topgun

Yay for the service tech calling and on his way over.

We had that wind yesterday.

A new entertainment center will get built one of these days too.

Yes, I know its a mess right now. My lack of free time and caring is apparent in that photo.

What it looks like occasionally.

I'm hoping that they replace my TV out of this damn deal.

Is that a pretty old Honda?

Fixing a screwed up TV top!

Service tech from Sears is supposed to be out from 8-12 this morning. What kind of a friggin time window is that? It pisses me off since I have to be out of here by 11:20 and knowing ole Murphy he won't show up till 11:30

I realize it is massive oversampling, but with only a force measurement I'm not sure how else to do it. I'm going to talk to him today about running load/stroke on it just so we can have values and something to relate them too. Thinking about it now I realize that we are going to need displacement on this, no other way to do it correctly.

That it would, going to have to look into that.

'Hop Top! Most posting I've done in here in a while.

The load cell I spec'd out is kinda cool too. It is a LoadStar Sensors one, with a USB plug and play interface, hadn't seen that.

The reason it has so many pieces is they wanted to burn it on their laser out of stainless. Hence the stacking of parts.

I'm a little pissed that we don't have more time for this. I'd like to get it running, get a shit ton of data, get someone to run some statistical analysis on it to find if it is truly repeatable and then be able to give them something that actually works, or give them a plan on how to fix it. I don't like giving them something that I don't know works, and isn't completed.

Once they have this data for a range of materials they want to look and see what kind of hoppers/flow designs for for the materials and be able to test a new material and get a pretty good idea using this test data as one of their parameters as to what they need to look at for hopper/flow designs on the new system. They handle everything, aluminum shavings, corn flakes, dried peas, cement powder, etc.

They don't know what they want. Hence the problem. As far as I know they want the initial force to push the slider out, and then the running force to continue pushing. We are doing this by using a servo and lead screw assembly. The total test will take ~30sec to run, the load cell/software has a 150hz refresh rate, which (in theory) will give a new data point ever .00080" of travel which I imagine will be enough for what we are doing here. (The company is K-Tron Premier) In reality, they wanted something along these lines with a small budget, short time, and here it is. They don't even have this damn thing built yet, haven't ordered the load cell, I have no clue how well it even physically works.

Learned yesterday that one of the guys around my age from back home died last weekend. He crashed his truck on a dirt road on Saturday, they found his body in a creek on Monday morning. Never even liked the guy, but not a good deal. Never a good thought that a guy wrecks on a Saturday and is found on a Monday in a creek. I don't know how many miles I've put on dirt roads and done crap I shouldn't have throughout the years, but its a lot.

Have a presentation to the company on this on Thursday evening. Oh, and we had a month for this semester long project because the relations with the company we had before fell through (not our doing).

Here is an exploded view

Photo of said creation. It is a friction tester machine for a company that handles bulk materials. It is for measuring the pull out force for taking a slice out of a column. They are looking for the data to extrapolate to different hoppers for different materials. The model is v3.0 prototype.

FML. This is going to be the week from hell and I need more intelligent group partners. I'm f'ing tired of doing most of the work myself because they either can't write or don't know wtf they are doing.

If only that fix worked for women.

I'm sorry that it has the 460.

Sucks about the little guy Sean. Hopefully he gets better soon.