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Early Valentine's evening out at the theater. Local production of Will Arbery's Heroes of the Fourth Turning. I had low expectations and was very wrong. "On the edge of the Wyoming wilderness, the last guests linger late into the night at a celebration for the new President of their conservative Catholic college. Reunited after seven years, the friends toss back whiskey and name-check Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Steve Bannon, even Bojack Horseman, tracking their distance from each other and the people they thought they’d be by now. Will Arbery’s portrait of white conservatives trying to make sense of where they, and their country, stand is an incisive yet personal look at the intelligence and despair of the Catholic right."

Greg comes in for the save!!!

that is a lot of bits. It made me curious how my Musknet was doing. About as expected -- okay fast - when it is up. I have super calm weather this morning., so it can see most of the satellites. Putting it on top of a 33' pole has helped a bit. but still have to deal with the on/off switch of it all. Streaming will always be an issue. When I really need to have a stable (mostly stable) connection, I switch over to my phone's hotspot that I have a cell booster (on the same pole as the Stardish) for. It may only give me about 15Mbps, (and only LTE) but the bits are always there. Enough for a zoom or an Andy Sidaris movie when you don't want a drop out.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/15864749683 1.2 Gbps down , overprovisioned to 1.4Gbps. looks about right. 2.5Gbps ports on Cable modem, WAN/LAN ports on router, switch and PC over Cat6 will do that. No Mid split here, yet, so still only 40Mbs up 😠 https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/wiki/knowledgebase/next-generation-internet/#wiki_west_division Still waiting for uncapped sonic.net fiber to get here. 😞 https://www.sonic.com/

Does this make me a bad person?

Eating my words quite quickly, it does look cheaper than the vintage models... it is what it is.

More Laufey / More Tiny Desk

Well Hello Joshua, with your blue note cap..

I thought I might post some of the modifications I have been doing to my Flox Alien vasto. I got fed up with the not so rigid spoil board and so filled in the bottom with 20mmx40mm aluminium extrusion... and replaced the thin t slot and mdf spoilboard with a 30mm thick mdf slab. The result is far more rigit and will take my own weight (60kg) with ease and no detectible flexing. The plan for the spil board is to have m6 threaded inserts on the underside of the board to allow me to screw in work holding clamps/brackets. A 20mm by 20mm grid engraved and a set of 3.175mm holes around the edge so I can insert small pegs to make lining up work with X and Y axis easier. I also got fed up with the cheapo controller. It has no rs485 support so it could not control my spindle vfd. I could not change spindle speed or direction in software. In fact the original unmodified machine could only switch on and off the cheap dc motor it was supplied with and had a potentiometer for manual speed control with no indication or rpms. It has no wifi support and no user interface, is also only 3 axis and completely undocumented. I opted to rip out the controller and put in a rootcnc controller (https://www.rootcnc.com/root-controller-iso-about/) running fluidnc (http://wiki.fluidnc.com/) control software. It took a while to configure fluidnc and re do all the control box wiring. I replaced the 2 pin spindle power socket on the back with a 4 pin to carry rs485 from the controller to the spindle vfd. I also removed the pause and resume buttons and replaced them with sockets for a tool height probe and a 3d probe. While I was at it I replaced the now redundant potentiometer that used to control the voltage on the original 48V spindle output with a fixed voltage divider of 12V so I could run a good quality noctura cooling fan and power diode lasers directly. I also got a cheap minbot labeller and went on a labelling spree. The result is I can store multiple profiles (one for the laser and one for the vfd spindle) in the controller flash, In fact rootcnc and fluidnc is versatile enough and has enough I/O I could run a vfd and laser at the same time if I could find a sensible way to mount both. I can control the spindle speed and direction in software and by using standard S and G3,4 and 5 gcodes, control the machine via the built in web server, usb or wifi and have much less fan noise, power 80W diode lasers directly from the control box and have 2 more axis. The spindle control and a spare axis makes an automatic tool changer such as the rapid change atc https://rapidchangeatc.com/ a viable option. I now have enough expandability that I could add control for a rotary axis, run a pendant or even consider automated tool changes... I have been experimenting with automated tool height measurement and have written some gsender macros to set the tool length offset using the tool height setter I recently purchased. I still have to manually remove and insert and screw down the tools but the aim is that I will then just press a button and the machine will measure the new tool height and Z axis work coordinate so the tip of the tool is at the same physical Z height as the previous tool. I chose the tool height sensor because it is also compatible with the rapid change atc.. Gsender has poor documentation for its macros so I got the source code and reverse engineered the macro language parser. I love open source software, if you can't find the information online you can always find it in the source code. The Z axis mount is too narrow to accept a mounting bracket for an 80mm diameter spindle. So at the moment I am stuck with 65mm spindles which limits me to only er11 collets and a maximum end mill diameter of 6mm. So when I have finished rebuilding the machine I will make a new zaxis mounting plate for 80mm spindle brackets and am looking at buying a 2.2KW er20 spindle with ceramic bearings and better dust sealing. Further in the future I would like to get the rapid change atc which will probably necessitate extending the y or x axis extend the x axis from 420mm useable to around 550mm or so. I'm also thinking about changing to closed loop steppers. happy cnc'ing James

I got my hearing aids! The for realsies ones, the others were demos. I am still on cloud 9.

I was about to post some pictures but we just had a 4.7+ earthquake. I blame Brent...

RIP Mojo Nixon, even though he wanted to Destroy All Lawyers. Can't decide which is worse, dying at 66 or dying on the Outlaw Country Cruise. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/mojo-nixon-elvis-everywhere-singer-dies-66-country-music-cruise-rcna137886