Trust me, nobody wants to sit around watching hours of nothing for like a 10 sec crash. And I really don’t want to deal with YT’s BS. The time lapse thing is just an experiment, no idea how frequent it’ll be.
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Not hours, just short time lapse videos. What do you mean with bullshit?
I was talking about the run footage.
It’s no secret that YT is messed up, broken, not really suited to creators and all of that. That’s a cancer I want to stay the hell away from.
From my experience it’s not too bad. Not if you’re as small as me at least 
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Perhaps, but I just in general want to keep the platforms I have to keep track of to a minimum. Having a channel as well is extra faff that isn’t necessary. If I’d thought of doing the time lapse videos when I was still modifiying Banshee, it would have made sense, but there’s nothing left to do. The only one I definitely have planned is for when I go to eventually conformal coat the motherboard of Carbon Mamba (and clean the dust and crap out beforehand).
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Project work has sort of paused again for a few reasons. The first is that I’m just lazy and want to enjoy my free time. The second is that the gaming battery tests are a complete chore for me, especially when I have to play for 2h at about 4fps (literally) and the third is that all of the photos on my site dating back to about a year have been bricked, yet again.
I started posting from imgur, but their new UI boils my blood, so I went back to using the image links from here. However, the clowns here have been doing something in the background again and all the image links have been bricked. So now I’m going back, downloading all the pics, posting them to imgur and then linking them from there. It’s taking a while. Until that’s done, I won’t be doing much in the way of project work.
As it stands, battery testing is nearly done and Banshee has just been sitting there. I need to find a more interesting place to run it.
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All the images should now be fixed. If you happen to find a broken one, please let me know.
This is probably the second last personal project related post from me for the next year or so as uni starts again for me. I’ll still post the gaming battery test results some time soon.
Right, now that I’ve sorted my W10 issues (for the most part) I can finally get around to making this post. Recently I decided to get three extra screens for my laptop, because I got fed up of having to multitask on a small 15.6” screen.
This ‘upgrade’ had a few added benefits for the rest of my setup as well. My laptop only has a single HDMI port, so I need a dock to run more than one extra screen. A bit of digging around online lead me to the Dell TB16 240W Thunderbolt dock. According to its spec sheet it could comfortably run up to four external displays. Unlike most Thunderbolt docks, this one also provides laptop charging. This means that I can eliminate my stock charger from the setup. This is good because it means I can just keep it in my bag at all times, and I don’t have to crawl under my desk every time I want to take it out or put it back.
The dock also comes with a lot of extra ports, including an audio-out jack. This means that I can plug my Hi-Fi system into it and leave the jack be (as opposed to having to disconnect it whenever I take the laptop with me). The added USB ports also let me connect my phone through a USB 3 PowerShare port. This means that my phone charges faster than a regular USB 3 port while also having a data connection to the laptop. Charging over PowerShare isn’t as fast as the stock charger, but the payoff is worth it since I have a data connection to my laptop and my battery is getting less abuse. In addition to connecting my phone, I can now have my external optical drive connected at all times as well. Better still, the optical drive has an almost identical footprint to the dock, so I can just stack them on top of each other on my desk to save space.
My entire setup is now down to one wire. The three external monitors, charging (at 130W, just like the stock charger), audio out, optical drive and my phone all run off the single Thunderbolt 3 port on my laptop. I was a little concerned about this as my port only has 2 PCIe lanes (as opposed to the newer 4 lanes), but it all seems to be working just fine.
For the screens, I didn’t go for anything special, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this and wasn’t planning to do anything crazy with them (I just needed extra screen space). So I just went for the cheapest and best value for money screens I could find. I ended up going for three Samsung S24F356 24” screens. They’re nothing special, just some 60Hz, 1080p, 24” screens. Apparently, they have AMD FreeSync, but it’s not like I can use it since I have an Nvidia GPU. I wanted to go for some 27” screens which cost roughly the same, but I’m glad I didn’t as I have more mobility with the smaller ones.
Obviously, having three screens was going to take up a lot of desk space, so I had to get a triple screen desk mount to reduce the space needed. I decided to opt for one of those ones that just clamps to the desk and has three VESA mounts. The two outer arms have gas springs in them for easy adjustment and all the VESA plates have full 360 rotation and are on a rail and clip system. This means that you can screw the plat into the back of your monitor and then slide the monitor in place on the arm.
In the pursuit of further cleaning up my desk setup, I botched a simple phone mount onto my headphone stand and passed the USB cable through the stand as well since it’s actually the hollowed out charging and transmitter stand from my dad’s old wireless headphones.
