theme... got my ass moderately kicked by a stirring hotplate off of ebay. The seller told me the heater worked fine, but the stirring motor just went fullspeed. This was all true. I figured that this would be a simple case of an open circuited crap-o potentiometer.. like the last two "stuck at maximum" items (both power supplies) I'd encountered. Oh joyous day of easily fixable stuff! Unfortunately, this was not the case. This little guy, A "Lab-Line" Pyro-Magnestir 1266 500W hot plate, has a heat control and a speed control. The heat control I did not mess with, it was working. The speed control is a little thyristor jobby controlling a shaded pole motor. No sweat, right? Unfortunately, my first suspicion (and hope while buying it) was off base. The rheostat was fine. Attempt two, the guts of a Ace Hardware Fan ceiling fan speed control.. do not mechanically fit and would make the whole thing permanent ugly shite... So I had to root cause it and fix it. The controller was a simple triac-diac based affair. Some schematics from the building company (which will remain nameless) were on their datasheets on the web, unfortunately, they didn't really match up. To make a long story short, was very hard to ring out becuase everything seemed shorted together. It was: There were two little green caps (a filter and what I'd call a snubber) that were blown short. (this is rare) And one resistor was pretty well smoked.. to the point of not being able to read the bands. Luckily, magically, the board had several sets of holes for caps.. some of which magically fit higher voltage caps which I happened to have. And now it works fine. I do hope that whoever had the thing go on them in the first place was not seriously damaged when it happened.. the typical failure mode of a thyristor control is to go full speed.. and that's what happened here. It's a tiny little shaded pole motor rated at 2500rpm max speed... Not being particularly well ballanced, the thing turns into a good vibrator when it goes full on. I imagine this is not fun in a real lab, depending on what you've got going on the hot plate.
2010-7-2: Rain Rain Rain! Well, it's raining again today. We've had some sunshine recently, but we had the wettest late spring I ever remember. A lot of stuff rotted or just didn't come up... I had to get starts to replace all but two of my Babylon cucumbers, and we had to reseed the Zuchinni. The bed turned into a lake shortly after planting. Really, it's been pretty nice lately, and I should stop whining. Blueberries are coming on in the front yard.. both kids like them, and so do we.. They're not quite ripe, but we're eating them as they get barely there anyways. Sam and I planted corn in the south patch of the front yard this year. The artichokes got frozen out by the hard freeze last December, so I used that space, and pulled up some of the lawn as well. I only had two bags of chicken manure in about 2-300 sq feet, so I'm tempted to hit this with manufactured (non-organo-hippy) fast nitrogen. The big oil blowout in the gulf is still out of control. They're capturing some, burning some off, letting some just blow into the sea. There's something totally metal about a 10000bbl/day (29 gal/minute) oil blowtorch of the side of a drill rig, but the situation is just sickening. If anyone has been watching our species over the last what, 3 months, they've got to be thinking: "Wow, they're really a bunch of assholes down there!" I sure hope those relief wells work. On the bright side, electric cars are coming, probably quicker than people realize.. Nissan will be shipping the Leaf in December.. Tesla went public, and the guys I rent from are shipping lots of motor drives. Technology has come a long way since the EV-1, and I think it's going to stick this time. Fixed an ENI 600V/5A power supply a couple days ago. Same issue as the 600V/1.5A had: Frontpanel voltage knob is a potentiometer wired as a rheostat... when the wipers develop an open (this is practically gaurenteed end of life mode of those pots..) the supply goes up to 600V. Anyways, the thing was $250, with free shipping from LA. I was a little bitter about not getting it at the "known broken" price, but it's likely it was working fine in the rear panel configured test setup that it was in before the guy who sold it to me got it. 2010-5-16: Sam and I plant Zucchini Did a bunch of work on the garden Saturday and Sunday.. skimmed weeds and tilled. Not taking it as seriously as in years past, simply don't have the time. I've been buying peat moss and chicken manure in bags.. do not have time to mess with looking for local horse manure or whatever. I did throw the leaves from last fall in the main garden, but they're not fully broken down, 'cause I never turned pile last winter and didn't add any nitrogen.. For the record, Sam and I planted Black Beauty Zucchini seed in the north