(^&*&^% Server stuff

 ... and I say that like I actually have servers ... 

Background:

• Wife had an old Dell Inspiron PC with Vista on it. (Yeah, me too, I choked on bile while I typed that.) It currently has a Win7 salvaged from my old laptop and re-installed, and to say the least, it's slower. We use it as a file and media server but it's becoming an issue, the external drive that most every file resides on drags the power bus down so far that it won't boot with the drive plugged in.
  
  So it's what you might call sub-optimal for even that purpose, and then I recently had to put my 3D printing files and all the stuff I'm working on into that drive too, so work is currently at a crawl.
  
  
• I bought a 2nd hand bitzer from a PC shop, pretty much wasted my money. It has a dodgy USB bus that loses track of ports in a heartbeat, only 2G RAM (just like the Dell, come to think of it) and because the techie added an SSD, it takes about five minutes to reboot while it re-identifies the drive - every reboot. Warm or cold. 
  
  It was supposed to be the machine that all the development work was done on but it doesn't have 3D capable graphics card, and I can't even get reliable USB communications with the 3D printer to use Repetier Host or any software to help manage the printer. 
  
  

Sooooo...  Not ideal, and it puts a serious crimp in everything I do. My underpowered laptop can do my 3D graphics work - but ever so slowly - and because I tried to speed it up with an SSD, it hasn't got enough space for the files. So they live on (See Inspiron, *sigh*, and also known as "BUNNY" on the network) that machine, where it can sometimes take three minutes to open a remote Explorer window on a directory on that external drive. . .

And Now:

So I recently bought two little 256G SSDs from Aliexpress and when they arrived I initialised them, and then used Macrium Reflect to clone the system drive of the 2nd (aka Bitzer or, more properly, "KIDDENS" because most of my computers have pet-related names) machine and then installed that as the primary drive. 

And surprise of surprises! It's not the SSD being some shonky make that is causing the motherboard to not recognise the drive - it's the F)&()ing motherboard itself. Yay for me. Most useless POS I ever wasted my money on. . . 

So kept the old SSD in it (and yep for anyone playing along at home I changed the CMOS battery and it made no difference, it's the BIOS itself apparently) and bunged the newly-cloned SSD into Bunny, put a USB stick with a fresh W10 install in, and am now sitting while it works out whether I can install it or will I need to get a 32bit Win10. (No I am not kidding I can't make this stuff up it's so sad and annoying...)

At least they both got a half-hearted dust out and wiring moved around and tidied up a bit. Oh yeah dust. We live with the window of the hobby/craft room about 12m away from a major regional highway and so I vacuum all our machines out about every six months to clear the dust crust out of vents and fans, otherwise they start to get a mite warm. Only the 3D printer has a dust-proof enclosure.

I'll update this before I post it, I just wanted you to understand why I often feel like I'm head-desking more than the average techie should ought to . . . 

UPDATE:

Yep - BUNNY is now updated to the win10 installation and seems to be working as well as before but file access is still woeful.

KIDDENS is as it was before, and the idea of some accelerator and a box of matches looks so enticing - if only I could replace the damn thing with a real computer...

A day in my life. Five minutes to midnight. Peace out.

Collaboration

 Joining the plastic (and other) waste material recycling is Grumpy Old Guy. This is a fun account to follow, with some social commentary and I enjoy it. But that account's donations and mine are now all going towards us making new machines and technology for recycling plastic and other materials. It means I don't have to keep buying parts out of my limited budget and can start working a bit faster on the development of these things.

What Am I Working On?

I started with simple things - bought a flat plate sandwich griller (aka a panini press and other such names) and made a few flat plates and sheets out of various plastics. To stop the plastic sticking you could use baking paper but I was lucky enough to have had a silicon/carbon fibre BBQ sheet, which worked well.

Far better than my fingers and an old oven mitt did to protect me while releasing the plastic and folding it to exclude air bubbles . . . 😬 (You have to get the bubbles out to get the plastic properly flat, but with my gear I can't, so I've made a feature out of it . . . hehehe . . . )

But I found I could make sheets with HDPE, LDPE, and PP plastic. And when I buy a decent set of heatproof silicon gloves I should be better equipped to work with hot plastic. 

I was also able to laminate some decorative patterns cut from things like TP pack plastic (just big plastic bags with "extreme softness" and similar toilet paper slogans printed on them) between laminating sheets and that has me thinking that I could laminate multiple layers of bags like that and shopping bags and rice and pet food bags between two silicon sheets and produce quite hard and hard-wearing plastic sheets for turning into sides for enclosures, cover sheets, etc. 

I decided not to test anything with that much thickness on our little A4 laminator as it's for office use, but will be looking out for sturdy A3 machines I can possibly modify for this purpose, but once again it needs money so it's on the backburner for now.

