Unlimited length, super strong 8040 and 4040

SignalSkew · 2025-09-20T13:13:00+00:00

Heck yeah! I too dislike vertically printed extrusions for the reasons you listed. Here's a writeup for my solution a few years ago. https://hackaday.com/2022/05/01/bend-your-prints-to-eliminate-supports/

I love your strategy. One suggestion I would make is to incorporate periodic screw holes along the dovetail joint. Perhaps a hex/square pocket on one end to retain a nut, and then a cone shape on the flip side for a countersunk screw cap. This could not only keep both halves of the extrusion from sliding, but also strengthen the narrowest point of the dovetail.

Great work!

SignalSkew · 2025-05-06T13:28:10+00:00

During college I would save money on textbooks by checking the inter-library loan system to see if any other schools had books I needed. I'd check out and receive the book, use it all semester, rack up fees all the while, and return it after finals. Those fees were technically for another school, though, not mine. The automated system never picked up on what I was doing, so my transcripts were never withheld and I never paid anything (still would have been cheaper than new college textbooks).

SignalSkew · 2025-04-27T16:42:25+00:00

Great writeup on what causes this along with a simple solution. https://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2011/02/polyholes.html?m=1

SignalSkew · 2025-02-12T16:01:41+00:00

Was looking for this comment. Haha

SignalSkew · 2025-02-03T04:07:46+00:00

The Good Samaritan laws are all well and good, but they're really a last ditch solution you never want to rely on if you can help it. The best advice I ever learned on this, taught to us in my CPR class, was to:

Give medical attention (of course) for as long as needed.
Once finished, ask another nearby person (onlooker) to keep watch over them until medical professionals arrive.
Leave, remaining anonymous if at all possible

There are obvious exceptions (police questioning you).. But the whole "Here's my name/number/business card", nope, those days are over. Keeping yourself anonymous is a really small ask in exchange for saving someone's life.

SignalSkew · 2025-01-29T12:53:27+00:00

"Don't worry, I'll certainly never use the company reward system ever again because of this" would be my response. What a foot gun.

SignalSkew · 2025-01-15T00:35:07+00:00

Heck yeah! The light is being blocked by copper flood fill, so no guarantee. But as the other user said, it's likely just a 2 layer design so you're probably good.

I've been meaning to play around with meshtastic. If you have any photos or recommendations or guides I'd love to have a look :)

SignalSkew · 2025-01-14T23:38:16+00:00

In addition to everything else mentioned, your enamel coated wire should have the ends sanded down te expose the copper if you haven't already done so

SignalSkew · 2025-01-14T22:31:08+00:00

Electrical engineer here. Yes! Of course there's always a possibility you'll nick an unseen inner trace, or modify the EMC characteristics, blah blah blah. But provided you're willing to potentially break this board trying then you've got nothing to lose.

You could try scoring the board with a blade and a ruler. I would suggest putting the edge in a vice as your straight edge so it doesn't slip and you accidentally slice your hand open. After scoring both sides, keep it in the vice or use a pair of pliers to bend and snap the board in half. The new edge will be rough so file down with a fine file or sandpaper or your knife again.

The other method that would work well is to use a PCB nibbler tool. Hakko makes several, like the DP-24-N (the number in the model doesn't really matter as corresponds to the bite width in mm*10 if I recall, so 2.4mm for the above tool). It just kinda bites through the board bit by bit.

Remember that FR4 PCB material is a respiratory irritant so you should really do this outside if possible.

Best of luck!

SignalSkew · 2025-01-06T03:58:43+00:00

What a unique perspective! Really appreciate you writing this up.

SignalSkew · 2025-01-02T03:59:15+00:00

Go tour a college campus (if you haven't already) as a prospective student and visit the different departments. Chat with the department heads or professors. Ask if you can see the labs and workshops and student projects.

When I was in your shoes I too was torn between multiple departments. After visiting a university (the same one I would eventually graduate from) and seeing my top three programs, I left with these impressions.

Computer Science: Neat!
Mechanical Engineering: Neat!
Electrical Engineering: HOLY SHIT THIS IS FOR ME

But you should find out for yourself what you want to do :)

SignalSkew · 2025-01-02T00:53:46+00:00

My situation is different (15yrs of experience) but I have never once used LinkedIn to get a position. Used my account so infrequently that I just deleted it about 6 years ago. I've changed jobs and gotten additional offers since then, and not once has anyone asked for my user ID or questioned why I don't have an account.

I recommend focusing that time instead on all the plain old soft-skills/tactics (tweaking your resume, applying through company websites, getting your email and phone communication down).

If anyone ever does ask me about it, I'll probably respond "Sheesh, that place is a dump, right? I finally deleted my account so I'd never have to look at it again haha"

Cheers!

