Peter "Sci" Turpin

So to reward myself for throwing out a bunch of shit, I went out and collected a bunch more shit.

Marquee tent fabric and some stripy sunscreen fabric

Large duct fan, lighting ballast, circuit tester

Bunch of laptop screens, some heatsinks, couple of gears

White Electrolux hoover (now dismanted)

Office light fitting, and again with emergency power battery

Combo printer, scanner, copier FAX MACHINE

Black & Decker strimmer

Disposable helium cylinder

And (on a technicality) a Zanusi fridge-freezer

The bulk came from a house up the road and I had a chat with the owner, so I knew most of it’s dead for it’s original purpose. Though of course I don’t know if that’s dead-dead or uneconomic-to-repair-dead..

Anyway, fabric may be used in a couple of costumes.

Duct fan has a dead motor. Already pulled it apart. AC outrunner motor, part of insulation is melted. Irreparable. May be able to replace motor, but tricky.

Ballast & circuit-tester, both fried, but ballast is fancy and may have internal parts salvagable, the tester may make a nice tiny enclosure.

Laptop screens have already been stripped down. They were very wet, but I only wanted the angled diffuser plastic anyway. May be used for a costume. Saved the EEE PC screen tho.

Heatsinks are usefully generic, but also big chunks of aluminium.

Hoover was from another place, apparently a bad switch. It wasn’t, it was full of fluff. SOLIDLY. And had been in the rain, so some had turned to clay. Also smelt of baby-puke. Stripped it down wearing gloves. De-fluffed motor and fan, tested it and it works. Earmarked that for vacuum-former project. Left housing to soak in disinfectant and hosed it down. The white plastic casing will likely be used for my pseudo-GlaDOS build.

One light fitting has a nice cast heatsink. May be useful for something. The glass looks nice. A bit Personality Core “Eye”, but will see (lol pun). The other has the big battery pack. Will see how functional that is and how/if it can be repurposed.

Combo printer will be torn down for the usual steppers, belts and steel rod and any bronze bushings.

The strimmer apparently just has a broken drive belt which the owner couldn’t replace except at silly cost. If I have one that fits I’ll return it to him, otherwise I’ll tear it down but I’m unsure what useful bits I’ll get from it.

The helium cylinder is about 9.5″ in diameter so I think it’s about the right size needed to make a chamber for the Hackspace vacuum coater/chamber. It’s technically a bit undersized, but it has the benefit over converting a propane cylinder of 1) Not having been filled with an explosive gas 2) Already having a hole in, so it’s definitely not under pressure 3) Being free and here already. ;P

The fridge-freezer is a technicality. My aunt was getting rid of it, so my mother brought it back with her on her recent trip to Sommerset. It’s the same age as my current fridge, but bigger and probably in better condition. So I increase food storage and decreas floor-space used. Only niggle is it’s going to have to go outside the kitchen in the “conservatory” to fit. Since it lay in the bus for a couple of days, leaving it standing for a day upright before turning it on again.

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

While it’s probably nothing special to many, I’m very glad when I can aquire replacement computer hardware. Especially when it’s free and in a better state than my existing stuff.

For a little while now, the workshop PC had been running on it’s secondary IDE channels only. It was a 1.8Ghz  P4, but with USB 1.0 and PC133 RAM. It crawled at most things and took a few minutes to start with little to load. It also didn’t cooperate well with the PS3 Eye camera I picked up a few months ago. The memory bus was slow enough it choked even once I got a dedicated USB 2.0 card for it.

Some kind soul donated a bunch of used machines to the London Hackspace a fortnight ago. Mostly older Dell machines and a few oddities. Nothing that could be expanded much (except the 5000 which got re-purposed by the space itself). After examining a few I selected to re-home a Dell Dimension 4550 with an 80Gb HDD.

Dell Dimension 4550

The case was marked as having a 31Gb drive, but I don’t know where that number came from.

I got it home and pulled it apart. Got it cleaned of dust and fluff and found some leaky caps on the mainboard, hidden under a cowling. They got replaced with some caps I pulled from some obsolete server gear some time back.

Bad bad caps, no motherboard for you!

After running it for a few hours on the original RAM, I started upgrading. I’d already replaced the epoxy(???) thermal pad with some good thermal grease. I had some 400Mhz DDR sticks around, which fortunately worked (though underclocked) even though the machine is spec’d for 266Mhz. That got the RAM up to 756Mb.

The official spec says the machine can take 1Gb of RAM, but it can actually take 2Gb. There’s just only two RAM slots.

All clear after the transplant

I swapped in the best AGP x4 card I had (which came from the former workshop machine; a GeForce MX4000 128Mb),  put in a better optical drive (which was capable of opening when the case was on it’s side, unlike the original), the USB 2.0 PCI card (because the PS3 Eye apparently needs an entire USB controller to itself) and added an extra hard-disk.

