Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Poor man's DRO!

Bout time
finger was over the "PING" button

Sorry guys, I kind of fell down a few ratholes - mainly catching up on various infrastructure stuff that I'd had to let go while my health was "wait for a good day to walk the 25 yards to the mailbox" status. This is a big place, needed work on the basic survival stuff, and well, mowing this many acres that were starting to grow trees and rosebushes...I've more or less lost some 10's of acres of usable pasture (also - that's a retirement fund), but did recover maybe 5 or 8.
Not stuff I normally post about here, but the exercise, now that other issues are handled, is good for me. It's of course all relative - I can't run to the mailbox, but walking to it on any given day works, and isn't a major deal anymore - even more than once. I wish it was better, but it's so much better than last year it feels like a new life. I'm trying not to waste it, though the strictures on what I can eat and do are chafing.

The other rathole is the second, upstairs Fusor2 system, which has random inability to make a vacuum good enough for what I want to do there with looking at particle behavior vs density. I'm still fighting, well, I'm not sure what exactly, as my leak-fu hasn't shown me detail, and I even wonder if the old pump station isn't a bit flakey. I may just have to re-do this in the #1 big setup, which would take down the use of it as a reference for testing detectors etc.

Meanwhile, two of the "too many computers" I have here failed, one even fails to post now. That's a first in computer use since the late 60s (a pdp 8 in that case) - and it was a pretty new one, an Intel 7th gen NUC not even a year old. Finding and ordering parts for a new "main squeeze" while I live on a raspi-4 as a daily driver took some time. The new one is going to be my first AMD box - I am still waiting on a new gigabyte b550 master mobo, but the rest is here - AMD ryzen 3700, 16 gigs of ddr4 3600 ram, 1 tb samsung evo 970plus nvme (along with the one from the borked machine, so I'll have 2 nvme on it) and an MSI RTX 2060OC video card, with the usual power supply in a noise suppression case from Corsair. I didn't get pci4 drives, but hey, it's not like the samsungs are slow. I will also put in a 2.5" laptop spinning rust drive to support timeshift - that software saved my butt and is way worth it. Should be killer! I had the idea that I want to learn some video editing, and the machines I've been using just aren't up to that. This one should manage fine.
Timeshift saved all my dev work on the machine that blew up ...

But it's all gonna happen, "whatever it takes".
Another rathole is the build for the "really good" data aq and control setup. I'm coding for "fusor2", a raspberry pi 4 with a touchscreen that's going into a nice rack panel, and will finally also incorporate gas flow control and some autotuning pid kinds of things. This is what lead to the machine thrash - making that really nasty looking broach from dogonlyknows steel and doing it poorly didn't make me feel like things are good enough.
So I bought some O1 to make a real one. The errors and slop on the mill and lathe (combined of course with a little bit of cowboy operation) made for that first broach to have uneven teeth with uneven size change per tooth, as well as - like always - you can't put metal back if you take too much off, and it wound up undersized, requiring force or filing to get those bnc's in. And this is going to have a metric-crap-ton of those on the panel.

It's always been my philosophy that tools tend to pay off and are worth investing in. So, the upgrades, limited as they are, combined with a bit of cowboy control so as to regain the status of the best tool in the shop for myself, are what's going on now, along with some pyrotechnic hobby work I may or may not post on - it's fun but it could be unwise to jiggle the paranoid authorities over my harmless hobby. We'll see...

Hopefully I'll get to writing up all this machine stuff for the appropriate forum here at some point - it's a work in progress and of course, it's best to have some good success to report along with the "it almost worked" parts.
But it is getting better - I'm going to try a better version of Joe Pi's inplace collet manufacture to see if I can't get this to work with Clickspring's "just do it all next to the chuck and keep pulling the stock out little by little" which couldn't work with my chuck runnout before, and also the lack of good ability to know how far I'd moved things - there need to be a couple more caliper setups on the lathe. It's just not as good as Chris' little Sherline for this. I'm wanting to be able to do the flat cutting on the mill _after_ the lathe work, which means I need to invent a better setup. Cutting the flat first means interrupted cuts on the lathe, and the long length makes trouble with that. Maybe I'm being too perfectionist here, but it seems this kind of capability is worth the work to have in the bag of tricks. It does fall into that "I've always wanted to be able to make funny holes" kind of mindset.

