I’d Buy That For Five Dollars

Welcome to the Mac fab engineering podcast. We are your hosts, Parker, Dolman.

And Steven Craig.

This is episode 216.

I don't think we'll ever do that the same way ever again.

No, never again. Anyways, what's up, Stephen? What's going on? What? What is going on in the wild world of Denver, Colorado?

I mean, everyone's on lockdown. Right now. This is getting pretty close that here in Houston to? Yeah, it's I mean, it's pretty much everyone shut down at the moment. And we just got the word yesterday that all restaurants and bars and things of that short are shut down for eight weeks. So we're all all of us who can work from home are, it's kind of actually it's funny, because I'm still going into the office because I'm like, they put me way in the back corner. And I have to run the mill. And so like I'm a machine operator, so I get to go in. And it's kind of nice, because my machine runs on 100% ethanol. So it's super clean all the time. And like I have ethanol all around me. So I can just spray everything down. So I'm still going into the office. But it's also kind of nice, too, because since there's nobody there. Today, I set up a whole bunch of desks. And I made like a super engineering bench all around me because it's just gonna be me. I got every piece of test equipment. I got microscopes. I got everything going on. So yeah, that that's that. Yeah. Yeah, that's

what I've been doing. I've been working from home. My favorite thing was, is that meme where it's like, when when you find out that how you live your life is the quarantine protocol.

already been doing this? Exactly. Yeah. No, I probably spend, I don't know, right now a third of my life in my basement. So and the other two thirds were at work.

The way you know, we're all joking right now. But I think it's important to note just like everyone stay safe, don't do dumb things. Like just consider what you're doing. And if you know I heard a talk radio guy was talking about it's like, still go out and take a walk. Like you can still go enjoy the sunlight. You don't have to be a cave troll this entire time. Like, the sky is not necessarily falling and you can still go enjoy things like that. Just you know, be be mindful of what you're doing at all times.

Yeah. One of the biggest pieces of advice I've seen, or I guess listened to was pretend that you have the virus and don't want to spread it. Yeah, yeah. And so yes, you can go out and go for a walk, because you're not going to give it to anyone about going forward. Unless you're like, go to like the Boston Marathon or something. If that's your idea of in a walk, that might you might spread the disease that way. But run walking around your neighborhood by yourself with your dog isn't going to harm anyone.

I think we should call this the introverts disease just because like everyone else has to now become an introvert. Like it's government mandated integration. But but here's the thing, we should all be getting all of our projects done in the next two months, right.

If you can get all the parts for it. Yeah, well, yeah, true.

I mean, the Postal Service is still working, I suppose. For some time.

Yeah. What was it the the thing you have to worry about most is the Waffle House index. What's that? So the one of the last businesses to close is waffle houses. Which is for those that not in the States. A Waffle House is like a really inexpensive breakfast diner that serves breakfast foods. 20 470 Yeah,

it's a kind of place that you go into it and like half the people are smoking in there. And the person who's serving you is also smoking. Yeah. What do you want Han

into like the trucker stops kind of thing? Yeah. And so it's the seriousness of a natural disaster in the United States can be gauged off the Waffle House index. Well not waffle houses have closed down or not. Got it? Mainly, it's used for hurricanes.

I was not aware of this. I could see a waffle house being like a place where you're sitting on those little benches here. You know, it's like three in the morning you were out drinking all night long. And there's like mushroom clouds in the background and they're like that we're still open

so I actually haven't looked at the wealth health index for the Coronavirus yet but I got a bunch of some rules for it.

Oh, probably. Yeah. Well, I mean, technically I guess they're supposed to be shut down right?