I only encountered a couple of problems during the whole process. The first was with mounting the screens. The screens are on a 75mm VESA mount, but the way they have been designed prevents 100mm or 75/100 hybrid plates from being mounted because the regular stand mount gets in the way. I got lucky and my hybrid plates are machined in such a way that they only just fit and missed the regular mount. However, it did mean that I couldn’t use the rail and clip system to mount the screens. I had to precariously hold each screen while screwing them into the plates while the plates were already on the arms.
The second problem I encountered was the running of all three external screens as well as my laptop screen. For reasons I can’t fathom out, all the display output ports on the laptop are connected to the iGPU as opposed to the dGPU (including the laptop’s native display). Intel graphics aren’t advanced enough yet to run four displays and can only run three. I got around this by buying an active USB 3 to HDMI adapter with a DisplayLink chip inside. DisplayLink lets you run displays from USB ports. This means that one of my displays is technically running off of a USB port and the dock is acting as a USB passthrough for that display.
The pricing for this part of the project (I’m counting this as part of Carbon Mamba):
-
Screens: £300 (£100 each)
-
Dock: £180
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Monitor stand: £80
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USB to HDMI adapter: £32
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HDMI to DisplayPort and mini DisplayPort cables: £12
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Mains 8 socket extension bar (not necessary to recreate the project, I just needed it): £12
-
Total: £616
(I used my old phone for the sake of the photo)
In other news, while I was sorting out W10, I started to suspect that one or both of my RAM sticks might have gone bad. I ended up running MemTest86 and it detected 77 errors at the end of the first pass. I contacted Corsair yesterday to ask for a replacement, they’re yet to reply.
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Quick update:
The replacement RAM came in yesterday, installed it today, everything seems fine for now. I’m also planning to release the gaming battery results over the weekend if I have the time.
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At long last, I’m finally posting the gaming battery results I said I’d do ages ago. I didn’t even finish the list of games I had planned, because it felt like a massive chore (there’s a reason I quit gaming). I was planning on doing Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider as well, but based on the results I got from the other games, I didn’t want to sit at the laptop for over 2h playing at 4 FPS.
Power plan settings were almost completely the same for this round of tests as they were for the last, except this time I had an external mouse in use at all times, because most games are physically impossible to play on a track pad as it doesn’t register a simultaneous left and right click.
All games were also set to their highest possible graphics settings at 1080p and V-Sync was enabled, so the max frame rate was automatically capped to 60 FPS as my laptop only has a 60Hz display.
And yes, I realise my library is quite outdated in terms of the stress they would provide to the system, but these are the games I’d be playing if I was still a gamer. Almost none of the new stuff interests me and I actually skipped the two most demanding games since results started to level off (as you’ll see below).
Battery life (mins):
| Game: | Absolute Power | Balanced: | Potato: | Average time: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batman Arkham Asylum | 45 | 41 | 120 | 69 |
| Crysis | 50 | 45 | 65 | 53 |
| Crysis Warhead | 48 | 45 | 85 | 59 |
| Crysis 2 | 42 | 40 | 50 | 44 |
| Crysis 3 | 46 | 43 | 75 | 55 |
| Hitman Absolution | 45 | 45 | 75 | 55 |
| Tomb Raider (2013) | 46 | 40 | 75 | 54 |
| Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005) | 45 | 50 | 70 | 55 |
It seems that on battery power, run times are roughly the same for most power plans, regardless of the game, however games do run at different qualities. For example I was getting average of 60 FPS on Arkham Asylum for Absolute Power, but was only getting about 15 for Crysis 3, despite pretty much identical run times.
I also took down results for temperatures and frame rates while plugged in and in Absolute Power mode.
Temperatures (celsius) and frame rates:
| Game: | FPS Avg | CPU Avg | CPU Max | GPU Avg | GPU Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batman Arkham Asylum | 60 | 76 | 86 | 76 | 78 |
| Crysis | 35 | 80 | 83 | 77 | 78 |
| Crysis Warhead | 35 | 80 | 84 | 77 | 78 |
| Crysis 2 | 40 | 77 | 81 | 77 | 78 |
| Crysis 3 | 18 | 78 | 86 | 72 | 78 |
| Hitman Absolution | 25 | 74 | 82 | 76 | 78 |
| Tomb Raider (2013) | 25 | 77 | 86 | 77 | 78 |
| Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005) | 60 | 63 | 69 | 60 | 64 |
In other news, I’m very seriously considering getting myself a 3D printer for Xmas, if that does end up happening, work on Banshee might see a spike at some point as it opens a large range of possible custom mods. I’ve already got some things in mind like custom aero kits, custom rims to give the truck a much wider track, twin motor mounts and so on. I’d just need time to design, print and test them. That’s all of course if I do end up getting a printer.
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How much GB??
That looks awesome! Seems arkhan asylum is the only one reached 60 
And… I didn’t get second table… FPS CPU one… 
So you are planning to print RC from the 3D printer? Uf i forgot the name you were gonna buy… Something from c 
- Ideally I’d be at 64, but that’s for my next laptop.
