Did you discharge the caps before testing them?
My meter and test tool do nothing for ages if they’re not discharged. No idea why but suspect it’s a programmers fault rather than an engineer. A car light bulb is an excellent discharge tool… mind your fingers
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Yeah, they were discharged. I’m pretty anal about discharging even small caps before working on anything. Learned that lesson disassembling camera flash units in high school. One of my friends popped a nice little hole in his finger when he wasn’t careful despite my warnings.
But…both my DMM and the LC meter are less than optimal measurement devices. Better than nothing…but not by much. So I’m not chucking these in the trash just yet…but not using them until I have to either 
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Well, I’m going to have to break out the big bits…wound up going with a 1" hole just to make things fit easier:
This was a test print from yesterday - It’s just a tube with some holes:
New revised print with threaded body and a matching nut is printing now.
Debating what color LED’s to use. I’m leaning towards green for +12 and yellow for -12 so I can tell the two rails apart at a glance. (I don’t much care for red as an indicator light…red means trouble so a red light to indicate things are working always feels wrong to me.)
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So I got the bright idea that it would be nice to extend the power collet and add some threads on the back so I could also print a nut to attach it with.
That worked out well:
My first attempts used M25x1.5 threads. But I couldn’t get them to work on FDM or SLA. I added chamfers but it still didn’t help. Added some offset on the threads to loosen the clearance … .still no luck.
Finally I gave up and used M25x2 threads and both the FDM and SLA versions worked. Though I may not have left quite enough threads for it to snug up without a gasket.
The SLA version is a bit nicer (you can see it near the back) the FDM version the nut doesn’t quite thread all the way because two paths didn’t quite sick right as it was printing. (It’s the one iwht the LED’s in the near the bottom)
Honestly anything I printed today would work. But…I want it to be what I want and not just “good enough”.
While these were printing I made my less than traditional thanksgiving dinner. Since it’s just me and my Daughter and she is the pickiest of picky eaters there’s little point in making a turkey. I did last year (even though I was so sick I could barely get off the couch) and it basically went to waste. So I figured since I’m working from home and can monitor something over a long slow cook why not try the sous vide recipe I’ve been wanting to try since I got a circulator a few years ago. 72 hour ribs:
As their name implies I started them on Monday. Insanely easy recipe. Just seal beef short ribs in vacuum bags and sous vide at 140f for 72 hours. I did slightly salt them first. The result was pretty impressive:
Even without any sauce or additional seasoning they were incredible. I did make a red wine reduction to go over them…but it was totally unnecessary.
I also made some roasted potatoes (no photo, nothing fancy) as well as a brussels sprout cranberry salad and an apple pie:
So it was fairly easy to bounce between 1-2 hour prints ( FDM prints raged from 15 minutes for just a nut to 1:120 SLA were all 2 hours.) and cooking.
I just have to make an appropriate hole in the case now. My spade bit is mysteriously missing the 1" bit (I think I may have destroyed it drilling holes in a stump a few years back) and my hole saw set…is…not usable. Apparently water got into it - which is a bit of a feat since I live in the desert. But two years ago we had the remnants of a hurricane blow through and it took the tarp off my outside kitchen - which the bits were stored in. Haven’t had to use them since then…so I was a bit surprised to find more rust than bits. I should have another 1" bit around here somewhere though. I’d really rather not have to go to a hardware store right now.
And I may print the collet in SLA in some nicer resin. This resin is one of the toughest I have…but it’s just not very attractive. Or…maybe I’ll just give it a quick sanding and a coat of paint.
Going to sleep on it. But I’m really itching to get this case together. Tonight I was in the mood to play the synth…but…it’s just too torn apart. I need to get things that work and I’m happy with moved into this case and get 2 more power supplies running. Thankfully it’s a long weekend ahead so I should make good progress. And I have enough left overs I won’t have to cool for a few days 
But…I also need to finish a few fixes on the sandrail now that the weather is nice out:
Note to self…set the jack stands further back than the rear axle in the future
The wiring on there is something I’m definitely not proud of…and…frankly am kind of amazed myself that it works at all:
(photos are actually from last year when I coaxed it out of a 12 year slumber.)
There’s a coolant line that’s leaking I need to replace, but I also need to add a splitter on it to add a new sensor for the cooling fan. So it’s not a straight forward replacement and I’ve been putting it off since it was just sketchy looking and not actually leaking. But it started leaking after nursing the rail back to life so I need to finally do it right.
