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

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:

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

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.

Enough

Just three weeks left out of the two years since I continuously struggling with my 3D printer. I put it aside several times, because it creates the feeling of being unsuccessful, every time I touch it. To every successful print the way goes through at least ten unsuccessful ones and hardware tweaking. The 3D printer is not a goal, it is a tool for me.
Two days ago, I was in such a good mood that I felt, even a 3D print can be successful. I was wrong. Tried to print out some standoffs for the printer itself from PLA, to allow enough airflow to cool the badly designed electronics inside to be able to print with ABS without Marlin freezing to death (as usual).
First print failed - my fault the filament stuck outside the printer.
Second print failed - the Y axis started to jump something like this: http://community.robo3d.com/index.php?threads/shifting-layers-in-y-axis.4690/
Third print - The head picked up the whole print, and I still trying to remove the plastic from the print head.
So, it is ENOUGH!!! Not worth the effort. This is a badly designed complete crap. I think I put already much more effort into tweaking this than it worth. "Beyond economical repair" :-)
As today is the Big Chinese Online Shopping Day, I bought a decent printer from Geeetech, for a quite reasonable price (less than a half of "that crap"):

 And when it arrive, "that crap" goes to Vatera (local ebay like auction portal)

USB Microscope "Stand"

To be honest, I'm not a great fan of Lego. While I was a child, I played with it, but not to much. I was jumping into the electronics quite early and abandoned Lego.
The years passed, and now I've a son, who is obsessed to the Lego. This frighten me a bit.

Together with the one I wrote about, I bought an other microscope also. I wanted to use this as a magnifying glass on my desk. Arrived. I realized that the stand came with it, is a heap of crap.
I wanted to have something what I can build quickly, because I've no time to build the final solution, what is in my mind.
So I borrowed some Lego parts from my son. Here is the result. The height can be adjusted, solving the focus adjustment:

In the background you can see the image it makes.

Ordering from China

I'm continuously ordering things from China on the eBay and AliExpress.
Now I ordered a USB LCD microscope. This one:

Arrived, but no battery included.
Ok. Lets talk with the seller (the gray italic is just my thoughts, not actually was in the letters)

Me: The item arrived without the rechargeable battery. I don't know if this is intentional or not (I'm aware that certain regulations doesn't allow the shipment of the battery). Anyways: Please tell me the exact battery model needed, and if keeping out the battery was unintentional, I'd like to get one.

Seller: Thank you for your kind email and sorry for the trouble.
Sorry to say the item does not include a battery.
Because of the aircraft accident, our shipping company
does not ship items with batteries included now.
Powered by: 3.7V-4.2V Rechargeable lithium battery
In this case, how about you buy the battery in your local place?
We will be responsible for the cost of the battery.
Do you agree?
We look forward to your reply.

Me: Thank you for the answer and your generous offer, but I still would like to know the exact type of the battery, because
"Powered by: 3.7V-4.2V Rechargeable lithium battery" is too generic to find out what kind of battery I need.

Seller: We confirm this is the exact type of the battery: 3.7V-4.2V Rechargeable lithium battery .
You can have a check on eBay.
Then you can choose one and buy it .
Any question is welcome.
Have a nice day.

Me: Yes, I can confirm, that you are a complete idiot.
Let's assume, that you haven't got a clue about, what kind of battery is needed, but you will never admit it.
So, to help you. Fortunately I had a Nokia battery, what almost fitted into the unit. Based on this battery I made some research, to find a bit shorter one. Actually I found installed and tried out.
Please be so kind, to add to the description to the unit, to help to the future buyers. The battery what fits into the unit is the Nokia BL-5B. I bought one, for nuts, so I don't need any refund.

In addition, one of the LEDs on the bottom is dead, what I not fill as a serious problem. I'll repair it instead of sending back.
As I not really like if somebody think I'm a fool, this will be the first time when I got the article I ordered and will not add a five star review.