Yes. Yeah. So that that's when you know, it's bad when the waffle house near you shut down because of Coronavirus. So speaking up project, Steven that we were getting done. Yeah. Are you up to? Well,

okay, I've been talking about the CNC for a few weeks now. And I basically got it finished. I say basically, because there's just like a few small odds and ends, like zip tying some cables together and things like that. But I got it all working and things are going well with it. So I ended up calibrating the three axes, which were because I had already built a machine, they were pretty close. This time I use a dial dial Mike and got them a little bit closer, but I was we're talking about like, changing numbers, a few pulses out of 1000, just to get them a little bit more accurate. So I ran. Previously, I had I don't know, I had some really crappy cable management on the machine. I've had virtually no cable, you had no cable management, like

I remember on

I mean, I had some things that were like, they were like, taped to the machine.

So I remember we had to traverse the tar gantry across the bed, like you had to pick up the cables and kind of like shuffle on the long by hand.

Well, yeah. And when you had seen the machine that was after I'd actually taken some of the cable management off, just because like it was it was old and crappy. So

the cable management was worse than doing it by hand. No, normally it was better than

that I had actually taken off what was there previously, by the time you had seen it. Okay, just there was a handful of reasons for that. But so I went over to a local wood store and got some, what do you call it? Dust vacuum dust hose, you know, that kind of hose that's like vinyl, but it has an actual spiral of metal and cable in it. It's really flexible, and it works pretty well for this. So I actually just made a U bend. And that instead of buying e chain, I didn't want to go out and buy a whole bunch of E chain because like I just don't want to spend the money on that. And these were like 10 bucks for a tube. And I can just pass everything through that and it ends up working fairly well. So I just used some hose clamps and and screwed those into the back of my gantry. And that ended up working fairly well. So you know, cheap solutions for things that I just don't want to spend a bunch of money on right now. So I got the spindle control going, which that was kind of like the biggest thing that I haven't done before with this. So it runs on a basically the computer PWM the VFD. And then the VFD reads that in well, I apologize, the computer PWM my small breakout board and then that breakout board spits out a zero to 10 volt control signal. And then that goes off as an analog signal to the VFD. And that controls things from zero to 24,000 rpm. And it's actually kind of cool because, you know, if I want to set it up to do 100 hertz, it'll actually spin at 100 Hertz. And there are some situations like well, really probably the slowest I'll go is 1000 rpm. I said hertz RPM, we're talking about spinning things, not electrical things here. So 1000 RPM I use for my edge finders, so I have little spinning edge finder things and I don't really want to take them up at 10,000 rpm. That's why well because it's just bring on the inside I don't want to deform anything and they're meant to be super accurate and 1000 RPM has worked well for me in the past. That's one of the reasons why I got a water cooled system so I could do things like edge finding.

That's actually one reason why I want to eventually upgrade my my drill press to a VFD get it put a three phase motor on it and then put three phase of VFD because you can spin the drill press at like 10 RPM, which is really good when you're you know trying to bore a a large diameter hole and like sheet metal or metal like aluminum but we're trying to use a big hole Saul spinning it really slow is pretty important.

Yeah and with VFDs you can program in whatever torque curve you want or you can program constant torque which is super convenient. So such that it can basically ramp its torque up or ramp its power consumption up if it detects a heavy load, which is awesome for cutting through metals. Because then it's it's a little bit more independent upon like you pulling and pushing force into the metal you get cleaner cuts that way. So you have a full like stand up. Drill Press Right?

Yeah and it's one with a actually has a CVT in it. So it has like a big lever on the side that adjusts the the pulleys inside like it tightens or loosens them. It has a belt in there. It works pretty well but it only goes down I think the slowest it goes as well. 300 RPM,

which is that's pretty fast.

It is still a little fast for some of the cutting I do. Especially if I do I'm doing like anything over an inch diameter, like bore.

It makes it makes the bit walk a bit a bit.

Yeah, a little bit like, it's really the biggest problem is if I start using step bits, you start to burn step bits pretty good.

