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[GAZOU]

Hellmut   

You have a perfect workshop!

However your champagne is badly stored. It surprises French   

It will not shock DERECK who drink his hot champagne mixed with  Coca Cola, it is why it gives him this particular humor. He is Australian, that explains many things.

[Carlos Mariano]

Jean Pierre c´est en France que on bois le Champagne ...et le Cognac ..et la Sidra des BRETONS


oh oh !!!! Quel souvenirs 

[Hellmut1956]

Due to the health problems I mentioned earlier, my hobby is proving to be a good therapy to overcome some of the consequences, I am again able to stay concentrated for much longer periods of time. I hope I will get ahead with my work on my workshop so that I get a certain degree of order into it. This is needed to fix problems I am ecountering with my milling machine. Soon you will see more photos!

[Brian60]

Looking forward to your photo update Helmut, and glad to hear that it is helping the recovery therapy.

[ballastanksian]

Crikey, you make some splendidly technical stuff Helmut! Can you convince me and other electro-luddites that electricity is not magic?

I am pleased to see that your 'mancave' is so well equipped. A Bandsaw is a definite time saver and is very versatile if you use it with care. Worth the money, but remember, once you buy one, you will suddenly find jobs that it is too small for and you will yearn for a larger one and so on!

[Brian60]

Crikey, you make some splendidly technical stuff Helmut! Can you convince me and other electro-luddites that electricity is not magic?

I am pleased to see that your 'mancave' is so well equipped. A Bandsaw is a definite time saver and is very versatile if you use it with care. Worth the money, but remember, once you buy one, you will suddenly find jobs that it is too small for and you will yearn for a larger one and so on!

So true.

I bought a 5 inch table saw to supplement my bandsaw. Trouble is I can't find any 'thin' enough blades to make it worthwhile. Standard blades are about 4mm thick and carbide tipped, not conducive to cutting fine pieces of timber to the correct thickness, although it is ideal for ripping bigger pieces down to more manageable size.

[Hellmut1956]

@ballastanksian:
If you are interested I am very willing to translate and make available and support you in the process of building what myself and this german friend call the "experimental card" I would nevertheless recommend to spend money for an inexpensive programmer for Avnet AVR controllers. Should you and others want it, I would open a new thread, actualize the existing tutorial, help in fixing incompatibilities of the small programs you will be placing in the controller. One think I can guarantee due to my experience, is that you will be amazed and fascinated once after implementing the small DC/DC converter that generates the stable 5 VDC the circuit needs to run you can actually measure that it does what it is supposed to do and the LED lights up!

The next great step is when you achieve what in embedded computing is the analogous to the "Hello World" program in programming. You will have a LED blink at the rate you want it to do! The other amazing experience is, when connecting a small 16x2, 20x2 display and you can see how the numeric value on the screen follows with its value your move of the control stick on your radio transmitter.

So, if you, and may be some others want, lets embrace this adventure!

[ballastanksian]

I had a quick look and found this blade on the Axminster site. It has a kerf of 2.mm which is about half of what you currently have Brian.

http://www.axminster.co.uk/axcaliber-contract-254mm-thin-kerf-tct-saw-blade

Bushes are available if this is the right size for your bench?

Helmut, that is a kind offer and one that I would love to try out. I am currently worked off my feet and could not do your efforts justice for a while, but I would like to read your tutorial to begin with.

[Tug Hercules Fireman]

Earlier in the year, another member suggested the banggood Site. I bought a couple of blades for my MicroMark Saw and am happy.

Ordered from I believe in China and they arrived in Canada within the week.

http://www.banggood.com/85mm-24-Teeth-TCT-Circular-Saw-Blade-Wheel-Discs-For-Wood-Cutting-p-957702.html

[Brian60]

Cheers Ian, I've bookmarked the site, I'll order one when we are back in Spain next week- currently finalising moving out of this house here.

THF- those are cheap blades, only £3.45 for a 3 inch blade, too small for my table saw but I think I'll buy a couple and experiment with building a fine slitting table with an old dremel or 540 type motor.

[Hellmut1956]

May I interrupt? I would like to use this thread to report the work and progress on my workshop and respond to questions, suggestions and critics and finally if as a result of what I am presenting in my posts somebody expresses his interest in the electronics tutorial! But right now the posts are totally unrelated to the topic of this thread!