This is kind of a slow video (Joe is a really good machinist, but was learning video production), but the idea is to make a collet in place that will effectively eliminate the usual 3 jaw chuck runnout. I do also have a 4 jaw, but it won't close down to 3/8". Joe's trick works, a little less perfect if you don't have the tiny boring tools, but it works. I ordered said boring tools from Bangood at the beginning of May...They say I'll have them in July sometime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCUkJydSmdA

I really need to get off the dime and install TimeShift on my server machines. I've just been doing .tgz files on S1 and S2 machines and backing up the MySQL databases that live on S1, but if I can run TimeShift as a cron job automatically that might save having to do data reconstruction from the time that I took the last backup. I do full backups before kernel upgrades or if a lot of changes have been made to the web site and radio club roster I'm hosting.

We could perhaps have some really productive discussion and exchange of scripty goodies on this topic. I finally have some really good and reliable - even tested - stuff set up here. Not to preload Murphy, but it seems to be doing a fairly heroic job of keeping my stuff safe.

Big kind of standalone machines, like this "main squeeze" that I spend a lot of time in front of, run timeshift. No need to write further scripts if you can live with the ones timeshift puts in.
Timeshift has a limitation, either a weakness or strength, in that it will only make backups to a physical drive. While you can have that going on to the main drive you boot from, the smart thing is to use another.
On my big machines, I just have a 2.5" spinning rust drive just for that, high capacity ones are cheap, and they spend most of their time spun down via setting that up in hdparm and a udev rules file.
Sadly, timeshift won't work with mounted shares as a destination, though with enough fiddling, you might trick it into using a folder on a local drive that has a (nfs) share mounted over it. Forget samba, the permissions never seem to be able to be set right enough - it doesn't seem to support the fine grained permissions and other metadata that ext4 likes to have.

Big machines are kind of special here as they get turned off at night. I have a few so there's always one where I am - two+ per building at present, somewhat customized for what I tend to be doing when I'm at that place.
In this building there's this one - kind of a catch-all which I do management from, as well as being the entertainment center, one that's customized for coding and testing embedded stuff, on a "tinker bench" and a third upstairs
that has the remote fusor command center software on it (the 4 monitor one). These big machines are actually less important in general than the smaller ones on my network(!). A local timeshift backup seems to serve fine.

I also have a few raspberry pies on the network, and 4 odroid HC2 boxes that have 4 tb 3.5" drives on them. One pi is my "lot master" or master for the LAN of things. Others are either just cameras, or maybe add data aq and a little control for some water system, or garden guard function. Those odroids are really sweet, much faster than a raspi, and I run odroidian (the older) and armbian (very very nice) on most of them. I'll be upset when they go obsolete, hope they make something reasonable to replace them.

One of the odroids runs open media vault and is just a huge share for everyone else to mount in a directory under their home. Another runs the sql server that I use for the fusor stuff, and for another phpbb just like this one that I keep sysadmin and project notes on locally. A third is just there to wake up in the middle of the night and run scripts that mount all the always on machines and make bit copies of them every night. The 4th is a spare for the moment, that I use to test distro upgrades, scripts and the like. All these small machines run tightvnc server so I can remote-admin them easily, or at least as long as you don't want to do things as root - a recent change (wayland) prevents root on a gui when remote. (there are workarounds). TheLOTmaster (which has a share on it too, which I use to make copies of /home from the big guys) and all but one of the HC2's wake up early in the night and back themselves up in a shared folder. That last HC2 wakes up later and backs up the whole world. So, for example, the HC2 that runs a big MySQL instance has already dumped the DB into a file, sometime around midnight, and at 3 am, the master backup makes a copy of that along with anything else shared. All the smaller machines do this on cron scripts around midnight, so they'e done by the time the big silent backup guy wants to grab them.
There are some specialized scripts for those individualized backups, using rsync. Just doing a copy is far too slow - linux is like that, and it really stinks for lots of small files - and can take over 24 hours doing all that directory diddling.

