Friday again folks, hope everyone is staying warm.

Today here "Two Weeks From Anywhere" we're warming up (If you can call 17° outside warming up) after being without power from 10:10 AM yesterday until 1:15 AM this morning. Got pretty cool in parts of the house even with using the wood burner due to the 40+ MPH winds that came up before the ice covering everything could melt.

Not sure what I'm going to do over the weekend other than thawing out.

 

So, What's on Your Weekend Agenda? 

 

 

Been on the road quite a bit lately.  Just got back home last night.  Time to decompress and kick back for a bit.  Have a lot of yard work to do and get caught up with.  Have some cabinets to get started on.  Have some vinyl & glass work to get on.  Have a garage that needs cleaning out so that I can continue that project.  Have taxes to get back to... I won't be sitting around much...

Guests will be here for another week or so. We'll be doing more snow bird activities this weekend. Not a lot of shop time. This is the Tucson Rodeo week end. It'll be a traffic mess in that area. Streets closed for the parades. And everyone wants to go to a swap meet close to the rodeo grounds.  

My CNC milling machine should show up today along with collets and bits to use with it.  Arriving in three separate boxes I'm guessing the milling machine will need some assembly.  It comes with Mach3 which I'm not familiar with so it'll take some playing around with to figure out. 

4D 

Project MIGHT be ready for a finish, this weekend..we'll see...

32 clear and sunny degrees outside..Winter has returned for one day..

Domestic duties today. A few errands tomorrow. Grandson's spending the night tomorrow. I expect we'll be watching the IU vs PU basketball game. Sunday school and church responsibilities Sunday AM then on the road for youngest grandsons basketball league games. Birthday celebration for our daughter after games. 44 years rolls by fast.

Teaser PIP..

This is a view of the back of this Stand...

Did a little searching for electric fence supplies (to build one ) and meter pole for my son's place after lunch had to sit and relax for a hour or two. Oh doing home PT every day which takes a plug out of everything. Now going to shop in a few as finally making progress getting ready for event at the AG next week. Boy didn't know a month sitting and struggling to walk would take so much out of legs and me, but it is getting better.

1 hour ago, Gerald said:

Did a little searching for electric fence supplies (to build one ) and meter pole for my son's place

If you have farm supply stores like Tractor Supply, Rural King, Farm & Fleet is the place for electric fence supplies. Occasionally see some on CL under Farm & Garden.

Same with power poles, Check CL, Materials; sometimes Farm & Garden.

 

Happy to hear progress continues for knee rehab.

CNC mill arrived. Took my time putting it together.  Had to mount the vertical Z axis post to the base and make sure it was square to it.  Had to mount a stepper motor to each of 3 axes.  Had to mount the motor and spindle to the Z axis post.  Had to plug steppers into the control box and plug the control box into the PC via a parallel cable. Had to install Mach3 and add the license data and machine configuration files to it.

Ran Mach3.  Turned on the controller.  Steppers engaged as if they were being controlled by the controller. 

I don't know enough about Mach3 to know if I missed a step or not, but no matter what I tried I couldn't get Mach3 to speak to the stepper motors. No jogging.  No MDI moves.  No apparent communication over the parallel port.  Read the included info front to back a couple times.  No help. 

 

Good looking machine though.  Came with different sized collets and a small vise. Steppers all have a nice handle on them to manually turn them when the power is off.  I suspect I'll have to figure out how  to set Mach3 to see the parallel port and send data through it.   Give it is after 5:00 Friday I doubt I can get any help from Taigtool until Monday, so this weekend I may have to do lawn cleanup instead of metal machining. Lawn needs it though, so not a bad option. 

4D

Got a clue.  Apparently Windows 10 64bit doesn't support LPT1 ports.  No 64 bit drivers for printer ports available it appears.  My system configuration doesn't even see the printer port I installed.  Solution is to install windows 10 32bit version apparently. 

Oh me oh my. 

4D 

Going to finish this kitchen cabinet by installing a shelf and two door knobs.  Got to clean a messy shop sometime before the next project of two bookcases.

Cold rainy snowy weekend for us So. Californians, amazing!

Fireplace is roaring, watching a wonderful series on Netflix "The Chosen" and planing a way to do some small crafts and spoon carvings inside the house, long story why but it'll be fun! Tomorrow will be a wind down day for mama and me, things been a tad crazy around the ol Morris home and we just need a day of rest, and lazy. Sunday gotta make a food run up to my dad's place in the mountains, he's running out.

Hope ya'll have a wonderful weekend ahead, stay warm, stay safe, and stay sane!

8 hours ago, John Morris said:

and stay sane!

 

 Now why would I want to do that?  

Mine is simple…Daughter is playing at UGA so I’m in Athens Ga. When in hotel spending time with wife and her. Doing some paper work. AND reading/ watching YouTube videos for when I order my cnc and software….

10 hours ago, 4DThinker said:

Got a clue.  Apparently Windows 10 64bit doesn't support LPT1 ports.  No 64 bit drivers for printer ports available it appears.  My system configuration doesn't even see the printer port I installed.  Solution is to install windows 10 32bit version apparently. 

Oh me oh my. 

4D 

Serial, & parallel ports are a thing of the past, newer computers haven't had them for quite some time now.

