Longs Motor DM542A idle current bug

Stepper motor drivers like this one usually have a jumper (that's usually SW4) that sets idle current.  So if you haven't sent any pulses in a while, rather than cooking your stepper by holding full current, it'll cut it down to half current:

But I just noticed a bug on my Longs Motor DM542A: when it first powers on, it comes on at full current (the whole unit drawing about 1.3A at 32V) and stays there.  But if I move that axis (send the driver some pulses), then after I'm done it drops down to about 630mA.

So to work around this issue, make sure you move your steppers a little after powerup so that the half-current mode kicks in.

Also, I discovered that the half-current mode seems to actually be "half power" mode -- the current only goes down to about 70% of full, rather than 50%.

BTW, I checked this behavior against a stpperonline DM556S, and it does the opposite: it draws very little power until it gets its first step pulses, then moves up to half current.

Teardown: Miller RFCS RJ45 tig welding foot pedal

[Gallery with hi-res versions of the photos shown here]

Tig welding pedals are expensive, mostly over $100.  Miller wants $150 for the RFCS-RJ45 pedal that goes with the Multimatic 215, and $600 for their wireless pedal.  So I'm not the first person to wonder whether something cheaper like a musician's expression pedal might work just as well.

The RFCS-RJ45 is unusual in using an RJ45 connector instead of the more common 14-pin connector.  RJ45 is less rugged but very common, and one nice feature of the RFCS-RJ45 is an RJ45 socket inside the pedal, so that the cable can be replaced with a standard ethernet cable using just a screwdriver.

The pinout for the RJ45 is given on page 15 of this Diversion 165/180 manual, and is the same for the Multimatic 215.  Note that in that manual, pins 6 and 5 are listed out of order.  In order, the nominal pinout is:

1. +10VDC supply for foot pedal position
2. 0-10V foot pedal position
3. common for foot pedal
4. +15VDC supply for contactor control switch
5. foot control select, to be tied to pin 7.  (Seems to do nothing on multimatic 215)
6. contactor control, enable by tying to pin 4
7. chassis common
8. no connection

So the simplest pedal we might imagine would be, say, a 1K potentiometer on pins 1-3 for current control, and a switch connecting pins 6 and 4 to start welding.

Miller did something more interesting than that, though, as we can see when we look inside.  No moving parts!

Theory of operation:

Potentiometers can be finicky and unreliable over time, as everyone knows who's ever owned  a stereo with a scratchy volume knob.  And in fact audiophiles often pay over $100 for really high quality pots.  

So miller opted instead to use a hall effect sensor instead.  The screw you can see on the underside of the lid holds a little magnet, and U3, the little 3-pin IC between the springs, is labeled 324, so it's probably this hall effect sensor.

Also of note is the pic 16f689 microcontroller the pair of chips marked VBHI, which are probably these op amps, and U5 marked D2B, which is probably this 8-bit DAC.

So I'm betting one op amp cleans up the signal from the hall effect sensor, feeds it to the pic which applies factory calibration data, and then uses the DAC to generate the simulated potentiometer output, which is then scaled up to the 0-10V range by the second op amp.

Signals:

I sacrificed an ethernet cable and used a breadboard to break out the 8 lines.  I measured voltage and current on each pin of the RJ45. 

12-15mA flows from pin 1 to pin 3, so the board seems to be using the 10V supply to power itself.

Pin 2 has the 0-10V signal reporting foot position.  Mine doesn't pull quite all the way to 10V, but it gets pretty close.

I was a bit surprised to only read 40-100uA of current flowing through pin 2.  Since welding is so electrically noisy, I figured they might draw several milliamps from the sense line to drown out any picked up noise.  But I also imagine there are plenty of pedals floating around the market that use high resistance pots which would sag under that load, so 100uA seems to be the compromise they chose.

Pin 4 does indeed have around 15V on it, with no observable current flowing through it.

Pin 5 doesn't seem to do anything on the multimatic 215.

According to the manual, pin 6 should get tied to the 15V on pin 4 to enable the contactor, but my RFCS-RJ45 only pulls up to about 9.8V when I press the pedal.  Not too surprising; they were already working with 10V and didn't want to get the 15V rail involved unnecessarily.  I measured 650uA flowing through this pin when the switch was pressed.

