Short update

There wasn’t any update from my side for a while, I’ve been busy with family and work duties. But since there is the risk that the project will significantly slow down once you stop doing regular updates I decided that it’s time to write a few words. So let’s keep the ball rolling and quickly post an update about some improvements that I managed to do recently. Not much of the new code that I added to Cinode but there are some improvements on the hardware side.

The theater is getting bigger

Remember the stage that I wrote about in the previous blog post? Well, I was able to fill in some gaps and now it looks like a proper server rack segment. Just take a look:

Now with two rows, 3 seats each, we can have quite an awesome orchestra. The first artist is already there, our beloved CinoDave ❤️ :

What you’re looking at here is Dave himself testing different seats. That’s a useful validation step before putting the stage back to the rack. The power is routed through plates in serial - each plate connects to the one on the right. Any issue on a single plate would mean that we lose the power all the way to the right:

Brave Dave was able to check all of the plates, and unfortunately one of them turned out to be broken. I’m not yet sure what caused it because I tested each one of them before putting them all together. But looks like the quality of my soldering is still below some sane level and I had messed up something here 😆. The preparation of a single plate requires me to use some glue to keep plate parts in place which means that now I have to prepare a full replacement 😠, repairing the old one would be just too troublesome.

The plate factory

Now you may wonder how do I prepare those plates? The main body is of course 3D-printed. Once ready I have to remove all unnecessary support structures. Those structures are used during printing to put hovering shapes on top:

Once everything is nice and clean we can proceed to the next step: soldering of connectors and placement of internal plate wires:

That process is a bit tedious due to the size constraints - to fit everything nicely inside a 3D-printed model I had to come up with some interesting techniques. Let’s take wire tunnels as an example. Those go throughout the main structure. Software that prepares the 3D print instructions tends to put support structures inside those tunnels to keep the ceiling in place while printing. But such a tunnel is then really hard to clean up from that extra material. I decided to put the roof at a steep angle and shape the ceiling in an inverse-V form. That angle being a crucial parameter here, was the key to have nice and clean wire tunnels.

I also had some crazy ideas here. Initially I wanted to pause the 3D printing for a minute or two, right after wire tunnels were ready but just before closing them with the ceiling layer, put wires inside the model and then resume printing. That didn’t work though because the layers before and after the pause did not want to stick to each other. I’m not a 3D printing expert here but I guess this must have been caused by the already printed section shrinking while cooling down. Or maybe I made some silly mistake 😉, e.g. putting wires into the printed part might have moved things a bit. In the end I stayed with a continuous, uninterrupted print with a few more holes and separate covers. The final result is really nice.

I also had to experiment a bit with figuring out how to align different plates correctly - the second row is attached to the first one with a dedicated runner making the whole structure very stiff. That required a lot of testing prints to find the correct spacing. It was not that easy to avoid jamming between the first and the second row plates.

Orchestra on the stage

There’s more to come regarding my recent hardware improvements. I managed to realize some other pretty fun mini-projects. Won’t be sharing much details today - some interesting stories are still yet to be revealed when the time comes 😉. But for now let me assure you that CinoDave is not alone doing his show on the stage:

That would be it for today, next time I’d like to finally start working on the code again. There’s just too much about hardware recently so my code thirst starts showing its first symptoms 😉.