And one of these days if I move to a house with a garage again I’ll tear it down to the bare frame for the 4rd time and do it right again. (the first time I had no clue what i was doing. The second time I did it right and it was gorgeous when I was done but the motor was never reliable. The third time I switched motors and decided I wanted the motor to prove itself before I put the effort into repainting again…even though I had already stripped and primed the frame. And the darn thing worked so well and so reliable that I just ran it for a few years…and then took 13 years of due to a combination of reasons but mostly lack of a garage. But I put the time in in the driveway last year to get it running again and took my daughter out…and she didn’t hate it. But we didn’t get to drive much because the line started leaking.
Ok - sorry for the diversions. Once I get power back on these racks this weekend it will be easier to focus on synths again
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Tasty diversion.
Love the power cowl.
Trying to decide though between Bruce Wayne or that you live somewhere with at least 10 extra hours in a day.
Do please share your project/time/life management skills 
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Thinking that a gasket outside and wedge spring on the cylinder might work. Not sure that’s what it’s called but the kind you’d push in and it snaps out behind the board: to remove you pinch from the inside.
I hate it when that happens. Seems to be about 50% of the time. Gotta work on that.
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Love the sand rail, which engine does it have? I think they’re just the coolest, but the nearest sand dunes that can be driven on is 3 hours drive away.
For me and my son I do a sous vide turkey breast
along with garlic mashed potatoes, apple galette, and squash pie. Son did a pasta dish that included veggies. There’s leftovers but we’ll get through them.
Happy Pie for Breakfast Day!
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You hit me right in the BBQ feels. I had frozen buffalo chicken nuggets.
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Time for a Dual-boot rig like my AS400.
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snap ring , they come in inside or outside configurations and are best used with a specialty tool for removing or placing them .
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Sadly it’s mostly a matter of “ignore what’s important and focus on what makes you happy” 
The trick is learning to stop ignoring the important stuff before it becomes critical 
I live about an hour from the best dunes in the country…and about 20 minutes from the southern end of that same set of dunes. I love getting out there. Nothing quite like sitting at the bottom of a sand bowl at night looking up at the sky and just enjoying the silence of the dunes under the moon.
The rail has a Ford 2.3l in it currently. It originally had a 2.0l Pinto motor but it was on it’s last legs when I bought the car. It was rebuild by a friend…but he did a really lousy job and it only survived two trips after the rebuild before failing again (long story.) I then put way too much money into having a high end shop re-build it…only to have them loose 2 vital hard to find parts. And after that expensive rebuild and finally tracking down replacements for the lost parts it never even made it out of the driveway. With the cam it had the 2.0 was an interference engine - and on the second break-in run in the driveway one of the rockers snapped in half. So at that point I decided the 2.0 was cursed and was done with it. Traded it for a VW motor with a broken camshaft and $200. Then found 3 of the 2.3 motors for $200 from a shop in Sacramento that did v8 swaps on 4 cylinder Mustangs. Got 3 full motors, 2 ECU’s and one wiring harness. Took me 3 months to get them to my house though with a number of friends helping pick them up and transport them until they eventually got to me. I put the worst looking engine along with the harness and one of the ECU’s into the rail and it’s been reliable and trouble free since. The second motor went in my manx:
The manx had a 1776VW motor in it when I got it…but that only lasted a year before spinning a bearing. Turned out whoever had built the motor had put the wrong oil pump in. I rebuilt it - but didn’t like having an air cooled motor in the desert and with 2 more 2.3’s just sitting there…
Unfortunately once I got the 2.3 in the Manx it started a string of upgrades that included replacing the whole rear frame to upgrade from the old swing axle transaxle to an IRS bus transaxle…then adding bigger beefier shocks…and then I moved into a house with no garage so it’s been sitting just getting a bit of work done every couple of years for the past 13 years. Trying to set aside the money so that this summer I can get it into a friends shop and just let him finish the upgrades for me. I hate having someone else do it…but I’m tired of the car sitting and without a shop to work in myself it’s just not going to get done otherwise.
Ouch 
This was by far the easiest sous vide recipe I’ve ever done. Just sprinkled a bit of salt on them sealed them…then waited 3 days. The result was astounding right out of the bag with no additional flavors.
I actually strongly considered switching to some kind of snap ring retainer. Would be a lot simpler to design and print. But…this is as much about the learning process as anything and I was determined to get threads I could print successfully
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And half of the new case has power.
Finally found a 1" bit laying around today. Unfortunately it was just a spade bit (and an aggressive one) so not the greatest for getting a straight clean hole in ply. But…it worked. I also marked out and drilled holes for the power board and bus board. I’m using M3 screws to mount - but adding brass threaded inserts in the wood so they’re easier to install/remove:
The busboard has holes for 10 mounting points. I’m only drilling and using 6 of them for now…we’ll see if I feel the other 4 are warranted or not.