[ballastanksian]

My bad Helmut.

I saw Brian's response to your reply and felt the need to help. I should have PM'd you Brian.

Got any more picies of progress Helmut? I like seeing mancaves taking shape!!!!

[RAAArtyGunner]

May I interrupt? I would like to use this thread to report the work and progress on my workshop and respond to questions, suggestions and critics and finally if as a result of what I am presenting in my posts somebody expresses his interest in the electronics tutorial! But right now the posts are totally unrelated to the topic of this thread!

[/b][/u]

Helmut,

That is quite normal for this forum,      happens all the time and actually helps maintain interest in the topic.

[Hellmut1956]

Hi friends, I did not want to interfere with the style of the forum. I do very much appreciate the cooperative and informal way we deal with each other. It is may be just a egoistic motivation that made me express this request. I love to read through my reports as a way to get myself up-to-speed if I have not been dealing with a certain aspect of it.


As to the advances in the work on my workshop. The fascination of other activities, like to design by modeling efforts, some problems with my health and the awful chaos in my workshop right now have been slowing down my efforts. Now I have reached a level of pressure, my boss (my wife) demands me to either use the stuff i have been accumulating or to get rid of it!

[essex2visuvesi]

Now I have reached a level of pressure, my boss (my wife) demands me to either use the stuff i have been accumulating or to get rid of it!

I think almost all of us on here can relate to that! 

[RAAArtyGunner]

I think almost all of us on here can relate to that! 

Helmut,

You are not alone. It is a world wide problem one day we will find a solution.

Oops we are off again

[Martin (Admin)]

 
Topic split!  - http://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,50751.0.html

[Brian60]

Definately. Keep up with the reports Helmut, we may drift a little in discussing subjects but we always like to keep on track with the main topic.

[ballastanksian]

Pace yourself Helmut and spend a half hour devising the reasons you will need to keep hold of your essential materials!

[Hellmut1956]

i can tell you a simple reason! When ever I have thrown something away I have required it not much later! it is like when you decide to get rid of something, destiny takes the decision that you will have a need for it soon!

[ballastanksian]

Most true Helmut! When I last moved, I did nt throw anything away completely, I just reduced the amount of each type of material. For instance, I reduced my 1.2metre by 60cm area stack of wood and board to just a small bundle and a few sensible sized sheets of board. I gave away my selection of steel and repatriated an amount of minerals (terrain making materials) to the environment:O)

[Hellmut1956]

What makes thing so bad is that for about a decade and a half it was easier for me to buy something new then trying to find something I know I had. After I had my first stroke a good friend and fellow naval modelist did visit me and started the work to fix my chaos! First thing he did was organizing the stuff and then building a new workbench for me. I was of little help due to my reconvalescence. But as I wrote somewhere. Just see the wealth of types of screws that exist:
1. They can be of different type, like for wood, metric or inch, steel, plastic and what ever more choices exist
2. They are different due to the kind of heads they have
3. They can have different diameters and length
4. They have washers and nuts of different type
5. They can have the thread over the full length or only partly
6. They need adequate dowels
When you work with different kinds of metal, when you work with wood, when you work on the walls with stone, when you work with plastics, when you work with electronics the variety is endless.
Now go to the electronics: You have resistors a whole series of values, they can be carbon based, they can be metal based, they exist with different ranges of precision. Kind of similar when you deal with capacitors, less bad with inductances. All this components exist for different power values expressed in watts. All this exist in through-hole packages, in surface mount packages, those even at different sizes. Just get a view of the motherboard of your PC to get an idea.

Then you have speciality ICs for special purposes, you have evaluation and demo boards, you have the tools for all this, you have a need for software tools, a need for books to learn to use all of that stuff, datasheets, etcetera. You have tons of binders that tax office requires you to save for 10 years, you have tons of papers required to get the proves that define the value of your pension. You have just books that you like to read for entertainment and it is close to impossible for me to throw books away.

You have material of wood, of metal, of plastics that you need to have in place when working with the lathe or the milling machines which also require dedicated tools.

