At some point since my original post in February an update to Chrome broke the layout of the EV100 logo overlay you (should!) see on the upper-left corner of this page. Before fixing it I noticed that nothing was visible there except on the contact page, and that was because that page is short enough to not require scrolling on my display. The bug wasn't present on firefox, IE, or mobile Chrome on my Android.

A little investigation revealed that the element itself was correctly positioned but that the background image wasn't visible. Removing the fixed positioning of the background (but not the element) proved to be the solution. I replaced this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat fixed top right;

With this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat;

I don't exactly understand what changed in Chrome and why this fixed it, or indeed, why I had it that way in the first place. Any explanations are welcome!

Plastic dust from the spinning nut on one of the couplers.

I recently fixed another problem with my 3D printer: damage to the z-axis caused by unsecured wires getting in the way of the z-axis limit switch. This caused the nuts to turn entirely out of their housing as the printer reached zero mechanically but couldn't trigger the limit switch to turn the motors off. Read more about the fix here. This is another reason I need to get back to the task of making cable chains and other wire management features to make this printer a little cleaner and better contained.

I recently designed something to fit inside the Pelican model 1550, one of their excellent “Protector” line of rugged, watertight cases. Although Pelican helpfully provides exact 3D models of the inside of their cases, I needed the outside geometry as well for documentation purposes. Using their models as a starting point, I built the rest of the geometry from measurements. I didn't need it to be nearly as detailed as this, but I wanted to release it on Grabcad, and I wanted that release to be as useful as possible to others. As a result this became a bit of a labor of love; I haven't gone into my time-tracking app to find out how many hours I have into this mostly because I think I'll be dismayed by the answer!

Although I'm not very active on either platform, I have accounts on both Github, for some of my more public software efforts (mostly web development experiments), and on Grabcad, for some parts I've modeled in CAD that are both non-proprietary and potentially useful to other engineers. These models are mostly commercially available products that I have to work with or design something around, and Grabcad has a more appropriate audience for that than, say, Thingiverse. Naturally Grabcad also gets bonus points for having been an Estonian startup!

So if you'd like to be fully aware of my activities on the Internet, now split over at least ten platforms including this blog, visit both sites and follow me there too. Thanks!

An indoor demonstration version of the musical swings will be up for a month at Fort Lauderdale's FAT Village Projects, a gallery and event space in the FAT Village arts district. I previously gave a talk about this project at the same venue as part of their Art + Tech Incubator Lecture and Workshop Series and they were kind enough to host what I'm calling version 2 of the installation as an exhibit.

The complete installation.