Yeah, step bits don't like to go blinding speeds. No, they

don't. And 300 is on like the edge of being too fast for those. So I'd like to be able to step it down somewhere, it's like, Oh, I could have spent some more money and, you know, got one that that went slower that had more gear reduction, but

or you could spend even more money and put a VFD. But you

get the constant torque wrenches. I actually have never seen a, I guess prosumer grade drill press that has that. So I'm just gonna make one

constant torque is just how hard you're pulling down on the lever. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Manual constant torque. So yeah. So I got the spindle up and up and running. And I'm god, I love how quiet these things are. So my CNC is in my basement, which I put it in a corner that just made the most sense for the basement. But you know, 12 feet vertically upwards is my living room where my wife watches TV, and I, I was surfacing my my CNC table. And I went upstairs and I was like, Hey, did you did the CNC bother you? And she's like, the what? Like, yes, it's quiet enough. So she could watch TV straight through it, which is awesome. So I glued a whole chunk of MDF to the to the table and did a surface on it. So the other day I picked up a for flute, two and 1/32 inch diameter surfacing bit.

So when 30 seconds kind of weird.

It is kind of weird. I don't know why. Because that

must be a metric. Prop size. Yeah, I bet you have you put a mole caliper on it. I betcha it's a metric number.

I wouldn't surprise me just because it's odd. Yeah. But with with two inches, I mean, that's that's it surfaces the board pretty quickly. So I took that bit at 12,000 RPM, which is pretty damn fast for a bit that big. But everything I researched, like people were like, yeah, go fast. This, this thing is fine. And it seemed to work pretty well. I was also pushing it into material at 100 inches a minute, which is one and some change inches a second. And it seemed to eat the board alive, it produced a really fine dust that went freaking everywhere in my basement, which sucked I should have had my vacuum hooked up, but I wanted to watch it and and listen to it in case I heard anything weird. So I don't know, I had to spend a bunch of time yesterday, just vacuuming up a really fine powder of glue and sawdust everywhere, which sucks. But I also took it at about 5000 to 10 thousandths of an inch depth to cut. And honestly, I think I could go faster than 100 inches a minute, a lot of people were saying this bid, they take them to like 200 to 600 inches a minute, which is 600 inches, a minute is 10 inches a second, you know, like, I'm not gonna go that fast, I guarantee you it would not hold up to that. But I might be able to go 150 to 200 inches a minute on it. That's pretty fast for a CNC like mine. But I mean, I am just taking a skim cut. So I gotta do a little bit more surfacing tonight because I left a little strip wanted to make some simple changes. So I'm going to do that tonight. Just get everything done on that and then start cutting some calibration blocks. I already calibrated all the axes and everything like that. But now I'm going to start cutting some squares that are like, you know, five inches by five inches, measuring that I actually got five inches, five inches. But the biggest thing that I'm worried about, and the hardest thing to like actually account for is squareness. Like if I kind of a square, is it square on all four sides? Yeah. Do

you have 90s? Or do you have 90 ones? Yeah, exactly.

I'm not worried about the the accuracy of the axes. They're, they're good. I can already tell you that from what I've measured, but I am somewhat concerned about the squareness. And so I'm going to start by cutting some small squares, make sure that they're good. And then eventually I want to put a thing down and cut a four foot by four foot 90 And see if I'm cutting four foot by four foot and that's going to be difficult. So I don't know. I'm going to try to get that running tonight. So you know actually, I think I sent this to Parker. I haven't post put up in the Slack channel yet I need to do it. Last week I talked about MIDI to G code. And we talked about putting meatloaf bat out of hell into it. I totally did it. It does work. Doesn't sound very good. It's just not like that song is not intended to be played on stepper motors. Yeah, it was also eight channels of MIDI going into three separate stepper motors. So the way the code is created as it has to like prioritize notes, and it's like jumping all over the place. So it's not fantastic. But I did. I did pull it off and play bat out of hell on my CNC.

