MadModder

I'm sure that I used to be able to put a UK sterling sign in a post, now I have to resort to "UKP" or other artifices.

This is what a pound Sterling sign ends up as:   ?

? <-- testing

Hmm... weirdness. I can only wonder if the server is set up to use 7-bit characters, as the pound sign is part of the standard (8-bit) ascii table.

? <-- more testing (that was a Euro symbol)

? <- A copyright symbol

~ <- A tilde (ascii 126)


Yep, I'm going to call it - the server is using just the basic ASCII codes, not the extended ASCII set.  Probably a server config option.

Thanks.
The good luck continues - OK I've used my one and only 'Measuring Card' spare.

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Best see if any are available on eBay - oh yes several in the price range just below and quite a bit above 1000 UKP - yikes. Then I found a UK dealer clearing his stock -  20 UKP inc postage - never hit a 'buy it now' key quite os fast !

Still in the end I did end up with a fairly neat winding and when all was re-assembled and the two halves of the resistor paralleled up it measured exactly and precisely 3.3 ohms - phew what a load of bother for a simple wire wound resistor.

Re-assembling it all on the machine went reasonably well - I thought I'd leave testing to the following day. But in the night I woke up in a sweat thinking 'did I remove that melted dribble of resistance wire on the upper cage frame ?' Of course I had to pull it all apart again to check and sure enough I hadn't - the power of dreams - lucky really.

Anyway testing at least didn't result in the previous glowing fire that I'd had previously - controller came ready but when I pressed 'Reset' to initialise things it went into eStop and dropped the servo crate power displaying:

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Decoding the error message it was implying that the Z position encoder was out of phase, shorted or disconnected. Now the encoder and it's wiring are not the easiest things to access and are far removed from where all the trouble had been. My first suspicion was the servo cards immediately below where that resistance wire had melted and dripped however changing them made not an iota of difference.

OK bite the bullet - open things up - get to the back of the Sinumerik controller by sliding it out of the cabinet onto its shelf so now at least I can see the Z axis encoder cable where it plugs into the Siemens 'measuring card' that takes all four encoders. Nothing looked amiss - suppose it's the measuring card itself? Fortunately I had a spare. A bit of gymnastics - old card out - new card in and lets see:

Whoohay - I can now jog X and Z axis for the first time in months 

At that point I decided to quit while I was ahead and reserve more testing for tomorrow - there's only so much excitement I can take these days 

So time ticks by !

Several false starts winding the resistor: Firstly hand winding it is a pain (literally) the wire is very springy and hard to tension - anyway I persisted, got an ugly looking resistor but it's resistance was far too low.

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Turns out my calculations were wrong on two counts - wire diameter was actually 1mm not 0.9 as measured - the bit I measured was wasted down by being repeatedly  heated - and the turns count was wrong due to the mounting arrangement obscuring things as there were actually extra inactive turns used for the terminations. Re-working the calculations proved that it actually is wound from the more common Ni-Chrome wire. So I ordered up a reel of 1mm Ni-Chrome and wound another resistor. To aid winding I made up a bolt on adapter for the frame allowing me to mount it between centres on the lathe (still hand turned), this allow me to have better control on the tension - if only the reel of wire had been long enough 

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I've been experimenting with Debian server based Mate on my pc, just to find out, how it runs on hardware.

Observations so far:

Being server based, there will likely be missing, graphics-related libraries - lack of "desktop plumbing" as the saying goes.

In practice, even if one manages to install Nvidia driver, it works with apps like Blender just fine (it's quite easy to see if there's a real display acceleration, by making a scene with hundreds or thousands of objects).

As always, I insist on using benchmarking apps on a new system to see how the hardware performs. That's where the missing libraries are - well, missing.

An example: that happened with Passmark - it launched only in a text mode in terminal, instead of gui, to do some of the tests. It uses some older libraries, that aren't in Debian repository anymore. That can happen with other apps as well. Also, from what I've read, enabling and using old repositories might break the system.

One should know exactly how to handle such issues. At this point I think it's too much of a hassle. So, next one I'll be testing is a 'real' desktop' distro, Mint Mate.