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Thermal Runaway and Heating Failed errors

Posted on February 11, 2020February 11, 2020 by Gus

With the stock extruders heating block on the Anycubic Kossel I was encountering Thermal Runaway errors with low ambient temperatures. Ok, ok, I might have been printing outside in an undercover area but bear with me.

The error is caused when the extruders hot end can’t heat quick enough to reach the desired print temperature.

A workaround for this is to lower the print cooling fan speed, allowing the hot end to use less power to get to your goal. In hindsight, it seems a bit smarter to lower your energy spent heating with unnecessary fans blasting your work.

The problem was that this was also a clue to a bigger problem. Over time the power cable to the extruder was wearing thin after moving around so much for so long and eventually gave me this error.

That bottom red cable is meant to be attached

Well the replacement extruder hot end was only $8 so I may have bought two. The one that came with the printer lasted a year but the age of this printer seemed like it would be obsolete soon so I thought I would stock up.

Winamp 5.∞ and R4 visualization on Windows 10

Posted on December 27, 2019December 27, 2019 by Gus

Winamp was taking a little too long to release an update for version 5 for some. It was leaked and in good form the people working on it cleaned it up and released 5.∞

It is what you would expect from a Winamp release, the features of winamp 2 and 3 mashed together. That is why they skipped Winamp 4 to bring us this, the culmination of the two major releases and I suppose it was worth it.

Trivia question for this post is, why did they skip Windows 9? The answer is at the end of this post.

So why do we care about R4? Well for home users, it just looks cool. You can adjust frame rates and resolutions, visualizations and effects. My favorite thing is being able to do text overlays for script notifications using the web front end and it just looks great. For commercial users who buy a licence you could announce promotions, news or updates on products while playing music without the need for a video feed.

The downside for me was that the R4 experience is broken in Windows 10. Mainly due to permissions. People with UAC turned off are not effected but there is a simple workaround for getting this going without making too much of a mess.

R4 wouldn’t even load without being able to write to a log file in the data folder and was unable to save any changes in the session without write access to this folder so the quickest and easiest solution was just to give users full control of the folder.

Have fun, play safe and if you want to call Windows versions 95 and 98, make sure your condition for checking the version doesn’t start with a 9!

http://www.winamp.com/
https://www.rabidhamster.org/R4/download.php

Streaming Digital TV with the Raspberry Pi

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Gus

TVHeadend is now in the Raspbian software repo and if you have a USB Digital TV Tuner (DVB-T) you can stream live TV, timeshift and record.
Before you get the pitchforks out and start with the “HaVEn’T YoU heARd AboUT CaTChUP Tv?!” on me, let me explain.

Have a Shitty TV and no DVR? sorted

no internet? you’re good

love Kodi or vlc? it works with them

someone is using the TV and someone else is choking your connection with bittorrent? yep, you can still watch TV

The only other things you need to know is that the web interface is useless for streaming in the brower. A Pi 3 can only stream radio channels on it and a Pi 4 with 4gb of ram can only do standard definition. Don’t bother trying transcoding either. Sadly not all HD Channels are rebroadcast in SD so what you need to use it smoothly is Kodi or Vlc.

The play program button in the web frontend will download a m3u file which will open in Vlc or other video players.

Kodi will integrate the TV Guide and other features too.

This probably doesn’t appeal to everyone but it can be done. The people it does appeal to probably don’t watch much TV and the remainder will be pissed that this is not a tutorial.

Raspberry Pi in the car

Posted on November 19, 2019November 19, 2019 by Gus

This project was a big one. Displaying text only GPS information on the screen in the car. The Pi has no way to use the touchscreen input so you control it with Tasker on a smart watch, using services from your phone. It shows you your speed, GPS Coordinates and the street you are on by default but can show more with a push of a button.

I recommend NOT trying this but the startonbt.sh code was fun so have a look if bluetooth and bash are your thing.

more info and code here

Launch

Posted on November 17, 2019November 19, 2019 by Gus

Well not really. The domain and hosting have been there for a while. The blog and git are kinda new. I have been thinking about this for a while and the Mad Science department has been busy but not a lot documented other than photo’s and the occasional social media post.

I intend to upload most of my code, mostly current stuff that is either in use or in progress.
There’s a bit of Raspberry Pi, some bash, a bit of python, PHP, javascript and other stuff.

For the next few weeks I’ll be dumping stuff that I’m working on and some from the archives here.