richfiles

Hehe... That K-OS blue screen. This has turned out beautifully! One tip, regarding mounting holes. If they don't line up perfectly, just drill them out. drilling will create a new hole alignment. If you can't get screws to bite anymore, then epoxy some nuts on the inside, so the screws have something solid to thread into. Sawdust and glue can also be used as a filler, and you can then redrill new holes as required. But seriously... That build is so awesome!

Thanks! Also, yes. Yes I did. Good eye!

Welp... Final update on my diversion from Kerbal controllering. Here it is, during final assembly, and below, finished, minus any labels that get added later. I need to trace out one issue, and make another adjustment. The green LEDs are almost painfully blinding, so I'm just gonna pop a bigger value resistor in to dim them. The red fault LED in the reset switch is kinda dim, so I'm gonna boost that one by reducing the resistance to it. I've already run the circuit on a simulation, so I know it works, but I have one of two fault conditions not triggering the fault latch. I figure I either made a dumb mistake in the layout, and have to bodge a wire in, or I have a bad solder joint. Nothing too critical. Minus that one problem, nothing to serious. This is for one of my employers. It's used to test hall effect (magnetic) commutation sensors used in brushless motors. I'm particularly happy that the power supply worked, first try. As I said, it's my very first switching supply. I definitely want to move away from 9 volt batteries on toward either AAs or LiPos on future projects. Don't worry, this is probably the last post about this bit of side tracking. It DEFINITELY has taught me a lot, and it specifically has left an endgame in sight for making the navball controller boards! My main job seems to have let up a bit on the relentless torrent that's been keeping me late, and now that this project is done, I can finish up some other work I need to do for that same job, and then maybe get back to building my controller! **EDIT** My goodness, those green LEDs I selected are EFFICIENT! Even with a 910Ω resistor, they are still incredibly bright! Yikes! I was gonna measure the current, but forgot. Oh well. Box is closed, and I never want to open it again! In the end, there turned out to actually be SEVEN issues! 1: I failed to consider orientation of the reset button/fault indicator, and as a result, had to use spacers when mounting the board to leave enough room for the part. 2: The spacers meant it was no longer possible to electrically mount the board directly to the push post terminal's threaded posts. 3: This turned out to actually be a good thing, since I managed to wire the mounting pads in the wrong order. I had to cut the traces to the two outer push post mounting pads, or they'd short to the wrong post. I was forced to manually wire the posts using ring lugs and wires running from each post to the secondary input header (I'm glad I implemented that). 4: The resistors I had selected for the Hall Effect Sensor LEDs were ridiculously undersized... (180 Ω to 910 Ω 2.2 KΩ) Rather the LED I selected was rated far too bright for what I needed. (I went back and replaced the resistors again, after finishing up at my regular job... They were still too bright. Current was about 1 mA @ 2.2 KΩ. Tried 3.2 KΩ, and got 800 µA, but decided to stick with 2.2 KΩ, just to play it safe. Didn't know how my power supply would handle low batteries, or whether the LEDs might dim more at the tail end of the battery life. I might yet change it again in the future). 5: The resistor I had selected for the Fault LED needed to be lowered a bit, as the fault indicator was a little dim. (150 Ω to 100 Ω) 6: The application note for the MAX756 Step Up DC-DC converter chip assumed that the user would simply connect their own signal to the standby/shutdown pin of the chip... Since the schematic showed it as not connected, I did the same. I never even considered it during the design phase. I couldn't figure out why the circuit was only getting 3 volts (straight off the pair of AA batteries), instead of the 5 volts it was supposed to generate. Discovered the problem because it would go away if I simply touched the shutdown pin. The residual electrical charge in my finger was enough to activate the chip. Fixed it with a small resistor jumping it to the power source, to activate it whenever the power switch is turned on... That was a dumb mistake... But