Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Holiday Leftovers

Both literally and figuratively.

Leading up to the holiday, I asked Mrs. Graybeard several times what she wanted to do for dinner, assuming it would involve the smoker.  It took her until the weekend to answer, "one of everything".  There's not enough room for "everything", so it turned into two large racks of spare ribs, some beef short ribs, and a package of chicken leg and thigh quarters.  I think this is the biggest load I've ever had in my little Masterbuilt smoker.
From my standpoint, as the guy doing the cooking running the smoker, that's easy, because instead of getting up every two hours overnight with a brisket like I've done, or just getting up early and starting about 4AM like I've also done, I can start late morning and have dinner ready "on time".  I do both types of ribs with the 3-2-1 method, which is fine but can make them turn out too ... mushy; too much like they've been in a stew.  Yesterday, I made the simple change of not adding liquid to the foil-wrapped ribs and they came out with more "chew" to them.  Fall off the bone is fine, and pulling out a bone while leaving the meat is desirable, but most competition judges like a bit more resistance to the "bite", as they say.  It also helped keep the bark or crust the right texture.  The chicken just went on the top shelf of the smoker with plenty of dry rub on them and sat the full 6 or 6-1/2 hours. 

We'll have leftovers tonight, and then probably freeze everything else. 

In the figurative leftovers, last time I talked about the shop I mentioned having issues with my "test plate" used to zero the mill.  I was unable to get the Z axis zero to behave properly. 

The software is supposed to lower the spindle slowly until it senses the contact, withdraw the spindle .050" and then lower it again at a much slower speed, find the plate, figure out the coordinates and finally move the spindle to a "clearance plane" we define.  My fixture is 1.075 thick, so I need to set the clearance plane above that.  If I set the clearance plane to 1.500, Mach3 should say 1.500 when it's finished and the end of the tool should be 0.425 above the plate (1.500 - 1.075).  Instead, it would touch the plate, retract about 1 inch, lower the spindle about 0.2 "looking for" the plate, decide it was done, put the tool way above the plate and call it 1.500".  In actuality, it was about 3.375.  I wrestled with this for several hours, reading the software and still couldn't make sense of it.  Finally, something told me to do the universal software fix: quit the program and start it again.  I had been changing some settings in Mach3 over and over and maybe I'd messed it up?  After "turn it off and back on" the zero routine worked repeatably.  Yesterday, after the system was off overnight, I re-ran the routine and it screwed up again, stopping 3.375 above the base.  Quitting and starting over fixed it again.  I'm hoping this doesn't turn into something I need to do all the time.



9 comments:

  1. On your mill issues, have you verified it's not merely a case of Bill wanting his vigorish???

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    1. Mark, I have to say you lost me here. Bill wanting vigorish? Please explain.

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    2. May the Gates be with you? What's the OS that software runs on?
      }:-]

      Oops! I see that Anonymous figgered it out below...

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  2. Bill Gates. "That's a nice MTBF you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it"

    http://linuxcnc.org/

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    Replies
    1. Oh, that Bill. FWIW, I don't think it's OS. I think it's a crappy script that I paid $20 for, along with some other things. It doesn't have proper error checking. I don't speak the scripting language - yet - but if it had error checking, why would it go up a different height than a declared variable and get lost?

      It starts going down at 10 inches/minute. Touches the plate and stops, but then jumps up a full inch instead of .050". OK, it screwed up. Now what? It's supposed to switch to 1 IPM and then find the plate again, so why does it stop after something like 0.2"? Why not just keep going looking for the plate until that logic line from the continuity checker shows it found it again?

      http://linuxcnc.org/ BTDT. I went back to Windows and Mach3 for the same reason everyone else does. "Everyone uses Windows because everyone develops for Windows. Everyone develops for Windows because everyone uses Windows."

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    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpbAV72W_JY

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    3. That's ... I have no words. Just kind of amazing.

      The guitars look to be one of those $35 or $50 eBay specials, which is good considering what they do to them.

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  3. An economic network effect is a real thing, and developing an alternative has real costs. But are you money/hassle ahead from using Microsoft products for 36 years?

    Ubuntu 6 in 2006 seemed good enough for many grandmas. Has this last decade of Microsoft use really been worth it? Especially since Windows 10 is basically a surveillance platform?

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    1. But are you money/hassle ahead from using Microsoft products for 36 years?

      On the whole, yes. Especially the "less hassle" part. I have a handful of software that absolutely needs Windows and every time I've switched over to some flavor of Linux I've spent a month or so trying to get alternatives, or things I liked as much, and gave up. LinuxCNC isn't bad, don't get me wrong, but when I was trying to sort out a problem and determine if it was hardware or software, the hardware vendor didn't know the first thing about it and I had to switch over to a backup computer with Mach3 before I could troubleshoot the issue with the hardware guys. (It was their hardware).

      If all someone is going to do on their computer is email, browse the web, office applications, or other common tasks, Linux is there already. It's not there for everything I do.

      The short answer is that Windows has a cost, like everything in life, and the choice to use it comes down to cost/benefit ratio. The benefit is convenience. You know, even when you're retired you don't have unlimited time. That turns into a question of "would I rather spend my time in my hobby or working on the tool, which is the computer?" I choose to spend my time on my hobby. Back when the computer was my hobby, I probably answered that differently.

      Windows 10 is bridge I'll have to cross some day, and it does concern me. For now, I'm still on 7.

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