Engineer Porn

How not to use a drill press

Jeff Wurzbach — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 05:00:24 +0000

My friend Chris and I are making some tutorial videos on the use of some basic machine tools. The photo shows just about everything I could think of that a person could do to endanger themselves while using a drill press.

To be very clear: THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SHOULD DRESS WHILE USING A DRILL PRESS OR OTHER MACHINE TOOLS.

I am intentionally doing a number of things wrong.

Known Safety Infractions

No safety glasses
Work piece is not clamped properly
Wearing a tie
Long sleeves not rolled up and out of the way
Long side of work piece is situated such that if the drill binds, it will swing into my torso, not the column.

I’m sure there’s something else I am doing wrong in the picture, but it escapes me at the moment.

The drill press was off when we took this photo.

New Camera!!

Jeff Wurzbach — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:00:58 +0000

I bought a new camera recently for a photography class that I am taking. Below are some images I’ve shot with the camera, around UCSD, home, and my general day-to-day life.

Please email me if you would like the reuse them for any reason.

Grounding

Jeff Wurzbach — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 08:01:45 +0000

The importance of grounding is becoming more and more apparent to me as I progress through my schooling and projects. I’d like to write a tutorial on grounding for beginners to help tame entry into a complex set of rules, theory, and practices. Sadly, I don’t have time to do write a proper tutorial, so I’m going to put some links/references to other sites that have helped me, directly or indirectly learn about grounding, for the time being.

http://www.edaboard.com/thread49697.html
http://www.hottconsultants.com/techtips/split-gnd-plane.html
Circuit Cellar, November 2010

WordPress Updated

Jeff Wurzbach — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:39:58 +0000

I applied the WP 3.0.5 release tonight. I am still updating my plug-ins. I had to apply the update manually due to undetermined issues with my host’s system. I’m rather annoyed by the problems, but I haven’t had time to … Continue reading →

The Tape Monster

Jeff Wurzbach — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:45:39 +0000

I am leading a Micromouse Team for IEEE UCSD, and in trying to hack something together that would drive in a straight line, I ended up making a contrivance with a lot of tape holding it together. I named it the Tape Monster, because it didn’t really work, and it looked horrible, compared to what I usually produce.

Now, it turns out that there is a preexisting Tape Monster, from before I joined the Micromouse Team in 2008, so my ‘creation’ is technically the Tape Monster mkII. Fair enough, I guess. Anyways, the robot has 4 Sharp GP2D120X sensors, an Arduino board, motor driver shield and a pair of DC motors with encoder feedback on them. I wanted to power the thing from the USB port, but the cable bias was unacceptable, so I added some batteries.

Here’s where things get interesting. Without encoder feedback based speed control, the value of Vin (feeding the H-bridges that drive the motor) matters. The reason is that the higher Vin is, the PWM duty cycle required to overcome the parasitics of the motor is reduced. Do I have equations a sexy graph for this? No, I wanted my robot to drive straight, NOW. I would like to relate them, but that will have to wait for a night when I’m not under a massive time crunch.

You can follow the progress of my robot and see some of the data that I am using to drive my engineering and design decisions at the IEEE UCSD Wiki.

Now back to the regularly scheduled homework assignment….

Add Mutliple Pins the same name in Eagle

Jeff Wurzbach — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:08:10 +0000

Very handy for those packages/parts with lots of GND pins.

http://www.electro-tech-online.com/general-electronics-chat/42261-your-eagle-tip-day.html

(edited on 4-Apr-2011 to correct a typo)

“New” Jointer…

Jeff Wurzbach — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 06:06:06 +0000

A couple of days ago, I finally opened up the bench top jointer I bought about 9 months ago. I assembled the machine and ran a few test cuts. The last time I used a jointer was in high school wood shop on a couple of assignments. I took a few minutes to read the operation section of the manual, particularly looking for the section with feed and speed type data.

I found a suitable piece of wood- two 3/8″ pieces of plywood glued together and I set the depth of cut very shallow (on the order of 1/32″) and made a couple of passes until I had cleaned up the edge. Admittedly, I could have cleaned up the edge in one shot with a 1/8″ depth of cut, but it being a new machine and that I was very much of practice, I decided a few light passes to get the feel of the machine would be better than a single heavy pass and risking break it or me.

The volume of chips the jointer made took me by surprise, since I’ve never seen a jointer without a dust collector firmly attached to it.

Pictures are here:

Chip Pile 1

Chip Pile 2

A big thanks to the Big Webmaster Blog for directions on fixing the blown auto-updates

Jeff Wurzbach — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:59:20 +0000

http://www.big-webmaster.com/wordpress-automatic-update-with-1and1/

Collaborate with Museum of Making Music-Art of the Stompbox

Jeff Wurzbach — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:05:05 +0000

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=1692

Frustration with Config Management Software

Jeff Wurzbach — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:37:32 +0000

At work, I’ve been entering cabling into Windchill, which is a PTC database tool for keeping track of BOMs, configurations, and other stuff.

The frustrating part with this system is that I can’t import cable runs sheets from Atlium, and apparently, it can’t import a BOM from a Pro-E (which is a PTC product) drawing or an Excel sheet.

I’m not sure if this is a problem with Windchill, or if it that no one at my company knows where documentation are for this feature is.

So far I’ve managed to find a few workarounds that are making the entire thing less painful, but still we have over 1000 cable runs to enter and we’re at about a minute per cable. It’s better than about 3 minutes for one cable, but still annoying.