Cooker hood and clock face

More domestic chores, Fatty?

Yes, The Stupid Fat Bloke has been busy again. The extractor hood above the cooker hob has been dodgy ever since we moved in and if anything has been getting worse. Partly the switches getting gooed up with condensed cooking vapours - with a failed light driver module preventing the lights working.

Quickly and without any obvious forethought the whole thing came off the wall and got dismantled without consideration of the effort required to complete the job.

This seems to be an AEG HD6470M, probably about a decade old. Found the user / installation manual which gives some idea how to dismantle it:

Here's the dodgy switch assembly:

Not shown here, is the dismantling, cleaning and repair of the switch PCBA shown above. All 4 switches were clagged up with congealed, condensed fat. I managed to clean most of them with IPA and switch cleaner but the light switch refused to latch. I swapped it out for the "2" position fan switch. This means I have only fan speeds 1 and 3 but as I was unable to find a direct replacement for the original switches, this seemed a reasonable compromise. At least I now have functioning lights and a 2 speed fan, rather than no lights and 3 (at best) intermittent fans.

The lamp driver module seems to have popped. Either that or it is only happy driving a high load such as the original halogen bulbs. Whatever. I'll replace it with a modern LED-rated driver. It simply converts mains voltage to a regulated 12Vdc.

Here's the replacement alongside the original (£5 from Amazon next day). It's a bit wider but it should fit.

And indeed it does. Held in with some double sided foam strip, once a couple of superfluous moulded features had been snipped off the housing:

Lid back on and module replaced in the hood assembly:

The switch / lamp assembly slides in from the front. It was a bit of a fiddle to get back in - but not half as much as it was to remove in the first place.

The cowing thing "just" drops back down and the job is done. Yes, I tried it out on the bench before refitting it.

What's this clock business about?

The clock face has been looking a bit sad recently. It seems the facia(?) has come loose and is distorted.

It seems to be rather brittle, so fixing this thing will involve more than just a touch of glue.

All is not yet lost. I have some high pressure laminate ("Print HPL") from a previous project. This is black substrate with a white coating. When you machine into the surface, you get a nice black pocket against a white background. 

This is ideal for recreating a clock face, so let's craft up a design in Fusion, based off the dimensions of the original.

It's a "radio controlled" clock ie receives synch signals (from Rugby in the UK?), hence the funny symbol. It would also be rude not to personalise it. "13BR" is the shortened address of our house:

Created some toolpaths, using a 2.4mm PCB router bit:

Shouldn't take long to machine - about 10 mins:

Off we go. I couldn't be arsed to remove the machine vise and have to refit / retram it again afterwards, as it's much simpler to mount a piece of good quality (= flat) plywood in it and fasten the stock down to it. The machining forces will be minimal, so deflection isn't going to be an issue.

The engraved features have a depth of 1mm and the white outer coat is a fraction of that, so I only need a flatness of better than half a mm or so to be sure of a decent appearance. In practice I'd guess it's 0.1mm or better, without having actually measured it.

And off we go:

That went well.

And soon enough it's back in its place above the (repaired) cooker hood. Yes, it's managed to synchronise itself and I also replaced the hands correctly. If you park the hands at 12:00:00 by removing and replacing the battery, you know the correct position to replace them at.

So that's that sorted out finally.

Well - what happened with the Bantam's LinuxCNC update?

Did you get it running finally?

Last time round, I'd installed the new version of Linux and LinuxCNC but it wasn't working.

The error messages gave a bit of a hint. Each one lists the lines in the HAL files that are causing the app to crash. Commenting out the problematic lines one by one finally got me a working system, with all the axis scaling, homing, closed loop operation etc. 

Still some issues to be sorted out, when the ongoing domestic tasks allow:

• The wireless MPG sort of works. It allows jogging but many of the keys don't work.
• Andy Pugh's macros don't show up. A tab appears in the GUI but clicking on it does nothing. This was actually one of the main features I was hoping to gain by upgrading, so there is work still to do.

Hopefully I will get some inputs from the LinuxCNC forum to help resolve these issues. But for now, it's over the main hump in the road.....