Keith's World

June flew by... I haven't been painting much, but I did get some stuff primed for painting. My sister came for a visit and we stayed really busy the whole time she was here. But I did manage to get one project done...

I made a RaspberryPi Echo Dot clone.... and it works, just like the Amazon Echo Dot. Keep in mind, if you had to buy everything, you could probably gotten 2 dots. BUT, what fun would that be and I can extend it to use the GPIO on the RPi. The only thing I had to buy was as usb microphone. - I had everything else on hand.

You can find a walk through on Lifehacker. I did mine as a part of a stackskills course, The 2018 Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi. It was $9.99 and covers a lot of ground for the price, from webservers to camera servers, but the final project is to build an Echo Dot clone. Now I need to learn how to set up skills.

I plan on taking some photos and doing a little write up on it. I am just not quite there yet.

ttfn,

Keith

I finally got my Prusa i3 Mk2.5 all sorted. They released a new firmware/software update (you can get it here). I also did a factory reset and after the firmware update. She is printing nicely again. Another tip is to preview your print. Things that look good on one screen may not look so good after slicing. 

Target started carrying the Google AIY projects (voice and vision kits). I picked up the Google Voice AIY kit. It was $49.99 and included the RasberryPi Zero... Not too bad. It only took about 30 minutes to build, but over an hour to get it to finally work. But, following directions helps! Now I want to see what I can do with it, besides pressing a buttion and asking a question. I need to write this one up... 

I got back to work on my old quadcopter. It was having issues, very unstable. I finally sorted it out to a bad ESC. It would not calibrate, the other 3 would. And, I finally got it to fail, though it was flying at the time and I broke an arm... no biggie as it was a 3d printed frame. So, I started working again on my FPV frame. I pretty much had it together, I just needed to finish a few tweaks. Again, it is 3d printed - but for some reason, I cannot locate the files or web reference right now. Once I find it I will post it.

I wanted to do a little write up on it as well as this is my first FPV quad. So, do not expect perfection or for it to last long. I expect to crash it, sooner rather than later. I need to find some goggles that work with glasses, or some reading glasses that will fit inside my goggles. I can see, just not too clearly. I may be able to find some readers that are narrow enough to fit inside the goggles I have. We will see.

Lots more to come...

TTFN

Keith

First, my Prusa i3 started printing like crap... I finally figured out what caused it. Don't know how to fix it yet, but I am getting there. Apparently, when using Repetier Host and slicing with the Prusa Slicer, it drops some layers. I was thinking it was due to a clog, but no... you can see it on the slicer preview. If I slice it the just the slicer and save the gcode, I can dump it into Repetier and it works just fine... Go figure. EDIT: Well, the slicing issue was due to a problem with the model. I repaired it and it sliced properly. Another issue was with the new PINDA probe. It now has a thermistor to compensate for temperature. Well, if it is not up to a certain temp BEFORE it start the mesh leveling, lets just say it prints a bit high. Insert the code "M860 S35" to the start code to wait for the probe to reach 35C before mesh leveling. Seems to have worked. I will post more later on it.

Second thing... I recently rebuilt this site, mostly from scratch, lots of cutting and pasting. But last week another site of mine, cthulhu.in-anchorage-ak.net, pooched... just like this one. I was beginning to think I needed to find a new host. After a nasty gram to support, they came back with the fix. I had upgraded my PHP version on the hosting control panel. Since this the old site was running a really old version of CMS Made Simple, it could not handle the newer PHP version. Why it took a couple of weeks to decide that, I don't know. BUT, it did allow me to go back and upgrade everything from version 1.12 to 2.2.7. Then I had to upgrade the templates... EDIT: update to that site to come...

There you have it. Two issues, one week. One sorted, one not. I now need to get motivated and start putting up some new content on the other site. We will see how it goes.

ttfn,

Keith