A Kerman on our Slack channel has a posted a Thingiverse link to printing a Tetris block on your 3d printer that has embedded the Tetris theme into the servo motors, I saw actually still print a Tetris block to

Dad's incredible, like, I can understand the whole like what I did with the MIDI to G code where it's just prioritizing, like, I have to turn this motor at this rate to get this tone. But on top of that with with the Tetris piece, like it also has to print, like, how did they pull that off? I'm not entirely sure.

I think it just changes the frequency that you're running your motors that it still has the Yeah, yeah, the going from x point two to y point is still the same. It just changed. So it's continually changing the speed that it's moving at. So it's probably not the best print. Oh, it's

probably a garbage print.

But um, I was going to actually print this probably or try to print it. Tonight,

does it? Does it print one Tetris piece? Or does it print all the Tetris pieces,

it just prints one? Oh, it prints is the block. Cool.

So I don't know those rectilinear those like really square pieces are probably easier to do that kind of thing with because you know, you have like really nice 90 Straight lines to calculate everything with. So, so yeah, the CNC is working, I'm super happy with it. Now I can actually start doing other projects. But hey, I said earlier this year that like, my goal was to like, commit to doing a thing and then like ripping through it, and I've been so far, so good. We're three months in now. And I'm accomplishing crap. So I got another thing that an interesting thing we talked about last week was the spindle wiring and the cables that connect to the spindle. And we had, well, I guess both of us had sort of mentioned a little bit of confusion around properly grounding and properly shielding the VFD cables that connect up to the spindle, so your VFD to your spindle path. It's a three phase connection. But then you also have a fourth conductor, which is the ground but then you also have a shield, how the ground is pretty easy to do work with but like, what do you do with the shield? Do you ground it at one end? In a soda granted at the VFD? Side? Or do you grant it at the spindle side? Or do you grind it grounded on both sides? And Parker and I kind of talked about it last week. And with our experience, when it comes to shielding, the common thought behind that is to ground one side of a shield. So you don't get ground loops. And so you don't also have ground current flowing through the shield? Effectively, the way to think of it is that like, think of like having a tubular extension of your chassis that flows over whatever conductor you have. And that's been my, my entire experience with shielded cables is like, Oh, you ground one side. And a lot of times, yeah, most of the time you ground that at the source side. And that's always worked out. But after a bit of research this week, I found out that is not correct for VFDs. So the the biggest thing is, the way I was thinking about it is well Okay, so let me back up. Let me put it this way. There's kind of two thoughts with shielding. Are you trying to keep something from coming into your conductor or you're trying to keep something from your conductor from going out into the world? The way we were thinking about it is shielding us in like I don't want crap from the environment to get into my Senate inductor or conductors? Which is absolutely not what is going on here. I've got a really really really noisy environment inside my conductors. And I don't want those getting out into the world. I don't want to radiate and spit crap out. Which is the case with VFDs. Like, who cares about shielding? 220 volt three phase wire against RF like it doesn't care. No like That's not going, that's not doing anything. So the biggest thing behind this is that EMC regulations for VFDs require that you shield on both sides, or you I'm sorry, you ground the shield on both sides, which seems really counterintuitive at first. But check this out. Well, first of all, I have a link to some a great, fantastic document about grounding and shielding, or they call it screening VFDs. You can, the the website is ice web dot e i t.edu.au. So just go to the show notes. And you can click and read along with this. But it's basically a fantastic document that details a lot of things about VFD EMC regulations, but also gives some pretty nice, like, here's why we do things as opposed to just saying like, do this, which, okay, so first of all, in my experience, that's kind of the worst aspect of researching these kinds of things. Because you go to like forums or you read other people, and they just say, just do this and there's no background. There's no like, here's why. And it's just as easy to find another person that says, just don't do that thing that this other guy says three posts above my, you know, like, Yeah, but neither one of them justify why.

Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's at least we have this document that goes into it. Because when we talked about USB shielding, oh, ages ago, like, Should you tie your shield to ground and whatnot? Like the USB spec says, use your common sense to make that judgment call? It's like it doesn't they wash their hands? Yeah, it's not in the specification at all for that.