The upshot is that when I get up, the master backer machine has a fresh copy of all the important embedded ones, and one of those has gotten a copy of the home directory (and maybe /etc) from the big machines whenever I thought to do it- that gets copied along with the rest. The big share, mounted in a dir over everyone's home, gets a lot of activity, and is backed up nightly. That's a big change - for many years, due to low availability of electricity, I had no always-on machines, all was peer to peer and done manually, it was a mess. Now all the machines need less disk to start with - that 4tb share of which 2.x is used - is there for all of them.

I guess I'd have to draw some pictures and do some arm waving to really make it clear how this works. Only the machines running timeshift have rolling backups so you can revert to more than just the most recent, though the staging through the couple of layers gives you a little fudge on that for the rest.

Special scripts do the pies and pi-like things, to avoid trying to back up parts of the filesystem that aren't really files or just don't matter. The whole thing is a tree like structure - some things back up to some other things, which are in turn backed up. This is how the not-always-on machines are handled - they do a backup on my whim to one of the always on machines, which is then automatically backed up nightly.

Note timeshift puts in its own cron scripts. By default it leaves out home(!) and /root. You can add these back. Since I have a lot or remote stuff mounted via fstab, you also have to be careful not to create a copy loop.
A flaw in timeshift - you have to make sure your "exclude" filters precede any include ones in the list, or things go south.

FWIW, all the machines here run webmin, it's nice and a time saver. It makes setting up cron jobs and doing updates a breeze, among other things. It kind of knows the formats for all the config files in linux, so it makes the simple stuff simple.

Timeshift is an all or nothing thing - it's a bulk backup of everything. It does create a mirror file structure, so you could restore just parts if you like, but it's good to do an sql dump for backing up sql servers - keeps everything coherent, while just restoring the db files might miss a partial transaction. For just doing your home and etc, there's a thing from ezee linux call xbt that's worth looking at, and it was good to look at the rsync tricks in.
I do most all of my top layer stuff via nfs mounts over subdirectories of everyone's /home/user, named after the machine I'm mounting so I don't have to think so hard moving around the network - HC21 is always the same share and in the same relative place on every machine that mounts it.

Maybe we can do a thread on the software forums somewhere and share little script examples and tips about what works. While a lot of what I do is custom to this topology, some of the nifty tricks work anywhere if you substitute various URIs and other options. Rsync is an absolute BEAST - but with great power comes great complexity in the option switches!s And those really matter at restore time. It's true what they say - if you haven't restored it, you don't have a backup.

That's another thing on my "TODO" list. get another machine running locally with similar enough characteristics to S1 and S2, to use for "restore testing" as in "The hard drive and MB just ate the big one", so can we recreate the entire machine on another piece of hardware. I suppose I could just spin up another off site machine like S3, S4 and S5 for testing but then there is transit time over the Internet. S3 is an off site mirror of S1, but I have been lax in keeping it up to date.

Yeah, one of the big disadvantages of cloud, other than the rent, is the loss of local speed (and some control and observe-ability).
I've been pretty bad about keeping things up to date myself, and mostly been lucky in spite of it. Or just staying on track as priorities shift a little.
I'm cleaning off a bench to build the new machine this AM, and having to move half a dozen(!) projects begun - it's a tinker bench for embedded - around fusor2. And by the time I pick them back up - the main code for the pi4, and that for the two slave arduinos (needed for fast counting and some of the time determinism, as well as separating the gas pressure control) - it "out of mind" and I'll have to relearn my own progress so far. Sigh.

And not all infrastructure debt is strictly technical debt... Those Ashley parts have been in my life since around 1979, though not only owned by me. When the original owners, who let me stay with them when I first moved here, got rid of the thing - I begged the pieces off him and used them to make a barrel stove. This is one of those "if this could talk...." kinds of things. I may reuse the nice top for the next one. I suppose I should have burned more wood the past 2 years - the shop has been used less in winter - so the ashes in the bottom would have stayed dry despite a bit of rainwater getting in. But I did get ~ 15 years out of that one. It's a major pain to adapt a barrel to those compound curves, but worth it, I guess.
There goes a few days and some fishing for the right stock to make the adapters.