BF2 reached it easily too. I bet both would probably hit close to 80 if I disabled v-sync. I haven’t got a powerful GPU and the XPS is not and was never meant to be a gaming machine. It’s a workstation, acceptable gaming performance is just a side effect and added bonus.
It’s frame rates and then avg and max CPU and GPU temps while plugged in and running in Absolute Power mode.
Custom RC parts. I might even make a Mk4 flamethrower / Mk2 Hellhound if I have the time.
I’m strongly considering a Creality Ender 5.
I want to get through a couple of updates in this post.
The first is that I just bought a 3D printer. I ended up buying a Creality Ender 3 Pro because it was about £80 cheaper than an Ender 5 which doesn’t have that many more features to justify the price jump. Instead I spent the money saved on 4.5kg of 9 different colours of filament and a silent motherboard.
The second update is that I’ve been designing and experimenting with 3D printed parts for Banshee. For now, I’m only exploring rim designs. I’ve designed some modular rims where you can adjust the hub offset. I did it by printing a standard 0mm offset rim and then designing it such that you can insert spacers of a given offset. So far, I’ve designed it to only have 20mm and 40mm offset. I made them modular, because if I printed a 40mm offset rim with a static offset and realised that it actually made the truck worse, it would mean that I just wasted £60 of tyres because they’re superglued on.
I calculated that if I print in PLA, a single rim would cost me £0.48, a 20mm spacer would cost me ££0.40 and a 40mm spacer would cost me £0.58. That means a set (a rim and one of each spacer) would cost £1.47 and 4 sets would cost £5.88. I only need to print a set once and then I can just print rims as I’ll have the spacers. A set of 4 rims would cost me £1.93. In contrast, if I bought proper OEM rims from a shop, it would cost me £22.48 for 4 rims. Printing (just rims) is 11.65 times cheaper!
I have my concerns with printing rims, one of them was the durability of PLA compared to the OEM rims which are nylon. The doubt was rapidly taken care of when I printed the first prototype rim and smashed it into the concrete floor as hard as I could. The only thing that broke was a part where I hadn’t calculated my layer spacing properly and there was a hollow point in the print.
My other concern is how they’ll affect the suspension geometry, they weigh more than the stock nylons (meaning more unsprung weight), the offsets increase the leverage on the shocks and I don’t know how they’ll affect camber and toe. I guess I’ll find out with the next set of tyres that I buy.
No offset:
20mm:
40mm:
The third and final update is a side project I randomly thought of the other day. It started out as the Pocket Rocket but then I developed it into FYHAS (Fuck You Health And Safety).
The pocket rocket is exactly what it sounds like, a rocket that can fit in your pocket. I wanted to see how small I could go, so I took a C6-5 motor and fit as small a body as possible around it, the Mk1 prototype is about 150mm tall. I was initially going to design vent holes for the parachute ejection charge as the PR doesn’t have a chute, but then I realised I could potentially use it as a pseudo second stage to blow the body off the motor. If the body doesn’t blow off, then it will explode and I’ll have an air-burst weapon.
However, as a friend pointed out, with a C6-5 motor, the ejection charge would blow once the rocket is past apogee, so it will most likely send a very sharp spike speeding into the ground. I’d need a Cx-0 motor to avoid that. This thing will be lethal, if it hits someone, it’ll probably kill them. I designed a Mk1 vent-less yesterday and set it to print, I’ll pick up the print on Mon when I get back to the lab at uni.
Project FYHAS is essentially a Gatling gun/revolver hybrid which will fire pocket rockets. Obviously, I have to get a single PR to work properly first.
In the below pic, the red is the rocket motor and the two blocks on the side are rail guides for a standard launch pad.
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This sounds particularly exciting, you’re becoming an official weapon manufacturer
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There are a few updates I’ve been meaning to release for a while now, but I haven’t had the time. This is not that post as I don’t have the time to sit down and make a mega post. This is just a quick PRR for a Banshee run.
This one doesn’t have gifs as it was a dark run and I’m not providing telemetry either as I don’t trust the one from this run (this will make sense as you read on).
I only did this run so that I could finish off a battery I had charged last week. I ended up finding an issue with the truck. A few runs ago I said that I felt like the truck was plipping the throttle randomly and I said that it might be a gearbox issue, then I ended up finding that the spur gear had stripped in a couple of places. Well, turns out at the time I was right, I wasn’t being paranoid (I know the truck too well). It turns out that for some reason, when I make a sudden steering input or if I go to full lock, the throttle would trigger. That meant driving was a nightmare.
