Bah.
Yesterday I thought I had made some improvement in the accuracy department with my ShapeOko.
This evening I ran a job that demonstrated that I was all wet.
Even more accuracy for the ShapeOko
I’ve been boring holes through some 3/4″ thick MDF recently and having a little trouble with it.
The blanks are about 3″ x 6″ and I’m boring 50 holes in them. When I set them up I put a pair of parallels under them in the vice and tighten the screw.
The problem I’m having is that the first holes go all the way through, like I want, but when I get down to the other end of the block the holes are a little short. The depth that I’m boring them to is .790″, so what gives?
This evening I did some investigating and discovered a few interesting things.
Server Upgrade Fun
My Ubuntu server that powers this blog hasn’t been upgraded for a while. The uptime was 450+ days and the Message of the Day was telling me I needed to reboot for some thing or another.
So I decided to do the dist-upgrade. What could go wrong?
Well, I’m still finding out. I’m not even sure what version I was running. 11.something I think. It was upgraded to 12.04.2 LTS.
What broke:
mysql – it appears to have removed the server application and not installed a new one. I had to install mysql-server (and dependencies) to get it running again.
sqlgrey – something changed so that it only listened on the ipv6 localhost address. I had to edit the config to force it to 127.0.0.1.
postfix – another ipv6 issue, so I disabled ipv6 in /etc/sysctl.conf
mailman – lost it’s template files. I believe they moved, maybe I originally installed from source, I don’t remember. I had to hunt down the template files (which were on the disk in /usr/share/mailman) and change the link to them.
carbon/graphite/whisper – not sure what happened here. I had to reinstall whisper and carbon. Graphite web pages were dorked up because python-whisper appears to have been removed and not re-installed.
That’s all I’ve found so far. Some fun.
And ironically, before I upgraded my Ubuntu server, I patched and rebooted my Windows 2003 server. In the past this has been a risky action, but today – flawless. Go figger.
Shoes for the ShapeOko
Dust shoes that is.
I finally got a dust shoe finished up last night and I couldn’t be happier. I managed to run several unattended jobs over the past two evenings!
By unattended I mean I didn’t have to stand over the machine with the shop-vac hose in my hand. I setup the job, turned on the router and the vacuum and pressed go. Then I could wander around the basement and do other things while it ran. Bliss!
Precision Leads to Accuracy
Lack of precision, not so much.
This is actually not a ShapeOko post for a change. Well, it’s related…
One of the things I sell in my Etsy store is loading blocks for reloading ammunition. These are finished planks of maple with various sized holes drilled in them.
All ShapeOko, All the Time
At least thats what it feels like to me. But I’m having fun, mostly.
Over the past few days I’ve done more stuff to my ShapeOko. Here is all the stuff that I can remember, and some pictures.
Warning, very long.
Chasing Accuracy – Part 2
Part one was running the Circle Diamond Square test, which indicated I had a problem. Part two is starting to solve some of the accuracy issues, and discovering some more.
I posted the results of the CDS test on the ShapeOko forum and another member suggested that the results indicated that my X and Y axis were not square.
I attempted to square them up by squaring the Y axis rails to the rear plate, and then making sure that the back edges of the X carriage plates were the same distance from the rear plate. Then I ran the CDS test again. Same results.
Today I investigated further.
First real job with the ShapeOko!
I ran my first “real” job with my ShapeOko last night!
I’m making a custom set of grips for a Ruger Mk II pistol and the left side grip has a cutout on the back. The last set of custom grips I made with cutouts were a hassle. I made a template, filed it to fit, traced around it and then routed to the line. A huge pain in the ass.
This time I measured the cutout, drew it up in LibreCad, generated some G Code with CamBam and milled it out!
It turned out great!
It’s a little hard to see, but it should do the trick.
Here’s another shot of the blank.
Next I’m going to try and recreate the face in CAD and machine it. It has a thumb rest on it, so it should be a challenge. Fun stuff!
Circle Diamond Square
There is a test you can run to check the accuracy of your CNC mill. It’s called the “Circle Diamond Square” test. It’s real name is “NAS 979; Composite cutting test 4.3.3.5”
Essentially you mill a circle, in a diamond, in a square. The real test also has some other features such as a 5° ramp and possibly a few more. It’s hard to find the real test on the internet.
I made up a circle diamond square test for my mill and ran it today.
VI Search and Replace Snippit
Since I haven’t programmed for a while, my formatting is rusty. I realized that I was inconsistant in how I was using spaces around my parenthesis in my code.
The “correct” formatting is to have a space after the opening parens and one before the closing parens.
Here are two quick vi searches to fix it up.
The first one looks for all open parens that are followed by any character except a closing parens or a space and adds a space:
%s!(\([^) ]\)!( \1!g
The second one looks for all closing parens that are proceeded by any character except an opening parens or a space and adds a space:
%s!\([^( ]\))!\1 )!g
Sure, now that I figured this out, I realize that it’s backwards from the style guide… Or maybe not. Perltidy adds spaces in the parens…
Also, I should probably just use Perltidy…
In any case, I’m going to post this anyway, since I took the time to figure out the regex. 😛