The problem is…getting the inserts to thread straight into this ply is fairly tricky. I’ve tried a couple of methods but they all seem to be less than perfect. Thankfully the holes in the PCB’s are big enough and I’m printing my own non-threaded standoffs - so I have some wiggle room.
The standoffs are 5mm tall and I just printed them on my FDM printer. Warning…printing m3 standoffs is a pretty high bar for FDM printers there’s so little bed adhesion and so much leverage as they grow. I made a quadcopter a few years back that used two thin sheets of ply (or better yet a composite material) and a bunch of standoffs as it’s frame:
Printing all those red standoffs was tricky to pull off - if one fails it can take a lot of others with it. The quad…was ok. But the ply was way too weak. I broke the wood more than I broke the PLA standoffs.
The spacers I needed today are a lot more modest. And first plate of 10 came out perfect. Next two plates only had about 60% success between them. But I got enough to do the case:
Test fit looks good. Now to wire it up.
The board interconnect didn’t come out quite as cleanly as I had hoped. Positive and negative are swapped between them But that means both connectors are wired the same.
And it looks good from outside:
The LED’s aren’t as insanely bright as they appear in the photo. Just the lighting in here makes them come out a bit exaggerated. Green for +12, Yellow for -12. Tomorrow when I etch and build another power board and solder up another bus board I’ll do the same for the top row.
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Ate a quick lunch so had time to finish the 2nd power supply install.
The brass inserts really do make it nice…though…with 6 per board I wish the holes in the PCB were a little bigger to allow a bit more slop.
But all four boards installed and things look good - test out good on the DMM too.
Closer to how they look…though this still makes them look brighter than they appear in person. Now that they’re working I’m thinking about going with red for +12 after all…since I used red wire for +12 and yellow wire for -12 on my intra-board harness. So that way my LED’s will match the wire colors. Even if it does mean using red to indicate “ok”
Now to start filling this case. I think I’m going to try to do all my own 3D printed modules in this case. The original case I’ll fit all “3rd party” modules. Though I may pull a few 3rd party up to the top since I do seem to use them in every patch. They may be handy enough in the top row of the bottom case though.
Now to crimp up a bunch of new power cables and finally get some of these modules out of the “todo” box!
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starting to come together nicely .
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Hell ya you’ll have it filled in no time!
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Sorry to drudge this out of the depths, but I am getting ready to undertake the clock divider myself.
Is there a good way to add a pushbutton reset?
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Well, the build my build was based on was in turn based on the Fonitronik design which happens to include a reset button:
http://www.modular.fonik.de/pdf/SimpleDividerSCH.pdf
So you should be able to adapt that. You’d probably have to change the resistor assuming you’re on 12v not 15v like this schematic…but otherwise looks like you should be able to graft it right in:
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Been moving slow the past few days. Did some more cleanup on the wires in the new case.
When I re-wired my K40 laser cutter I found that all of the wires going into headers had nice distinctive crimped ferules on them. having had stray strands of wire get loose and cause problems in the past I liked this idea and after a quick search found I could get the crimper and a bunch of ferules on Amazon fairly cheap:
For a bit under $30 I got the crimping tool and a bunch of ferules:
Just strip your wire, pick the right size ferule and give it a crimp. I like watching this particular crimper do it’s thing so that’s a nice side bonus.
Oh - and if you’re using these headers be warned - they almost always arrive closed but can still look open. That center one is actually fully closed even though if they were all like that the gaps under them could look like where you should put wires.
With all the headers now wired cleanly I decided it was time to start moving in properly and made up a bunch of new power cables for modules that have been awaiting a home:
And I have to say…having my homemade panels off in their own case (well, the 1222 made it up there because I had to move it to make room for the triggers on the midibox outputs and I didn’t want to deal with remounting it into wood.) both cases now feel kind of empty.
The new case feels more empty and like I need to make more DIY modules…but alas…I really want to get these AO modules and the two new LMNC modules built because the two AO modules have been waiting almost since I started building a few months ago. Besides I still can’t make up my mind about what to make next. And I need to figure out why the one 3340 stopped working, what happened to the /8 division on the clock divider again, and why one of the LED’s on my multiples isn’t lighting up.
Oh…and I should probably do new panels for the reverse avalanche (the current one interferes with the rails because I had my side ribs going too close to the edges - and the jacks/knobs don’t follow my current spacing rules.) And the MS-20 filter…which is really disappointing because I’ve done more panels for that filter than anything else already! But…it looks out of place next to the new spacing/size I’ve used on everything else so I’ll probably go ahead and redo it ONE more time.
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