Good to hear things are working out as best they can.
I broke my scapula once ~December 21st. So I know what kind of fiasco it can be at the hospital and getting specialist treatment this time of year. By the time someone could schedule surgery, I was so far recovered that I opted out of operating. I had like 40% of the shoulder socket part of the scapula floating too.
Stay positive, and Happy holidays!
You doing alright Don? How is your brother?
I think it has a lot to do with how each of us are raised, but as a child, getting told to ‘grow up’ or when you grow up… along with concepts like don’t talk to strangers alone etc., creates this subtle perception of an age transition. I’ve come to view that bias as a subtle prejudice in a way. I think it is a common fallacy most humans around me seem to posses but seem largely unaware that it exists.
This age bias is at the heart of a lack of value placed on the young and many social expectations. It could even be a major factor in why population decline is happening in the west.
Someone wrote recently that academia is largely about forming good ideas at a young age, then spending decades trying to prove their merits and defend them. As a society we undervalue the best ideas of youth, we do not value youth or respect their autonomy and fundamental needs to thrive.
I find that funny, because I am only wearing a mask of age and am fully aware that I am still the same curious child at heart. I kept waiting for the day I would feel all growed up but that day never came, and I live my life blindly doing the best I can with the opportunities I have available.
The limited scope of human attention and the ineptitude it creates in governance is impossible for a mortal being to fix in our finite existence. We will eventually formulate an AGI that can address this primal flaw, but defining who or what is fixing the issue becomes an unsolvable philosophical paradox in the idealized fantasy world of philosophical definition.
Radio is light at a different frequency, because transparency is weird.
It breaks everything if an electron can’t change levels and release a photon. Randomly picking one fixated target… fusing hydrogen into helium no longer emits photons and without light pressure to counteract gravity the Sun goes straight to something like a tiny white dwarf.
You can’t really say photons only go pow at X frequency and not Y or Z. Photon don’t care how you spank it into action. High energy, low energy; photon just wants to fly at the speed of causality.
Use https://linux-hardware.org/ to check stuff. Ask questions with the links if you do not understand the reports. Everything you can build with has a proprietary bootloader, even the System76 stuff is proprietary.
I use Graphene. I like the Auditor app and the ability to verify that the ROM is unaltered because you can never trust an orphan kernel like all mobile devices. If I ever give up possession of my device, I can verify if it was altered. I also have a way to wipe the device on locked login with no indication that the ROM is being wiped as provided by Graphene.
That’s interesting, but most SD cards are based on the old Intel 8051 microcontroller running in the background. While Bill Mensch is behind Western Digital and the 6502, which is the processor typically in the background of hard drives.
I get my news from here. If it is really important it will bleed into the periphery to places like this. My physical disability with social isolation makes this a best self health situation. The news is not real news any more, it does nothing to inform. It was changed to “news as entertainment” long ago.
This is freedom. Stuff here is scraped like everywhere on the public internet, but no one is watching your dwell times and farming your every move, or experimenting on you to achieve targeted viewer retention statistics. The demographic here seems in flux at the moment. Reddit was like that too though. This is usually good book reading season for most social media and here is no exception. Lots of closed minded people and negativity pop up in my feed, but you can’t fix stupid and that is everywhere.
Good luck. I hope your brother gets good treatment and everything works out for the better Don.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
RepRap is the original place where the 3d printing hobby got started. It has a wealth of info about DIY robotics and how to do more than just buying something.
deleted by creator
https://invent.kde.org/graphics/okular
I like Okular’s ability to scan and convert tabled data in PDFs too. There is an option to turn off DRM nonsense. That can do page edits and stuff. If you want to create pages with images you need an office suite.
Anyone have shortcuts for modeling complex over center, compliance mechanisms, and bistable auxetic materials? I’m using FreeCAD and trying to just use rough sketches and trial and error to create a bending tube structure that 3d prints vertically but then bends into place like a pop-tube kid’s toy, but only on one side of an otherwise vase mode print design. I’m really pushing the limits of what FreeCAD can loft before edges go wonky and the Part Design workflow is no longer sufficient. I can make a compliant spring easily, but a bistable bend in a tube is at the edge of my learning curve.
