MYX Digital – Page 4 – Over Engineering Stupidity

Have Dust Shoe… Will Travel

Mar 182014

The next logical step (at least to me) was to get going on the dust shoe. While hand holding the vacuum works well, it is something that you have to keep a focus on throughout the whole milling job. Why? Because if you don’t, you will be met with a loud zzzshwap! when the end mill comes into contact with the vacuum hose. Not cool. Doesn’t do anything to the end mill, and actually did not hurt the job. It just scares the hell out of you.

The dust shoe will allow me to attach the vacuum directly to the cutting head (spindle). Meaning that the main force of the suction is always very close to where everything is happening.

Spindle: Massive Upgrade – All Powerful Googly Eyes

Shapeoko No Responses »

Mar 162014

I finished this mod a couple of nights ago and have been testing it while working on my dust shoe. So far it seems to be making quite a lot of difference. I think that it intimidates the cutting material by having to look up at the menacing glare of the DeWalt. Also, being that the DeWalt is a moving, vibrating object, I have found that there are the added benefits of the upgrade making wonderfully unpredictable moves. I highly recommend this to any serious DW-660 user.

Acoustical Absorption Testing

Shapeoko, Sound No Responses »

Mar 142014

Several years ago I made 22 absorptive panels for my edit suite at work. These let me control the number and amount of reflective surfaces in the room. This is great for accurate listening so the room does not color the mix. When we moved into our new building, all the edit suites received new sound panels. Most of the panels were given to my church to try to fight some of the issues in our main room, but I also kept a few for myself. These have an NRC (Noise Reduction Coefficient) of 1. With these panels, most frequencies above about 400Hz are totally absorbed. While this is all well and great on paper, I wanted to do some rough testing of what I might really see as a reduction. These were very rough and fairly unscientific tests, so in theory, the end results will be even better than this. I did all testing at 1 meter from the sound source, which is 1. a very loud vacuum and 2. a very loud DeWalt DW660. The software is “Audio Tool” (clevar name) on an Android phone. I did some checking into the specs of the mic on the phone and it has a maximum sensitivity up to 90dB. So as the actual levels, they may be louder than what I am able to read, but it will get me close. To support my phone, I used a highly scientific bar stool with an even more scientific piece of wood sitting on top of it. I did not want the cushion of the stool to absorb the sound and give a false reading.

If I learned anything from Mythbusters (and science class years ago), you need a control. Here is a recording of the baseline room noise. These samples are roughly a minute in length. You can see that aside from my dog laying down and then dropping something a few seconds later. You can see some noise from the A/C as well. The base SPL is roughly 48dB.

I did not have any way to really hold the panels to test them with the DeWalt (again, this was not a completely scientific test, just trying to get a rough idea. There is a very solid tone just under 500Hz. This tapers off, then picks up again around 750Hz and stays strong up through around 7K. There is what looks like clipped level right around 6.5K, you can see a harmonic of this around 13k. About 2/3 of the way down the picture you can see the line under 500Hz swing off to the left. This is me shutting off the DeWalt.

I did not want to pull the Shapeoko off the table, and I am not yet ready to cut the panels down yet, so I shoved a panel behind the table, resting it on the window sill, shoved 2 other panels in along the sides, and held a panel in front of the table. Again, very scientific right? While the scream at 500Hz is still fairly present, the level is reduced for sure. But check out the what happened to the levels above 1K. This is crazy good to see. Near full reduction except for various frequencies between 3-5k. The 2 peaks around 6.28k (as shown) and 13k, while reduced still very present. This reading comes from what would be a horrible job of an installation of sound reduction material. When I get this actually enclosed, this may really do the trick.

Next up, I did a recording of the vacuum. This first image is with no noise reduction. You can see very high levels around 150Hz, with a second peak from roughly 1.7k – 6kHz. The Nexus phone mic is reading is 88dB, so it is possible that it is louder. I may borrow the dB meter from work to retest with proper equipment. Being that the vaccum was not attached to the table, this was much easier to test. I made a little triangular room out of the panels and placed the last one on top (see the images below).

The first measurement was taken with the vacuum hose coming out of the front of the structure of panels. While things quieted down substantially this revealed how much air noise a vacuum makes by itself with air rushing through. Here you can still a strong presence around 150Hz, but no where near the levels they were before. From just below 1k to just above 2k you can see near full attenuation.

Lastly we have the vacuum with the hose moved to the back. Being that there is no wooshing air noise directly in front of us, you can see an even greater reduction around 150Hz, and from roughly 600Hz and above there is a near full reduction.

The Table

Shapeoko No Responses »

Mar 122014

With proper cooling in place, I needed to respond to the needs of my wife… Get this $#!+ off of my kitchen table. Well, not her exact words, but I can read between the lines. Actually, she has been great about it all. I have been fretting about what and where my Shapeoko will live. I was initially thinking about putting having it in the garage. I live in south eastern US and I can see that 1. I will not want to work down in the garage during the heat of the summer. 2. Seeing that polar vortexes seem to like the south, and as you may have seen a little snow can bring the our City to a skreeeeching halt. I will not want to be in the garage for long periods of time. So… looks like it will be in my workshop.