Nothing of interest on pins 7 or 8.

Substituting a musician's expression pedal

So can we swap in a musician's cheap Moog EP3 expression pedal and save some cash?  Two potential issues:

1. You need to control the contactor somehow.  One option would be to use a switch separate from the foot pedal, and musician gear has plenty of those.  In such a setup, your foot has to find the switch, get back to the pedal for current control, then find the switch again to shut off the arc.  (And don't bump the switch on by accident, because now you've got a torch that's hot until you hit the switch again).  But if you want the traditional single action, you'd need to, say, rig up a switch to the expression pedal for contactor control.

2. A brief search suggests that expression pedals use 10-25k ohm pots.  A 10k pot across 10V flows 1000uA, so the 40-100uA drawn by the welder is enough to cause some sag, but you'd probably get away with it.  25k might be pushing it.  Also, I see some reports that the EP3 pedal in particular has a logarithmic response, whereas you probably want linear for welding.

Home made cold slab ice cream

Executive summary: With an 11 pound slab of aluminum chilled in my freezer overnight, I can make one small 30g serving of ice cream.  Other promising avenues include brine instead of aluminum, and dry ice + alcohol (which gets waaaay colder than your freezer).

----

I was daydreaming about 3D ice printers, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make Cold Stone style ice cream if I put a big chunk of metal in the freezer.

My first thought was to use steel, but aluminum turns out to have almost twice the specific heat of steel and about 4 times the thermal conductivity.  So for a given weight it can absorb more heat, and do it faster.

I had an 11 pound hunk of 4"x4"x12" aluminum left over from the rotary mill, so I cleaned it up and put it in the freezer for a few hours.

The tape was to help me more accurately measure the temperature with an infrared temperature gun, but I think a contact thermometer would be better.

I used a 1:1:1 mixture of cream, sweetened condensed milk and fresh strawberries.  I'm not sure how much the cream adds to the experience, so I think it'd be worth trying just sweetened condensed milk + strawberries.

But even after lots of waiting and pushing it around on the plate, it never quite froze (but read on!).

Doing the math: should we expect it to work?

Later it occurred to me to work out the heat of fusion of the ice cream and see how that compares to the heat required to take the plate from my freezer's ~0F to 32F.  Wolfram Alpha tells me that "specific heat of aluminum * 11 pounds * 15 K difference" takes 67,700J, whereas 100g of water (~5.5 moles) needs to lose about 30kJ to freeze.  So that says my big chunk of aluminum should be able to absorb 2x as much energy as I need to freeze a small serving of ice cream, but that's assuming it starts at 0F and doesn't count any other losses (like ingredients that need to be cooled down to 32F, and absorbing ambient heat from my kitchen).

So I'll give it another go with the plate freezing overnight, but I suspect I'd need to start out colder than 0F to really make it work.  

And that makes me think this guy's clever solution of dry ice (-109F) cooling a griddle through an interface of liquid alcohol is probably a better solution.

Take 2:

On second thought, I think my IR thermometer may have been telling me something useful.  On my first attempt, it claimed the plate was only down to about 20F.  Leaving it in the freezer overnight and turning down the thermostat a bit, the plate got down to under 10F, and I made my first successful batch:

One spoonful of cream, one spoonful of sweetened condensed milk, and one spoonful of strawberries came out to about 30g.

Still marginal:

I tried a second serving right after the first, but it wouldn't freeze.  So 30g seems to be about the limit for this plate at this temperature.  I'm not sure how much of that is due to the ingredients warming up, the plate warming up as a whole, or the first batch putting too much heat into the surface of the plate (and it not being able to dissipate quickly enough into the core).

I pulled out the Flir One to see if I could sense one face of the plate being warmer than the others.  Aluminum tends to reflect thermal IR, and in the video below you can see it acting like a mirror:

Mostly it's reflecting heat from the rest of the room and the cold towel it's sitting on.  You can see some fingerprints after I touched it, and I'm not sure if that's something to do with condensation or with giving it more heat to emit, such that it's noticeable over the reflection.