garden area. Soil seemed fairly decent. Added peat moss, a little lime and phosphate rock, and chicken manure. Sam watered them in.. I couldn't get the wand from him, had to pick him up and direct the wand by aiming the toddler. A good time was had by all. Sam watched attentively as I ran the tiller on the south side area... then major checking out of tiller. He knows there's a fire in gas engines, and wants to see it. He wants to know how they work. I explain the basic priciples, and tell him he needs to check with Uncle Fred for more. Our apples seem to be doing well, although the "spartan" never set blossoms or fruit. Okay, first year. The blueberries in the front, are doing fantastic, I think we'll get more berries off those bushes than the mature one in the back yard this year. Strawberries are spread out good, lots of flowers and green berries, but not ripe yet. Pulled the last of the leeks as they bolted.. I think I'll forgo leeks this year and try parsnips.. got a little sick of leeks. Work is completely kicking my ass right now. We'll celebrate Sam's 3rd birthday this weekend, he's turning into a nice little boy, except for the early mornings. Am pretty upset about the Deepwater Horizon ongoing blowout. At this point, I don't think we should drill in deepwater unless it can be made intrinsically safe... a lost well should collapse on itself, not empty the reservoir into the ocean. It's just too great a price to pay. I hope we have a real conversation about our petroleum usage in this society, but I doubt it will happen. 2010-5-1: Operated in Linn County for 7qp I went out for the 7qp again. Unfortunately Fred couldn't make it. This time I was smart enough to get a hotel in Detroit rather than try to camp out after work on Friday. I drove up Friday, scouted the ridge road, and scouted Pamelia Rd... Pamelia Rd. is paved... and it was clear all the way to the trailhead. I ended up parking in a spot a little ways up Rd 750, which heads off from Pamelia, where I could throw the antenna in a couple of trees just off the road.. this way I could operate from the car rather than pitching the tent, which was great, becuase the weather was cold and rainy. Maybe I'll write more later.. I managed to get about 45 contacts, including Maine. But the 10W and fairly low fan dipole doesn't really do it, and is frustrating.. I'm considering whether to take the event more seriously or skip it next year. Which I considered this year too. Need better antenna, more height, maybe more power. 2010-4-4: Planted a Grape Vine Finally threw a grape vine in the yard here.. "Reliance" purple seedless grape. Hopefully it grows and can be arbored up over the back deck. Soil is clay, and I didn't do much other than dig it up and toss a few shovels full of dirt in that I'd worked with peatmoss and gypsum last year. I don't know anything about grapes other than I'd like them in the yard. I put in a 2 yrs old plant, got from Larsen Farm Nursery on Stafford, which looks pretty good this year. They have the most important qualification there, a friendly, mellow dog. We were actually in there to get potting soil for a pea growing experiement on the windowsill. Just realized I never recorded the fact we put in 2 apples and a cherry from bareroots last year. I can't remember the date. I do remember we took out 2 of the three inedible pears, and how much work I had to put out on the stumps. The apples were "Hidden Rose" and "Spartan," the Cherry was "Danube," all from One Green World in Mollala. Cherry branched out a lot last year, and was recently covered in flowers. Apples look to be doing fine, but slower growing. We'll see. I really would like producing fruit trees in the yard. We've got an unknown apple that Georgia and Eric gave us, unsold and rescued from a plant sale long ago.. and blueberry bushes... 1 unknown in the back yard, 2 "Duke" and 2 "Bluecrop" that went in from bareroot a couple or three years ago in the front yard. We picked asparagus last week.. Not much, but enough for a taste for all of us. Best thing I'd ever tasted, but the kids.. didn't really care. I could barely get Sam to eat any. I think this is early for asparagus here.. we did have a very warm February.. crazy thing is, it's April now, and Winter again. Overall, with the effort I put into that asparagus bed 2 or 3 years ago, I'd have been better off with a headstart on the fruit trees. Yesterday, got a Minivan: Mazda M5, from Herzog Meier Mazda on Canyon Rd. in Beaverton. Overall a good experience. Very glad Fred came out with me. as for the car, I actually like the car a lot. It feels very stable. We've had our eyes out for something a little bigger for a long time, we're looking at used Odysseys and Siennas, which would've been a lot bigger. Unfortunately never managed to sell Lisa on the idea of a used Crown Vic. 2010-3-30: Released arrowhead.ulp arrowhead.ulp is a CadSoft Eagle ULP that puts arrowheads (arrow heads?) on the end of lines. May be useful for putting arrows on dimensions in fab drawings, which has always given me major fits. arrowhead.ulp has been released under a BSD license. You're only possibly interested if you use Eagle for doing boards, and you're still probably not interested. If you are interested, here's the ULP:
