u/ChintzyPC

About 13 years ago we got my grandmother a senior-friendly computer called the WOW! Computer. It's basically an MSI-branding-removed AIO running a custom Linux distro with a simplified UI. Pretty easy for her to use (but horribly overpriced for nothing but a custom distro and a fat-lettered keyboard, wasn't ultimately up to me though).

Shortly after her passing I took the computer and let it sit in a closet for years. Until I got the idea to play with Linux and make a cheap NAS out of it as well as giving it a platform for expandability.

Cracked it open to see what I could find. After taking off the heatsink to replace the thermal paste I found it had an AMD E-450, 4GB of DDR3 SODIMM RAM, and a 64GB HDD. Really underpowered but I could work with it.

I swapped out the HDD for a 120GB SSD I had laying around. Turns out the BIOS supports up to 16GB of 1333Mhz in dual channel so I bought an 8GB stick (still $25, wtf) giving it 12GB total.

The mobo has 2x USB 3.0 ports I could use for storage. Had four old drives in the same closet, an M.2 and 3 HDD's totaling 4TB. After getting the dock and enclosure for $58 I configured the drives in RAID with parity.

Then I loaded up Ubuntu and installed it with Xfce. Idle it's running at 9% CPU usage and 700Mb of RAM.

Got SSH working. It has a Gigabit network port, but it also has two Mini PCIe ports with one of them using a wifi card, so if it comes down to it I'll probably upgrade the wifi with a new card to make it decently wireless. I could also add a second network port for loads of fun.

I plan on setting it up to do smart home management and home security in addition to the NAS functions. It's got a touchscreen and webcam (hence no keyboard or mouse) so I will probably mount it to a stand and make a custom UI of my own for total control (think ADT/Google assistant control panel with extra functions). That will probably be ran as a backend API via browser so the CPU doesn't get overloaded.

So yeah, with the slim OS and 83$ later it runs as a nice remote NAS... for now.

My PC overclocking gang will get this one. Gotta snag those top scores on the leaderboards boys

To preface, looking back at 2018 I don't think this would have ever worked. But it was fun to explore the concept anyhow.

These were my idea of making Big Hero 6's Microbots a reality. I figured out a lot of how to make it but didn't get far enough since my k_ickstarter failed (I'd post the link but this sub has rules against it, even though it's over). But that was back in 2018.

It was basically a set of quarter-sized capsules that held and moved around each other with variable DC magnetic attraction and repulsion. Each capsule was charged via AC induction. They communicated with a series of LED's and photodiodes. Interconnecting platforms served as the base which would provide communication through the system from a computer.

Unfortunately, it was pretty bold do to so much work without figuring out the physics of the magnetism. Doing the math now I can see no real configuration would have been able to move these capsules with the needed efficiency much less being able to hold each other like I demonstrate in the CAD photos. Plus the field interference among each one would be a pain to figure out.

I don't even know that the SMD Circuity is capable even today. Swarm logistics would have been a nightmare. Just too ambitious for any one person, but it was certainly a learning experience. I'm kinda glad this didn't get funded lol.

Edit: Aight fuck it, I'm diving back in and gonna try my hand at it again. We'll see where this takes me. Maybe you'll see another post with this working ;)

Things that nobody mentions:

If you get the test voucher from the Student Edition it does (not) break it into three parts. That means if you fail you have to take (and purchase) all three parts again. This is a stark contrast to what is detailed on Dassault's website. Threw me off quite a bit when I launched. If you fail enough to not make the passing grade as a whole you cannot retake those sections again. When I took it the first time I basically passed two sections but bombed one of them, but because it was all one part it was a failing grade.

The good thing is you don't have to wait for another 2 weeks to take it as they are technically different tests (that give the same Cert).

Also, none of the Dassault practice material covers a few things that are in the test:
- Mechanical Mate: Gear Mate
- Advanced Mate: Path Mate
- How to manually change the Mass Properties to whatever you want. (Open Mass Properties, go to Override Mass Properties, and type in what's required)

If you do the practice problems on Dassaults website they will not be accurate
I did almost all of them and most were broken.
Some have missing specs for one or two of the features making it impossible to recreate it to get the right value or you just can't create it at all.
I also almost never got exactly the value on the key even though I quintuple checked everything. If you get it within .5% then you've probably got it right. I attribute this to either the former point or the hole wizard (which the CSWP never had holes that were screw-specific types anyhow) and I think there's some sub-values in there that could throw it off.