Have spent several hundred instead on cartridge and sleeve heaters and control boards and am now just waiting to save enough to buy some motors and PID temperature controllers I can almost go for Phase 3.02.a (OK that's just a bullshot number but I'm trying to tell you that I have a HUGE list of experiments I'm working on) once I can afford it, and that'll be an injection molding machine. 

I have ideas for making injection molds out of PET plastic because it's higher temperature than the soft plastics, and making pressing molds (Phase 3.03.d !!!) out of whatever plastic so I can stamp metal molds out of tin and aluminium (Phase 3.04.a) and use them to line the PET molds as they'll add temperature shielding and endurance to the PET (Phase .01.a) so that I can then injection mold useful items.

And once I manage to have enough to commission a local engineering company to make a steel press frame and a few blocks for me I should be able to equip that to pressure press flat sheets that are much more uniform and dense, drive the injection molder, and so forth. And stamp more aluminium and steel sheets for yet other molding including turning old cardboard into pressure-molded containers, environmentally friendly packaging, and so forth. 

From that to food-safe bowls and so forth is just a materials change away. And suddenly I'd be able to recycle plastics, thin metals, plastic bags and old cloth and other materials, and so forth. 

That's sort of the current state of play, loads to do and not enough resources to do it with. 

The Inevitable Inaugural Post

 Hello World. 

Some of you may know I have a website on a hosted server with Digital Pacific who are a pretty good - no, let me rephrase that - an excellent hosting services provider here in Australia and whose services I've used for at least a decade by now, for various websites. Nope I am not getting anything for this endorsement but I feel that the service I've received and the uptime of my various sites on their servers is exemplary and so I have no hesitation in recommending them. 

(Well, if DP ever wanted to sponsor me in the future I wouldn't complain, but at the time of writing this is a totally unsolicited testimonial. Also, if, as you read on in this and subsequent posts and get what I'm doing and would like to sponsor / donate / help out in any way, I'll have my sidebars and footers sorted fairly soon and would really welcome any way I can collaborate with you to make it happen.)

So, What Do I Do?

Okay. This is difficult to write up in one blog post but I can summarise. I've always been a bit concerned (and believe me I've had time to become so, I'm almost 65 at the time I'm writing this) about the waste problem. It's taken several decades for it to come to a head within me but I finally started to do some serious thinking about what I can do just before the pandemic started. It's taken a few more years but I've now evolved a bit of a plan and a bit of a system and (as one does) started learning about 3D printing in early 2021. Yes there are reasons. I said this was going to be difficult to do in one go. 

A few other organisations online gave me some ideas about where to start with my experiments and development, and a lot of input from my beloved and her family, some from my family, and a few friends, all gave me invaluable input and insights. (I know, for example, how far the average person is willing to go in handing over useable plastics and materials for recycling. Answer is "not a great deal, but far more if you get them involved." This has become important for my approach, because it dictates how much pre-processing has to be done.)

Basically, then, I'm a person that will 3D print small items on demand, print a whole lot more to learn how to apply various techniques mainly slanted towards recycling. And not just plastics (although they are the easiest of the waste stream materials to recycle and repurpose) but cardboard and paper, aluminium, and steel and tinplate. At this stage. There are quite a few ideas I can't work on all of them at the same time as I'm also organising all the other required stuff. (But check the sidebar about "Getting Involved: How You Can Help" if you think you'd like to.)

My purpose with this recycling operation isn't to make a fortune, but rather to develop equipment and techniques and so forth and, more importantly - a system - for others to follow, also a set of branding identifiers, and then hopefully very soon, a series of similar little community operated facilities will spring up that will take care of a significant portion of their local waste stream and keep it out of landfill.

The brand identity will be pretty much to be small, almost cottage industry, local operations that recycle re-use and repurpose a significant part of the local waste stream. I'm aiming for something that'll be not for profit (See *** next para.) but pay the wages of a large group of people locally thus taking them off the unemployment lists, give them a job that is easier and less struggle than many of today's high-risk high-pressure workplaces, and - as the general public begins to appreciate how important good stewardship of the planet actually is - will become quite prestigious jobs. 

(***Actually - EVERYTHING is on the table, but it needs YOU to start talking to me and others and we'll decide it from there.)

I myself am a disability pensioner and don't have a lot of disposable income to contribute but so far I've scrimped and saved and poured several hundred dollars of my quite limited income on parts and equipment and am currently using a corner of my front porch as my workshop for developing things.

On the plus side, I have quite a range of developments (plans for machines or partially-assembled development machines, small items made with plastics and metals to prove things work, etc) in that corner of the veranda and inside the house, and while I'm a bit limited as I said in my financial and ability capabilities it just shows that if I can do it so can anyone else. So as soon as you see those links in the sidebar please do get involved and help make a difference!

A few of those links will (sort of) explain what I'm on about, and when you decide to get involved, you'll be able to help decide exactly what sort of an operation it'll be. 

Hope to catch you again soon!