2010-1-3: I finally started a Facebook page. Uh oh. 2009-12-30: Sloadhost upgraded to Beta status Sloadhost has been upgraded to Beta status. Happy New Year! 2009-12-30: Sam's first Ski Trip It snowed here about 3 inches yesterday! I put the skis on and carried him around the yard a little bit, which he thought was great fun. I tried to get him to stand on the skis in front of me while I held him up.. he's still unclear on the concept, but this got laughs because of the novelty. 2009-12-12: Tuba Christmas! I played my second Tubachristmas this Saturday. Lots of fun, and very educational. The rehersal especially is a great experience for me. Our Maestro, Dr. John Richards, is the best tubist I've ever heard, a great leader, and an inspiring teacher. We also had Victor Morris as a vocal soloist, who's got the most powerful voice I have ever heard. I wasn't sure I'd make it this year because things with kids and work have been crazy lately, but I am very glad I did. It's the most fun I've had all year! Got to remember to bring clothes pins next year to clip the music book so it doesn't close itself.. I had to improvise a little wire clip. Last year, there were clothes pins in abundance, something I'd never seen before but very handy. Happily, mrking99 posted a short video to YouTube! Thanks!!! 2009-11-18: changing defaults in OpenOffice Draw I've been using openoffice draw to do block diagrams lately. Openoffice draw is capable of doing really high quality work, but it's been difficult to get into. The defaults are a little wrong for me in many cases. Finally found how to change them, at the Openoffice.org community forum Getting connectors to bend in the middle.. to get them around other boxes.. has been a chore. I've finally resorted to splicing connectors together... draw a connector from air to the "to" box. Then draw a no-arrows connector from the "from" box to the tail of the connector that's sitting in air. Yikes. There must be a better way, but I have not found it. I really need a better place to dump these notes becuase they don't fit in well with things like the Rice in Piano Incident. 2009-10-15: Rainbow Rice in the Piano Incident Our kids, especially Tessa, love to play with Rainbow Rice. This is rice that's been dyed with food coloring, then baked to dry. Basically multicolored rice. We keep the rainbow rice in a playpen to avoid too much of a mess, but it does get out on occasion. Well, one day, I come home from work, and there's this horrified look on Lisa's face... "Wait till you've seen what the kids did to the piano!" What had happened was the playpen got a little too close to the piano, and Tessa decided to dump a few cups of rainbow rice in the keys. This wedged a few of the keys halfway down, rendering the piano pretty dysfunctional. The fact that keys were inoperative brought the situation over the "I don't know anything about it, but I'm gonna try to fix it anyways." threshold. I was also worried about serious damage to the instrument if the rice picked up moisture, or if the keys were banged on with rice wedged in the wrong places. I did spend some time thinking about the relative level of embarrassment in calling a piano shop, explaining one of two possible situations:
I thought that I had a pretty good shot at this anyways, so the order-of-magnitude increase of shame in option B. seemed pretty unlikely. To make a long story short, a few levels of wooden parts were unscrewed and set aside, then each key was removed, and dusted off with a towel. I quickly decided to go ahead and pull every single key. Even though only about 10 were affected by the rice situation, there was a huge amount of dust under everything. I went after the space under the keys with a vacuum and a brush. I left the hammers and damper mechanism alone. The hammers and dampers mechanism is under a solid board so they didn't have nearly the dust, and I was worried about knocking dust from places where it wasn't causing problems to places it would. It wasn't that hard, but it was time consuming. Some things can't be rushed, and anyways, it was a strangely relaxing, pleasant way to spend a weekend between chasing kids. I have even more appreciation for the instrument now.. a piano is a very clever, beautiful machine made mostly of wood. This piano is a bit of an heirloom for us now. My mother's grandfather got it for her when she was a child. It's nice to have something that doesn't go obsolete in 3 years, and doesn't take any batteries.
