Household expenses

Just a quick note to say something about household expenses.

Expenditure = Income

(… unless you max out your credit card… but you can only do this once)

So if any houshold item increases in cost, for example gas/electricity, then something else has to either be abandoned, or its cost has to go down.

The question is what will go down, under financial pressures?

It seems that little is susceptible to these pressures… Mortgage? No the banks have got you by the short and curlies here, even if the housing market goes down, they still want the full value of their loan to be paid back… Food? Yes you could starve yourself, but only so far! …Energy? Yes you can cut this down by 18C freezing instead of 21C warm, by sitting in the dark, by not watching TV or using the internet, by eating cold meals, by insulating your house. But none of these choices are pleasant, and insulation is expensive in capital terms (why spend capital to save expenses… Taxes? Very unlikely as these taxes pay for local services, but there is some room to demand they are cut… what else??? Oh yes, insurance! Have you ever seen this come down, yet again financial services have you by the short and curlies.

The problem then is that very little is susceptible to market pressures, and that is a major problem which is causing people to scream and shout about any price increases.

We need to look at things very differently and keep in mind the best split in expenditures for your family.

Of course the other solution is higher wages and pensions. But both of these are highly dependant on market conditions. You can change your job, if you have guts and qualifications. But you are unlikely to be able - no really it is impossible - to increase your pension.

More Reprap

What we have discovered about our Reprap 3D printer is that the plastic delivered with the kit was PLA, not ABS as we expected - after all the kit was called ABS - Prusa! For weeks we had poor prints, lots of misaligned squirts from the extruder, wiggly output, poor adhesion.

But now we have purchased some correct ABS material, and tuned the slicing software "Slic3r" to have the best parameters for our setup, and whoopee great prints. By the way we are also using Replicator Host on both PCs and Macs for printing. Great software!

For example,



Looks good, eh?

We have also printed a sturdy and quite large item, a reel support which clips onto the side vertical support of a chair and holds the reel of plastic. This is a great idea and the plastic un-reels easily as we print.

Two projects are in progress, like everyone an iPhone case! and a complicated, many pieced, heat exchanger for a kitchen extraction system. Here's the iPhone case downloaded from Thingyverse, thanks.

Eye poppingly bad maps

I haven't written for a while, but I have to now. I have just upgraded my iPhone to IOS6, and I wish I hadn't. (Can I go back?)

The new Apple Maps app is very, very poor.

Just take for example: the village of Chipping Warden, nearby to where I live, is not found in the search and not labeled on the maps.

On the way to here there are two roads labeled "Banbury & Oxford Canal", their is no such thing, it is the Oxford Canal, and its not a road.

The satellite photos are much worse resolution than the previous Google ones. And they are obviously shot years ago, at least 5 years!! As many features have changed since then.

So, bad Apple, bad, bad.

Infact there is no feature of IOS6 that I have found that is better than IOS5...

Morning out with the girls

Our grand daughters have come to stay, here they are out playing:











Then we went to the allotment and climbed trees!

Reprap gets going

After a lot of fiddling with settings in the slicer (slicer) this is the result.

Here are a couple of iPad stands, which need a cross bar the hold them up, but otherwise work well. The design comes from the web site thingyverse:



And this stand along, but rather chunky design:



UNFORTUNATELY

The hot end extruder has developed a leak, and hot plastic dribbles down the side, spoiling future prints. Later… this has been fixed, had to take it off the carriage and tighten it in the heat insulator tube. All now seems well and I have started printing again.

By the way here's the hobby area:

A better SDR Ham radio setup

I have been looking for a while at the conventional ham radio setups. They look like this:



The ATU and TXRX are in the shack, with a long cable to the antenna. The ATU and TXRX can be integrated.

What I have thought of as a better solution is:



The SDR and ATU are integrated. And the control is by WiFi. The box is placed at the base of the antenna. No long feeder cable, in fact no cable at all, except for the need for an AC supply, or maybe a rechargeable battery? The system can be controlled from either a PC, or from a mobile phone or pad. You could offer others to log into a server and for them to control the system?

1st Reprap prints

Got the Reprap printer going!

Some notes about this are below:

* Usefull g-codes are: G1 Xn Yn Enew Fnew: move to coord, new extrusion, new federate. G28 [X0 Y0 Z0]: home [X, Y, Z]. M104 Snnn: Ext temp, return. M109 Snnn: Ext tempo, wait. M140 Snn: bed temp, return. M190 Snn: bed temp, wait. M84: Stop after print job.

Calibrating the extruder. You have to make sure that the extruder consume the right amount of filament. So heat the nozzle up, then feed in filament until some comes out. Then give a command to feed in precisely 10mm and measure what actually goes in, say 13.8mm as ours did. Then you can set the Slic3r parameter Printer & Filament > Extrusion Multipler to 10/13.8 or about 0.75.

Running the printer. Noe: I use a MacBook, and Replicator Host and Slic3r software. MAke sure you have the latest versions installed. After setting up the various parameters in the slicer, and in Repetier Host software… Output an STL file from your CAD software (e.g. from Sketchup), Add this file to RH, check the objects orientation and that it is sitting on the bed, adjust if needed by rotating and shifting. Open Slic3r chose external version and load your configuration then Generate the g-code. Finally check that the right start and end g-code have been generated, and hit "Run".

You can monitor the bed and nozzle temperature as it rises, and then watch the printing happening. IF all goes wrong hit Kill or Emergency Stop.

These are our first attempts at printing as we learnt the Slic3r settings and played about a bit:



Printing



The results after various tries. Not yet perfect. The main problem we have is getting the object to stick on the print bed. Need to try different temperatures.