On the other hand, all this (otherwise sadly) not fusor work has improved my health enough to be able to enjoy some food that is good for the soul vs just being health food, and it's a positive divergence - the better I am, the more excercise and that makes things better and...off to the races. High hopes that as soon as I clobber another few obstacles I'll be back - and in real force as I now have more energy to apply to my real passion.
Several months ago a meal like this would have had me feeling bad in the GI tract for a few days. No more!

So, heh, when this showed up at the grocery store - and it's pretty rare for them to cut a filet mignon this thick (it's also a butcher, this is local fare) - oh wow, that was quite a celebration! Seared in cast iron and then baked semi-sous-vide at 390 F until meat thermometer said 125F, then rested covered for 5 min. There is no better way.

Hey Doug,

Good to hear about the latest projects. I've been checking in, off and on, to see if you've shared anything new.

From recent posts I see a few words about recovering from some health issues. Like these...

"Super busy here, as my health is coming back - strict regimen but it's paying off - I've been doing a heck of a lot of yard work while the weather is friendly for that, and the exercise is part of the regimen. It appears that spending a large part of each day totally out of breath and feeling like I'm going to collapse is good for me, whoda thunk. Maybe I'll live to fight another day."

"the exercise, now that other issues are handled, is good for me. It's of course all relative - I can't run to the mailbox, but walking to it on any given day works, and isn't a major deal anymore - even more than once. I wish it was better, but it's so much better than last year it feels like a new life. I'm trying not to waste it, though the strictures on what I can eat and do are chafing."

"... work has improved my health enough to be able to enjoy some food that is good for the soul vs just being health food, and it's a positive divergence - the better I am, the more excercise and that makes things better and...off to the races."

----
Wondering if you would be willing to give a quick summary about what you have been dealing with? From the mention of last year, I guess its been going on for a while (not Covid). Maybe I missed something earlier. I don't think I knew that you had some challenges. If I missed something you shared earlier, sorry for not being more aware. As I am moving into my 70's the memory thing looks like something I might have as a coming challenge.

So I thought I'd ask. I'm ok if you are willing to share more, or not. Whatever's up, I send my best wishes for you to get your vigor back. Your posts have always kept me thinking and I've benefited from a lot of what you shared.

Hi Rex,
It's been hard to get some balance between, gee, this is really important to me, and well, it's kind of embarrassing as I did all the damage to my health with great enthusiasm and after all, it's only my health, so why would anyone else care much? It's all kind of mundane, actually.

I smoked, around 2-3 packs a day from age 14 or so, for starters. Tobacco and well, other stuff too. So, > 40 years. While for most of that time, there was no obvious ill effect - to me, others complained about the smoke of course - eventually it caught up with me. And then there was all that money I spent on slow horses and fast women, wasting the rest (not an original one, but all too true in my case...). Just the crap all the doctors warn you about, along with the usual sloth, alcohol, and generally all the fun things.

It got to the point of it actually being hard to get to my mailbox - maybe 50 yards, with a slight climb. A visiting lover brought down the hammer, along with a visit to a surgeon to have a bit of skin cancer removed. The doc thew me out of the office after measuring my BP as a routine thing...it was so high they thought I might die right there and then. So, emphysema called COPD, crazy BP (like 250/130) - and general bad days with a decade or two of constantly bleeding hemorrhoids tossed in - hard on clothes, can't go out much, or get much exercise, and it'll make you jealous of women who only bleed a few days a month...Basically at age 62 or so, I was medically around 100 or something.

In the usual denial, I had undertaken automating as much of my setup as I could to avoid having to pay the consequences of those bad days...what I could get automated, I did, reducing the need to lift a finger, but also costing me the benefits of exercise. Mixed bag. Living off grid (at least with my bucks) is more work than on grid, at least on the home front. The "no bills" thing means less of the work is about getting the rent paid - there is no rent! I didn't have any decent "access to health care" which actually means - no insurance means that unless you get into serious business discussions with providers, something simple costs ridiculous - say $5k for a few stitches in a finger. That actualy happened, but I stiffed those jerks - it can be nice to laugh at them when they say they're going to bork your credit rating, as having lived without any credit since I was 18 or so - I don't have one. As it turns out, the black mark is much better than no rating at all - another whole story as for example, without one you can't get an account on the gov SS website(!) - and with nothing but a strike, all the credit card apps start coming. So funny in some dark humor world. My finger was indeed torn up - high power furbine- and many bone bits. Which they refused to pick out, saying they'd just stitch me up and re-break it later and do the surgery then (which of course means 10's of k$ more in bills to them). So...well, I'm a good enough rude field surgeon.