not the king of derp... 7: Drumroll please... I managed to entirely miswire HALF THE FAULT DETECTION CIRCUIT'S INPUT! I am STILL uncertain HOW I managed to screw this one up. I had meticulously copied the schematic from my circuit simulator on my phone (ain't technology grand ), where I had PROVEN the circuit was validly functional, over to the schematic editor of KiCAD, the tool I use for PC board design. Somehow, when I decided to use the spare inverter gates to buffer the input, I SOMEHOW managed to leave half the fault detection circuit's inputs on the input side of the inverter gates... but took the other half and moved them over to the output side. What that meant, was that the circuit that was meant to detect if all three sensor inputs were logic high (5 volts) at the same time worked, but the circuit that detected if all three Hall sensor inputs were logic low (0 volts) would instead see the opposite, and so it would ONLY trigger when the other circuit was already triggering, and even then, it'd give the wrong output anyway. It was SUPER DUMB. The good news, is I only had to cut three board traces and jumper them with wire to the correct inputs. I STILL can't belive I made such a drastically severe mistake... Or even SEVEN mistakes in general. Sheesh... Good news, is it works 100% now! Bad news... My one job is still utterly monopolizing my time, and it's severely impacted my ability to get out of town to the machine shop and do my work there. I'm closing in on being nearly a month and a half behind on where I'd like to actually be with my work there. That's bad... I don't like it at all. Granted, I tend to only get 8-24 hours in a month period. It's not full time. Still, I'd say that I feel like I need to do about 50+ hours by the end of the month to catch up to where I'd like to be... And the month is drawing quickly to a close. I've already stated the problem with my current job. Having two people work a job that's clearly a three person job is stressful! They just don't grasp the concept! At the end of the day, I am sore, I am tired, I have no energy left. I AM most definitely burning out, and losing my patience. At the end of the day, I have to make a choice... Do I go in to the other job, drive out there, work a couple hours, and leave at 9 or 10 PM (21-22:00 for those who use a 24 hour clock), head back into town, and then get up in the morning to work at 8 or 9, and have to repeat that for 3-4 days, cause I can't get enough hours free to just go in and power through everything in two days... Or do I just go home and fall asleep early, cause I got nothing left in me? Sure, I could power through. I've done all nighters before. I've done low sleep... But it's BRUTAL. I'm not getting younger, and that is STRESSFUL! I can't keep punishing myself like that. I just end up like December... Sick for the entire month, never getting better. The other issue with going into the shop tired, is if I screw up, it could cost quite a lot. If a cable is $10 a foot for the raw material, and you have a 10 foot cable... Maybe I get the cables assembled, only to discover that I miswired them, cause I was tired and swapped the yellow and white wires. Gotta redo an end then! Say I'm so tired, I screw up something else up and the repair ends up leaving the cable short for it's minimum tolerance... That would be a loss of $100 on the spot. Boom! Gone! That doesn't even count parts I couldn't reuse in assembling either end. If I am tired and I drop a brake assembly, for a different product... Oh bummer, there goes the smooth bore of the bearings. Gotta tear 'em out and replace them. If I cut down a wire on the assembly too short, or I solder every connection wrong cause I was tired and rotated a part 180°... Yeah, there's SERIOUS potential to screw up when tired, and at that job, screw ups can be expensive. I'm not keen on doing that job tired. Supposedly, we're gonna have a massive streamlining soon, with some all new methods of preparing media at the lab... But dang it! It's taking so long to work out the kinks! Even if it saves time in the long run, I strongly suspect we'll initially be slower at it... I just want this stupidity to end. I want my free time back, and I want enough time left in any given day that I don't feel pressured to even fit time in for my second job! Ugh... Enough ranting. I need to sleep, or i'll be too tired for my regular job of +33 overworking. **EDIT 2** Got a raise at the machine shop job! Aww yeah!

