Bearings for the Heisler

I got the bearings for the bogies on the Heisler at work the other day. I might need to stop getting stuff delivered here, some people are starting to look funny at me.

And here's a comparison to the axles that we've bought. There's a bit of material to take off so I'm glad for the CNC's to run automatically.

Hopefully I can get the G-Code written by the end of the week and start machining this weekend.

On the BeBoPr front; I have got the bridges and the components to assemble them. However when I look at the Element 14 webpage I see that I need to call to get the availability for the BeBoPr's themselves. I called and they'll be in the UK around the 16th so I should see them near the end of September. At the rate these are going I might have the new hardware running by early next year.

Cheers,

Rex

Boat work - Centerboard

So on Sunday I got a chance to do some work on our little Vagabond. The other weekend we pulled it off the trailer and pulled the centerboard out so we could put anew rope on it and thin it down so it doesn't jam in the casing as much. This is what it looked like after about half an hour of hand sanding with 80 grit paper:

I don't have the patience to take all the paint off by hand so I got the electric sander out. This is what it looked like after half an hour of sanding with the orbital sander:

After that I took a break and helped my brother make a prototype pipe organ pipe out of scrap MDF we had lying around. If you want some more info on that let me know and I'll take some photos and do a writeup of that.

Once we got the pipe finished and working I went back to sanding and I got another 15 minutes into it so the centerboard looked like this:

That was all good. What wasn't so good was that the sander looked like this:

For reference it's supposed to look like this:

So it looks like I owe Dad a new orbital sander...

Beaglebone Progress... Or lack thereof

So I finally got my Beaglebone Blacks out last night to try and get started on the CNC controllers and what did I find? I found they need micro SD cards to store all their info on and don't come with them... So today at work I'm going to order some from Dick Smith and at least one mini HDMI to HDMI adapter so I can plug them into a monitor...


Edit: I have just ordered an adapter and 3 x micro SD cards, one for my phone. I should have them within the week now

Progress on the CNC's

Today I finally bit the bullet and ordered 2 Beaglebone Blacks and 2 BeBoPr capes so I can do some more work on the refit of my CNC Lathe and Mill. The BeBoPr Capes are not avaliable until the 15th of august however so I won't be able to do anything with those for a while.

Stay tuned for some initial insights when I get the Beaglebones.

Cheers,
Rex

New Toy

This arrived while I was at work today.

However to be able to use it I needed to do some cleaning up...

I can't see much room for any test equipment in there can you?

This might be a little better:

Now I can get some real work done with my op amps...

Cheers,

Rex

New Gear

I have just ordered a new lab power supply from ebay. It should be arriving between next tuesday and the tuesday after. So Look forward to some work with op-amps after that.

Cheers,
Josh

Oil Burner Atomiser

Due to some offcuts of 12mm square bar from the frames of our Heisler loco becoming avaliable I'm going to make some small test runs of making some atomizers for it.

I can't find any open source CAM software for outputting to a lathe so I'm going to be writing the G-Code by hand in gedit. I'm getting the design from here which I've found to be a very good resource for info in the shay and heisler locomotives. I am making some changes to simplify construction with the avaliable tools (rounding to the nearest metric drill size).

I can post up some CAD files of the proposed design and the G-Code if anyone is interested.

Cheers,
Rex