That situation with health care is BTW, now fine - a neighbor who is a retired paramedic/fireman turned me on to a near-secret network of docs who mostly do other docs, and don't rip you off. Amazing, it's run like any business, they know how much things really cost, charge you that plus a bit of profit, and compared to the rest of the biz, it's practically free. Most practices don't even know about the business aspect, and some MBAs in another state do it all. Along with insurance they've learned that they just bill near ininite numbers and then take whatever the insurance will pay - and if they bill less,l the insurance pays less. So when a regular person, without negotiating power gets that bill, well, we're the only ones who ever pay that kind of silly stuff. Which of course, the person you try to negotiate with doesn't even know, much less sympathize

So, not that out there as health issues, I'd guess, a few exacerbating factors perhaps. But having to wait for some confluence of the planets resulting in a good enough day to make the mailbox, or golly, the grocery store is not a great life.
And as a result, the infrastructure around here - kind of slipshod as I never put big bucks into it - ran down and I got seriously behind. Water supply and purity, woodstove, solar batteries, clothes washing, roofs leaking - again the usual boring stuff perhaps. I didn't have the kind of bucks one need so just call someone to "make it so"- I put that money into shop and science and well, toys.

So a few years back, this all took a turn. Jamie forced me to start vaping, and I learned how to use that to get off smoking entirely - it's trick that may not work for most, but it did for me. At first, just doing the vaping made things get a little better, but then things went downhill again. I'd gotten into it - temp controlled fancy vape stuff, homebrew mixes, so I had some tools to work with. I made a mix that was extremely strong - nicotine and menthol, no PEG, just glycerin (who needs the big clouds, my lungs sure didn't) - and was able to then say, well, I'll only allow myself to smoke for 5 min at the top of an hour, period. I was able to do that in highschool between classes, and that was a little hard, but do-able. I then discovered that the later in the day that first smoke was the less bad it all was, so if I could, I put off starting for another hour. One day I hit the end of the day, or nearly, and that was that - time to start the real denial of impulse, which was now far less of a habit for two reasons - one is just not doing it constantly all the time, and the other was, that stuff was so strong that only a couple hits and you'd put it down before your vision blurred too badly, so the psych habit was just less of it.

At any rate, it worked, and while it still grabs me by the throat now and then, I resist. I think I smoked half of a cigar once in the last two years - got too drunk to care. And got reminded it's not good for me, hacking for days after. I'm done.

Lower GI issues - turns out you can't live on one can of Campbells soup a day, sort of - I did for some years while staring out this off grid thing in the late '70s. That got diverticulitis going...then later, living on sugar and protein...not good.
I'd picked up a habit of just not eating much, fine in some ways, but that meant next to no fiber and just not enough stuff to keep the plumbing cleared. This caused the bleeding...and it's a lot more trouble and nastier than it's easy to relate.

So, quitting smoking, and radical diet change along with some meds (I'm lucky, I managed to get to only lisinopril really early on, because living right is the real deal) - and it's all on the mend. Now that I can exercise, I find that when I do, I'm glad I did. It's hard to make myself, still, but it's worth the effort. I'd fallen into another trap as an engineer - finding ways to never lift a finger and be super efficient allowed me to get into denial and other bad habits, and I'm still fighting that one.

I should publish some of the recipes that I worked out that put me back on track, it's really good stuff...not weird at all, just kind of boring if you have to eat it all the time - that steak above was a miniature victory of its own - normally that would have made me ill for days, and don't even sniff a pizza. Lets just say that oatmeal, fixed with a tropical fruit cup - and a nice chicken/vegetable soup, really full of goodies, without fail... it's a bigger deal than most want to tell you about.

And then I found that in my special case, sodium docusate (stool softener) is huge and I'm really on the mend. There was 100% correlation between my BP and how much ...sh*t was in there, no shit. Just running on empty -in, then out, no local storage - huge, huge, huge - my dose of BP meds has gone down a factor of ten, and it's almost time to stop entirely! All those little extra diversionary pockets are slowly going away - I might get back to near-normal. Damn.
And that too a long time - maybe 10 days or more of daily use - to really prove that the correlation was that huge. Well past the initial blowout stage.