I ended up isolating the issue to the Tx/Rx. I dropped a different Tx/Rx into the truck, and it was fine. I then tried the problem combo on a different esc/motor combo, and I was getting the same kind of behaviour. Out of curiosity, I made sure it wasn’t the servo by dropping it back into the truck and swapping the servo with an ESC combo (I don’t have another servo to hand), and the issue seemed to be gone. I then put the servo back in and can’t seem to get the issue to come up again. A friend from uni is going to help me troubleshoot tomorrow to see if we can find the cause. I’m almost certain it’s not a brown-out as I have an 8A BEC, so the Rx would fry long before there’s a power shortage and telemetry shows the voltage being completely stable. Also, if it were a brown out, the whole truck would die momentarily, it wouldn’t see a throttle spike.
On top of all of that, the ambient temperature was about 5℃ which is bad news for the sort of tyres I run, but even worse news for me, because the rears are shot to bits, they’re completely bald. I also noticed that the throttle response felt wrong and that the off-the-line acceleration was horrid. Turns out I’d completely cooked the clutch and the spring had also loosened over time. This is why I don’t trust the telemetry for this run. I need to find a way to lock the clutch permanently without spending a stupid amount of money on a kit. I might design and 3D print a new spur when I find the time.
All the white powder stuff in the photo is clutch.
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Woow that sounds like a nightmare… I did not get the complete content due to the specific vocabulary but I understand the explanations- and when I could understand it- that means you can explain very good 
:)) -
and the line when you said “I know this truck so well” or so- made me smile… I still remember when you built it… uhm… her ( lol- I know it’s it 
)
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Turning the steering wheel made the gas work without me touching the gas.
Technically, I never built it explicity. I’ve replaced and upgraded so many parts that I might as well have built it.
To follow up yesterday. Took it into uni today and did some probing with an oscilloscope and help from a friend and we couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Took it for a quick pot about outside the engineering tower and it was fine. I couldn’t recreate the issue today. I hope that’s the last time I’ll be seeing it.
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Just wanted to quickly stop by and say that I’ll be releasing a massive update tomorrow (the one I’ve been saying I’ll do for months). The plan was to release it today, but it took me so long to write it that I ran out of light to take the pictures I wanted to take. 
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Right, here’s that massive update I’ve been saying I’ll get to for the best part of 6 months now. The lockdown has given me a chance to catch up on personal projects. This is going to be really long (several sides of A4 long), consider yourselves warned. There are four main things I want to go over with this post. Banshee, the Ender 3 Pro, Carbon Mamba and my website.
Banshee
Banshee:
First up is Banshee, getting a 3D printer has opened up a bunch of new possibilities for me, so I’m changing the project’s status from ‘complete’ back to ‘in progress’. I’m considering this wave of modifications enough to call it a new mod wave. So, Banshee is officially on Mod V9, I didn’t even intend to do mod stages, but I kept making waves of upgrades, that it made sense to have a way to roughly track what happened and when.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this at some point, but the society I’m in in uni has an electric go kart project we’re working on (it’s just a standard go kart that we’re converting to be electric). We jokingly challenged our uni’s Formula Student team to a race against their petrol car which they custom design and build for races against other unis every year and they accepted. Obviously, with current events, the race is postponed (if not cancelled altogether). Before that happened though, I decided I’d also join the race with Banshee, just for the sake of seeing what would happen. Out of the three parties taking part, I was the closest to being race ready before the outbreak. Mod V9 has several upgrades that are to do with the race.
I mentioned a while ago that I designed some modular 3D printed rims, those were actually because of the race that was meant to be happening, I wanted to be able to throw the truck into corners as violently as I could without it rolling over, that meant I needed to widen the track. The wheels are still happening, but they need a major redesign. I was doing a test fit on the rears the other day and noticed that the mounts of the offset spacers catch on the hub towers and lock the drivetrain completely. So, I need to move them further outboard to stop them from catching. The offsets themselves don’t have that problem as they don’t have anything mounted to them on the inside. I still need to print the 40mm piece.
On the topic of rims, the bearing to hex adapters that I designed ages ago for the front rims turned out to be inherently flawed in their design. I don’t know why I didn’t spot this a lot sooner, but when the wheel was mounted to the adapter, it didn’t seem to be fully mounted and had some play in it despite nut being fully tightened. I solved the issue with a washer and the play was gone, but so was the motion of the wheel. I had completely locked it. I hadn’t realised that the entire wheel rotates when I’m using a hex one, and on the hex ones, the nut makes direct contact with the wheel. Whereas on a bearing one, the nut makes direct contact with the inside ring of a bearing. That meant that on the hex wheel, the motion of the wheel would undo the nut in a few wheel rotations, because the nut turns with the wheel, but the front axles are static.