The second part refers to hotlinking. That's when you display a picture from website A on a page from website B. Website A is hosting the image. Website B is linking to another server to request the image. Some servers block hotlinking. If they block hotlinking, then you'll be forced to download the image, and upload it to an image hosting site that will permit hotlinking.

Some sites try to "obscure" the image from right clicks, to prevent them from being copied or saved to your desktop. If your browser has a developer menu, activate it (if it hasn't already been activated), and close something like "inspect" or "inspect element". Use the tool to try to trace down where the image is in the code, and when you spot it, copy it. Paste it into a new window or tab to see if it will load at all. Some sites have hot linking detection, and that means you need to just download the image, if you can get it to load at all, and then put it up on a secondary site to host it. There's no getting around that.

Me... I just miss the days of getting out of work at reasonable times... I wanna BUILD! They got just me and one other guy... A measly two people... Doing a job that has always taken three people, and sometimes had four people. This is often our busiest season, and it's proven true... I've tried to explain to our supervisor that it's not working... We can't man three stations with just two people. It's a massive bottleneck... She just says it'll give us more hours, and that's good, right! Ugh... She just wants her total man-hours ratings to look good by working fewer of us harder, and not replacing the person we lost. I need to leave that place. Bad. I'm so burned out... Unfortunately, it's also the most stable job I've ever come across. That's a VERY hard thing to turn away from.

Man, you are kickin' it! That build is awesome, and you threw it together SO FAST!!! The BoM is cool too! I figured a total of $80.49 (unless I missed adding a line ). That's not bad at all, considering all the stuff you packed into it! I could't even guess what I've spent on mine, mainly cause so much was bought at different times, and I really haven't been keeping track all that well, and a bit of it is salvage... Wow... Organization, drive, and ambition, with a side of actually knowing how to code... It gets stuff done! I... do not know how to code in C very well. Any variant... I enjoy the hardware work... The physical build, but the software is looming in front of me like a big final test that I've never studied for. That kinda worries me. It is inspirational though to see projects like yours come together so nicely! It gives me hope that there's a light at the end of my own tunnel someday!

A while back, this post was temporarily stickied, much like many other posts that have been highlighted from time to time. What actually is stickied changes from time to time, so people in all different categories get a chance to be in the spotlight. This particular post was stickied around the time of the forum software change about a year or two back. I seem to recall the old forum software had some option to mark or sort a section's posts by a tag of some sort. I dunno. Back then you could easily single out "hardware" or something like that. The new software, I think, couldn't do that as nicely, or at all. I think it got stickied back then, to let it stand out. I've always felt this belonged in the Game Mods section. The people running the forum don't have the same view. They see this as a "fan work" because you can't download a controller, and people might be "disappointed" if they try to download a mod to run external controllers, only to find that <gasp> some assembly is required... (I wish we had a more sarcastic eye roll, and not just the "oh you" eye roll). Apparently, the application of effort to flesh out the communication mod with physical hardware puts us in the same category as 3D prints, paperworks, animations, art, and fanfics... It's a point I will NEVER agree on, but as the saying goes, "mods are gods", so it's their way or the highway. This post actually being sticked, was actually kinda in response to the overall opinion that this is more mod than fanwork, and it might not be as visible to the people looking for such things, as any one of us would consider this a mod to our actual game, and not a standalone work inspired by it. It was a compromise. We're still stuck here, relegated to the fan art section, but we got our month or so in the spotlight. The other good news, is this is a popular topic, so it pops to the top often! Not as often as it used to, before I started my own build thread though! LOL Now if only I could get enough free time to actually pick up and work on mine again! I'm so swamped at my first job, that it's actually cutting into my ability to keep up on my second job, not to mention free time! Yikes!

That... doesn't even look like a proper image link. Looks like part of a script. Make sure you can actually view your source image in a new window or tab in your browser. Then copy everything between the http part and the file name+extension... So up to the end of ".png" or ".jpg" or ".gif". Usually that's the entire link, but some sites might tack modifiers (such as resolution options) after the base link... Ignore anything after the file extension... But seriously, what you posted... that's not a proper direct image link at all.

-14°F (-25°C)... What is this above freezing thing you're talking about? I know not what this is. I do belive we are projected to get just below freezing on Sunday... Ehh... I'll take it! Skimmed the first line, saw the list, and my first thought was "what's with the class full of self entitled snowflakes and just plain flakes..." Oh... OH! This is ONE person! Kraken take her!

Gah! The mysterious neighbor delivery... Curious, did they mistakenly deliver, or did they leave you a "left with a neighbor" notice? Either way, hope you find it! Also, consider a tweezer, small plier, toothpick, or any suitable tool when doing the reflow + bend, incase the part gets quickly too hot to handle. The nice part of that technique, is since you only reheat the one side, the solder joint on the other side holds the part stable. Don't have to have that much of a grip or anything, since it won't fall off. Good luck!