I spent a few hours transferring files around to get all the data from the previous two workshop machines onto this one, then juggled some more while I formatted one drive to do a clean install, then transfer data across and format the other. The 80Gb disk that was already in it was reporting some bad sectors in SMART, so it’s been relegated to the D-drive/storage-disk where I’ll stuff music and video capture files. Non-critical stuff.

(Yes, I’ll be annoyed if I loose a long capture, but I’ll probably just get some corruption rather than losing a file outright.)

The machine’s primary 80Gb was partitioned in two again for dual-booting. I got XP Home installed on one since I couldn’t find the old machine’s XP Pro key certificate and the Dell case already had a Home key sticker. I’ll get round to installing Ubuntu on the other partition once I decide which version to go with. 10.10 I didn’t like much.

It’s now in the workshop, running fine on the extra workbench I built last week. The PS3 Eye works fine with it and I’ve managed to successful do a test Livestream with it and record video to disk (though still need to find some on-the-fly compression that’ll work with the camera format).

Installed in place

It’s also whisper-quiet! :D

Only annoyance is the front-panel lights are barely visible. They’re so dim you have to kneel in front of it and concentrate to tell they’re on. If I get a free moment I *may* try to replace them with better LEDs, but for such a minor thing it’s really not worth it. If I really need to know if the HDD is running, I’ll be willing to bend over to see.

An additional bonus has been realising the old PC’s case is perfect for another project! My hope to build a desk from all that mahogany I have was also one to have a PC installed directly within the desk’s structure. The old case was riveted together with a motherboard tray held in with screws! A few minutes with the drill and I have the rear of the case with all the needed mounts and the tray to mount a motherboard on! I can plan more about the future desk around these parts. :)

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

I am officially looking for a treadmill to rip apart. I almost had one tonight but went to make a sandwich and got bid-sniped before I got back.

I know, with all I’ve said about just going straight in with your max-bid.. :P

Maybe I just want something new to mess around with.

Thinking of combining several of my existing half-done projects to conserve resources. Like taking the steering rack off the electric kids car, the motor and axle from the golf-caddy and the wheels from the big robot to make an electric go-cart. I can allways re-use it for the robot project later anyway.

Likewise thinking to combine the never-quite-functional robot dog thing with the robot camera-arm to make a sort of Scutter robot.

The treadmill I’m after with a view to fixing up the milling machine more with new head. Would be relatively easy to mount a slender DC motor on the mill’s front compared with a chunky AC motor of similar power. Plus I’d get a nice flat torque curve and less pully-gearing requirements (I anticipate at least 3 “gears” to give additional range. 8000rpm motors will probably only go down to 150rpm before stalling. Proper mills can get to low double-digits).

I suppose they’ll always be these things around, and I should concentrate on more pressing matters. But likewise I want to feel like I’m progressing. And the easiest way is to try and buy progress.

I’m acting no better than those militant Doomers who pile up their homes with survival gear they’ve never used and have no idea how to, just for the safety blanket of feeling more protected.

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

Up the road from my house, the same place where I got the mechanical bed, is a pile of debris taller than I am. It appeared today while I was in the city. It seems to contain a lot of household items, bits of furniture, appliances and lots of wood and metal.

It’s raining outside. I’ve just taken a leisurely walk in it. It makes everything calm.

The chip and ply in that pile probably won’t make it through the night, and the proper wood will not likely fair well in the high humidity and warm atmosphere. On a colder night it would absorb less.
I already have the OK to take things from the pile, but at gone midnight it’s not the best of times. Still, there should be something worth salvaging tomorrow.

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from "Dreamwidth Creative Blog" into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

Grabbed the electric adjustable bed from up the road earlier. Could tell it contained at least some angle-iron and a motor, as well as an oversized controller.

It’s about what I’ve come to expect from all commercially available “medical” appliances. Off-the-shelf parts in a design so basic it’s crude. It smacks of zero product development; no refinement beyond the first working demonstration model.

Controls all run on mains voltage so the flex to the massive hand-held controller is about half an inch thick, the controller itself being slightly larger than that used to control industrial gantry cranes. All angle-iron frame, welded, with M6 bolts and nylon washers as hinges. No nylocs, all counter-tightened slim nuts to hold them in place. Even using two bolts as load-bearing end-stops. Considering the bed has two separate “massage” vibration motors, it seems dangerous to use pivot nuts and hold the bed portions raised with a scheme that could easily shake loose over time (and many of the nuts were already loose enough to undo by hand). The internal control box that I expected to contain relays only contained some fuses and a small transformer (probably for the vibration timer in the controller), the rest of the box being 3/4s empty. Another off the shelf project box you could pick up from any electronics hobbiest shop. Connector bundles also held together with a project box. MDF covers for the vibration recesses have been neatly and pointlessly bevelled on all edges, where no-one will see it or or any wire would touch it. The vibration motors themselves have a bolt and washer as a weight drilled into the cooling fans at each end.
Also noticed there’s no packing on the pivot bolts for the actuators so they twist in their mounts when changing direction. This will surely lead to metal fatigue and sudden unexpected failure of the mounts in the actuators cast aluminium housings.

