inmysocks (version: awoo) @inmysocks@awoo.space

This is the first thing we have successfully cut on the laser cutter after getting all the components together.

It cut though 3mm MDF in 10 passes with a 5.5w laser. So it was able to retrace its path 10 times with no noticeable deviation, and we returned it to the initial position every 2 passes to give the laser some time to cool off because it is cheap.
We bought the z-axis movement, the x axis is a camera rail Ben had, everything else we sourced and bought from hardware stores. #Engineering

We are doing accuracy and precision tests with the laser cutter.

I am so very happy.

#Engineering

We are trying to resolder an 0402 surface mount resistor. For those of you who don't know, they are 1mm x 0.5mm and the solder pads take up about 1/4 of the length.

Fun!

The laser driver seems to be borked, it is ignoring the pwm input and outputting a constant value regardless of the input and it is less than the desired power level.

So instead I am using a 5V 2A usb charger and a motor driver instead.

I expect it is probably not very good for the laser, and may result in uneven power output, but shockingly it seems to function to burn stuff.

I have never gotten proxies to work in node. It is annoying.

Gitea is updated on the pie server, that was less painful than I expected.

so... Does anyone have a copy of the windows source code?

Make sure you read all of this article.

The real take away is in the second-to last paragraph.

https://lwn.net/Articles/780078/

The two biggest engineering problems that I run into consistently are:

Loose goddess damned wires
and
Getting a decent power supply

very few of my problems come from the knowledge side of things.

I had to remove my desktop from the known hosts in /home/gitea on the rat pie box and then remove the rat pie box from the known host on the desktop and login again so that both computers would associate that public key with the correct account on the rat pie box.

This took me over a year to figure out.

Bleh.

Is this #Engineering ?

I made the rat pie box over a year ago, today I finally tracked down why I couldn't ssh into it from my desktop but I could from my laptop.

I set up the gitea user on my desktop so I both the rat pie box and my desktop had that pubic key set as logging into the gitea account, but after setup the gitea user is set so you can't login to it.

My local gitea server has 145 repos in it.

I need to start making sure that my projects are properly shared and publicised. And possibly make things that are more useful

Today I got the x, y and z axes working, and everything is set up nicely.

Then the laser started acting up, it was always on regardless of what I did.

So I tested everything and it was all working nicely. So at the end of the day I finally gave up and decided that the laser just isn't reacting to the PWM input and it is a laser problem.

So now I get to figure out if a motor driver is good enough to power my laser.

#Engineering

So a copper trace on the PCB was damage and sometime around when the fuse burned out the trace also broke so no power was being delivered at all.

It was all very confusing until I found the broken trace. I can solder a wire onto it to fix for now and we are ordering another board. Luckly the boards are cheap.

Why do they have a fuse if you can't replace it reasonably? If the fuse blows there isn't a reasonable way to replace it.

The solution on the internet seem to be 'replace the fuse with a wire'. So yeah, I guess that is what I am doing.

And now I have burned out a fuse on the CNC control board.

I have broken more on this project that I have on any other project.

How fun.

This is the current state of our laser cutter/engraver. As long as it works it will have a cutting area of about 50cmx50cm.

At the moment it has some bits held on with clamps and we still need to make a better system for tensioning the belt for moving the x axis, but it works, at least in that it moves on three axes and moves consistently as far as we can tell without putting the laser on it and trying to repeat a complex cut a bunch of times.

#Engineering

And I am certainly going to write up how to make this. I need to do that for a lot of things I have made, but this one is one that other people may have actual interest in.