Getting that package in the mail is like a little mini Christmas! The gift of tinkering! It's especially a joy when the package arrives on a Friday... and a bummer when tracking shows it'll miss your weekend and show the next Monday. Hehe... Mass wiring can be a pain, but that end result is so worth it! My solution was three dimensional. I brought my decoder circuitry right to the back of the LEDs. Complex, but compact. Bus wiring is tried and true and reliable! I really like your strain relief efforts on all the wires. Extra effort, but well worth it to make the ends more reliable. I do that often when I wire wrap boards. Yeah. It can be fairly important to have a tiny bit of extra lead length between the board and the component for many parts. With those resistors, you snapped them from leverage forces pulling at the wire when the edges of the resistor body hit the board and couldn't budge any further. I always leave at least a millimeter or so of space under a part, just to avoid scenarios like this. I actually had to break my own rule doing some of my recent work, and it left me very worried about defects. I managed to not break anything, but it was not ideal. One simple trick if you soldier it too close to the board... Reheat the solder joint as you bend over the part (the solder joint that's too close to the part is the one to reheat). It lets the lead pull up, giving it enough slack to bend. As long as you don't pull the lead entirely out of the solder joint, you should still have a reasonable connection. That ought to fix the problem of the right LED bars being recessed! Another tip, for the broken ones. If you pre-trim a new resistor with a short lead, and pre-tin the lead with solder (if the part isn't already pre-tinned), then you should be able to just heat the pad and insert the part into the hole. The old busted lead may or may not fall out. Doesn't even matter, as long as it doesn't come out and short anything. If it pokes out partially, you can just trim it. Great work on this! You're moving a a lightning pace, and doing a great job in the process!

You might wanna ask Stibbons about his LCD navball too. Like seriously, he makes this stuff look almost easy! Not terribly expensive or hard to find the needed hardware. An LCD, a controller for it, and as far as I'm aware, you just feed it the required data. If you're concerned about room on your panel? Well, you can always expand to a second panel! I'm the one going with a real navball. So much work! I managed to get my hands on an FDAI (Flight Director/Attitude Indicator) from an old Israeli P-4 Phantom flight simulator. It's quite literally older than I am, and I sure do hope I can make it work. I'm building a mostly hardware solution to control it, with the software side only needing to command the hardware to do the real work. You'll notice I'm more of a hardware guy. I kinda refer to others far more knowledgable than I am right now, when software is on the line.

Check this mod out out. I spoke with Snark, the person behind it, asking if it was possible to make it's variables visible to other mods. Stibbons Is far more knowledgable on how the software side of things works, and clarified what was needed. I'm still deep into hardware, and even deeper into being overworked, so I'm not even remotely close to messing with software, but it seems like the mod has a lot of useful ∆v and time data, relating to maneuver nodes, surface impacts, and atmospheric interfaces. The update that mentions the data availability is located on page 12 of the thread.

Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click!!! addictive, innit! So much more fun than some silly old keyboard! It's what drives us! Seriously though, lookin' great!

It arrived, and I have it mostly assembled! This is officially my first professionally manufactured PC board! I made a couple mistakes that I will DEFINITELY aim to avoid in the future. A few ground solder pads on my ground plane had multiple connection points... enough that they were thermally bound to the ground pad. That was a huge pain in the retrograde... I also forgot to up the hole size for the pushbutton's alignment peg hole, and the two switch leads, since they were a bit thicker. I was able to make it fit by filing the square leads round, but again... huge pain! Good news, is making minor mistakes like this now means I'm far less likely to make them in when designing future boards! As for future boards... I've pretty much latched onto the plan to do the FDAI Syncro emulators professionally. Since most board manufacturers offer prototype boards in triplicate, I can simply do like I said, and make each board be 1/3 of the circuit. This will mean a few things... I need to decide whether each board will handle the DACs and amplifiers identically at the cost of using more components, or if I will conserve components with more crossover links between the three boards. Since each DAC and each Amplifier handle two signals, and I need three signals per axis (for three axes), it means I need nine DACS and Amps. In an ideal circuit, I'd use five DACS and five Amps, wasting only a single circuit. Going with three separate boards means I can't share one part across a pair of separate axes, without additional links between boards. The part count isn't significant. I can add six DACs and six Amps without an issue, be it space, complexity, or cost wise. The main consideration is communication. Over a serial bus, do I want to communicate with six devices instead of five? Do I have time to waste on an extra frame of data, when the micro running the show is busy with sine lookup tables and multiplications? Alternately, does it simply become easier to split it up the task? If each axis is entirely separate, and entirely identical, then rather than have a single micro handle those calculations for all three axes, I could have three small micros handle the identical functions on one axis each, and only communicate with two DACs, rather than five or six. I guess I'm erring on the side of six DACs and Amps, with three small micros, so each axis is 100% independent from the other two. The only thing shared between them, is an inverted and a non-inverted 400 Hz sinusoidal reference frequency coming off a bit of vintage retro hardware, and the general serial bus for the main Arduino to retransmit received values to other devices. Each of the three micros would only need to sniff for it's specific axis value, and only process that, and nothing else. Hmm... I was pretty broke when I ordered the DACs... I might need to order one more, if I went super cheap and just ordered five... Here's the blank board, as it came from the manufacturer. Gotta say, while it's not specifically Kerbal hardware related, is HAS been an amazing learning experience!

