…….

I have all the raw materials in hand, as well as the motor and power supply. The 5 mm drive belt material is somewhere in the reloading supplies. It is the material I used to make a replacement belt for the wet tumbler when the original, 20-year-old belt broke.

Is this a commercial design? No. The front drive belt is there to provide a built-in safety. It will slip if there is too much drag on the system. In a finished product, I would be mounting the motor differently, behind the front plate.

In the same way, the idler shoulder bolt would be a blind hole instead of a through hole.

Finally, it is likely that a better design would use belts for driving everything instead of gears and belts.

Here’s a peek at the rear.

As soon as I get working drawings out of FreeCAD, I’ll go into the shop and make the faceplate and mount up the motor.

The next step will be to press the bearings into the faceplate. Then I’ll make the drive pulley, the cutter/driven pulley, and the three toolholders.

The last step is making the gears. I’ll be cutting a longish piece of Delrin with 22 tooth gears. That long gear will then be cut into 4 actual gears to use. The final task will be the 14 tooth idler gear and the shoulder bolt.

Exciting times.

The Seventh Circuit court ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen and decided that Illinois did nothing wrong when they held their Bruen tantrum to bass PICA.

The case got dumped back in Judge McGlynn’s lap. The plaintiffs filed motions for things to help The People.

Judge McGlynn denied them, but in writing that denial he took issue with the Seventh Circuit court. This is the same as publicly stating, “The boss told me to fill your home with concrete. I have to do it. They are wrong for all these reasons …”.

But in the meantime, the state has continued their quest to deny Second Amendment protected rights to The People of Illinois.

On December 22, 2023, the state told the court: Our attorney is super-duper busy. She’s scheduled herself out of the office from December 26 through January 9. And she’s so busy, she has other cases with deadlines, there are three holidays, she just can’t do it.

Yesterday, Judge McGlynn said, “NO. You WILL have the scheduled reply by the 19th of January.”

From following these cases, I believe that the normal scheduling is about a month, with replies due 3 weeks after and responses do a week after the reply. It feels like Judge McGlynn is going to keep the state on a short leash.

There was a time when I had the luxury of going shopping for movies and music every Friday. The family would get in the car, and we would drive over to Circuit City and look through the new movie releases.

As we were looking through the movies, I heard a nice five string quartet on the store speakers. I asked what the group was, found the disk and went to purchase it.

My eldest daughter, a freshman in high school, took one look at the cover and accused me of buying the album because the cover art showed some fine ladies.

If this is a repeat, sorry.

Welcome to the beginning of another year of crisis.

One and a half years after the Supreme Court issued their opinion in the Bruen case, not a single Second Amendment challenge has been resolved. Every state that had Draconian infringements now has worse infringements.

After Bruen I was hoping to get a permit to carry in MA. That is not happening anytime soon.

The economy is the worse I’ve ever seen it. For the first time in my life, I’m stressing about bringing in enough money for the family.

We are already into the campaign process. I’m watching Biden hide in the basement, not bothering to campaign at all. Meanwhile, the media is attacking each of the Republican candidates in turn. It will only get worse.

I’ve decided on my next project, I just do a reasonable job of it.

It turns out that there are multiple different companies that sell trimmers for cutting cases to length. The issue is setting the distance to trim. Both Lee and Lyman have a system where a probe goes through the flash hole to bottom out on the case holder.

Those probes fit all the standard cutters.

The cutters have standard threads.

My project is a geared motor driving the trimmer. The connection will be via rubber pulley. The shaft will feed through the face and where a gear will be mounted. That will drive a distribution gear to drive three other shafts. Feeding back to the front where they will be drilled and tapped to take the standard case prep tools.

So, when setup and running, you will be able to trim a case to length, chamfer the outside, chamfer the inside and then mount the next case for processing. When doing the pockets, you can have up to four tools spinning. I figure a reamer, a normalizer, and a pocket hole cleaner.

It is all fun, I’ve got some Delrin rods to make gears from, looking forward to making this monster.

Happy New Years to you all.

Stay ready, stay prepared, have fun.

