2016. január 19., kedd

Motherboard repair

I had a home grew storage server based on Nexenta. It was working for a few years. Unfortunately it wasn't stable. The storage part was rock solid, but the web interface died frequently. In addition I had problems with the boot SSDs.
A few weeks ago finally I migrated everything off it and disassembled the machine. It come out, what I thought is a software problem, maybe a hardware issue:


Two of the same size/type capacitors are dead on the motherboard. As I realized no known (at least to me) markings on the cap, I thought that Intel played incorrectly and used some cheap shitty caps.
Desoldered them, looked around the net, and found out, these are United Chemicon Low ESR caps, so good quality. Maybe this series has some manufacturing issue. Out of the several ones on the board just the 3300uF/6.3V ones died:


8.8uF and 13.4uF in the place of 3300uF not really looks like enough. :-D

2016. január 18., hétfő

MobileVise

For my soldering work I almost exclusively using the StickVise to keep the boards, connectors, etc. in its place on my desk.



As I'm not working in the electronics industry in my daily work, I don't have it in the office just at home. It happened that I was need to solder some audio cable there. Without the StickVise it was a horror.
During the weekend, I was thinking. What would be the solution. I deffinetelly don't wan to carry a StickVise in my bag. I need something like it, but something portable. Than I figured out the solution and the MobileVise born.
After a failed attempt (one of the screw holding clips broke almost imediatelly, because it was too tight, etc.), here is the working one.

The design:


Closed:


Open:


Assembled:


In action:


The movie:



2016. január 16., szombat

Headphone holder

As my 3D printing started to work, I wanted to create some additional things also.
Yesterday, I put in work my long unused (today nonexistent) knowledge in trigonometry. Here is the result:


Meet with my shiny, new headphone holder.
Printed:


And in work:


The files are on the thingiverse

2016. január 2., szombat

3D Printing - seams working

It was a long journey and quite not finished yet. But the current state is satisfactory.
It was more a month ago, when I wrote about it. Many things happened since.
My new printer arrived, I almost fully assembled it, when I realized, that according to all internet sources the included MK8 extruder is a joke. Almost the same kind of as my original one in the Robo 3D. I didn't even want to give a try to it. So I ordered a Bulldog Lite extruder and the well known E3D v6 hotend (to be precise the Chinese clone of it).
The later one didn't arrive, and I wanted to print badly. So I took a deep breath and tried to repair the Robo 3D - millionth attempt.

  1. Repaired the Y axis. It was much easier than I thought. removed the two screws holding the plastic part at the end of the Y axis timing belt. I was able to tighten the belt by 15 teeth (lot).
  2. Replaced the fan holder at the hotend with the good one (the previous was broken and fixed with some adhesive tape) I designed/printed long time ago, lying on my desk.
  3. My assumption about the hanging of the printer electronics because of the overheating of the heat requirement of the ABS looked correct. Based on this I left the cooling as I just want to use PLA now.

The future looked bright, created my first design and...
Just before I started to print, on the old Dell laptop I used to drive the 3D printer the Windows said, that, the hard drive's state is critical and need to be replaced.
SHIT...
The original drive is a 320G one. I wanted to use a 120G SSD
Made a copy of the drive with Clonezilla to a 2T HDD (to resize the partition before copying to the SSD). It took more than three hours, several bad sectors reported.
Checkdisk, resize attempts, etc.
Second Clonezilla to the SSD.
The machine didn't boot.
Ok. I give up. Don't know what data lost (maybe some printer settings and the modified Arduino source of the printer) but I don't want to run into a long Windows repair session either.
Opened one of my shiny new BeagleBone Green. Installed Ubuntu + Octoprint (with a few attempts worked within a day). I felt that the BBG is not powerful enough for the slicing and the legacy Cura installation has some issues. So I decided to do the slicing on my Core i5 desktop and stick with Slic3r what I already used before.
After this everything worked smoothly. Here is the result:



This is the enclosure one of my ongoing projects. It isn't perfect, but I'm satisfied with the printing result so far.