MadModder

I've installed Mint Mate on my pc, so for a change, hopefully less terminal usage. It has its own software- and driver manager, making installing of software like Nvidia driver and Wine rather simple and straightforward.

Downsides of using software manager in Mint Mate:

- it has a limited selection of 'curated' list of apps

- when selecting "show installed applications", it shows only the ones the user has installed.
         -  -  -   
When rebooting/shutting down, there is 10 seconds or longer delay - like some app or process was hanging on the background. It's not just my system; some other Mint users have this issue as well. One solution works in some cases, another works, again in some other cases and so on.

Quick and dirty (although not necessarily convenient) way to circumvent that is to add 'custom application launcher' button to panel, having command 'reboot'. It doesn't hesitate, it reboots immediately.  Same procedure can be used to add also a  shutdown button, if needed.

Testing ? $ ? @ ?

edit: in message preview they look like they're supposed to.

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