Well, and once again, like USB, which is what five volts 500 milliamps versus VFD, which is 220 volts, 2200 Watts, you know, very different game. Yeah.

And that's, that's the power aspect, though, is most mostly you're trying to protect on your USB is getting that is corrupting your differential signal in there. Right?

Right, right. So in that in that document, if you go to pages 10 through 12. That's where they kind of detail the connections between your VFD and your spindle. So once again, like the rule is that you connect on both sides. Now here's the thing that kind of gets confusing about that, if you connect your shield on both sides, your shield is now a conductor through which current can flow and just like standard normal operating current will flow, sort of the kind of idea that goes behind that is that the majority of your current is going to flow in your main ground conductor that's inside the cable, because that's going to have a lower impedance than the shield itself. Shields are not intended to have current flowing, but they can have some. So the biggest reason why you connect on both sides is actually a general impedance thing more about capacitive and inductive coupling between conductors, but also adjacent cables that are next to it. If you have only one side grounded, then you can have some really awkward impedance mismatches. And you can have voltage spikes up here on that on the shielding conductor. And with the exposed braid end, or it might even be foil, but mainly it's going to be braid. On the exposed end, you can actually get really high voltage spikes there that lead to arcs, and maybe even flashover. And so it's actually ends up being a safety thing, especially if you have lightning surges that that strike, you can cause like huge amounts of voltage to appear on your shield, unintentionally. But if it's grounded on both sides, you have a bit more protection against that. And one, it's not in this document, but on a on a different website I was reading, they were discussing the inductance that can appear on shields that can cause they were showing 25 to 50 volt spikes on their shields due to like inductive coupling and things like that. And the shield grounded on one end was not capable of draping that quickly enough. So grounding on both ends was was vastly superior there. And for most EMC regulations, they actually have a specification for what the amount of voltage rise can appear on your shield. And for most EMC it's 25 volts is the maximum voltage rise you can see on it. So that depends on a lot of things, like your cable length and And what kind of coverage you have. But in fact with coverage it's important to note that most DMC also requires that your cable has 80% coverage. So make sure you specify that in your the braid of your, your cable if you can specify that. So there we go answered answered this the problem and figured it out. For Home gamers like me, it probably doesn't matter. I a huge amount, but I totally built mine up to up to spec and granted both sides and I actually have in my cable tubes that go through my CNC, I put at least two stepper motor control signals that are kind of bundled together with the spindle. And so far, there's no issues with doing that. So there we go. There we go. Yeah, EMC, it'll bite you in the ass. Yeah. Actually, on top of that, I went to Belden, Belden makes a lot of cable and wire assemblies and just wire itself. And, and they have a specific cable that is called like VFD cable or something like that. I can't remember their trade name for it. But in the datasheet for that they actually call out like it is required that you ground both ends of the shield. So even in like the datasheet for the cables. They're making sure you know. Yeah, that one of the biggest things is yes, our arcing and Lightning Surge and flashover and stuff like that. But you can also cause a bunch of stuff to emit into the, into the environment, just because of the impedance of the shield itself. You can't necessarily rely on it being zero.

Yeah, could be your wife won't hear that scene. See, but then you turn it on, like messes up the TV.

Yeah, the TV's jacked up.

So I have another question then for that is, you mentioned last week that sometimes the in the spindle, the grounds not even connected? Do we have closure on that?

We do. Yeah, I check that check that before connecting everything? Yeah. So a lot of these Chinese spindles up? You know, that's, that's a good point. China is China's EMC laws do not require VFDs. To be grounded, like at all. So sometimes when you buy these things from China, it's you actually

get a Chinese spec one instead of a exact us EMC. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, exactly as yours connected.

It is. Yeah, a lot of people there's there's actually, like, full, like, walk throughs on how to take your spindle apart and grounded. In case you don't. But but here's the thing, I bought a spindle off of Amazon like and it smelled like Chinese from the, from the, from the images, you could just tell like Chinese that thing is going out to like make like a professional machine for it's not

like one times or to smell like chicken.