This means that I have to redesign my front rims or the adapters. I could just start printing bearing rims for the fronts, but I want to be able to rotate the tyres, because I go through rears a lot faster than I do fronts. This leads me to the next point I want to talk about, tyres. I’ve been running on completely ruined rears for a long time now and I need a new set of tyres. I ended up buying two sets of tyres. One crap one that I can use as a test set for the printed rims and a good set for actual driving. I bought crap ones, because I don’t want to print the rims, glue the tyres and then realise that the rims are rubbish and I’ve just wasted £60 of good tyres for nothing.
The crap set of tyres are Proline Ion T 2.2 in M3 (soft) compound, they’re an old design that hasn’t been in production for a while from what I know now. The Ions came with open cell foam inserts that seemed for be a bit too big for the tyres (despite fitting inside), so I cut open some old slicks to extract their closed cell foam inserts. The difference between open and closed cell inserts are that the closed cell ones are waterproof, so won’t soak up any water that gets in the rim and throw off the balance. I know that doesn’t really make a difference in my case as I seal the rims, but the closed cell ones generally fit better as they’re shaped like the tyre as well.
Ideally, I would have gone for the usual M4 (super soft) compound, but they didn’t make them that soft and it was a random eBay listing I found if I recall. The Ions will be used for rim testing, if all goes well, I’ll be using my good tyres on the printed rims as well, if not, I’ll stick to stock rims until I’m happy with my ones.
For the good set I decided to go back to Proline Prime T 2.2 in M4. I went back to slicks, because the current Electron T 2.2 in M4 that I run lasted me maybe just over an hour in total running before the rears were completely bald. I also really like the performance of the slicks when it’s chucking it down with rain. I’m yet to tape and glue both sets of tyres. Below are pics of the new tyres and the different inserts (white are OC, blue are CC).
The next upgrade I want to talk about is probably the most significant for Mod V9 and that is the camera. I finally ditched the Campark ACT74 action camera I was using for an FPV drone system. I went for a Mk1 RunCam Split, the model is a bit dated, but is a lot cheaper than the Mk3 (or whatever version they’re on now) and works perfectly fine. I really wanted to get rid of the action cam because it was wreaking havoc on my centre of gravity.
The Split is tiny, so I can mount it low down in the truck. It’s tiny and the PCB is independent of the camera itself, so I can have the PCB elsewhere in the truck and the whole system weighs next to nothing (it gave me a 10% weight saving for the entire truck which is huge, goes to show how heavy the ACT74 was). I went for the Split specifically because it has on-board recording to a µSD and doesn’t need to be streaming to goggles that have a recording feature. It records in 1080p at 60 FPS and can support a 64GB card whereas the ACT74 could only do 32GB.
It also came with a WiFi module that lets you stream to your phone, but the way the stock pin headers for the connector were soldered on meant that it stuck up out of the main PCB and would break in a crash. So, I ordered some 90o headers to solder on, but did such a miserable job of it (they were 1.27mm pitch) that I killed the WiFi chip. Not a massive loss, since I don’t actually need it.
I conformal coated all the PCBs because they’re exposed, and now I need to design and print a basic mount for all of them. I experimented with a clear piece of acrylic in front of the camera as a lens guard, I need to go for more runs before I conclude whether I need it or not. The only thing I don’t like about the whole system is that it is very fussy about its supply voltage, it can only do 5V max. That means I can’t run it off my 6V BEC (and I don’t want to lower the BEC voltage as it will negatively affect the servo and light bar), so I had to get an LM2596 buck converter was well. Along with the regulator, I made a basic USB splitter so that I can power it and offload footage (not simultaneously as it’ll fry the PCB) without having to keep unplugging cables. It’s more convenient and increases the lifespan of the connectors.
In terms of actual performance, it is better than the old ACT74, mainly because all of the colours don’t look artificial and over saturated, half of what it captures doesn’t look like a crayon drawing either. Despite both cameras being 60 FPS, the Split looks slightly smoother. I made a quick comparison video below. The Split has a slightly weird angle because I was still experimenting. I have since adjusted it and need to go for a test run. The Split is also slightly out of focus, because I adjusted it on my desk as opposed to outside. I need to adjust it for outside and it will be fine. This is the only time I’d really need the WiFi module as I’d be able to live adjust the focus. Now I have to adjust, film, offload the footage, watch it and repeat. The new camera position (at the base of the front shock tower) means I have had to cut a hole in the body shell, so it looks a bit strange now, but I don’t care. Also, although the system is an FPV, I don’t intend to use it as FPV, so I haven’t bought a Tx or goggles. The total cost of the system was about £47, so not too bad for what I got.
This is the initial method I used to temporarily mount the PCB, the stock standoffs that came with the camera and some screws.
This is the piece of acrylic I was experimenting with. With the new angle on the camera, I’ve had to remove it because the two cut-outs in the middle were in frame.
