Month: November 2018

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A New Tool Part 13

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’ve finally completed the construction of my New Tool!

I believe it’s only appropriate that I write this post on the computer in question, a little Pac-Man themed Raspberry Pi system I’ve named Blinky Pie.

The work this week was actually fairly simple. I stopped by a local hardware store with the Pi and the case to pick up two screws, and the guy who helped me was very knowledgeable. He helped me choose screws that were big enough to hold the board, but not so big as to crack the printed plastic.

Before I did my final assembly, I did a dry run where I taped the camera in place across the top of the dome and down the other side, and it worked pretty well, so well, I only had to add a final piece to keep the camera secured.

I took the camera out to finally install the two heat sinks that came with my Raspberry Pi starter kit, a task my father was happy to help with. After that, I installed its ribbon cable around the back of the board where I could install it with the screws I picked up earlier after making sure the camera was installed correctly. Of note, I have been having a lower rate of failure when installing that thing lately.

While celebrating the final completion of the base hardware for my tool, I ended up exploring some settings on the GUI, specifically the task bar, or as Windows would call it, the Start bar. I found a setting to customise the color, and about a setting for about everything you could think of and double it. The term is called “decision fatigue.” There are so many settings, you can spend, and have to spend an hour or two to get everything looking OCD compliant. One glitch preventing using the “icons only” setting from save space has a workaround of moving the task bar to a side and back again, but that throws a bunch of other settings into chaos, mainly the height of the task bar, and guess who doesn’t have a “restore to defaults” button!

I’ve run multiple tests with the Pi idling in the case before its final installation. I’m pretty confident the case won’t melt. It’s well ventilated by the heat-sinkable chips. I even ran the dry assembly for a few hours, and the plastic around the stock board with out heat sinks was only warm.

Final Question: Besides feline repellent, what other applications can you think of for a Raspberry Pi with a camera?

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A New Tool Part 12

Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am finally done with the paint job. Let’s get started!

I had to give in. Spray paints are just too broad of strokes for the delicate eyes. I ended up recruiting my sister to do them with acrylics. On the plus side, they are a slightly closer shade of blue to the original sprites, which I was going for, anyway. I booted up the Pi after the final bits of paint were dry, and confirmed a clear image from the camera. I snagged My father to clean the whole thing with rubbing alcohol and the two of us applied a clear coat.

As of this writing, I have spent an hour or two working at removing that Elmer’s glue mask. I waited too long, and the mask is too thin. If I ever need to mask off another waffle cone like that again, I’ll spend less time using masking tape beforehand than peeling the glue afterword. The Elmer’s glue trick is only for small details!

The paint job is not as perfect as I’d hoped. The white iris has a little bit of blue in it and there’s a little chip in the paint on the back. A bubble or three have grown in a few places about the surface, and the final irises have brush strokes. Even with all these small flaws, it still looks better finished than it did while stuck in development limbo. Overall, I’d say it’s almost what I wanted.

As it stands now, I have most of the glue off, but the rest is either splitting on me or stubbornly sticking to the printed plastic. Fortunately, the holes I taped off remained taped off through the whole ordeal so I didn’t have to go through and find a hook to get blobs of glue out of all the deep crevices.

Looking forward, I hope I don’t need to use an Internet connection to recognize a cat. I honestly don’t know how long it will take to finish with the software side of things, but I will need to first make a “Hello World” program to debug my coding setup. Come to think of it, I likely only have one more “A New Tool” post, as it’s just going to be attaching the board and any little details that pop up.

Final Question: have you ever had a long project finally approach its completion date after crawling along for way too long?

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A New Tool Part 11

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m reporting the trickle of progress on the Pac Man Ghost Pi case. Let’s get started!

When last I left off, the paint needed a little sanding to get rid of brush strokes. I used 1000 grit sandpaper on it, but I ended up smearing the blue touch up paint onto the white iris. Additional sanding to get the smudges and strokes off the white rubbed straight down to the red plastic.

I ended up having to repaint the whole thing. Dealing with paint on this project has been a two-person affair, and my father has been quite busy any time I’ve been thinking on the project, and time to dry just compounds the problem.

The first layer to be redone was the biggest, red body of the ghost. As a pro-tip, my father showed me how he peeled back the masking on the eyes a little to get that bit more of coverage. From a diagram I saw some months ago, I believe that will help avoid a hard line in the final product after all the tape comes up and everything.

The second layer was the whites of the eyes. Nothing much special happened here, except the eye holes were covered with tape this time. To my dismay, my father explained the correct tool for the job if I wanted to spray the eyes on. It turns out an Air Brush is a lot more handy than a full spray can, but he did figure out why it didn’t work so well the first round of touch ups.

The solvents in spray paint evaporate quickly, so he maximized the amount of solvent by spraying upside down to get some extra propellant, as well as use some mineral spirits to help combat premature paint clumping.

As it stands now, there was a little bit of an accident with the blue spilling into white territory. Without an Air Brush, it looks like I will just have to endure a few brush strokes on an imperfect surface. At least the clear coat will still protect the looks it does get in the end. The whole thing is already looking awesome, but my dream of it looking absolutely perfect is something that will need to wait for a bit more experience.

Final Question: Have you ever wondered why you couldn’t do something, only to realize you don’t have the best tool for the task?

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Headphone Repair?

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to fix a pair of headphones that popped a joint while I was off on vacation this week. Let’s get started!

I’ve had this set of headphones for a while now, and I’m not always the most careful with my technology. I often leave them on top of my cluttered desk or computer tower, and the household cats often pilgrimage to the window behind my desk. Be it from my cat or my klutz, the headphones often would wind up falling to the floor, and I would count my blessing when they still worked each time they tumbled.

Typically, I’ve had headphones fail at the micro-USB connection from the wire to the headset. This time, I stuffed them in a backpack along with a couple other laptops and a keyboard. Sometime between home and our second hotel, one of the sides had popped out, likely when a dog crate shifted into the backpack momentarily. I tried to push the piece back together, but I was afraid of damaging it, partly because we’d had the opposite problem happen to one of our dogs’ Gentle Leaders (a training tool worn on the dog’s head).

With the lack of enough progress on the Pi case I’ve spent months slugging on about, I noted the lack of broken-looking individual parts on my headphones and decided it wouldn’t hurt to disassemble the hypermobile joint and put the whole thing back together correctly.

I started by removing the four… three of the screws holding what was left of the wayward side together. The forth one was a little stubborn, but it eventually came out. The piece itself had a little more resistance, so my father and I coaxed it out gently.

Exploring the inside was a little disappointing. The first sign this wouldn’t be a successful mission was the tweaked, plastic fingers meant to hold onto a grooved peg (helpful for) earpiece rotation. Additional bad news came when I spotted an actual crack in one of the brackets.

For the purposes of the blog, I decided to pull the other piece off for comparison. Remember all those drops? The teeth on the “good” removed piece were well on their way to deforming in the exact same way. The backpack getting crushed must have affected only the one side and was either enough to finish the job or do it from scratch.

Either way, I won’t be able to repair them as I’d hoped. I wouldn’t trust my 3D printer with something so delicate, and even if I did, I don’t have a pattern or a way to scan the “good” piece (so it can be mirrored). The plan is to screw the pieces back where they go and either cache in on a warranty or save them for parts.

Final Question: Have you ever had to back out of a repair project when its apparent difficulty level spiked?

 

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