Why is it every single piece of consumer medical equipment is apparently designed as someone’s final GCSE Design & Technology project??

It’s no wonder the devices needed by our most vulnerable are also so expensive when they never refine the designs at all. Even a courteous bit of refinement could drop construction prices by a large amount. Even if they didn’t drop the sale price, the companies would make more money! Where’s the downside? Or is there some bit of safety legislation that demands any “medical” equipment be explicitly built like a 1920s farm tractor?

That said, I now have some short sections of sturdy angle-iron and a pair of mains 250Watt linear actuators rated at 2500N with about 200mm travel.
The reason for it being thrown out? They’d accidentally yanked the mains cable out of the controller box. I plugged the pins back in, changed the fuse, and it worked fine.
Except for a week outside, the foam mattress portion smelled like rancid fish.

Truly, it pays to remember that when something breaks, it generally only means one single part of it has actually broken.
The attitude of the consumer however is far more often that the magic box is dead, so they need a new one. Well, I suppose that is why they’re called consumers.

Wondering if the actuators would be sufficiently powerful to make a small crane. I doubt it actually. Could probably shift a large satellite dish or similar though.

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from "Dreamwidth Creative Blog" into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

More tinkering today.

Pulled the frame apart and flipped it over to give the motors more ground clearance and enough space for a trailing castor.
Rather than cut up the push-scooter bearing tubes, I made a new longer one from a piece of old vacuum cleaner nossle and bolted it into the clamp from an old satellite dish mount. That gave me some bolt holes and nice steel plate to attach some more scrap 1″ box section to as an angle-block. Another couple of bits of smaller box-section went on top again to provide rigidity.

I’ve run out of M6 bolts now though, so will have to get some. Studding would probably be better though.
The motor assemblies were already made up, so it’s really only the frame that’s the product of the last couple of days.

The motors look a little wonky because they’re not bolted down properly. Neither are the bearing-blocks, which’ll need three more M10 carriage bolts. Probably want to put some fibre washers between the motor mounts and frame to help prevent damage to the aluminium gearbox housings.

Here it is with the existing battery box roughly in place.

It’s a large box because it contains a commercial van battery (12v, Lead-acid), as well as positive and negative bus-bars, keyswitch, automotive fuse panel and emergency-stop button on the rear hatch.
May had a high-current plug to it too to allow it to provide jump-starts. If I find one of them laying about anyway.

No motor controllers as yet. I still need to test the stall current of the motors (12v, 180Watt, ~220rpm geared).
Wheels are ten-inch pneumatic sack-barrow wheels. Freewheeling hubs were previously ground off and fixed hubs with a coupler-dog brazed up and bolted on.

Got some aluminium car-phone enclosures with surface-mounting holes that should take a controller each quite nicely.

Whatever this ends up being, it’ll be pretty powerful and be able to go a long way.

Need to make mounts to secure battery box and fork-extensions to turn the current front wheel into a castor. Wanted a pneumatic castor, but there’s not enough space under the frame currently. Maybe later.

Will keep my eyes on the river; see if a shopping trolley turns up. A trolley basket could be a good addition to it for the moment.

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from "Dreamwidth Creative Blog" into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

Basically I got annoyed with ebay. Enforcing zero-postage costs on
certain things means it’s no longer worth it to list odd bits and bobs
that may never sell and loose you money in fees. But the electronic odds
and ends are still too good to bring myself to throw out.

I had a domain that’s still good for a few months, so I’ve stuck a forum
on it. I’d like to see if the idea of a sort of
electrical/mechanical/scientific/oddity swap-shop could work out.

Keep a post on there about your own stuff you have to swap, and a list
of the sort of things you might be interested in. If you’re after
something more specific, make a request post and see if anyone can provide.

It’s been up less than 24hours, so it’s not even early days yet, but I’d
like to give it a shot.

Think of it a bit like freecycle, but without your post scrolling off
the recent posts in 5 minutes and rather more tech-biased.

Anyway, be happy to get any opinions and/or interest, and hear if
there’s any other groups that might be interested in it.

Linky: http://www.madscientistsunion.org.uk/

EDIT 20th June, 2010: MSU.UK Now defunct. Little traffic and became a target for spambots.

[20/06/2010: Amalgamating old posts from "Dreamwidth Creative Blog" into sci-fi-fox.com to re-purpose DW blog account.]

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.