After YALockdown…

Well, it’s now 2021, CoVid-19 is still rampant globally despite the startup of a lot of vaccinations (not yet here in Oz, despite Scottie from Marketing’s blathering). Finally, we got the phone working on VoIP via Newsprout who debugged everything with their upstream provider; part of the problem was the NetComm modem SIP config (incorrectly documented…)

Some Raspberry Pico’s arrived, like Arduino Nano’s on steroids; will get one running soon. Still working on ArduPSU, the analog part has a few issues…

Aaand, we’re back!!

The interwebs were restored after a considerable amount of time. We now have our servers visible to the world again via NewSprout (a great little ISP in Lennox Heads in northern NSW). Still waiting on getting the phones activated VoIP-wise, but the house phone was reconnected to the copper pair in the pit out the front (it was chopped off by the NBN dude back in May, for reasons..) by Telstra, when we raised an issue with the TIO..

Arduino IDE wrinkle

I noticed that upon updating the Arduino IDE to 1.8.13, that the editor.font setting in preferences.txt was being steadfastly ignored by the IDE when running. After some Googling, suggesting that the problem was being looked at by the developers via GitHub. I found that the font I wanted to use, JetBrains Mono, had hinting properties embedded. JetBrains have issued a later font build 1.0.3, which has fixed this issue..Arduino IDE is now back to an easy-to-read editor panel…(was using Geany as an external edtor for a bit..)

Tricky, I managed to leave a word out!

The NBN arrived; we are off the internet..

The NBN arrived on 20 May last at 1130am . We now have no phones, no email, no DNS, now web presence. After a lot of buggerising around trying to get iiNet to fix it, I wrote a post on their FB page, this elecited a response from a young staffer in corporate, who gave it his best shot, but was hampered by a string of porkies from sales, loss of phone porting orders etc.. In the end, I canned our two iiNet accounts, and went to the local Telstra shop,  where the Business Technology Advisor (who appears to have a clue) organised a 4G mobile router which keeps us online enough to to banking etc.. and is working on porting our phone numbers to NBN VoIP and getting our network reconnected again. However, it may take 6-8 weeks..

Watch this space..

My new 3d Printer

I have now gotten a Creality Ender 5 printer; which I have been experimenting with for a couple of weeks. Used nearly a kilo of PLA+ filament already. Quality of prints are very dependent on filament quality; PLA+ (from 3dFillies very good; Cocoon from Aldi, OK, no-name filament that came with the unit, crap).

It is a CoreXY style machine, uses Marlin firmware, has a ‘proprietary’ slicer based on Cura which works moderately well (v. slow to start because Python 2 – and I like Python!). Have resliced some of my OpenSCAD designs and they print quite well. My only reservation is the the Ender 5 doesn’t have autolevelling (yet!)

The Duinotech is still going, needs a cleanup and relevelling. It works quite well with the cocoon filament. The i3 clone was not finished, broken printed parts need to be reprinted and the frame needs stiffening..maybe it could be repurposed as a CNC style PCB mill or laser burner thingie..

 

Social media(=Facebook, etc) is taking over; I really don’t like that..

I followed yet another link from Thingiverse which pointed to yet another blocked Facebook page. Doesn’t seem much point in advertising the link publically if you have have a login to Facebook, etc to access it..

Tried it once, could make no sense of the torrent of irrelevant and rather unpleasant stuff, it then took weeks to flush the crap email from our mail server after I deleted the account (a complex job in itself). I would not go back there without an alias and burnable email account; but Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t like that…

Found another way around the email avalanche and other crap (courtesy of rellies who are up with this sort of platform…

Real soon now…

from a while back (2015!): My 3D printer (RepRap Prusa Mendel i2) is still in bits – but space is being made and I expect to start on it very soon.

much later (now); the Mendel i2 was not very reliable, it may become something else! I am now using a Duinotech TL4036 mini printer to make parts for a Prusa i3 clone which is nearly ready!

Another Year gone…

My main site, gerbilator.org has just undergone a change which one would think be straightforward. I want to avoid copying the side menus and links into every page,; once upon a time, this could be done with ServerSideIncludes in Apache2, but it meant extra apache config and renaming all the affected pages to .shtml. After much to-ing and fro-ing, I found that JQuery can do this relatively easily. I broke out the code that I wanted to appear in every page and put it into a html page of its own, then added a JQuery script to the page’s <head> and a suitable <div> befor the main content in the <body> of the page. If you look at the page-source in your browser, you will see how it was done. My main concern was keeping all the CSS3 markup intact..

 

The CleO 35 has a big sister !

The CleO50 works straight out of the box! The NerO and the RTC from the CleO 35 were plugged in as a quick test.. The Clock Display is at one end of the CleO 50 – which has a built in clock/battery , but I haven’t started on that yet..

The CleO makes a great clock!

I decided to try the retro nixie clock demo program with my CleO; got hold of a DS3231 breakout board and away it goes! I tried it with a DS1307 but the libraries need a bit of reworking..