And you have a certain amount of chaos on top of this all! Does you get a feeling of the size of the job? And then comes the topping of it! Wife and kids tell you, that if you ever one day finish, all kids will have left the house and we will have to move to a place cheap enough that the surviving partner of me and wife can then still afford to pay! So I leave this motivating statements out of my brain and keep slowly but constantly progressing in my efforts!

[Hellmut1956]

Dear friends, even today I am dealing with new problems with my health, so that I did not find the time to update this thread. I am now trying to continue for the second try. The first failed as I accidentally closed the window in my browser where I was working on it loosing everything! I will show you numerous pictures to hopefully make the reading of today's contribution entertaining!





This picture shows my ultimate goal to have a well organized and empty workbench, here my electronic lab! Invisible on the picture at the top is the room where I have placed my modified PC 600W power supply from which I take the different voltage levels made available on my power bar, the aluminium bar you can see just below the raw of power sockets. I have made the experience that you never have enough power sockets!


Below the power bar there is empty space to place things at a well reachable distance while keeping the work surface empty! In this picture I had place the "power panel" there. Below this you can see shelves for assortment boxes for electronic components, far to few as they proved to be! To the right of it I have my oscilloscope integrated into the workbench. The exits for heat are hidden but well exposed to be able to dissipate the heat generated by the oscilloscope being active! On the left "wall" of the bench I have placed my soldering iron, just for the picture!
On the right side of my electronic workbench I have placed my phone so it is well accessible form both places.





Here you can see a picture from today! It shows how my PC is placed between my "office and programming bench" and my electronics bench".





Sadly this picture shows that chaos is still governing the electronics workbench today!





Lets continue! Here in detail my revision 1 of a panel I do use to connect the circuits I am "playing" with for learning to develop what I have in mind for my model "Carina" presented in another thread in this forum!





This picture shows an setup for experimenting.  In my model Carina I do plan to install a lot of proprietary circuits to implement what I have in mind. This I will present later as part of my thread of building the model Carina from scratch in this forum! I do plan to implement a sheet control system for the sails of my model sailboat equivalent to the way it is done on the original sailboat Endeavour!





This requires the mechanics and electronics in my Carina to be able to change the length of the sheet by 8.3 meters. I do use as a winch a stepper motor. The electronics and the sensors allow me to ensure that the available length of the sheet is always just a bit more than what is actually required so the loose sheet problems cannot happen. The concept is relatively complex and unusual so that I will present it to you as part of the thread of building my Carina. But "experts" for sailboat models and experts from communities of physics have passionately expressed that it is not possible due to friction in the pulleys, model sailboat experts, and that there is no friction, physics experts! This created my wish to really verify who is right by modelling the sheet control system. For this I have to verify that models written by me actually reflect the reality. So I have to build experimental setups to generate real data and have this data made available for analysis in the Mathematica software from Wolfram. The technical terms for this are "HiL and SiL", "hardware-in-the-Loop" and "software-in the Loop". This techniques are finally reaching an adequate level of maturity in the Wolfram Software. Goal is to assign the data generated experimentally to mathematical symbols available within the Mathematica Software, as well as the "SystemModeler" software from the same source.


But to achieve this goal I had to acknowledge that in the 4 decades since I left university my mathematical, electronics and physics knowledge has dramatically eroded and that the advances relevant for my purpose in all 3 sciences have dramatically advanced. Thanks to so called "MOOC" courses from the best universities worldwide make it possible to study the topics for free by having videos of the lectures of professors giving the course, assistance's for completing the assignments and reading material. The fascination I felt studying made me perseverant to pursue this goals  enough to fight against i.e. brain damages I got by my heart stopping to work once for too long! But as it is known, the brain is like a muscle. If you train it a lot the brain can reorganize itself to fix the consequences of brain damages. Basically my brain damages limit my ability to work concentrated over a longer period of time and not to store what I have learned once. So I always need a bit of time to refresh before being able to advance.


Remember, the goal of my activities in my hobby are not to complete a model, but being active building it and using it to get in touch with new areas that make me avid to learn more!


