We own two Epson EcoTank printers and love them.

Thanks.

I’ve been working on getting the wheelchair lift working for about three months. It is an older unit, originally solid in 2013, and has passed through two or three owners. It had been “services” by a “certified” technician recommended by the company several months before I bought it. The controller uses five Schneider industrial relays of the type I used for this controller. Four have 24VDC coils and one has a 110VAC coil. The lower half of the relay socket on R2, the Active Security relay, had failed so that circuit was not working. The “certified” technician who worked on the machine removed the fifth relay, the 110VAC dead-man emergency lighting relay and moved the bottom half wiring from R2 to the R110 socket. He tied the coil power from R2 to R110. This left him short a relay. He took the next relay up, the Priority Relay which gave the lift platform priority over all other inputs and put it in the R110 socket then put the 110VAC relay in the Priority socket using the normally closed contacts as a short.

So…I bought a replacement relay socket and relays and put the machine back the way it was supposed to be. Then I started trying to figure out what the inputs and outputs for the controller were supposed to be. I got to the point where I was sure I had everything right and that the controller wasn’t doing anything. I convinced the company to provide some help and they confirmed that the controller was not working properly. They agreed that building my own was going to be more cost effective than buying a new one.

(Interestingly…when I removed the old one and took at look inside it was a voltage divider on the input, relays on the output, and an ATMEGA128 as the controller. Basically exactly the same thing that I built.

I had the Darlington arrays in my stock. I had to buy the Zener diodes I’m using to reduce the voltage from 24VDC to 3.2VDC.

Building the actual board took about four days. That board had a problem so I built a newer version with some improvements. That took a day.

Yup. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I forgot a couple of wires and had to add them after the fact. I got a bit close to that one with my soldering iron. The insulation is melted right down to the wire but it’s outboard and only used for development so I hope Lemmy QA will give me a pass.

I wanted something smaller than most of the designs I had seen. These are 60mm x 60mm which makes them small enough to go into the Plano parts boxes I use for storage. I also wanted them in various widths with various slot openings. I use resistors and capacitors on paper tape but I also have chips and LEDs on plastic tape which require a wider body and slot. The splitter and slot width was important because I need to be able to clip off the end of the tape and throw them in a drawer without losing parts. I wanted to avoid multi part designs with clips and springs to connect to a rail or spools to hold the tape which make the whole thing wider. The cover was important because I expect to use them individually rather than connected together. Connecting them together with the LEGO pins was a concession to the guys I work with (well, one of the guys) who tends to build a few at a time where I tend to do a lot of prototyping and repairs. The pins mean there are no clips or pins projecting from the individual cartridges.

Yes, I’ve been a LEGO builder for 50 years or so and there is lots of Technics in my office. The LEGO pins are POM and very compliant. I’ve actually considered adding a DIN mount to these using a compliant DIN latch from BUD that I can buy from Digikey or Mouser. Another thing I’ve considered is just building DIN end clips where you have one with an integrated cover and one without. You would clamp those to a DIN rail then sandwich your stack up of cartridges between them. I’m just kicking around ideas right now.

I may ultimately make up a version with a window in the little sloped part so my friend can use a pick and place pen to pick the parts up from there with a bunch of them pinned together for assembly work. I tend to just expose the one or two parts I need and dump them out into the board I’m working on. I’m an electronic slob. I do most of my work under an Olympus SZ40 binocular microscope setup for soldering.

So, nothing major and I could have used any one of the designs available for download but I wanted to tinker with the design and print a bunch of similar but different cartridges that work for me.

Sorry…flow of consciousness.

Tweezers are the bomb. I’ve been doing a lot of repairs to old gaming consoles and hand helds. That actually paid for the new soldering station. Removing the surface mount caps without tweezers is possible but not easy.

I know OpenPnP. We have talked about it but most of the work I do is very small run. I hand solder everything down to 0402s and TQFPs with 0.4 mm pitch in one to three or four units. I’ve considered buying a hand PnP unit and I may at some point. I just upgraded to a new Hakko dual head soldering station which makes hand soldering stupid easy. I’ve probably got a few years of hand soldering in me.

Most of what I do is repairs and rework with a fair amount of prototyping.

For any production runs the guys I work with have PCBWAY do the populating for them.

Thanks. It’s loosely based on a number of designs that I’ve seen online. I wanted to make improvements to meet my needs.

I worked with a woman when I worked for the federal government who was quite unpleasant. She left and went to work for a major contractor. I was on a call with her when several of her people didn’t show up for the call. She was raging and asked me where they were. I told her that I had no idea where her people were. She finally had had enough and demanded that I go find them and get them on the call. I said, “I’m not going to find YOUR people on your call with me, THE CLIENT. I don’t work for you anymore, Diane.” and hung up on her

Has Google considered making their advertising engine better? Allow us to skip every ad. Allow us to block all those fucking cryptocurrency scam ads. Forcing me to watch an ad for a company that I’m not interested in guarantees that I will hate that company and never buy their product even if I need it. I will go out of my way to buy something from a company that hasn’t tried to ram their advertisements down my throat. If ads weren’t so fucking terrible I might agree to watch them.

This is classic right wing “humor”. They get butt hurt because we make fun of them so they think that humor just means hurting the other guys. They try, and fail, and we laugh at them which makes them even more butt hurt.

I was on a call with a bunch of engineers from IBM a couple of weeks ago. I was teaching them how to demonstrate our product (I don’t work for IBM.) After about a week on calls we were chatting and one of the guys told me that he was in the process of building a highly accurate replica of the cockpit of the F16. After a pause of about 5 seconds I said, “You fucking nerd!” which caused everyone on the call including him to burst into laughter.

I embrace every word that the dumpth try to use to slight me. Intellectual? Yes. Progressive? Yes. Woke? Yes. Bring them on. I’m all of those things and I’m proud that I am.

My friend who does most of the design work says I should start with a schematic and parts and then use that to build the board. I need to learn that but I’m an amateur hack when it comes to this stuff and I just brute force the board design. I bought a hobbyist version of Pulsonix so I really should learn how to do it.

I started with the free version of DS PCB. It works very well.

Maybe this year.

Thanks. It was a silly project that just kept getting sillier and sillier until it actually became useful and I replaced it.

These are the shields.

https://lemmy.ca/post/1005016

One and the same.

It’s like a Quebec red light. The first and last 10 seconds don’t count and if it’s less than 20 seconds it’s only a suggestion.

Digikey sells them.

Get ready for some sticker shock.