The Mk2 camera mount, using extended screws from the front body posts. It’s quite janky, but it holds. Mounting the camera there was a pain and required cutting out some of the support ribs on the bulkhead top-brace.
Here’s the comparison video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BPKe8N-H5OdCPYET90xa0kZAVk3TouW2/view?usp=sharing
The last couple of things I want to go over for Banshee are general maintenance. I recently caved to my OCD and bought a new set of carbon front arms. I’ve been running the stock plastic ones since I broke one of the carbon ones in that sandbox crash the other year, so I’ll be fitting those in the next couple of days. I’ve modified the layout of the stock setup sheet for the truck, so an updated version will be going up on my site in the coming days. I bought a 35T pinion gear in case I ever find somewhere to do a speed run. I plan on printing my own spur gears so that I can eliminate the slipper clutch and run direct drive transmission. I replaced the stock ESC fan with a Yeah Racing Tornado I had sitting around from the old cooling system, which is much more powerful. On the topic of the ESC, I changed the telemetry settings such that the RPM readout is actually showing MPH and not RPM.
While doing the test fits for the printed rim, I noticed a pretty serious design flaw that somebody overlooked when they were designing the inline axle upgrade for the truck. Running inline axles moves the wheel forward relative to the end of the steering knuckle where the ball cup for the turnbuckle mounts. It moves it forward just enough such that there’s rubbing between the ball cup and the rim. The rubbing is so bad that my ball cups have worn down to the ball stud in a couple of places. I think there’s enough clearance now, so I don’t expect the situation to degrade, which is good, because any more rubbing and the ball cups will come off. As it stands now, the truck is useable.
The worn-out cup.
This is what it should look like.
Finally, I want to talk about the issues I was having a few runs ago of the truck acting like it was possessed. At the time I diagnosed it as a Tx/Rx issue, well, I was wrong…again, that’s the second time I’ve misdiagnosed that problem. The actual issue was the janky wiring inside my telemetry switch-over box. I found that two of the wires were being held onto the switch contacts by nothing but the heat-shrink, the cheap Arduino jumpers I used in a couple of places had ripped all their cores from where I had soldered them. I re-did all the wiring and the issue seems to have gone away.
Ender 3 Pro
Ender 3 Pro:
Now, onto the Ender. I haven’t written much about the 3D printer since I got it. That’s because I wanted to modify it and get some prints off it first. Now that I have, I can write about it. I suppose I’ll start with the basics. I bought a Creality Ender 3 Pro 3D printer as an early Xmas present for myself last year. The E3P is a good entry-level budget printer that is relatively cheap but prints really nicely, a lot better than much more expensive printers I’ve seen. Obviously, it’s not perfect, but it’s just fine for my use case. It has a 220mm x 220mm x 250mm print volume, and several improvements over the standard E3. Improvements include a better PSU, a bigger Y-axis extrusion for better rigidity, magnetic bed and a downward facing motherboard casing fan (that way it doesn’t clog up with debris).
Obviously, I can’t buy something and then keep it stock, I don’t live like that. So, I immediately started the upgrade process. My main goal for this was silent (or as close as I could get) operation. When I’m in the lab in uni, the noise doesn’t bother me, because there’s other stuff going on, but when I’m alone in my room, the sounds of the steppers and fans are enough to drive you insane. The first upgrade I did was to buy and install a silent motherboard. The V1.1.5 silent motherboard includes Trinamic TMC 2208 stepper drivers which shut the motors up completely. All I could hear after the swap were the stock fans. The board also includes thermal runaway protection.
Logically, the next upgrade step was to replace the fans with silent fans. Most E3 owners go for 40mm Noctua fans, but I’m not an idiot to pay £15 per fan for three 40mm fans and then another £15 for the 60mm fan. Instead I opted for Gelid Solutions Silent 4s and a GSS 6. They were about £5 per fan and have roughly the same specs as the Noctuas, they’re marginally louder, but I’m fine with it given the price difference. Unfortunately, the stock fans run on 24V, but my upgraded fans run on 12V, so I picked up some XL4015 buck converters, they’re slightly beefier versions of the LM2596. I actually run my fans slightly over-volted at 15V, because they seem to handle it just fine and the increase in air throughput is noticeable over 12V. Yes, the noise goes up as well, but only slightly, they’re still very quiet and miles quieter than stock. I replaced the two 40mm fans on the head, the 40mm for the motherboard and the 60mm for the PSU.
My quest for silence is almost at an end at this point, I wanted the printer to be that extra bit quiet, so I went on Thingiverse and found some fan silencers. I printed a prototype and it seems to work very slightly, it’s not a major difference, but it’s better than nothing. I got around to printing the 60mm silencer last night and my final 40mm ones finished printing as I am typing this very paragraph. I’ll just need to mount them over the next day or two. The one for the motherboard casing will need some improvisation as there are no mounts on the outside of the casing. The last mod I made (not chronologically) for silence was to put the printer on some dense foam blocks to stop its vibrations from getting to the desk which essentially acts as a massive diaphragm of a speaker.