I'm still lazy and after being a gymnast in high school (a slight build made that easy, one handed pullups are easy when there's nothing much to lift) - it was some mix of embarrassing and scary when I tried that "do ten pushups a couple times a day" thing and discovered that unlike the 100 I used to show off with, the limit was now around 4 - and that was after all this other improvement. My advice is don't go there - man, it was bad. I can now do the ten most days, but I'm glad to stop,

My lung capacity, never good, is slowly - key word - coming back, but in a couple years, not that great, the damage might be permanent.

So, in short -
Don't do too much stuff that's bad for you.
Eat the right stuff, in the right amounts.
Find good docs you can afford...more on that later, but avoid the chain franchises.
Get discipline on exercising. While I don't climb radio towers, (you know who I'm jealous of) - I'm at least back in the saddle at all, and catching up with all the infra that failed while I was also failing is a good start, if somewhat daunting.

And now I can quick walk to the mailbox.;..or even normal walk there and back, more than once on _any_ day, and not have to stop and rest a few times to do it. Doesn't sound like much, and isn't, but compared to what it was like... it's a new life.

Mea culpa - it's all my own fault, I was born with fantastic genes, got lucky in that lottery. My grandparents all lived to the 100's with little fuss. I must admit, that my mantra was "fun" and I managed more so far than most people will ever have if they live for 200 years...I never hit that bottom of addiction to alky and other drugs, I was a chipper, just keeping it fun, but still - a lot. The one good thing about being really addicted to nicotine was that you recognize instantly when something else tries to get that hold on you and know - nope, that's just not going to happen, get away from me....one external owner is bad enough. No more monkeys! The same fiercely independent attitude that had me starting my own biz vs kissing *ass helped there; and of course you find out when you do that that you now do more kissing than ever, as now it's both customers and your people needing liplocks.

And now, back to more fun. A few more major infra issues...I need to get under a couple buildings and fix sinking foundations and things like that, as well as simply cleaning up a ton of messes from projects I left the mess from when I stopped doing them (And a huge packrat issue set) - and here we are. As I keep saying, back to fusor real soon now, clearing out a room for it and getting all the pieces togther is underway.

Now, if someone wants to help me design what amounts to a specialized VNA but with output power in the 10 or more watt range, and impedance's way higher than 50 ohms (meg or so)..I'm listening. I had a 50w broadband amp Bill found us, but it went up in smoke, not liking a no load test - and here, after whatever would step up impedance, there's going to be a pretty loopy smith chart to say the least - as well as who knows that effective impedance the charged particles will act like?

I don't need the super fast a/d - receiver part, a scope will do for what I need for the basic exploration. Just the source, big and robust and oh, it's got to be able to produce precise levels, not just some power - as the target is known to be nonlinear (those mathieu equations scale with sizes and whatnot...). Things hitting the tank walls really changes what can circulate...

Note, anyone who thinks insurance is the solution to medical care costs - I have a bridge to sell you - they're the REASON for the high costs, along with the curse of financialization that's blown up other parts of the economy.
See this guy, he's right, and I have some more if people want it from a guy who did the interface between insurance and hospitals and knows all the dirt - I'd have to find hedgeless_horseman's link again.
Edit - here it is. Goot stuff, pay attention, this is truth and it works: http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/0 ... tiate.html
The true skinny WILL raise your BP, though. It seems the people who want a lifetime entitlement have discovered the medical biz - "how to get paid 6 figures and more to be an incompetent receptionist for life because you were once a nurse"....
They really mess up the good people in the biz - like the 90% of gov workers who get in the way of the few who actually do good.
https://youtu.be/EeCk4MxUOIw

Still doing the fun thing. Didn't put this up on youtube for what should be obvious reasons. Dave Knight and I have been working on some extra sensitive reactive target compositions. Here's a test of 100 grams at the end of the day.
Sorry, I had to zip it, not to make it smaller, but because the board doesn't like mp4 files.

You got to take care of the body you have, as you can't have Mouser or DigiKey overnight you a new one!