I've just learned KiCAD to make PC boards. Have not learned any form of 3D CAD. What do you use? I'd be kinda interested in maybe reworking that inner hole to be rectangular, to fit a flat lever toggle switch. That ought to provide more clearance for the side walls. Either that, or I might consider switches with anti-rotation levers, and possibly a stubby lever. Those are a thing, but they might cost a bit more than the Sparkfun ones. With that, I could both eliminate rotation of the tab and possibly just reduce the hole depth slightly, to below where it would perforate the side wall. One other question I had, is does the switch's nut fit over the tab lever attachment, or do I need to assemble the switch to the panel first, and then epoxy the tab onto the lever after?

How are you going to use the engine readout? Will it mimic the Apollo usage and show engine activity, or are you using it for something else? Is it going to be all or nothing (all five circles light together), or will it scale with throttle level? What I mean by that is, for example: none lit for 0%, 1 lit for 1-25%, 2+4 lit for 26-50%, 1+2+4 lit for 51-75%, 2+3+4+5 lit for 75-99%, and 1+2+3+4+5 lit for full throttle. The lighting pattern shown is COT balanced, so would kinda make sense. Just curious what your plans for it are. It really looks great!

Those tab lever style tips fit large toggles, right? I mean, it looks that way from the pictures, but I just wanna be sure. Man, I wish China would just mad produce those puppies... They mass produce everything else... $82.20 on Shapeways to have 30 of them made in Polished Metallic Plastic, or $58.20 for basic white... I wonder if it's better to go with the basic and just paint it? Either way... So worth it! They throw up a thin wall flag. Did you have any issues printing them? I presume once they are epoxied onto the end of a switch, they will be structurally sound. Just curious if it's an issue that came up with manufacturing?

Those switches... They are amazing! I know where to get the switch guards (I'm wanting to weld wire loops like the old school style, as opposed to using the modern switch guards), but the tab lever toggle switches! Did you find an affordable source for the Honeywell switches, find a replica, make the handles, or just spend, spend, spend!? I'm genuinely curious, cause those look GREAT! That DSKY display is exquisite, as well! That's just an unmistakable segment style, and is INSTANTLY recognizable! I didn't even realize it was an LCD at first. That's a cool bit of software to make that work! AMAZING job!

Lonely Jeb "Snaaaaacks plz..."

It's not a fix, but it seemed to get around the issue for me. I couldn't get the post editor to allow me to post imager images as an embedded image (only a link). Loading the image manually had no effect. What made a difference to me, was posting, clicking the links (presumably so the images load from Imgur with he link source being the Kerbal Forums, and then, I was able to copy the addresses and re-paste them over the links (Don't copy the links, or you literally copy the URL link.. .Copy the link destination) and replace the URL links, and the post editor should then successfully insert the image into he post. for viewers of posts, copying an image link and viewing it in your browser ought to be enough to make it load, if it doesn't load in a thread. Seems to me like hot link detection might be screwy. I've not tried with any other image host.