Other mods I have printed off Thingiverse for it are a back casing for the screen, because for some reason they sell the printer with a bare screen PCB. I’ve also printed a screen ribbon-cable cover that clips onto the extrusion and an XT60 clip for the PSU connector. I had other mods lined up as well, such as cable chains for stress relief and cable management, but after a few other failed prints that had bad tolerances and dimensions, I didn’t want to spend 30h printing and half a kilo of filament just to find that the prints are rubbish. So, instead I sat down one evening and spent 3h meticulously arranging and routing all of the cables such that I got the best cable management I’ve ever done for anything (pics below). The last thing I printed from Thingiverse was a modified head shroud that has part cooling from both sides of the nozzle as opposed to the one from stock.
Probably the most significant electronic upgrade I’ve made to the printer (besides the silent board) is the addition of a Raspberry Pi 4. For those that don’t know, an RPi is a small programmable computer that can rival a mid-range mid 2000s laptop (it’s like an Arduino on cocaine), but only costs about £60 depending on which one you go for. I went for a top spec Pi 4 with 4GB RAM. I use it to run Octopi. Octopi is an OS that lets you run and Octoprint server from your Pi.
Octoprint lets you remotely control your printer over WiFi and is completely free to install. Once you’ve setup your SD card, you just type your Pi’s IP into a browser, and it walks you through a basic setup process. Once you’re in, you’re ready to go. With Octoprint you can monitor your prints in real time, you can hook up a camera feed directly to your printer, you can control its motion, you can put prints on remotely, you can cancel them, you can upload files, but not print them. There’s a massive list of things it lets you do. All of this means that you can set something to print, walk away and monitor it over the day from your phone or computer. If you see something going wrong, you can cancel the print, or if you run certain plug-ins you can stop sections of the print. So, if something goes wrong in one corner of the print, but the rest is fine, you can tell it to stop printing in that one corner.
In my case it means that I can put on prints from uni, if I leave the house in the morning and forget because I’m still asleep. It means that I can monitor things mid-lecture and distract half the class. I can give others access to my printer if they really need it. The only time I now have to touch my printer is when I’m pulling a completed print from the bed, when I’m swapping filament or when I’m levelling the bed.
I have the PSU Control plug-in. That allows me to remotely turn the printer on and off from the mains. It did require some modification though. Most people online use a relay that is controlled by the Pi to cut the power. However, they put the relays on the DC side of the PSU, that means that although they are cutting power to the printer, the PSU is on at all times. I didn’t want that, so I put the relay on the AC side. Of course, I’m an idiot and didn’t account for the 60A inrush current and ended up welding my puny relay shut. I had to buy a beefy 60A Solid State Relay (SSR). Once I installed the SSR, operation was pretty much flawless. The only downside of this setup is that the Pi has to be on at all times if I want to use the printer because it sends the control signal to the SSR. It also means that the printer now technically has two power cords. Though that’s a small price to pay for the advantages. One of which is the addition of multiple emergency power-cut-off points, both in the software and physically.
I initially ran no cameras, but soon realised that running a camera is very useful for live monitoring (you can also do time lapse videos), so I got a Mk2 8MP Raspicam. The only issue I had with it was that I could either have a close-up view or a wide angle. Luckily there’s a plug-in that lets you run multiple cameras. So, I ended up buying a cheap endoscope as well that I’ll mount near the nozzle. That way the endoscope will monitor the nozzle so I can check my layer adhesion and the Raspicam will monitor the whole bed. I’m currently in the process of setting up the endoscope, so I’m still only running one camera at the moment. The only downside of the endoscope is that it has a 5m cable, which throws a wrench in my perfect cable management, because I’ve had to gaffer tape it to the side of the PSU. I’ll have to figure out a better solution at some point. Octoprint has opened a whole range of possibilities that I didn’t have before.
The RPi 4 has a reputation of running hot, so I bought a full-body heatsink and an extra 60mm fan for it. The heatsink is really strange in that it has a surprisingly bad design. The top plate is fine, but there are stand-offs on the bottom one, so there’s a 3mm gap between the PCB and the plate, it makes no contact and is thus totally useless. I suppose if it made contact, then it would short out everything on the PCB. I got around the issue by filling the gap with thermal pads. Running it with the heatsink showed idle temps of around 40oC, so I didn’t bother with the fan, I just designed and printed a basic extrusion rail-mount for it and called it a day. The last printer mod I want to quickly mention is that I got some LED strips that I put on the inside of the vertical extrusions’ grooves and the top horizontal one so that I have a lighting ‘ring’ for the bed, that way the cameras can better see when it gets dark in my room.