2009-7-9: Note... think about setting up WordPress I really should transition this to WordPress to get something that looks decent. I'll need to learn it and get comfortable with it.. I don't need the CMS stuff, but I really like the visual style of blogs done with it. 2009-6-29: Lowell's Tools Let-Us Weeder gets a great review! Lowell (my dad) and Sue visited today, on the way back from a big show in Newport, bearing gifts and entertainment for the kids. The Let-Us Weeder is winning praise and accolades from all over the country now! Check out this review in May Dreams Gardens. I wish I could get that sort of attention for my open source microcontroller bootloader! 2009-6-23: Released sloadhost0.11, Windows code working Sloadhost v0.11 has been released. Major change is getting the Windows side code to work. Now maybe more people will use it and I'll become famous! My ulterior motive here is that if people use it on the Windows side, they'll at least have some measure of comfort that they'll be able to target the part from Linux, and maybe take the Great Leap. I had a real issue with the write() call.. don't know if it was mingw or the Windows API or a combination. What was happening was that anytime I tried to write binary file to disk with an 0x0a in it, the write() call would automagically stick in a 0x0d!!! (carriage return before line feed) How a write() winds up thinking "text file" I do not know. I couldn't get this fixed by passing O_BINARY flag in the open() call. The fix turned out to be setting a weird little magic global in the main program context.. very weird for me.
I found this on oldwiki.mingw.org/index.php/binary The strange thing is all this pertained to file pointers.. and I'm using write() and file descriptors. One thing that may be important is that my mingw environment is rather old now. 2009-6-9: Example project for STM32 and Codesourcery-Lite
Came up with a stripped down example... more on this later, but here it is.
This uses the firmware library v2.. I need to try out their V3 library. In my actual
code, I replaced a lot of the libary with my own code.. becuase I don't like the
increased code size and all the wierd casting warnings (type-punned pointer)
Anyways, here is blinky.. which sends a msg out the serial port and blinks a led on PC12.
Blinky0.1.tar.gz 2009-6-7: Finally... Release of Sloadhost I released Sloadhost into the world: hosted on Sourceforge. Sloadhost is GPL'd software that runs on Linux targetting various microcontroller boot loader protocols. The first supported is the STM32 ARM Cortex M3. The build tools on Linux for code generation are great for ARM parts. (I use Codesourcery packaged gcc, THANKS CODESOURCERY!) Unfortunately code downloading tools are generally not availible. Every manufacturer writes code to target their chip from Windows, usually they don't even release their source code. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I've done this before for the Analog Devices ADUC 8051 Hopefully I learned something. I will probably integrate Aducprog into Sloadhost. What I'd really love to do is create a framework and method for developing boot load hosts.. trouble is, all bootloaders are different, all chips are different. There's also the time thing. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I continue to have to scrape up any profitable work I can get right now. If you're looking for JTAG support on Linux, check out Openocd After a lot of work, I've had good luck using Openocd with the Olimex ARM-USB-OCD pod. I am in awe of the Openocd project.. and very thankful for it. They support many many chips. Good JTAG support will be a huge enabler for microcontroller firmware work on Linux, which obviously I'm very interested in. 2009-5-26: generating prints from Eagle I use Cadsoft Eagle, have always had a bit of trouble getting prints scaled right... I use ps output then run ps2pdf to get a pdf. Just found out the way to get a 11x17 pdf page size is done with ps2pdf... it has to have the environmentvaraible PAPERSIZE set... PAPERSIZE=11x17 ps2pdf print.ps creates a 11x17 printout. Found this out from a search which turned up a post at current.workingdirectory.net Thanks Jamie! 2009-4-3: Setup USB Serial adapters on Ubuntu For lack of a better place to take these notes, here they are. This is the second time I've had to "discover" how to do this, I don't want to lose the notes. At some point I'm going to do a howto on getting the STM32 up and targettable with the Olimex-arm-usb-hoo-haw-Jtagger, + Codesourcery command line gcc toolkit and the works. It's been a bit of a struggle. USB-serial devices register themselves as /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, etc, etc, etc when they're plugged in. But they're not immediately usable by the unwashed masses.. permissions are wrong. Unfortunately there's no good error message on this passed thru minicom.. you just get nothing back.