To combat emissivity issues, I put a strip of tape around the four sides, since the tape won't reflect LWIR like the aluminum does.  Unfortunately, I only did this test after rinsing off the plate in the sink, which seems to have warmed it up (or at least the outer region of the plate) quite a lot and overwhelmed any evidence left from the ice cream session.

But based on earlier photos like this one, I'd guess that the heat gain is more uniform than localized.  (And I think this photo shows less reflection than the video because there was icy condensation on the plate at that time).  Maybe somebody with a better background in thermals could comment with a back-of-envelope calculation on how fast we'd expect the heat to dissipate into the core of the plate.

Saltwater instead of aluminum?

Also note Damien's suggestion below about using brine as a cold source.  Looks like a salt water solution above 33% freezes to -6F, so it gets cold enough for us.  And looks like its heat capacity is about 3300 J/(kg * K) compared to Aluminum's 910 J/(kg * K).  So it holds over 3x as much cold by weight (and since it's lighter, it has a smaller advantage by volume as Damien cites).

Weirdly though, for thermal conductivity, aluminum is reported as 205 W/(m*K) and brine says it's around 0.4 -- that's a 500x difference!  I expected completely the opposite, since liquids have natural convection and good thermal interfaces to neighboring materials.  So maybe the way they test thermal conductivity somehow controls for those factors, because I'd certainly expect putting my hand in freezing brine to be at least as chilling as putting it on a slab of aluminum.

Of course salt water is also way cheaper than aluminum.  So a thin hollow vessel, say, a box made out of thin stainless steel plate, ought to be cheaper and more effective by weight, assuming my intuition is right about brine's conductivity.  The most annoying part might be keeping the box sealed and avoiding bubbles, since we want to freeze our cream on the top surface of the box, and air bubbles won't conduct heat very well at all.

While we're on the topic, normal water ice also has better heat capacity than aluminum by weight, and like brine is listed as having less than 1% of aluminum's conductivity.  But it's easier for me to believe that solid ice could be a much worse heat conductor than solid aluminum.  So I wouldn't expect a block of ice at 0F to work as well as an aluminum slab or liquid brine.

One more thought on brine: rather than chilling it in a freezer overnight, you could also apply salt to ice traditional ice cream makers do.

Anyone got an answer to the mystery of low brine conductivity?

California Air Tools sucks

I bought this California Air Tools CAT-4620AC air compressor over a more respected brand like Makita because it's supposed to be so quiet. They claim it's only 70dB, about the level of a spoken conversation.

Well, it's not.  It's as loud as my existing compressor that's rated over 90dB.  Being 20dB louder than claimed isn't an accident.  I actually like that it has an aluminum tank, and I might have even bought it for that reason alone, but lying about noise level really ticks me off.

Compile NVidia Jetson TX1 kernel on device

There are lots of threads about problems compiling new kernels for their Jetson TX1 boards.  A lot of the issues seem to be related to the cross compilation environment.

The TX1 is pretty beefy, so I figure it can compile its own kernel.  I installed an SSD to give me enough disk space, then copied the source_sync.sh script from the Jetpack installation to the device.  I had it download the 'tegra-l4t-r24.2.1' tag which is currently the latest version.

I copied over the .config file from /usr/src/linux-headers-3.10.96-tegra/ to my kernel/ directory to start with the stock kernel config.  Then I ran make menuconfig to set the additional modules I wanted.

Alas, when I tried to compile with make -j6 zImage, I got errors like this:

  VDSO32C arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32/vgettimeofday.o
/bin/sh: 1: -Wp,-MD,arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32/.vgettimeofday.o.d: not found
/mnt/ocz_ssd/leopard/kernel/arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32/Makefile:40: recipe for target 'arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32/vgettimeofday.o' failed
make[2]: *** [arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32/vgettimeofday.o] Error 127
scripts/Makefile.build:455: recipe for target 'arch/arm64/kernel/vdso32' failed

Apparently it has something to do with backward compatibility to 32-bit ARM, which I don't even care about.   To get around that, I installed the 32-bit toolchain with 'sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf', then export CROSS32CC=arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc

The next issue was this:

drivers/platform/tegra/tegra21_clocks.c: In function ‘tegra21_cpu_clk_init’:
drivers/platform/tegra/tegra21_clocks.c:1064:31: error: logical not is only applied to the left hand side of comparison [-Werror=logical-not-parentheses]
  c->state = (!is_lp_cluster() == (c->u.cpu.mode == MODE_G)) ? ON : OFF;

That was fixed with an extra set of parentheses:

  c->state = ((!is_lp_cluster()) == (c->u.cpu.mode == MODE_G)) ? ON : OFF;

That seems to do it.  I could then make -j6 zImage as well as Image, modules and (sudo) modules_install, then copy the zImage and Image to /boot.