My original router was Vyatta running on a virtual machine on at PC. 100baseT connections
I upgraded that to an EdgeRouter X by Ubiquiti. The base software was built on Vyatta.
The EdgeRouter X is dual core 800Mhz MIPS cpu with 4 (or 5?) Gig-E ports.
The EdgeRouter X was unable to keep up with 1GBit/s traffic between two ports with NAT running.
The EdgeRouter X was just replaced with an EdgeRouter 4.
The EdgeRouter 4 is a four core 1Gz MIPS cpu with 3 Gig-E ports and one 1Gbit SFP port.
The Edgerouter 4 is keeping up with the current traffic load.
Things will likely break when I upgrade to the Fidium 2Gbit/s services.
END-UPDATE
(950 words)
One of the things I enjoy doing is teaching English as a Second Language to some of my client’s employees. (You in the back, stop sniggering, yes, I can actually teach dis stuf.)

I have written a custom program that tracks the progress of each student in their book of choice. There is a screen for reading which displays a bit more than a paragraph. I have buttons to show definition or to play a pronunciation sound bite.

It tracks each session, recording which paragraphs are read, what words we look at. At the end of a session, I can click one button and email them the automatic notes along with any notes I might add.

To do the actual communication, we use Google Hangouts/Meetings. Unfortunately, switching between different displays is not easy.

Enter Open Broadcast Studio, or OBS for short. OBS allows me to set up scenes. Each scene has different sources. These are combined to create a single output.

The output is then streamed to a streaming service, or it is recorded. Or you can use the virtual camera to export the image.

This thing is so neat that I created a short animation of Sonic popping up over my shoulder as I sat at my desk. Then, in a video chat with my grandson, I clicked the button that made the animation run. My grandson was over the roof to see Sonic in the same room as me.

I set up OBS to follow the window that has focus, of an allowed subset, which makes it easy for me to run three windows and have my students see exactly what I want them to see.

The problem that started to crop up was the network was dropping out. Two or three times per session.

In addition to that, we’ve had significant issues with the upstairs getting good signal since the new roof went on the house.

When we upgraded from Comcast to Fidium, we got a 100x speed up in our uploads. This means that we can do regular backups of the machines at the house.

Except I can’t. I’m topping out at 20 Mbits/second on the backups. This is much too slow.

Tuesday, I had had enough. I had communicated with my cloud provider, verified bandwidth in and out of my instances. From there I followed up with Fidium. Fidium said, “that’s slow” and sent out a tech.

Wednesday the tech arrives. We do speed testing with all of my equipment out of the loop. 995Mbit/s. Close enough to 1Gbit/s to make no difference.

The problem is with my equipment.

My equipment is commercial grade stuff. It should not be failing. So I do testing. Sure enough, my router is the bottleneck.

My original router was a virtual machine running on a PC with Vyatta router software. It worked fine, but that PC needed to retire. It was replaced with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. That was a fanless box about 4x5x1 inches. 5 ports with PoE. Great little router. 800Mhz Dual core. It replaced my old PC box and just worked.

That is, until I tried to move 1Gb/s in and out of that poor little box.

It crapped its little pants. Up to and including locking up hard.

As I’m investigating, my wife screams from the kitchen. When I went to investigate, the door of the front-loading washing machine had broken off.

That’s ok, It is mostly plastic with some metal bushings for the hinge.

NOPE. It is mostly plastic. The outer frame runs $250, the inner door panel runs $250, the hinge is cheap at $55.

And I can’t get it apart because one of the screws has rusted and stripped while I was attempting to take it out.

Which leads to ordering new and better tools.

The next day we were in the garage, on a 20ft extension ladder leaning against the slope of the roof, drilling and cutting a hole in the roof.

When we had the roof replaced, I had the guys go into the garage and mark where it was safe to cut through into the space between the house and the garage. So I was able to drill it safely.

We then spent nearly 3 hours trying to pull cable from the house side to the hole we had cut. It didn’t help that my son got his left and right mixed up and was yelling at me to move my tape to the right when he really wanted it to go left.

In the end, we stuck a 6 ft length of aluminum rod through the hole at the house side. My son then fished a zip tie loop over that rod and then that was pushed back to the wall. Then we feed the other fishing tape out from the house and through the loop. Then my son pulled his tape back to the hole we had cut, finally pulling it back into the garage.

10 minutes later, I had cable upstairs and the PoE access point powered up. It all just worked.

Network win! We finally have good connectivity in the upstairs again.

This left the washing machine and router to deal with. After discussions with the family, I ordered a new router.

It arrived Saturday. I was able to transfer the configuration from the old router. Did some other magic configuration. Then simply unplugged the old router, plugged the cables into the new router.

The upgrade was so seamless that connections to my remote instances stayed up while I did the switch over.

So I now have 950Mbit/second in and out of the router. My backups might run faster. The world is getting network better.

Oh, no glitches in network traffic since I replaced the router.