Planning a mill

This would be for PCBs, and will be a bootstrapped effort.

Build volume of 4″x4″
Three cutter heights with a travel of 3/8″ being plenty
Use a generic (Harbor Freight) rotary tool
Either drive everything directly off an Arduino or through-hole some stepper motor drivers

Have a build plain with mount holes to keep everything in alignment and flat
Build a jig for drilling these mount holes
Have the mount holes be offset slightly so the PCB will be keyed in case I ever need to do a double sided board

Manic

I’m becoming again. In today’s iteration gaming, or at least the majority of it, has become meh. Games that I want and ate on sale aren’t even getting my serious interest.
In Kerbal Space Program I’ve finally managed to do a could intercepts and dockings. Admittedly, my station I’m building looks like a disturbed bacteria of some kind. Probably virulent. I’m starting to envision something much grander though. I might start building that soon. Yeah. I’m looking what I’m seeing in my noggin.
But yeah. It’s one of those timeframes where I just get really punchy. I pretend I don’t know what the triggers are, but I know. GI Joe was wrong, knowing isn’t half the battle. 

Internalize

Theorize
Climatize

Accept
Inspect
Subjec

I don’t know, I want an acronym for what I do internally. My…. displeasure… was raised at work today. I haven’t been so… displeased… in a while.
But now, now its time to change myself, and in changing myself, change my world.
That’s some hippy bullshit right there.

I need to go… shit. There’s a good William Gibson quote on the top of my tongue. The funny thing is that I’m not even using the wire as originally created, but as it’s own beast.

Almost a four day weekend

It was a for day weekend until I volunteered myself when another party came down and asked “who’s working on Friday to do the (redacted) dailies?” I volunteered because I knew I had no strict plans on Friday and I could handle all of it where anyone else would take two people. But still. Maybe mention that we needed coverage before Tuesday afternoon? It’s not like Thanksgiving is a hard holiday to find on a calendar.
Whatever.
Four day weekend (ish).
Phone interface.
Solder fume thing.
Desolder surface mount components. It’s not that I want the components, just the practice.
Start soldering LEDs to the proto board. It looks like they’ll make the jump. Dear Lord those things are tiny. 0603 sounded a lot bigger than what they are. Practice.

Now, to work. Tomorrow I dine in Turkey.

Proto-board

I wonder what whether I could use some proto-board for prescribing my surface mount soldering on building a multiplexed LED array? I obviously couldn’t do just any package, but I think the LEDs would fit maybe?

Poutsgiving

Sweet potato fries, Turkey gravy, mozzarella shreds, cranberry chutney on the side. This is leftovers for early December.

Finally

Managed to do an intercept and recovery in Kerbin. That was way more difficult than it had to be, because me. I think what I kept doing was using both S to go forward and Shift to accelerate. The problem is that when your using RCS (canned air), Shift is up instead. Oops.
So the mill I was thinking about. I’m not a fan of chemicals, mainly, I’m terrible at storage, handling and disposal. With that being said, I’ve been looking at how to fabricate PCB’s at home, and etchant is totes a chemical, no matter what form it takes. But in researching different ways to fabricate PCB’s, I saw that you can also mill them. I have a rotary tool…

Kerbin Rescue

Gah… trying to nail that’s killing me. I think until I’m all pro at it, I’ll need to start saving one I get into orbit do at least I won’t have to start from scratch next time.
Tonight the Wif is at clinical so when I get home it’ll be time to do chores. I can’t rightly make pint glasses when the sink is full of dishes. But Thursday and on? Time to start building my phone’s interface. I’m thinking permanent keyboard across the bottom of the screen in portrait orientation. I might add a rotate button, I might not.add space at the bottom for battery, signal, and notifications as well. That’ll be a start.

Zero or one

I’ve been doing a lot of VBA because Excel, and that definitely didn’t make me happy, but whatever. My code is actually looking decent enough legibility wise, but at the cost of speed because I rock a lot of selects and activates.
Last night though, I had to use JavaScript to mess with some PDFs (thanks for the recommendation Wes), and our just writing work. Finally figured out what the problem was.
VBA starts with one.
JavaScript starts with zero, even when we’re talking document page numbers.
And this has been another adventure of coding with what I have.

As a plus note, I went full NASA in Kerbin on Sunday. I had a satellite orbiting the Mun with a bit of fuel left. I didn’t need the satellite, and I had some fuel, so why not. I put it at a really low and slow descent, keeping at least half of the instrumentation on top and plowed that sucker in.
Temperature readings from the Mun? For free? Check.