Yeah, something like that. I'm not gonna go down that route right now.

But like you if you're gonna, if you're gonna be building something for, you know, professionally, like, you'd probably not use one of these things. And you'd probably buy one that is known grounded, instead of have to, like buy it and find out if it's crowded.

And I'm really hungry for Chinese food.

Well, then go get some but before, tell us what you're up to.

So last week, when I talked about the Python PDF stuff, and some people actually were sending me suggestions, which is, which is really nice. Yeah. But most of them are ones where I've already looked at. So they're not really the ones I kind of need, I'm basically going to stick with F PDF, because it does give you a native ish way in Python to build a PDF, you'd have to think in, like tables, you basically build tables, and the PDF and you can layer stuff and but you're basically building tables. And so you think your PDF is more like a spreadsheets, building that out. That makes sense. Because every all most of the other solutions that are popular Are you build a template and like HTML, and then you convert HTML that to a PDF, which is fine if you know HTML really well. I don't I barely know enough Python to get out of a, you know, a bag. So I'm the cat in the bag. Right? So.

So have you actually cranked out any PDFs?

Oh, yeah. I should. I should I wonder if I would be allowed to send post a screenshot. Maybe if I put some bunk data in it, it'd be fine. It looks they look really nice, by the way. So I'll see if I can post some screenshots or something. I've already made like templates in FPDF. And it works. It works performance wise really well. So, but I'm not going to change off that. So I moved on to my next project, which was working with Zebra printers, which, which are the hardware is really nice. The software a long time ago used to be really bad, but it looks like it's gotten better recently. So it uses GPL, which is zebra programming language is like how you talk to the printers, when you want to do something more than just like print stuff, but the normal print spooler. And so basically, the idea is what I need to build is I need to build a label that goes on a carton, okay. And that label has all the serial codes of all the devices that are in that carton. So pretty in the carton itself got serial number two. And so what I want to do is basically be like, Okay, I, someone's going to scan 30 boxes, or 40 boxes, right? And that records all the serial numbers. And then you hit print, and it prints out a formatted label with all the barcodes and all the serial numbers and you slept out of the box does this

for like shipping or something like that? Yeah, like logistics shipping.

One of our customers wants a wants this as their way of doing their tracking. And, yeah, they're tracking. And so. So I'm like, Okay, we got to do zebra. And so we have zero printers. So I started learning GPL, which isn't as bad as I thought it would be the, the PDF for like, the Z, Pl PDF is. That is not good. Because it's basically goes, here's a couple examples, which are not what you're looking for. And then here's all the commands, with no examples of how to use them. So it's not the best document, but it does have everything. So at least you can like, Okay, if I run this command, what is it going to do? It just needs more examples of, of how stuff interact with each other, I guess is a good way to put it. So this is my because I basically I'm wanting to build a web app for someone to be able to scan all this stuff in and then hit print, and it does its thing. And so my process is I'm wondering if anyone if anyone's got is going to go through this, or has gone through this and has a better method, let me know. Because I'm probably making several of these over the next couple of months is first I use zebra designer three for developers, which that allows you to like use a GUI to like make your templates. So you can say, Okay, this is what my my label needs look like these are where all the fields seem to go. And you can set those fields up to be numbers, or you can do variables, which are stuff that you're going to be sending, like replacing data with. So like your, like all the serial numbers, that's, that's your variables in this case. And then you use zebra design in 3d to push that template over to the printer. So you can say this is my printer, and I'm going to load that template into its memory. So now the now the printer knows that about this template exists. And then you can use I use zebra setup utilities, software, which allows you to talk to the printer like directly with Z PL, like as like a command line kind of thing. So you can like send it a code block in or execute it and do nothing or do something. Can I wish there was a little more debugging in that, like if you sent that to an incorrect it would just because right now it just does nothing. So you don't know you don't know if you did something wrong or not. Yeah.