If I am going to be in the workshop that means I need a table. I just finished cleaning off the air hockey table a couple of weeks ago, so that was off limits. Air hockey tables are a high gravity catch all for anything that does not seem to have some other place to live. Dangerous things really. I designed the table to be sort of a box on legs. I wanted a ceiling on it to support the drivers, control box, tools and so on. It was designed to be long enough that I can grow the Shapeoko to 1 meter. Initially I will probably keep my laptop at the end of the table.

This was all originally supposed to sit on a couple of saw horses for the legs. After setting it up on the saw horses, the whole thing wobbled in an unsettling way. This is not exactly the sort of thing you want to be falling over mid milling job, so, I set off to build legs that were a little more proper, not to mention structural.

Something that is being thought about (heavily) in the back of my mind is how loud the spindle (Dewalt DW660 router) and the vacuum are. They are each quite loud by themselves, but together they are a whole new monster. They are both running around 90 dB. Sound containment was also considered in the design. While I will not be able to eliminate the noise completely, I would like to knock it down to tolerable levels (without the need for hearing protection). So essentially the sides are built as a cage to house sound panels on the sides. I will also be building a sound panel box for the vacuum as well. Once built they should be able to slide into place. I played with some panels I currently have to test a couple of ideas. I will cover this in another post though.

Cooling Tower

Arduino, Shapeoko No Responses »

Mar 032014

The next thing on my list was getting some air moving over the shield. While I understand that they will run hot and have become okay with the idea (sort of), I still want to take care of it. So I set off to cage the Arduino and shield and make a pseudo cooling stack sort of thing. I had some acrylic left over from another project years ago. While not a crazy hard project, this is my first venture into making something where all the parts really needed to line up. I designed this in a couple of hours in Draftsight. It probably would have gone faster if Game of Thrones was not on. I went through a time where I was buying all sorts of things from garage sales so my son and I could take them apart and grab the goodies inside. I am not sure what it came out of, but I had a 24V fan which I wired into the V-In on the shield. It moves a heck of a lot of air.

I cut’er out and put it all together. I was really pleased how close everything came out. Projects prior to the Shapeoko always ran the great possibility that come assembly time it may, or may not come together all together well. This was precise.

Cadillacs, Spin, and Hate

Barf No Responses »

Mar 022014

I saw a shared post on Facebook the other night, where apparently “liberals” were offended by a car commercial (Cadillac). I went and read the article because I thought that it was an interesting concept commercial and didn’t understand why one might be offended by it. I was going to to link to the blog post, but decided not to. While many of his ideas were on track, the rest of the post was full of hateful nonsense trying to make the point. Way to take it too far.

But as I thought through it, I think I figured out what the real problem was. It’s not the liberals, and it is not the conservatives. It is the continuous stream of BS news about the liberals and conservatives. So much polar absolutism. So much rage. So much hate. How do these things get so out of hand? Spin. So… here it is… One or two people say something stupid about some topic. The news then gets a hold of it, and inflates it full of farm fresh hyperbole, and now all the (fill in the social group)s are ALL the side of said issue. From a guy who does not subscribe to either side, I don’t think there is anything to be offended by (speaking of the above mentioned commercial). If someone is deeply offended, and hurt by a stupid commercial, it is time to put on the big boy pants and get over it. This is NOT the type of thing you need to get into an uproar about. More, if you are offended, don’t demand to have the commercial pulled, demand that the media in general be pulled. The media has turned into educational programming in how, and why, you should hate thy neighbor.

I subscribe to the idea of looking at each thing and making up MY OWN mind (regardless of who else thinks the same). And guess what… Sometimes my thoughts are not what is popular. Sorry, hope this doesn’t offend you. If you feel the need to hate me, so be it. Unfriend me, or close the tab and be done with it, but I refuse to be sucked in by this polar stupidity.

If I am offended by something, I am offended by the perpetuation of hatred of my fellow man (or woman). Here’s a novel idea, perhaps look for some good in people. Try to find the things we have in common. Hmmm… Try loving one another. Try to focus on appreciating each other, for actually having an opinion, and perhaps try to look at an idea from more than one side.

Lastly, for the love of God, please turn off any talk radio, news show, tv show, or Facebook post that spins any other group of people as totally evil and wrong, or totally right and oh so saintly. Many of these sources of poison are NOT in need of reporting good, solid, fact based news, they are in need of sponsorship money. They will spin things in the worst possible way. Why? Because people are so accustom to hearing bad things, bad things need to be amplified in order to evoke an emotional response. So, they claw at all that makes us human to find that little ounce of feeling that we have left. They want into your brain. They want to control your thoughts. They want to sway your thoughts, feelings, emotions.

Why? Because a people that are divided have no strength. People who are divided will fight amongst them selves instead of dealing with the real threat. Be careful what you allow into your mind. Be careful about who you let control your thoughts. Be careful who you follow. Because guess what? There are many people/groups/organizations competing to get into your mind, trying to get you to think about things in ways you might not actually think (if you actually thought for yourself). If someone is teaching you to hate, to turn you against someone else, because by God, they are DIFFERENT than YOU (because WE tell you WHO TO BE…), while somewhat difficult in this era of history (infestation of media, and spin), please don’t listen. More, please don’t share, post, or re-post hateful garbage. You are not helping anything, or anyone, you ARE the problem, or you are just making the problem worse. Yes, sure, it is so much easier to hate. Hate takes no effort. Getting along with others takes some effort, but you can at least go to bed, tired for the right reasons.

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