Jesse Log
Sat Aug 3, 2018
Disassembled one microwave oven transformer. Learned how to liberate the primary and secondary coils- but need to be more gentle next time, I damaged the enamel on the winding for the primary so I'll have to try again with another core. Got an unmodified core hooked up to power and producing arcs in order to have a hands on understanding of a high power transformer in operation. We should mount it on a massive heat sink if we end up using this component. I plan to model a microwave core in free-cad soon for reference, will have to engineer a hinged transformer core or maybe just screw holes for easy core winding access if replacement windings need ever be addressed.
Fri Aug 3, 2018
Studied the Universal Power Supply. Noticed the possible use for microwave oven transformers, in all of their high power glory. Decided I'm going to try to rewind a microwave oven transformer core secondary winding to provide 30v And around 2 amps to the buck converter circuit, which I ordered ten of off amazon for something awesome like $2.40 a piece.
Thu Aug 2, 2018
Learned the basics behind how to dimension drawings in free-cad. Took half an hour to download and explore dimension drawing workbench. Still need to learn how to change the Title and info in the bottom right table. This is what I have so far. Practice dimensions
Sent an email to info@opensourceecology.org to notify them of completed steps.
Wed Aug 1, 2018
Learned how to use Vokoscreen to record myself through the webcam on my laptop which was running the OSE live-USB. Recorded the video interview questions and uploaded them to youtube.
http://img.youtube.com/vi/9y8gRox_JXI/3.jpg
This took about an hour and a half to get to work as I had to calibrate it to proper settings to get it to record the sound in sync with the video.
In the end I used Window style recording and clicked on the webcam window to record just my image while reading the questions. I left the frame rate at 25, changed the videocodec to mpeg4, avi and the audio format I left at libmp3lame.
Sent off an email to ops at ops@opensourceecology.org to let them know I've completed the steps in the list.
- Update: Linked to corner_cube_test_video and learned how to upload my freecad file to the wiki.
Download corner_cube.fcstd
http://img.youtube.com/vi/zroXi9xBAUY/3.jpg Link to Corner cube test video
Time frames:
- Installing Linux: 20 minutes
- Learning Free-cad: 3 hours of trying to get faster and more comfortable.
- Documenting my work: 2 hours learning to organise on the wiki.
The hardest part was learning to use Free-cad. Its a tricky program with tons of tools and features.
Ill give myself a score of 95%. I'm missing some formatting techniques to make everything here appear clean and concise.
Tue Jul 31, 2018
Created live-usb and installed OSE Ubuntu OS to my desktop computer. Used the live CD on my laptop to record the desktop video due to microphone requirements. I'm having a hard time getting the sound to work with clarity on my laptop microphone for the video interview so ill give it a try tomorrow or start looking for old external microphones around the city. Recorded developer test video. Learned to edit video down to appropriate size and uploaded to youtube. OSE_DEV_TEST
Freecad is a lot to learn but now that I can use it a bit more reliably, its not crashing anymore and I am learning ways to speed up my workflow. One of the most useful tricks was the (ctrl) selection of files to mass rotate a bunch of copies. This saved a lot of time and will be a useful technique in the future. Hot-keys and always save!