But if you did something correct, it will do what he's told it to do. And it will like, you know, in this case, spit out labels with the variables filled out. Can you do general housekeeping, like scan your ports and say like, which printers are here and can like and then yeah, okay, so so you can at least give the user feedback being like, Yes, I see a printer. Yeah. Honestly, like, I know, that sounds really simple. But in many cases, you don't get that and it becomes a direct pain. Yes, you're

correct. Yeah. And then I'm using the zebra browser print SDK, which is like a. I guess the best way to explain it is because I'm using the printer in USB mode. So I'm using it as like a web USB bridge thing. Because how a lot of the how a lot of the stuff works for Zebra is it's designed for a print server. And so you print to an IP address. Yeah. And so you have to make this USB printer, a web address, or a local web address. So use the browser print SDK to that's what you're writing your, your, your script, I guess you can call it or the your your web app and it's basically JavaScript If you're writing JavaScript, and then you write a little HTML that formats the web page. And then to make that actually work, you need to use a web server, which kind of sucks because then it's like, oh, I have to spend a web server, blah, blah, well, Chrome actually has a couple like extensions that allow you to just make a web server on your like in your browser. And so I'm using web server for Chrome. And you just basically point that to your local folder that's got your JavaScript living in, and then you hit go, and it spins it up and gives you an IP, a local IP address, and you click it and it works. That's actually this stuff blows my mind half the time. That's awesome. So I actually wrote a little tiny application just to test it. Like, I basically made a web TextBlock that says, if I paste this EPL into here, send it. And that worked. I was like, Cool, yes. So now I needed to go the extra step and make like 40, blank fields that all the serial numbers go into, and then a button that just packages that up and sends it off. That's next step, which is, frankly, the easy part.

So what's what's the user? Like? How does the user actually use it? Like, do you like navigate to this and then scan and then press print?

Yeah, so you just be on the computer that's designed, there'll be a computer there, that's for this process, basically. And there's a barcode scanner, and they just scan all the boxes that's going to be in there. And that fills out all the fields on the on the web app, and then they click print on the, on the web app.

So if they, when they click print, does it just erase all the fields? So you can do it again? Okay, cool. You know, okay, here's the thing. What, what you all just described right there, that, that, in my opinion, is, or my experience, like talking to electrical engineers, like that is what electrical engineers do, like, go into work, a customer has a requirement, you have to go find some random ass document with some kind of like, weird thing that you have to study and learn. So you can accomplish this one thing. It's not like, calculating filters all day long, or like doing like, at least that's my PCB layout every day. It's like, this is more of what you did.

Yeah, this is this is what I do.

Like it's, but what I'm saying is like, it's my experience talking to other engineers or even observing other engineers, like, it's a lot of this.

Yeah, I actually liked this a lot. This is something I've never done before. Like, I haven't written JavaScript in 12 years. Nice. So I'm like, Okay, gotta remember how to write JavaScript,

some thumbs up or thumbs down.

It's okay, in the middle. I'd rather write for sort of, like I'm in the Python right now. I was really hoping apparently, there are some Python Live Python modules, not libraries, modules that work with Zebra, but it's zebras documentation is all further JavaScript stuff. So basically, everyone's just making Python wrappers for, and there's not a lot of documentation for that stuff. So it's just easier just to just do this instead. Right, right.

Just just, it's easier to just learn an entire brand new thing. Yeah, exactly.

So I spent it probably certainly about two days. Well, I just described to get that working. And so hopefully, like, I want by Thursday, I want like the application to be done. So, which it's funny. It's like, I've actually talked to like a software developer, they're like, oh, yeah, I can hit that out in 30 minutes. Well, yeah, cuz, you know, this stuff. This is stuff I had to go figure out right from scratch. Yeah. And I think I might actually put an article together on this process, because it's actually really useful. Because like, making a template, building labels out, like, this is something you can you can apply to a lot of different fields and applications. And, you know, it doesn't feel it doesn't feel like there's like one source of like, I had to go read like, at different, like, Stack Exchange, like, questions to figure this out. And like, even zebra themselves are like, here's all this stuff. And just like I need, like a, like, Do this, do this, do this, do this and this and that works.