You're looking at the final art for my first professionally designed PC board! Minor non instrument panel related update... Work's been brutal... Definitely a job meant for three people, but we've only had two people since October. It's been rough. Management sees nothing wrong, of course... They can just pad my hours (as a part timer) to full time, and keep paying me part time wages with no benefits... Thanks guys... Anyway, my other job (which has actually been suffering because of all this, because I have trouble finding enough time to go out to the machine shop now! ) has had this test device project to deal with, and I do belive I have a finalized design! It's been an interesting road, learning how to use KiCAD. I'm certain I will use it to do the FDAI synchro emulation board now. I really have no reason not to. I was considering going with OSH Park as supplier in the future for small boards, but man, my boss's (the machine shop) supplier is a place called Circuits West. Website ain't all that impressive, compared to OSH Park, but they offer a $31 special for up to 60 square inches (387 sq-cm)... That's 3x 6x10 inch (15x25 cm) PC boards for $31. That's actually pretty insane! Thing is... Their website makes it vague whether that's for all three boards or per board. They're not as fancy as the OSH Park boards, but it's a basic HASL (solder coating the copper instead of gold plating), green solder mask, and white silkscreen, so it's not that bad... except another weirdly worded bit on the website makes it sound like only one of your three copies is plated... Seriously, if they wanted my business, they could have put more than 20 minutes into making their website. Went with OSH Park... And that marks the first time i've ever designed a PC board from concept to manufacturing using CAD and a professional manufacturer! Here's the backside. KiCAD has very bad tools for via stitching (none), so it takes a few extra "hoops" to jump through to tie things like ground planes together over the board. Still, KiCAD is both free and open source. I'm alright with that! I guarantee i could have done a better ground plane if I had tried, but It's in the "good enough" range, and I really needed to get this manufactured... We already built our first batch of hall effect commutation sensor boards. These hall boards mount inside electric motors and tell the position of the rotor, based on sensing magnetic fields generated by a ring of magnets. A functioning board will always have on or two outputs the same, but never all three. It also has a pattern that changes based on direction of rotation. With this tester, we can hook it to a hall board to verify functionality (if an output is stuck on or off, eventually, as it switches through it's outputs, All three signals will end up being the same. This latches a fault detection circuit on, lights a fault LED, and requires a reset button be pushed to clear the fault. This lets us detect bad hall effect sensors or bad wiring or soldering (shorts or opens). In motors, if we spin the rotor by hand, and read the hall pattern, a motor wired incorrectly will show an incorrect pattern. Now, on to where this is relevant to Kerbal stuff... This marks a major change for me! This is literally the first time in my life that I've designed a PC board entirely using a computer, and sent the design off to be professionally manufactured. I've been meaning to learn this skill for the past 15 years, and just kept putting it off. Hehe... I guess being paid to learn it was a good fire under me to motivate me! I may still use wire wrap or hand made PC boards from time to time... Mind you, that this tiny board cost $40! It comes out to about $5 per square inch. I might contact Circuits West by phone or email and ask them for some clarification on things the website isn't so clear about... If I get an answer that I like, then i might go through them for the FDAI (navball) control board. That one wis gonna be sorta, kinda big, with 13 regular chips (minimum) and either 5 or 10 power amplifier chips (depending on if I can get clean signal separation on the stereo channels), plus 9 small transformers... Yeah, she's gonna be a big'un! If that 60 square inch board deal for $31 can qualify for a single board, then I'm good. If it doesn't... Well, the deal is you get three identical boards, and if each board can only be 20 square inches... that may actually still okay, cause the FDAI circuit is triple redundant. It literally will have three identical copies of everything except the input stage. I can split the design so that three identical boards can be tied together at the ends to perform the job. i'd only populate the input stage portion on one board, and jumper the signals across the other two boards. Data signals would pass from board to board, and each board would only manage a single axis, with three boards providing the three separate axes I need. It's just gonna be super annoying if they only do solder mask and HASL plating on one board, and the other two end up being bare copper. It's still better than nothing though, and i could conformal coat it after assembly, but it won't look as nice.