Lets continue! What I found out was, that in my experiment setups the cables began to look like a spider web! So my next step was to mount the panel on the "left wall" of my electronics bench:







But that was not enough! As my experiment setups require multiple electronic cards, see here a concept graphics of my electronic workshop:





This graphics allows you to get an impression about the whole electronics workshop I am setting up! You have me working on a PC on my office bench and communicating with RaspBerry Pi cards via WLAN. The local Raspi controls the microcontroller boards which themselves control i.e. a stepper motor controller. Remember that the winch in my model is build using a stepper motor. Magnetic angle sensors with up to 14 bits of resolution track the angle of the boom to the model center line so the software on the LPCXpresso board can compute the length of the sheet for that angle and have the stepper motor winch always adapt the sheet length to the length actually required. A second magnetic angle sensor tracks the "position of the sheet drum. So I do have on both control loops a "close loop" to ensure that no errors happen and if to fix them if they do. The actual desired angle of the boom is send from the R/C sender to the R/C receiver in the model, the position data is digitized by measuring the active state of the PWM data coming from the receiver. This data is used by my control system to ensure the sail does not open more that the user wants.


This revision 1 of the panel shown 2 pictures above was inadequate for my needs and the fun I have by usually exaggerating implementations made me start to work on a version 2 of that panel!





Before doing so here a picture that shows my concept to setup experiments! On the left I have a breadboard to implement "glue logic" to connect sensors and actuators, actuator is the term for any device that does something, a servo in R/C modelling i.e.! To the right you see that I would be using multiple controller boards for my experiments, which results in a need, of call it exaggerated wishes I do develop, to have a device that allows me to feed with energy multiple boards, to ensure each would be supplied as required by either 3 V DC or 5 V DC. Murphy's law say that the probability of something getting killed is higher the less availability for replacement parts or the higher the cost of a component. Chaos increases the probability of doing something wrong! At the bottom of the picture you an see my "experimental card" build years ago as part of a tutorial for enabling modellists to stop using electronics as a black box! by the way, it can be relatively simple to learn this!





Here you can appreciate my revision 2 power panel in construction. I have made available with it 8 different voltage level, each with a socket in its own color following the coloring scheme used in PC power supplies. The panel sockets are feed with its corresponding positive pole voltage from below the panel surface. If you want to be able to switch each voltage ON/OFF individually you can connect your circuitry to the top socket, otherwise you can connect it to the lower one.


[size=78%]




Here you can see the work in progress from the rear side of the panel.





Next a bit further down the road. Its getting more complex! But here as it was in the revision 1 version of the panel I have made available 5 screwable connectors for each voltage. The switch on the front side of the panels does switch them individually ON/OFF.





Next you see the completed implementation of the revision 2 panel before mounted in its final position:





Finally the panel mounted on the left side of my electronics workbench!





You can see that on the left side there is the part to connect the claws from a battery charger. As I might to be able to connect different voltages for the battery charger, the supply is connected via the 2 sockets on the front of the panel. To the very right side of the picture you can see a yet to be finished circuitry of fuses to the cables supplying the voltages to the panel. Above the panel surface you can now see the screwable connectors for each of the voltages, 5 for each, divided by a small wooden separator. While on the left side of those connectors you can see connectors for Ground, which are common to all voltages, above the panel those screwables, on the surface of the panel 6 banana sockets!


I do plan to have an color LED, called RGB LED's next to the interrupt switch of each voltage, which when the voltage is active, means available at its outputs, will be illuminated in the color of each voltage. Also I do plan to have electronic fuses to replace the short cables you see at the right side of the picture. Those will be made using MOSFET's, an electronic switch. I also do plan to have a RaspBerry Pi W, its latest version as of March 2017, which includes Bluetooth and WLAN wireless interfaces. The idea is to be able to monitor voltages and currents for each voltage individually and a software definable maximum current before the MOSFET switch interrupts the power supply to the panel, the electronic fuses! Her just the indication. Each RaspBerry Pi board can be controlled from my PC as if I had mouse, keyboard and display connected directly to the RaspBerry Pi board. The desktop of each RaspBerry Pi can be displayed and operated in its own window in the Windows 10 or Ubuntu OS on my PC!


