Adventures of a Tech, avonturen van een techneut

We visited Franz yesterday at took a look at his operation. San even made nice video and put it here :  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIaBfVBiNN8 The printer selected was the Prusa i3. I will post updates on how it works and the assembling of the machine. Update 8/9/2013 It works at last at last... Some pictures of the construction After a build that took about 30 hours of soldering, improvising and tweaking, including getting all the software set up correctly.

The Raspberry PI or R-pi from  http://www.raspberrypi.org/  is well known these days. It is not an accident that I have one, I have been doing Linux stuff since 1991, and professionally since 1996 I can not skip over these developments, have to keep up with the new kids. :-) Times have changed, hardware has become very affordable, everybody knows the Arduino , Raspberry Pi and Beagle-Bone-Black (BBB). Not everybody knows the stuff that  http://www.acmesystems.it/  aka Acme-Systems and  https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO  aka  Olimex make, so I will endorse them here. Since I am an engineer I expect to connect switches and relays to the boards and some documentation with products, not so with the " PiFace Digital " board, it comes without serious documentation, not a even the schematic. All links on their blog point nowhere. People asked them many times, yet nowhere is the schematic to be found. I finally found some info after hours of google-work, someone made a c

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year 2013 to date. Temperatures reached 36 degrees C. Normal value for this time of year is about 24 degrees (according to KNMI). My wife's car, a Hyundai Getz had a broken AC unit and I decided to fix it.  The AC light lit up just like normal but the clutch to the compressor did not kick in. After spending hours googling for schematics and diagrams, reading forums I found out why. The system is protected by a clever pressure switch, (conveniently located behind the glove compartment) It disables the clutch when pressure is too high or too low. After checking all things electrical, fuses, sensors, the clutch, the fans and switches I was out of options, I could not measure the pressure in the system. I visited a local car repair shop specialized in Airco systems, Rene van de Louw, st. Oedenrodeseweg 40, and he quickly noticed that I had a leak in my condenser. How? He put some pressure on the system with nitrogen and I could hear a hissing so