Axminster SIEG Super X1 Micro-Mill Dremel Addon

More updates for the Axminster SIEG Super X1 Micro-Mill. In order to drill PCB's and work on some small engraving jobs we found that we needed a much faster spindle speed than the standard motor will allow. We purchased a Dremel 300 series drill kit which has a rotation speed up to 30,000 rpm.

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HTC Desire Dock / Wooden Stand

After buying an HTC Desire smartphone, I tried to find a suitable dock or stand for holding the phone while syncing and charging the phone. I ordered one from ebay over 3 weeks ago but the seller has let me down and hasn't sent it.

After looking for a suitable material to make a Desire dock from, we found a piece of Rosewood in the workshop 100mm x 100mm x 40mm high.

I purchased a 1m long micro usb lead with a right angle plug from ebay for £3.00

The new custom wooden dock was designed in Illustrator and then the cut paths generated and fed to Mach 3 on the CNC mill.

Video at end of post.

The top surface of the wood was machined flat before milling using a surfacing tool.

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I have written a small app for my new HTC desire phone which I got last week and I was hoping that some of the other Desire users could help beta test  it :)

The app gets places to eat, accommodation, events and local news from my community site at http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/

I havent uploaded the app to the android market yet but the installer can be downloaded from http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/mobile/android/VirtualSwanage.apk

Any feedback, good or bad is very welcome :)

Next is the iPhone version!

Update 05/04/2010

More info about the photography issues for this law on http://www.stop43.org.uk

Update 28/02/2010

UK Gov nationalises orphans and bans non-consensual photography in public

The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to become law within the next 6 weeks. It introduces orphan works usage rights, which - unless amended, which HMG says it will not - will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist, since there is no ineradicable way of associating ownership details short of plastering your name right across the image. Photographer's organisations have pressed hard for mandatory attribution to deter orphans being manufactured. Early in the consultation process the IPO accepted the irresistible logic that it was completely unreasonable to permit orphan use without a balancing requirement to not orphan photos in the first place. However, the IPO recognised with dismay that this would mean "taking on Rupert" (Murdoch).

Publishers have a long history of opposing our moral rights. They were responsible for the feeble and unenforceable moral rights clauses in the 1988 Act. They want their branding, not ours, and they want maximum freedom to exploit our IP at minimum cost and inconvenience.

The IPO avoided confrontation with Murdoch, who does have something of a rep for being a vital friend in an election year. The Bill contains no deterrent to the creation of orphans, no penalties for anonymising your work, no requirement for bylines. It is a luncheon voucher for industry hungry for free and cheap content.

So Flickr, Google Images, personal websites, all of it will become commercial publishers' photolibrary. A fee will have to be deposited with a collecting society in case the owner spots the usage. The author who discovers his work has been used as an orphan can then make a claim and receive a percentage of the peanuts, after the collecting society has had its share, and the government its share.

Source: http://copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public

If this law is passed, anyone who takes a photo can have it "stolen" by the media and not get paid or have any attribution to their work unless we put a huge "photo by xxx" across the middle of all images used online.

There is a sample letter on http://copyrightaction.com/digital-economy-bill-mp-letter-template which you can send to your MP to urge them not to vote for this bill.

Our original milling machine has undergone several modifications since we purchased it.

First was a new longer bed and then a diy CNC conversion with the control box being relocated, and in December 2009 we purchased a belt drive kit to make it quieter to use. This was followed by a RPM monitor a couple of weeks ago using a optical sensor.

The one thing the mill has always needed was to be made more precise for CNC milling and the original lead screws had too much play in the threads to enable us to work with small tolerances. We had planned to get ballscrews and ballnuts when we first did the CNC upgrade but they are very expensive to buy and had difficultly obtaining the sizes we needed.

Last week a pair of 8mm shaft ballscrews with 18mm ballnuts appeared on ebay for under £100 so we purchased them to upgrade the X and Y axis on the mill. We will upgrade the Z axis later but we are looking into alternatives for the current cast iron column and runners.

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When we purchased the milling machine which was later converted to be CNC we also purchased a Axminster SIEG C1 Micro Lathe, the lathe was ok for working with larger materials (over 3mm) but due to excessive vibration from the machine when it was running it wasn't possible to work smaller materials and get a consistent finish.

Recently we needed to make some small parts on the lathe and found that it wasn't possible so we decided to see if we can improve it!

Removal of the covers and replacement of various parts narrowed the source of the vibration to the standard pulleys which had over .5mm offset which caused a lot of issues and the motor mount which flexed a lot when under load.

The original machine before starting work.

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To enable taskbar previews for the latest firefox update under Windows 7

Go to: about:config in the address bar and scroll or search to find:

browser.taskbar.previews.enable

Double click to enable taskbar previews

Yesterday my old G5 Apple iMac started to crash and have screen corruption with windows appearing to freeze and then leave parts behind when moving around. After a hour the computer was crashing as soon as it booted and the startup logo developed distortion and lines across the screen and ended up with the display being completely unusable.

After removing the cover on the iMac I found that 4 of the capacitors on the main logic board had expanded and blown which were located in the areas circled below.

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