Brass hammer from hex bar stock

My friend likes to make wooden mallets:

So I thought he might get a kick out of making one with a brass head.  Here's the head so far.  (he's still thinking about what to do for a handle).

This much 1.5 inch hex bar stock cost me about $50 on ebay, enough to make two heads:

The bar was too big to fit through the headstock on the lathe, so on the mill I clamped it sideways and faced the ends, indicated it vertical (overkill), used the edge finder to find the center, then center drilled both ends:

I tapered a piece of scrap steel rod in the chuck to make a dead center.  That let me turn the piece "between centers", which is a lot more accurate than clamping the bar in the 3-jaw chuck.

I was inspired by this brass hammer, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to use the same shape for the head.  I decided on a taper, and tried several different variants.  Because of the center hole, I had to discard the first half inch or so of stock, so it was a great place to experiment.  Here's a 20 degree taper:

Collar grooves look nice but ultimately I kept it really simple:

This profile was really tempting as well: flat / taper / flat leaves a sort of brickish look that's very hammer-like:

In the end, a 10 degree taper at each end was all I wanted.  It produces a beautiful parabola shape and emphasizes the intrinsic beauty of brass.

I did a pass all the way across to cut off the corners (which were a little banged up), and should have gone a little deeper since there were still a few blemishes.  I didn't notice them until I had already cut off the piece, so I couldn't put it back between centers, and I don't trust the 3-jaw chuck to hold it true, so I didn't have an easy way to clean up the corners later.

Here you can see the dimple I put in the very center of the head to make it easy to put whatever kind of hole my friend decides to use for attaching the handle.

I also rounded off the round edge of each face of the hammer so that it doesn't immediately mushroom when used on a flat surface.  But really, this hammer is more decorative than useful; it's several pounds, so it's not great for delicate work, and the whole point of a brass hammer is to get dinged up instead of the steel part you're trying to nudge.

NVidia Jetson TX1 raw bayer frames via v4l2 via /dev/video0

The NVidia Jetson TX1 dev kit comes with a 5MP camera and a bewildering array of different libraries for accessing it.  One of the routes is using v4l2 through the /dev/video0 device.  This route only offers raw bayer data, rather than the more usual YUV-style formats.  Also it only supports V4L2_MEMORY_MMAP, not V4L2_MEMORY_USERPTR or read()ing from /dev/video0.

If you 'sudo apt-get install v4l-utils' you can use this to capture a frame from the camera:

v4l2-ctl --stream-mmap --stream-to=foo.raw --stream-count=1

foo.raw is 10077696 bytes, 2 bytes for each of the 2592x1944 pixels.  If you want to write your own code to grab frames like this, this capture example gets you most of the way there, but you need to request the V4L2_PIX_FMT_SRGGB10 (raw bayer) format instead of the default.  So change init_device to be like this:

 static void init_device(void)  
 {  
  struct v4l2_format format = {0};  
  format.type = V4L2_BUF_TYPE_VIDEO_CAPTURE;  
  format.fmt.pix.width = 2592;  
  format.fmt.pix.height = 1944;  
  format.fmt.pix.pixelformat = V4L2_PIX_FMT_SRGGB10;  
  format.fmt.pix.field = V4L2_FIELD_NONE;  
  int retval = xioctl(fd, VIDIOC_S_FMT, &format);  
  if (retval == -1) { perror("Setting format\n"); exit(3); }  
   
  if (io != IO_METHOD_MMAP) {  
   printf("Sorry, Jetson TX1 v4l2 only supports mmap\n");  
   exit(4);  
  }  
   
  init_mmap();  
 }