I don’t have any more upgrades planned for the printer as I’m happy with it as is, yes, there is a lot more I can do with it, but I don’t want to spend too much money on it and I want to maintain the value for money aspect too. Any upgrades that I may do would likely be printed ones and won’t really cost me any money.
In terms of things I’ve been printing, I’ve had a lot of failed prints that I’ve since binned, but below are some random things I’ve printed. As for project FYHAS, it’s still only at the pocket rocket stage. The rocket team at uni still haven’t gone for a launch and probably won’t be going anytime soon for obvious reasons. That’s annoying because I’ve been waiting to test the prototypes for a while now. Until I can get a test launch, the rest of the project is on hold.
Going in a clockwise spiral from the top left: Prototype modular rim, prototype face mod for stock head shroud, pocket rockets, a pile of BRES prototype keychains I use as test prints, a pile of test rings I was using to troubleshoot Octoprint, a test mouth, test eyes, hex adapters, Z-axis motor spacer, part of a failed filament guide, failed fan shrouds, 40mm fan silencers (that I need to mount) and a Bowden tube clip with a cable channel.
A close up of the modular face. The joke started when I a friend in uni stuck googly eyes to all the head shrouds of the printers in the lab. I took it one step further by making it modular with swappable faces and mouths. It never went anywhere as it is for a stock head shroud which I no longer run. The eyes aren’t printed and are stuck on with double sided tape.
A close up of the pocket rockets, the small one was a normal sized one where the fins came out badly, so I trimmed them down. It is now the pocket rocket superleggera.
The printer.
Side view. Here you can see the screen cover, the foam blocks, 60mm fan silencer, the SSR and a little bit of cable management. The only thing I don’t like is the rolled-up endoscope wire. I need to find a better place for it.
The Pi.
Raspicam.
Thingiverse shroud and silencer prototypes (I want the final ones in black). Ignore the endoscope, I haven’t designed a mount for it, but need to keep it out of the way for now.
SSR.
LEDs
The majority of the cable management around the back. I ran pretty much all of the cables through the extrusion channels and held them in with Gorilla tape. I’m especially proud that I managed to run the extruder loom up one of the vertical extrusions without getting in the way of the X-axis gantry. It may not look like much, but it’s a huge improvement over what I had before, and it took ages to do. It actually looks better the higher that the gantry is, because all the hanging cables no longer hang and get hidden.
I didn’t think to take photos of my initial cable state, but I found some random pictures on Google of other people’s printers. Mine looked close to this, if not slightly worse.
Carbon Mamba
Carbon Mamba:
The update for Carbon Mamba is quite a short one. I’m not sure if I mentioned this somewhere but a month or so ago, I opened my battery to see if I can maybe build my own in an attempt to get a bigger capacity out of the same form factor. I mean I could just buy the big 97Wh one they sell, but it means getting rid of my second drive, which is something I’ll never do. Anyway, my experiment went nowhere as it turns out that it’s near impossible to get pouch or prismatic cells as a consumer short of tearing down other batteries. All the laptop manufacturers seem to get custom batteries made for all their laptops and none of them seem to come in standard sizes. Or rather, there don’t seem to be standard form factors for pouch cells.
A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a friend in uni who has a Dell Inspiron 15 7000, he has the exact same battery as me, but he has an i7 9750H and a GTX 1650 mobile (NOT max-Q) which are far more powerful than my i5 7300HQ and GTX 1050 mobile. He was saying that he was getting around 4 or 5 hours of run time with the laptop in balanced performance mode (the same kind of balanced I used for my battery tests) with mixed use.
That had me thinking, what if I just had a bad battery? My battery tests showed that I struggled to hit 3 hours with mixed use in potato mode. So, I bought and installed a new battery last week. I’ll be conducting the same battery tests as before to see if there was any change. Keep an eye out for those over the next week or so.
On another note, recently I noticed that my idle temps were around 5oC higher than usual, so I decided to clean the dust out of it and then I repasted it for good measure. I shouldn’t need to repaste it this often, but the paste was already starting to harden which is weird. Anyway, while I was cleaning it, I decided to give it a full clean, which meant a complete teardown. The amount of junk I pulled from keyboard was insane. I also saw the advantages of carbon fibre first-hand; I weighed the carbon fibre panel of the laptop and it only weighed 158g. The bare motherboard with all possible components removed weighed 8g more. The bulk of the laptop actually comes from the screen. My FHD one weighs 667g, no idea if the 4K ones are heavier.
Site
Site:
Finally, I want to quickly touch on my website. It’s been a while since I’ve updated any of the main pages, I’ve been posting the same updates that I post here, but the main project pages haven’t been touched. So, I’ll be doing some general housekeeping and updating of pages over the coming week or so.
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