My employer is taking advantage of my part time status. They wanted me to go full time, but their health insurance program is abhorrently expensive and quite frankly, what I'm on now is affordable and has reasonably decent coverage. If I went full time though, I'd not qualify for the insurance I'm on, cause as a part time employee, I don't have access to the company health plan, and having employer coverage would disqualify me from the insurance plan I'm on now. So, with that out of the way, I work two part time jobs. One job at a testing lab, and the other doing electronic assembly and occasional design engineering for a machine shop that makes electric motors. The machine shop is run by an old friend, and former supervisor from my old job, also making electric motors... His business is a continuation of what we did at out old employer, before they were bought out and closed (The old company was purchased so the buyer could acquire our linear motor product line). I've had the shop job for 7 years, and prior to that, I'd worked 9 years at the old motor manufacturer. Sadly, while it's a very profitable business, it's also very small. On slow months, I typically only get a couple days of actual work. Sometimes, when we're busier, I can have a week or two worth of stuff to work on, but it's a far cry from full-time. Pay isn't bad though. It makes a great supplemental job, as I can go in and work 3-4 hours over two afternoons, and come home with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket. The job at the shop has been exceptionally busy. Apart from the regular monthly stuff I do there, we finally got orders for a cable for a surgical tool, for the first time in almost two years! (We used to make the motors that go into the tool) That is GREAT, cause I can do 90% of the work from my home workshop. I'm also designing a piece of test equipment (I finally learned KiCAD to make the PC board), so that's a big project that's racking up the hours too... Here's where the problem lies. The lab job. It was alway part time. I started there doing an 8-12 shift. They decided a year in, they wanted me to do 10-2pm instead... No additional hours gained, no pay raise, but I LOOSE 2 hours of my afternoon. I refused to accept the change without fair compensation for the loss of my time, and they agreed to shift me to a flexible hours arrangement. I'd come in and do an "official" 9-1pm shift, but I had the option to come in early if I knew the next day would be busier, and I could stay as late as I wanted to get additional hours, if there was work to do. This was actually GREAT! All the time benefits of part time work, with the option to work extra as needed (and pad that paycheck). As time went by, things began to change. Suddenly, everyone in my area had to "check out" before leaving. The managers all took lunch at the time I normally would leave, so suddenly, on days I wanted to get out, right then and there, at 1pm, I suddenly couldn't check out for up to an hour. Then it shifted from, "okay, you're good to go" to "well lets make sure there's nothing left that you need to do"... Mind you, there are always 2 full-time employees there, and I was the part time help for when things are supposed to be busy. Queue another year or two later, and we've had 3 or 4 total employees in our area at any given time, at least 2-3 full-time, and me as part time. Sometimes it was 2 full, and 2 part time. Occasionally, it's drop back to 2 full and me as part time, when we were between fourth employees. The area I work is most definitely a three station workflow. Sample disposal, container lining, and media filling. There's other tasks, but they get divided up, and that was often the responsibility of the fourth employee. We had a particularly troublesome fourth employee, who managed to last a year. The two full timers transferred to bigger and better things, and a new third full timer was brought in, bringing us to three employees. Well... The troublesome one got fired a month or so ago, and we've now been down to one NEWish full time employee, and me... Still part time, but working 7-10 hour days. A two person crew, trying to operate a three station workflow. Anyone with half a brain understands that that's a bottleneck. if one person handles two stations, they operate each station at half the capacity as the third station being operated at full capacity. It creates buildups, delays, and leaves the autoclaves suffering from major idle times. It's... It's real bad! When I addressed these issues to my manager... Her response was "I'm not hiring a third employee. We don't need one. Besides, don't you think you two couldn't just work faster?" I'm NOT going to burn myself out, to do MORE work, for NO ADDITIONAL COMPENSATION, ESPECIALLY when I see that the friggin' ALDI's grocery store... You know, the REALLY CHEAP place, is hiring people with a STARTING WAGE that's half a dollar HIGHER than what I'm earning after nearly FIVE YEARS at the lab... What the!?!? She tells me that there are enough people in other departments that if things get busy, they can just have other people put in a little time to help. This is a garbage response. First off, EVERYONE is busy in the mornings, and that's where our worst bottlenecks are. Most times, when people FINALLY come to offer us help, we're in the middle of cleanup, at the end of the day. One day, the first offer of help was literally so late, that I had to respond "Well, you could help by wiping down the counters, but then we would have to leave, cause there's literally nothing left to do. I would literally have to stop working for the day, to let you help me right now". While there are RARE cases where we get help at useful times, it's not all that common, and it's burning me out. What's more though, is I have ALWAYS had two or three separate jobs, and the lab always accommodated my need to get my hours in elsewhere. When I needed to work a shift at my old job at Gamestop, or get hours in at the shop, what was once my manager saying "Once you've worked your official shift, you