To make them accessable when they're plugged in, you need to create a rule in /etc/udev/rules.d. Like this:
Create a file named something like this:
The parts to change are the SYSFS{idProduct} and the SYSFS{idVendor}
You can get these numbers by running lsusb:
To discover which devices the usb-to-serial adapters register themselves as, just watch /var/log/messages when they're plugged in:
2009-2-26: Observation of Comet Lulin... Barely. I haven't had the telescope out in awhile. From right out front of our house with binoculars on the 25th, I could kind of see where Lulin was, in Leo, So I hauled out the scope for a better look. Oops. I'd left the LED on the Telrad finder on. Dead batteries. Put in new batteries, but no light. I could barely get the scope pointed on Saturn that night. Turned out the battery holder in the Telrad had gone bad... After getting fed up trying to fix the battery holder, I just made a pack with some wire and heatshrink. Not sure you're supposed to solder on batteries, but it works. Friday.. (Feb 26) was cloudy, but there was enough of a hole in the clouds I could get it. Of course, especially with the clouds and non-dark sky so close to Portland, it was the standard fuzzy blur of an astronomical object.. but it was nice to see it. 2009-2-13: Prototype Transformer Bobbins from the Dimension Printer.
I've got access to a Dimension BST1200 3 dimension printer. This will print solid models from ABS plastic. I'm using it here to produce transformer bobbins for a prototype small three phase transformer. ABS is not a good bobbin material (low melting point) but this will allow me to prove a concept without having a special bobbin made. Why there are no "standard" bobbins for "standard" transformer laminations, I don't know, maybe I just didn't look in the right place. The printer belongs to RMS.. but I've bought a cartridge of prototyping material on my own dime. I'm looking to share the expense of this, if anyone needs arbitrary 3d parts. There'd also be some time involved for our machinist to program the machine, unless you can give me an STL file that just works. A single bobbin (they're fairly large, 61mm square and 38mm high) took a long time to run and used a ton of support material, so I had our machinist do the tube and flanges separate. These solvent weld together great. In fact, they're much stronger glued because the flange-to-tube interface was a very weak point. 2008-12-3: Cats at Peace. Perhaps this is a good omen for world peace and harmony. Cleo (white cat) will rarely tolerate Thomas (black-and-white cat) anywhere near her.
2008-11-23: Random Tidbit of today: Check out the Wikipedia article on Magnetars Just knowing a 10 Gigatesla field (or at least a very good theoretical probability of one) exists somewhere made me feel completely insignificant as an electrical engineer for a solid hour. (I don't work for a large firm, so I did not bill this to anyone.) Another Random Tidbit: Making chicken broth is pretty easy and it's a lot better than the canned stuff. Good comfort food after having your confidence demolished by astronomical entities. When I get time, I'll post some quicky directions here for my fellow domestically challenged gen-x'rs. |
