I got to work on my Shapeoko 3 for about 2-1/2 hours this evening and I got the plates mostly assembled. I had one bolt and nut that would not go together at all, so I’ll stop at the hardware store on the way home from work tomorrow and replace them.
Since I can’t leave well enough alone, I’ve already made some changes during the assembly. Change number one was using nylon locking nuts everywhere I could. I have an assortment of 5mm fasteners from my Shapeoko 1 rebuild, so I used some of those.
I worked from home this afternoon so that I could be here to take delivery of my Shapeoko 3. It arrived about 1:00.
I immediately opened the box and took some pictures. I guess this is the “unboxing” post.
In other “I have too many hobbies” news, my Shapeoko 3 has shipped and will arrive on Wednesday!
Exciting!
I’ve had a server in my basement on the internet since about 1998. Back then I was running a website and email server on a Pentium 133 over a 1024/768 kbs aDSL line.
I’ve been running on scrounged and cast-off hardware ever since. Generally it’s worked out pretty well with no major problems.
But the current set of hardware I’m running on is getting a little long in the tooth. I’m running a lot of stuff on one box now. It’s keeping up pretty well most of the time, but the Plex media server pushes it over the edge. The box just doesn’t have enough CPU to do the transcoding.
So today I got a pretty nice bonus at work and I spent some money on some hardware. This is the first piece of server hardware I’ve ever bought.
All the web sites hosted on my server now include this extra header in the HTTP response:
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
Life is a bugger.
On Thursday I drove the sidecar to work. After work I drove it to a friend’s house where we had a BBQ and played some games.
About 9:30 in the evening I went out to the sidecar to drive home. I turned the key and it said “Rrrr click. Click.” No start. Dead battery. WTF?
Luckily one of the people there had some jumper cables and after we figured out that the battery was under the seat, and then figured out how to get the seat off, we successfully started the hack and I rode it home.
Yesterday afternoon I decided to buckle down and make the angel eyes work. I redid all the wiring, making it cleaner.
The internet told me that there would be a red wire with a white stripe in the fuse box under the passenger side cabin air filter under the hood, and sure enough there was.
The internet also told me that this wire would have power as soon as the key was inserted and the power would stay on for a few seconds after the doors were locked. This part was not quite true.
I used my multi-meter to determine that the wire was powered when the ignition was turned on and the power stayed on for about 5 seconds after the car was turned off. Close enough for me!
I used an IDC tap (as much as I hate those things) to add a fuse to the red/white wire and ran the appropriate wires to the lights. Bingo-bango. The angel eyes come on when you start the car and turn off a few seconds after you turn off the ignition.
Here is a crappy cell phone photo showing the eyes.
On to the next project.
After the front end of the 528i got smashed in it needed new headlights, so I bought a set of aftermarket lights with Angel Eyes in them. I didn’t want to pay the body shop for the time to wire up the eyes, so the eyes haven’t been working.
Since it’s finally warm enough out to work outside, I decided to try and wire them up this afternoon.
Well.
Those damned Germans.
I got the wiring all cleaned up and hooked up according to the instructions. Then I turned on the parking lights. The angel eyes glowed a dim orange. That’s not right. So I re-read the instructions and checked the wiring. Yes, it’s wired according to the instructions. So I turned them on again and just for giggles I tried a turn signal. The angel eyes flashed bright white in sync with the turn signals. (They looked great, but they aren’t supposed to flash.)
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?
The next thing to do is look at a parking light. The parking lights bulbs are also the turn signals on this car. On most cars if this is the case the manufacturer will use a dual filament bulb, with a dim filament for the parking light and a brighter one that flashes for the turn signal. This requires three wires. (Ground, parking light and turn signal.)
Sure enough, there are dual filament bulbs in the parking light sockets. But there are only two wires. One for power and one for ground. How do they flash the second filament?
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot again?
After playing around a bit, and scratching my head a bit, I discovered that only one filament is being used in the dual filament bulb. I put my multi-meter on the contacts and it appears that when the bulbs are in parking light mode the car is sending a lower voltage, possibly A/C signal (the meter was freaking out a bit trying to read it.) And when they flash the turn signal they send the full 12 volts DC.
What the hell? Way to complicate things BMW.
They way the eyes are wired up it sends the (supposed) 12V from one of the parking lights to them. There is also a relay so that when the light is flashing as a turn signal it sends a straight 12V to them. It’s a bit convoluted and it took me some head scratching to to figure out how it was supposed to work.
Unfortunately, since the BMW engineers aren’t sending a full 12V to the parking lights, the eyes glow dimly until you turn on the turn signal, then they get straight 12V when the turn signal is on, flashing on and off.
That’s not going to work at all…
I suppose before I go all crazy trying to figure out a different way to wire these up I should contact the people I bought them from and see what they say.
Grrr.
Just as an update I’ve been doing some googling and just discovered that there are SIX different fuse locations in this silly car. I only knew about three of them.
The locations are:
Wow. Just wow.
This will mainly be a photo dump with some comments.
The 3D printer arrived last Thursday and I assembled it on Thursday and Friday evening. All told it probably took me about 6 hours from opening the box to plugging it in and moving the table around.
The only real quibble I had with assembling it is that the instructions are a series of videos (not really an issue) but at the beginning of each step lay out the parts you need. The parts are clear acrylic on a white background. It’s difficult to see which ones you need and there are a few that are close to the same, but not identical.
The section about the wiring was confusing. I figured it out but there are steps missing and it’s a bit unclear.
There was a delay on Saturday when I discovered that the version of Linux I had on my laptop was too old to install the controller software on so I had to install a newer version. That took a couple hours of messing about to get that all setup.
Saturday and Sunday afternoon (with a break for a drive in the sidecar) were spent messing about trying to get a decent printed object out of this thing. Man this is a steep learning curve and the information, while out there, is difficult to track down. I did find some good things to try for calibrating the machine though.
I finally got some things tweaked in close, but I’m having an issue with the extruder. I just googled my issue and have something to try tomorrow that should fix that.
Anyway, photos!
The Dell Lattitude series of laptops (D630, D830, others) use the Broadcom 43xx series WiFi cards. These have firmware that is proprietary and needs special voodoo to make work.
The answer is scattered around the interwebs and I can never find it on the first go, so here is what works for me.
First off, if you are using Linux Mint in the control center there is a Driver Manager. Do not use this to enable the Broadcom card, it does not work. (The Nivida driver does work however.)
What you need to do is as follows:
apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
Then edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and comment out the bcm43xx line
You should be able to unload and reload the modules with:
modprobe -r ssb_hcd modprobe -r b43 ssb modprobe b43
The wireless should just start working and network manager should start showing wireless networks!