can optionally stay later and work any extra hours you can take. If you need to leave at 1pm, that's fine." has recently shifted all the way to "Well you can leave once everything is done. I need you need to finish with everything here before you head out". Yeah... My "part time" duties seem to have shifted to full time duties, without any of the full time benefits. Tomorrow, I'm leaving at 1 PM, and my manager can just deal with it. I've told my coworker that I'm leaving at 1pm, so it's not a surprise, and it's not like it ain't fair to him. He got a whole day off. The previous day, my manager actually called my coworker to stay home on Monday (Our days off shift between Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to keep someone in the lab all week round), cause she didn't think it would be busy enough to need two people... DESPITE me telling her the previous Friday that I needed to be taking off at the end of my normal shift to go to the machine shop the next week... BTW... it wasn't a slow day at all! The impression that I get is that: A: She is completely dismissive of my other job, and feels I should ignore it, to prioritize the lab. It's reached the point where it almost feels like she's sabotaging my ability to leave at a normal time (like on Monday). B: She wants me to go full time, and is treating me as if I already was FT, but is ignoring the fact that I get no FT benefits at all. It's been months since I left AT 1pm. C: Multiple people in the lab think firing the troublemaker and not replacing him is an active ploy to pad her bonus, by reducing labor beyond reasonable means. She's actively IGNORING the fact that the lab employees are struggling to keep up (and who have spoken up to her about it), and taking advantage of part timers like me to get full time work hours from non full time employees, and pad the total labor pool with non-overtime hours, and fewer employees to pay out benefits to. I should have had a sweet paycheck from my other job, but days and days of delays, where I just don't have the time to drive out to the shop (which is out of town) have prevented me from getting as many hours in over there! If I could get a position at the other lab in town, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat. Sadly, the lab I work at JUST built a MASSIVE expansion that directly competes with the other lab in town, and they've been slow for the past year. I know, cause I've been checking with them. I mentioned that the friggin' ALDI's in town is hiring at a starting wage higher than my nearly 5 years at the lab... At my employee review, they literally pointed their thumb at the new building, and used it as an excuse for an abysmal QUARTER raise. No one got good raises. The company likes to spend on the buildings, and cheap out on the labor. Those people have me hating my job. I genuinely hate going there. My coworker is awesome. He hates it, but we have fun. It's how we cope with such crummy management, and such low wages. The ONLY REASON I haven't already walked... Is it's probably the most stable job I've ever witnessed in my entire life. I watched a man tell his managers he was quitting FIVE TIMES, be called into meetings about his behavior and attitude four times, run a cart into a pregnant woman, and verbally harass other employees, and not show up for a few days, cause he was in jail for a DUI... And HE'S STILL WORKING THERE!!! He's NOT even the guy who got fired!!! The one who got fired eventually got fired for repeated no-shows, blatant NSFW speech and behavior, and repeatedly getting into it with managers. He ONLY got fired cause he went directly up against management... And it took a YEAR. As long as you do your job reasonably well, and don't pick fights with management, I'm not sure you even could get canned from this place. I've only heard of one other firing in 5 years, and that was for stealing from the company. As for what we do, my department does food testing. Unless the government suddenly stops requiring foods to be tested to be safe for human consumption, or humanity suddenly stops eating, we will ALWAYS have work. It's the most stable industry I've ever seen in my life. In five years, we've never had a downturn, never had a layoff, never had lack of product to test. We're stable, BECAUSE we are a service industry, that services a government mandated safety regulation, on something every human needs (food), and that testing needs to be done fast. You can't outsource it to China, cause it'd take too long and cost too much to send the samples around the world. Instead, there are numerous testing labs dotted all over the country that service local food growers and manufacturers. It's the fast response that is beneficial, and drives companies like where I work. A customer doesn't even need to wait for UPS overnight, cause we have a network of couriers that can literally drive straight to you and pick up your sample, same day. If a company can't sell what they produce till they get a test result, then having rapid response makes a world of difference. Shipping by the afternoon, vs storing everything in a warehouse for a day or two. It's cause of that stability, that I've not walked away. I will probably never find a job as stable as a food testing lab in an agricultural town. Still, I want out... I know it's a waste of money, but they've driven me to start buying the occasional lottery ticket, just so I can DREAM of HOPING to wave that in their face and WALK! Why dreams! Y U no true!

Much better than before! This bodes well for when it's time to actually build the FDAI Synchro Emulator board. I belive there are 5 analog switch chips and 5 DAC chips, plus the sine wave generator, as well as 9 transformers, all being controlled by an Arduino. Honestly, with my newfound understanding of this software, making a board shouldn't be that terrible. It'll be better than wire wrap and a whole lot less brain twisting than trying to route that setup manually. Also, I'm starting to learn some of the hot keys... Good Lord, there are hotkeys everywhere...