This information makes it appropriate to report to you here another reason that delays me experiments. When I started to make myself familiar with the RaspBerry Pi boards and to learn the basics of Linux, the OS that operates on the Raspis it was relatively straight forward to communicate to the Raspi boards from my PC, to establish a link via an URL to each board and to program the boards from the PC by controlling the compiler running locally on the Raspi. Each Raspi got its own entry in a[/size]

[Hellmut1956]

Dear friends, even today I am dealing with new problems with my health, so that I did not find the time to update this thread. I am now trying to continue for the second try. The first failed as I accidentally closed the window in my browser where I was working on it loosing everything! I will show you numerous pictures to hopefully make the reading of today's contribution entertaining!Each Raspi got its own entry in a DNS provider that does not charge for this service. For those not being experts in Internet stuff, A DNS provider offers a so called DNS service which "translates" a "URL" or "LINK" to an IP-address! This way I can access my Raspi boards from anywhere in the world by giving their URL and the DNS service translates to the proper IP address!


I thought that by using passwords and "protected" communication I was on the safe side! My PC always has the latest updates to its OS, my run a very sophisticated protection software that includes more than just antivirus functionality! Still so, my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bits OS was attacked successfully rendering my PC inoperable. I tried every technique I know to recover, but failed. So I updated my OS to Windows 10 Pro, which was available for free! Now my PC was fully operative again and I had very little problems to get all software on my PC to run under Windows 10! I am sharing this with you, because as powerful and infinite are the technical possibilities this days, partly through the revolutionary evolution due to the IoT, the IIoT and Industry 4.0, the danger to suffer a successful attack from the Internet is equally growing and becoming more sophisticated!


The result of this experience was to start learning in depth about Linux, about cryptographic and about technologies to protect my workshop environment! The weakness responsible for this successful attack were my Raspi boards. As I did just use "standard" processes to protect them, attackers were able to succeed!


Just to explain the topic here in relation to the topic of the thread! If a workshop also deals with electronics and this days of IoT, IIoT and so on the topic of security is essential to have a safe workshop!


Learning about Linux in itself became a fascinating topic, not just due to the fact to learn in depth what means of protection could be activated, but also the topic of "real time" execution in a Linux environment! Real time is the term to define that a software does react to external events in a predictable and repeatable time period and this fast enough to allow to react properly to an external event! In my application for the sailboat electronics my sheet control system has to react timely enough to inputs from the user via its R/C transmitter, as well as to inputs from the sensors, here magnetic angular sensors. I did learn enough to know what possibilities I have and I will start to implement them when my experimentation gets to the proper phase!


This learning about Linux also made me aware of the means to ensure communication, the source from where I was attacked. I also learned how to implement the adequate functionality on the Windows 10 and the Ubuntu OS, a Linux. But I also got aware of what professional programmers do. They work out of so called virtual machines!





A virtual machine is an environment that simulates a real machine, a PC. A side effect of this virtual machine is that the native OS, in my case Windows 10, is not impacted by changes I do within the virtual environment. The term is the a virtual machine is fully isolated from the host system. So i.e. if my virtual machine is successfully attacked as it happened wit my PC before, the attacker is unable to reach my host PC with Windows 10. It just infects or modifies the virtual machine. Restarting the virtual environment presents the originally not infected or modified machine and the attacker is gone!


This virtuality is achieved by 2 methods and the graphic above presents it giving so to say the "generic" term "Hypervisor"! On the left side of the graphic we see what is called a hypervisor type 1. The hypervisor operates the way an OS like Windows or Linux usually does, bare metal!  Bare metal is the term to say that a software runs directly on the hardware and that application software and/or OS like Windows or Linux run on top of it as a client! "XEN" is one of the popular open source hypervisors. Also, if any of you has written programs that execute directly on a micro controller, this software is running "bare metal"!


The second method is presented in the above graphic as a type 2 hipervisor, being "Virtualbox" a popular tool to generate virtual environments that run on top of a native operating system.


So when programmers do work on a PC they use i.e. "Virtualbox" to generate a virtual environment and develop and test their software within this environment. The effect is, that what ever goes wrong the host OS is not impacted. Windows is supposed to isolate applications, but I am sure many of you have experienced that your Windows OS crashed due to malfunction of an application software. In a virtual machine this cannot happen!


