Wire it up!

Massive waste of time today, buggering about with my laptop. Due to my Office 365 Pro subscription, I suffered an auto "update" that rendered the Outlook search facility useless. When you rely on being able to retrieve emails and attachments on a daily basis in your job, that is a major issue. Seems that Microsoft are aware of the problem (didn't they bother testing it???) but don't have a fix yet. The only solution seems to be to uninstall the latest update and go back to version 1611, despite the various "fixes" on the internet ("just rebuild the search database", "disable search in indexing options", blah blah). Naturally that wasn't as simple as proclaimed but finally it stuck after running CMD as admin, manually changing directories,  etc. God.

Then the graphics on my laptop went completely gaga so I couldn't even view emails or Word or Excel files. This day wasn't going well. Turns out that even though I'd "rolled back"(yuk) the Office update, it had left some settings in a bad state. You can turn off graphics "hardware acceleration" in any office application and this fixes the mess.

Meanwhile, my iPhone keeps running out of storage. But as quickly as I delete photos and unwanted apps to free up space, my Outlook downloads more emails and gobbles it up. There is no way to stop it. Between Apple's thoughtlessness and arrogance, I'm almost buggered. I am falling out of love with my iPhone and feel a Samsung coming on.

I dug out my Sony compact camera last night with a view to using it instead. Bad move. Turns out that my wifi-enabled Eye-Fi SD card was unilaterally disabled by the manufacturer following its recent acquisition by Ricoh. Free lifetime support becomes zero support. Nice.

I've finally uploaded the photos from my iPhone. Although it had a wifi connection, it claimed it didn't. But when I turned mobile data off, suddenly it managed to transfer my pics. WTF???

So that was most of the day wasted then. At least the workshop did what was expected of it.

As ranted above, my iPhone was constipated, so I was unable to take pics for much of the time, although there wasn't much of that to begin with. However, here is what we have at the end of play today. The servo drives, servo PSU, soft start circuit, 24V PSU and circuit breakers have been wired in. That's most of the "power" circuits. I reused a lot of the black wiring - looks like 14g wire, so nice and heavy.

Also (not shown) is the front panel which I cut down on the bandsaw to the correct overall width and height. Started out as a 12U panel and is now closer to 10U and has rotated 90 degrees in the process. Once I've convinced myself the holes and lines are marked out correctly, I will cut out the aperture for the controller on the Bridgeport. 

Now that the heavy wiring is done, I have a fair bit of fiddley stuff to connect up. Firstly I will tackle the encoder and control interfaces for the servo drives. These use Ethernet (RJ45) connectors, so I will butcher some network cables and splice them onto the ends of the screened multicore cables from the motor encoders. Would be nice to be able to fit RJ45 plugs directly to the screeened cables but the diameter of the wires is too large. And I can't be bothered to put yet another pair of connectors in the way.

The top photo shows a test lead I made a few weeks ago to check the encoder interface and spin the motors with my first CNCdrives servo drive. So I know the connections were (almost) OK. I fact I had my 2 green wires crossed over but it didn't seem to matter.

The last 2 show what the screened cable and RJ45 tail look like. I'll splice these on with staggered joints and (after testing) protect them with adhesive-lined heatshrink. There are 3 of these - and of course there are the 3 control inputs to follow, also RJ45s. I should then be getting close to connecting up the myriad IO lines from the controller.