IIRC W7 32 bit was the last MS OS that natively supported LPT1 parallel ports, almost all printers had already gone to USB & WiFi before then.

If you're using a motherboard with a built on LPT1 port you'll have to check their website for updated drivers.

Another possible solution would be to set up your computer in a dual-boot mode, or loading another drive with an OS version that will work with it then swap between drives.

 

Apparently the Mach3 software hasn't been updated for some time.

 

I ran into a similar problem when I was setting up my laptop to work with the neighbors GM Tech2 Diagnostic System software. It uses the Serial Port.

As an added bonus with that software it uses a 16 bit installer. None of the MS 64 bit systems will load it.

Of course I had the laptop loaded with W7 Pro 64 bit.

(Which my Honda Diagnostic software works fine with and also uses the Serial Port with a propriatary driver included in the software.)

I tried the XP SP3 Mode software running W7 in Virtual Machine Mode with limited success with the Tech2 software.

Since I didn't want to mess with chancing screwing up my W7, & Honda software, I just swapped in my spare SSD and loaded it with WXP Pro 32 bit.

 

Oh, the fun of trying to get older programs to run on newer OS's and hardware they were designed for. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spent today taking inventory of the PCs I have to see if I could hack together a Frankenstein PC made from working parts of dead computers.  First PC I plugged in turned on and seemed to be booting up.  Attached a monitor to discover it was waiting for me to choose between DOS and Win3.1.   That PC I had given to my Dad many years ago when he retired so he would have a distraction to play with.  When he eventually downsized to a smaller apartment he gave me the PC and desk I made for it back.  The power supply at least worked, and might be useful to power a more  modern PC with a dead power supply.  Turns out while the physical size and screw holes would match, the cable outputs didn't.  The newer one with the dead power supply on it should have win7 on it.  It has a parallel port on the back.  I've ordered a replacement power supply from Amazon.  This was a cheap PC I bought at my local Aldi's grocery store. So shocked to see a stack of PCs in that store that I bought it on impulse.  Used it as my CNC room reference PC with Aspire loaded on it so I could update CNC files on it that needed a tweak before they could be cut on the CNC.   It just wouldn't power up one day, and has sat quietly in the shop room closet waiting for rescue. 

There is still one mystery PC sitting in my basement bedroom.   I suspect it also has a dead power supply.  With old bones and limited desire I'll save checking it out until tomorrow. 

 

Been looking into dual booting the new (refurbished) win10 PC with LinuxCNC.   I use it to run my Probotix CNC.  So far all efforts to get that PC to boot off a USB thumb drive or DVD have failed.  Tried every option of the bootup settings.  Spent all night downloading and creating a win10 32 bit install thumb drive.  Looked like it should work to reformat and reinstall windows 10 with a 32 bit version.   Never succeeded to get the PC to boot from that thumb drive though.   I've got another PC out in the garage that runs my CNC Shark.  I rarely use that CNC, so its PC might be an option to get the Taigtool CNC mill running.  

 

The good end to this adventure is that I'm sorting through old technology to see what is worth saving and what I can take to the recycler. I'll have to get my van running to hold all this old crap. 

 

2 hours ago, 4DThinker said:

Spent today taking inventory of the PCs I have to see if I could hack together a Frankenstein PC made from working parts of dead computers. 

 What do you mean it's now safe to turn off my computer? 

And where the heck is that  any key?

2 hours ago, 4DThinker said:

Attached a monitor to discover it was waiting for me to choose between DOS and Win3.1.

In a whole 16 colors at that. 

I remember upgrading to W95 with that stack of 3 1/4" floppies. Still have those and the 33 floppies it took to load MS Office. 

Oooo Do you feel the VooDoo? 

Decided after dinner I had a little boredom energy to use.  Picked up that last mystery CNC from the basement bedroom floor to see what condition it was in. Plugged it in.  The power supply started to come to life. then threw a visible spark out the back.  Might have been a bug that crawled in there getting fried.  While that didn't stop the fan from spinning I pulled the power plug and marked this PC for recycling too.  There wasn't much hope give the floppy disk drive and no USB ports to be seen. 

 

DOS days were the most fun.  I had BASIC to program with, and knew a few assembly language calls.  Wrote a 3D wireframe CAD program that became a hit application for the college students using the first PC lab we had in our college. Kept the colors used to 4, as the pen plotters we had only had 4 pen positions. 640 x 480 pixels was a luxury to CAD in.  Demand for access to the lab became so high that I recommended to my department head that every student should bring in their own PC to keep with them in studio.   We were the first department on the university, and as far as I know one of the earliest in the country to have students bring a PC with them to use in Studio.  The move to Windows killed my wireframe DOS 3D CAD program, but by them commercial CAD programs were showing up.  Those were some good old days. 

4D

Edited February 26, 20233 yr by 4DThinker

11 hours ago, 4DThinker said:

Those were some good old days.

 

Oh yes, driver conflicts, memory overruns, BSOD's. 

Was even more fun when running DOS, W3.1/3.11, NT3.51, W95 first edition, & NT4.0 using a boot manager on that old 486 slower than a brick going uphill PC.

I can still hear that phone line modem's Bweep, Brap, Browp.