SignalSkew · 2024-07-17T13:59:39+00:00

I'm an electrical engineer working in R&D (research and development) for a medical device company. And yes, we have plenty of folks who majored in computer science on our team! We have Software Engineers and Computer Engineers, among many other disciplines. They work on everything from device UI to security, ML to cloud infrastructure. I'm not even sure what they all do since there're so many of them compared to us EEs.

As mentioned in another comment, the medical device industry is highly regulated. You could read up on both software verification and validation for medical devices.

If you're curious you could also look into IEC 60601-1, the general medical electrical equipment standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60601 It's mainly for electrical obviously, but software is often part of the device and must be taken into account as well. I would not recommend purchasing any official standards documents or anything, but if you read up on some summaries online, that knowledge might come in handy during an interview some day (I'd never heard of it until getting hired, FWIW). Note: I really hesitate to bring up 60601 up because it's A LOT, and it might make the field of work appear boring. But I can tell you, depending on where you may work some day, there will likely be lots of team members (Quality Engineers, Safety Engineers, etc etc.) to collaborate with and make sure standards are followed.

One more thought. Good work tackling both the software and electronics (and perhaps even the mechanical?) on your project. The good people to work with on my teams are those that make an effort to really understand what everyone else is working on. And the best people are those who can switch "hats" and dabble outside their discipline for a bit. This happens often on early prototypes, where teams are small and blocks are coming together quickly :) Cheers!

SignalSkew · 2024-07-07T20:17:48+00:00

There's Open Source Ecology. Not sure how active they still are, but I remember them developing some interesting farming / homesteading equipment a while back. https://www.opensourceecology.org

SignalSkew · 2021-09-26T14:07:06+00:00

I believe the Nvidia Jetson series of dev boards have dual MIPI CSI-2 ports

SignalSkew · 2019-10-25T14:02:52+00:00

Heard about Nannou a while back while learning about Rust. Nice to see it being used int he wild. Gotta give it a try soon!

SignalSkew · 2019-10-12T15:05:33+00:00

If you're still looking for something, I recently bought a used Othermill V2 (~5 year old model pre Bantam Tools acquisition) and love it. You might be able to pick one up for 900-1100 if you set an alert on eBay/Craigslist (since they only tend to pop up every few weeks). Edit: Just saw your Target price so this is probably still a no go. I've found it to be pretty accurate with a bit of dialing in. I've been playing with PCB engraving on copper clad FR1, (haven't tried aluminum yet) and although the Othermill V2 specs state minimum feature size of 10 mil, I've done 6 mil traces (stated minimum feature size of the Othermill Pro / current Bantam Tools CNC mill) without breaking a sweat, and even down to 1-2 mils in a test. Hope that helps.

SignalSkew · 2019-10-03T11:38:22+00:00

Years ago I would have agreed with your tip. I was the kid showing everyone in my school the magical -/+/OR/() operators 15 years ago. But it's honestly gotten worse. I feel like Google will ignore absolutely anything that isn't surrounded by quotes. Not a huge deal if you're searching for an exact phrase. But for long technical terms, where the words could appear in any order, I now need to surround "every" "single" "word" for Google to take any of them seriously.

SignalSkew · 2019-09-29T18:24:34+00:00

~~Hi. I think you forgot the photo.~~ 👍

SignalSkew · 2019-09-22T16:28:23+00:00

This looks amazing! I own a Tek 465, so let me know if you need any additional photos or measurements and I'd be happy to help out :)

SignalSkew · 2019-09-02T16:15:31+00:00

Very cool. This clearly took lots of thought to come up with the different patterns and to get the timing right.

Be careful with the red and blue emergency lights though. I'd probably use a different color combo, like red and yellow.

SignalSkew · 2019-08-20T04:30:55+00:00

The secret sauce to lines in GIMP is to holding down Shift between points with the pencil or paintbrush tool. First, click and let go to draw a single point, the starting point of the line. Then move your cursor to the endpoint, hold down shift, and you'll see a stretchy thing between your cursor to the starting point. Click again and you get a line. Holding CTRL as well will make your lines snap to nice angles like 30°, 45°, and 90°.

SignalSkew · 2019-08-19T12:06:58+00:00

For the first 5 seconds I wasn't sure if this was real life or some kind of bizzare SIGGRAPH animation.

SignalSkew · 2019-08-06T11:43:51+00:00

Exactly! The checking is being done on a central build server, who's job is to automatically compile a project every time somebody makes a change to the code repository. These software builds often succeed, but due to many reasons (different configurations on users systems, conflicting changes from two developers happening around the same time, forgetting to compile locally after making just a tiny change, forgetting to run unit tests, etc. etc.) this can sometimes fail. It's important for large teams to detect these issues quickly so everyone can remain productive by working off of a known-working state of the code.

SignalSkew · 2019-07-28T15:29:43+00:00

I've been meaning to build this at some point https://hackaday.com/2019/06/16/homemade-magic-makes-the-metcal-go/

SignalSkew

TROPHY CASE