Cool! I love that you are engaged on my level. Today I had a new idea. I thought of the pop-tube kid’s toys randomly.
I was combining that with an idea I had yesterday. Yesterday, I properly measured my ear after I glued up a print and actually tested it by listening to music for a few hours.
So first off, my empirical hypothesis is that the sealing properties and the air volume are the primary factors that determine the perception of frequency response. The design pictured in this post adds a little bit of volume overall compared to the original. It doesn’t have quite the same bass response but it adds a lot of crisp clarity in the ~200Hz+ range. I think this is just due to the spacial volume.
After measuring my ear and looking at the CAD and print, my first prototype adds enough fore to aft clearance around my ear. It added around 3mm of extra depth. This clears my ear depth by about 1.7mm too far and is primarily from designing in a stiffer material than the original pad. The original pad touches my ear in several places which gets hot and annoying, especially in the summer.
So I started thinking about how I can alter the print to shape it and completely clear all of my ear. The printed pad is already cooler, but adding full clearance could make it even more comfortable. I was perplexed about how to accomplish this though because it would likely require me to replace the base plate if I am going to shape the print further. My present design is just a 9mm single instance of the tube shape with the pattern repeated and a little underlap sleeve added at the end. What I really need is to vary the spacing of each conforming section to control where and how each bend happens. This would likely make the unsolved clasping connector issue worse.
The pop-tube idea might solve my problem though. I don’t need to think about the bend joint like a spring. I need to think of it like a bistable switch and design the bends to snap into shape. I’m still mentally sorting out the idea before trying to design it. I’m essentially decoupling the bending from the shape itself. The challenge is how to do this in a continuous print without gaps in a vase-mode like mindset. I’m adamant on the vase-mode approach because I think I can better tune the pad conforming behavior based solely on single wall extrusion properties. Also, TPU is always more ugly for me if I allow z-hops and travel.
Anyways, if I introduce this disconnected level of complexity to my next iteration, I can likely also add something like a recess for glasses too. I have the same issue with my reading glasses and just use ear buds instead when I need them.
I also want to thin all of the walls of the tube and use a mathematical spreadsheet based pattern to stiffen some sections, but that is a secondary objective. My next step is to make a bistable bending action. I’ll see if I can make it tunable for a 4 corner topology so that it can work for oval and rectangular designs – not that you should wait or anything like that. I’m fundamentally unstable and unreliable due to my physical disability. Like yesterday was my big cooking day for 2 weeks of food and I’m mostly recovering so far today. I don’t know if my back will settle down enough for me to spend competent time designing today, but maybe after lunch and Adderall I’ll get an hour or two to mess around if I lay on a heating pad.
A tablet is mostly battery. If you can take it apart, do so and just bend it back in place.
Inside of most lithium batteries, it is basically a long set of ribbons that form a stack. They are wet like a clay and kinda oily (but still contained) on a ribbon like paper that is the width of the battery case/pocket. Then there are some layers of thin plastic that insulate the lithium ribbon.
It is not impossible that damage could occur to the center of a cell, but it is less likely unless the dent is sharp. The primary place that a cell gets damaged and where it causes problems is in the ends of the roll. If the end of the roll gets mashed, it is much more likely that layers can shorted out.
The thing to keep in mind is that something like a gasoline powered car uses a fuel mix of around 14 parts of air to 1 part of fuel. That means the atmosphere of Earth is providing a lot of your fuel requirements and it makes gasoline effectively like a super dense energy source. A lithium battery is proving all of the total energy in a single container. You don’t get to remove oxygen from the equation if things go south. You need a way to contain the situation if things go wrong.
Over discharging reduces the life and maybe some capacity, but the main issue is if it will charge at all. Most lithium batteries have a specification for charging them from fully discharged, but not all charge controllers implement the circuit block that is required. All lithium chargers (should) have a duel mode where it is current limited then voltage limited. The fully discharged state requires a very low current trickle charge until the cell hits a certain voltage before raising the current.
The main concern is localized thermal run away. If it starts getting unusually hot or expanding, you’re likely in trouble.
I’ve built robots and cat toys with lithium batteries and things like battle bots have them too. If you’re always supervising and have a container and a plan if things go wrong, you can be fine. What you can’t do is charge overnight or leave it unsupervised at all.