You know, I'm a little bit surprised that what you're asking for seems like a really simple function. That seems like it would already have a built in thing to do. But I guess it doesn't right.

Now. I couldn't find anything that well it's a specially formatted template to

Yeah, but I mean, still, like, that seems like something where, like, Zebra printers are, scan and print is what they do.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this is this seems to be kind of the way to do it. Yeah. It's actually not that I probably made it sound more complicated than it is like, after I did it once I set this up on another computer and about one minute, the ad all working so it's actually works really well.

That's cool. That's always something that take to your next job if you happen

to Right, exactly. No, I totally, we totally gonna be using this for other customers and stuff because now it's like, okay, this is that it's like the 8 billion feather in the hat at this point, right?

It's useful, that's for sure, is very

useful. And now it's like, Okay, now this is something I can do. So when someone says, Hey, I need this, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I can rock that in like, an hour to get that work in for you. Yeah, now the RFO.

Okay, yeah, well, and we only have one RFO. This week, it was a fun little video that I found. I found it on the amp hour subreddit. But it's from the subreddit was just a YouTube video that was up there. And this is Keysight. That was showing kind of the analysis of a $1 switch mode power supply that they had found, I don't remember exactly where maybe it was an Amazon thing or an Alibaba or something like that. As far as eBay. It's a $1 power supply. And they go through, it's a six minute video of them just like detailing tests on the supply. So things like power up switching and stuff.

I just opened up the video. So it's a $1 power supply that they're using, like 40k scope, analyze.

Oh, yeah. The funny thing is, okay, get this. I was watching the video and the entire time. Like, I was like, not even paying attention to what he was actually testing. I was like, wow, that oscilloscope is really fast. Like, you press buttons, and it automatically does what you do when you're pressing. I'm sure everyone here has messed with a oscilloscope, where like you, you turn a knob and then you have to wait a second and a half right to do anything. Or like you pull up, like so slow to like come in or whatnot. It's awful. But ya know, this, this scope is incredible. But yeah, check this video out. It's pretty cool. One of the reasons why I was even kind of bringing it up, it's just because it shows a really cool, it shows somebody going through some generic test for a power supply and might even be something you could use on one of your designs, like, a lot of times, you know, you got a TI web engineer to design a power supply or you design your from scratch or you read a datasheet and it says do this, this and this. And then you put it on a PCB and you turn it on and you go, Okay, there's power, like, what do I test? You know, this is a great example of like a handful of tests you can go through to validate and actually show your boss. Oh, yeah, I totally tested this thing is great. Yeah, totally. We're good to go. Yeah, and but at the end, like the conclusion is this $1 power supply is actually not half bad, you know, it actually making for you know, I wouldn't put it in a device. But for like a little project thing. It's fine for

hacking stuff around. I mean, that's what's in that 3d printed thermal detonator thermal detonator, I believe it's got little cheapy power supply in there. Yep,

they work great. Actually in my CNC in order to control the zero to 10 volt analog signal for the spindle control, I needed a 12 volt power supply. And what sucks is the the control board I have only takes 30 volts maximum input, but my stepper controller is 36 volts. So I needed a step down. So I found a step down on on Amazon snag that it's basically this exact same power supply yet it has a little voltage readout as a display and some slight other features. So I have that run into my CNC and it works plenty fine right now.

I'd buy that for $1

I think mine was five so yeah, check out the video pretty cool.

So that was the Mac five engineering podcast. We

were your host Parker Dolan and Steven Greg. Later Everyone, take it easy.

Be safe out there everyone.