Another advantage is that you can have running on the same physical hardware of your PC i.e. Windows and Linux concurrently, you do not have to restart your PC to switch operating systems!


But there is another way to achieve concurrent operation, its called "Containerization" and a popular also freely available software tool is called "Docker"!





This graphic compares virtual machines with containers! On the left side we see a virtual setup using a hypervisor type 2, on the right side how a system looks like that uses container technology. One of the main differences that becomes visible is the consumption of system resources. Remember, when electronics and micro controller boards are used in a naval model, the resources of those boards are minimal compared to those of a PC. My PC uses an Intel i7 processor, it has 18 GBytes of RAM and 4 TBytes harddisks that make up a RAID 10 harddisk. If I compare this with a Arduino board, I just have a few hundred kBytes of Flash memory, a few kBytes of RAM and even less RAM. Such an ARDUINO board therefor normally will not be able to run its own operating system. The ARDUINO development environment called IDE for short, helps you to easily write programs that will run, what is called "bare metal" on its controller. Usually it is not possible to connect a harddisk to such an ARDUINO. If you compare those ARDUINO kind of boards with those of the kind of a RaspBerry Pi board, the Raspis have dramatically more system resources! The microSD card can make additionally flash memory available of up to 32 GBytes, some of the newer types have 1 GByte of RAM on board and you can connect a harddisk of todays about 4 TBytes to its USB type 2 interface! This is the reason why a RaspBerry Pi can run locally the Linux OS and offer functionality of a PC just a couple of years old!


As such a RaspBerry Pi has i.e. 1 Gbyte of RAM, which is much less than the 18 GBytes I do have on my PC, efficient use of hardware resources becomes important. Now when you compare the virtual machine with a container setup, the container setup is more efficient in many cases! But as alternative choices always come at a price, Containers are much less isolated the virtual machines. They are more comparable to application software running on a windows system! Studying Docker and Containerization it soon became evident to me, that running Docker containers within a virtual environment would combine the benefits of both technologies. The term used in the industry is "hybrid systems"! But also the way containers work and the possibility to fully control the abilities of a container by setting the proper parameters adequately makes them extremely hard to be attacked successfully. I did do first experiments with Docker on my Windows 10 Pro PC. I was able to do a "Hello World" from within a container within a very short period of time.


So my intention is, that as soon as my workshop improvement has advanced far enough, I will start to create a paper sheet that lists all parameters and their choices so that I can define a workflow that enables me to develop the software for my experiments from within Windows 10, a virtual machine using Virtualbox and within it Docker. Then I will make sure I do implement the safest environment using the same techniques within my Raspi boards and to setup Linux in such a way it is as protected as I can to prevent the same to happen again to my PC! This effort I consider fully justifiable for me, as the advances in technology and the availability of wireless communication due to the IoT will allow me to operate my sailboat theoretically from anywhere in the world, one place could be at a border of a lake and be sure that the effort it will take to attack my sailboat successfully is so big, it is said it is so costly, that, as there is nothing to gain besides making me angry, does not justify the effort to attack me! Remember, any device connected to the Internet cannot be protected a 100%, it just is possible to increase the effort to do so successfully!


So lets continue with the electronic workbench! As the last step about my progress in this area of my electronic workbench I did present the version 2 panel. I did also mention that the cables that connected the controller boards to their power supply, the eventually directly connected display via the HDMI interface available in the Raspi and a connection to the LAN made the workbench look like covered by a spider net. As my experiments demands to setup the connection between multiple devices I did develop a concept that also reflected the inputs from my goal of having an experimental environment as safe as passible.





This picture shows me sitting in front of the display at my office bench, operating directly with my PC. My PC connects to RaspBerry Pi boards and the connection to the Internet via WLAN. What is missing here is the WLAN connection from my PC to the RaspBerry Pi ZERO

[ballastanksian]

I think the ratio between tidiness and space/places to put stuff is closely linked. I have a small area in my workshop that is my main ship building bench, but it gets used for resin casting as well and also I do not have enough storage space for everything, so it gets cluttered up. Your electronic layout is impressive with the different voltage supplies available at any time. You inspire me to build a more robust bench with better storage for tools and 'stuff'.

I hope you are well on the way to recovery Helmut.