Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

*screams internally*

@GAC Right? I'm looking for a rich vibrant royal purple and the closest I can find is a pathetic pastel lavender.

When did all the bedding manufacturers get together and decide that no fun colors were allowed anymore? Everything's muted or pastel now.

Getting very close to being able to land a plane on my own...😃

@catharineburki Yes. Democrats should have just all gotten on the "Republicans are about to screw you" wagon and then let the Republicans openly screw up so their voters have a better idea of how the reps they elected are choosing to wield their power.
Instead, they're just playing right into the stupid game Republicans created.

@mentallyalex Honestly, I think most real business owners do understand that.

It's shareholders who DNGAF. Once a business goes public, it's pretty much guaranteed to eventually destroy itself by ignoring literally everything but short-term profit.

It's funny how "economies of scale" only seem to benefit CEOs and stockholders rather than employees or customers...

@mentallyalex Still though, even if it's done for the most cynical of reasons, "give it away" is much better than "throw it away".

If only we could build the rest of the world to align profit and goodwill incentives so nicely.

@mentallyalex Did they only bake pies once a week? Because the business cynic in me expects that that's a good way to get rid of excess stock that would otherwise be expiring soon.

That said, it's not a bad practice. Many Panera Bread Co locations donate leftover bakery items to local homeless shelters for similar reasons (or at least they did years ago when I worked there).

No reason to waste good food when people are hungry. 🤷‍♂️

@paezha @RollingStone You can still go to Disney World and support them. They're fighting against DeSantis, and taking a beating from him for their trouble.

After getting it all designed, I measured up the pieces and bought them and cut them to size. That's enough for today, I think. By next weekend I should be able to have the desk portion constructed and make a little more progress on the dials.

I do need to wait on a number of components I ordered before I can hook up the electronics.

Today, I got to work on building the frame for the cockpit itself.

I designed the frame in #Maya and then went out to purchase the lumber. I'm planning to 3D print the dashboard itself, so the lumber part just needed to be the base frame, enough to support the rest without getting in the way. This is what I came up with (along with a representation of the yoke controller).

Next, I needed to figure out the gear faces. I want the designs to be crisp and readable, so free painting is out of the question (too finicky). I considered printing the design into the face as recessions that could be filled with paint, but that's pretty finicky too. Then, I realized I could just print the pattern negative space and put that over a white sheet of paper to show only the design I wanted to see.

Unfortunately, I ran into precision issues on this one too, as you can see in the image below.

Ultimately, I think I'll just be printing the designs onto paper and pasting that on the back of the dial. But it'll have to wait until I get a replacement ink cartridge for my printer.

So, I applied this gear design to a #3DPrint dial with a pressure-fit cap and two 3D printed clips. This allowed the #motor to drive the needle on the other side through the #gears.

The gears are a 3:1 ratio, and they're double-stacked, so that's 3^2 or 3*3 or 27x. That brings our 7.5 degree/100 fps margin of error down to 0.3 degree/3.5 fps, which is perfectly acceptable.

Enter the icon of industrial #engineering: the #gear!

I went through about a dozen iterations trying to get these to work. The one pictured below was the first to work properly!

Originally, I started with the standard gears like you think of in a watch, but I quickly discovered that there were precision issues with the sizes I wanted, and getting the gears aligned when they don't barely weigh anything was tricky.

So, I quickly discovered that thicker gears work a lot better in these situations, but they have issues with lateral slipping. So, I discovered this herringbone design that works way better than all the rest.

Finally, I had an almost working design, but there were issues with precision from my 3D printer. The design was just too small. So, I upsized it to the biggest the 3.25" dial diameter could fit and got the gears pictured below.

If you're interested in learning more about the herringbone design, check out this video I learned it from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqNkHA6-61c

While I waited for all those to arrive, I picked up a stepper motor at a local parts store to start prototyping the gauges. I'm using the vertical speed indicator as my first prototype because it's simple.

However, the stepper motor has a step size of 7.5 degrees, which is a lot (which seems to be common with smaller motors?). Anyway, doing the math, 7.5 degrees on the vertical speed indicator is almost 100 feet per second! That's way too big for a single step, so I either needed to buy better motors, or find another way to increase the resolution.