Good luck to all those about to take it!

I don't know why but I have a habit of looking up images of these really big or odd radio towers/dishes/antennas that give a eerie feeling. Bonus points if it's on top of a mountain or in a really flat plain where it stands out among the emptiness of the sky/ground. Especially if I couldn't ever handle standing next to it or seeing it on the horizon. These are some of my favorites.

1. Kalyazin RT-64 - Tver Oblast region of Russia
2. (my favorite) Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station, France
3. Duga Radar - Chernobyl, Ukraine
4. KVLY-TV mast (worlds tallest radio tower)- Blanchard, North Dakota

Here we go, the AI enshittification of Solidworks is upon us.

CAI and custom designed hood scoop combo needed a heat shield. So I sketched it up in Solidworks and got it laser cut by a local sheet metal shop.

2008 G6 GT 3.5L.

Not sure why but this says it can't work no matter how small it is. I need it offset for tolerance of the controller.

If it doesn't work this way, should I just scale the surface mesh of the controller up a bit and then cut instead? Or is there another method to this?

Edit: I just scaled the surface body up 101% and it worked flawlessly.

Yes, I could have manually remodeled it using the scan as a reference. But that kind of time is not worth it for a simple stand like this.

Prusa MK4

Creality HP-ASA

Fully dried spool

Fan completely off

Gyroid 15%

Nozzle Temp: 260C

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The surface around the star has bumps like it lifted up and cooled as it was laying down the surface lines. Did this exact thing for several of these scattered across the print bed, but all at different spots on the surface.

I know it's not the most aerodynamic or probably functional but it only took me like 10 minutes to design. Mostly for the fun of it.

Thinking about printing them off and putting them on my G6 GT.

I sent this to a local fabricator to quote me on some aluminum to be laser cut with screenshots and the DXW file so we'll see how much this is going to cost.

Edit: Just gonna put this here, aluminum is perfectly fine for a heat shield. Many manufacturers use it for theirs including K&N. There's a difference between radiant, convection, and conduction. Just because aluminum is a good conductor of heat does not mean it will radiate or convect the heat into the intake. In fact, reducing convection is a huge point in this shield. I'm currently leaning toward 5052-H32 aluminum because it's lightweight, corrosion resistant, relatively inexpensive, easy to laser cut, and bends well without cracking. The plan is also to add rubber edge trim and potentially reflective insulation on the engine-facing side if needed.

It's amazing he could visualize this stuff way back before modern methods were made.

After trying quite a bit is it true that the shape with the cube-octahedron hybrid is impossible in real space? You can see the inner cut of the octahedron doesn't intersect with the inner cut of the cube. I've tried playing with the geometry and I can't make it work. If so, lends well to the optical illusions he was so fond of playing with.

The last photo is of the tattoos I've gotten as a reminder to keep working on Solidworks and other CAD software, plus he's my favorite artist. (still needs touch-ups, and my skin warps them quite a bit so judgement aside please)

I’m working on designing a hood scoop for my car and I need to create a surface body I can reliably use to slice into the hood model and mount the scoop to. I’m totally new to this kind of workflow, so I wanted to check if I’m doing it correctly.

I found a guide that claimed this is similar to how the automotive and aerospace industries work from existing body geometry. From what I understand, the idea is to smooth out scan noise and create a clean boolean-friendly surface that SW can work with natively.

Here’s the process I followed:

• Scanned the hood using a Creality Otter
• Converted the scan into a mesh body
• Centered it around the origin
• Created a grid of planes spaced 20 mm apart
• Used Intersection Curve on each plane
• Opened each plane sketch and manually traced splines over the intersection curves, focusing on the important, tighter contours while ignoring obvious scan bumps
• Used those splines to create a Boundary Surface

So in theory, this should give me a clean surface I can reliably build from, right?

The reason I’m asking is because this process took forever. Pretty much all the intersection curves took over 5 minutes each to process, plus additional time just reorganizing sketches/features in the tree. I’m running a 5950X with 48 GB of RAM, so I wasn’t expecting it to take this long. I know a lot of that comes down to resolution of the scan though.

It almost feels like this should be something that could be automated with a plugin or macro which makes me wonder, is this actually the correct workflow? Is there a faster or better way to reverse-engineer a scanned surface like this in SW?