Fighting with computers

Some aluminium extrusions are quite convenient for building various types of structures. Manufacturers usually have a lot of choices when it comes to making unions. However, you not always have the time to wait for a part to be shipped to make a connection. Other times it can be done more cheaply and easily if you can use a drill. For certain 20x20 profiles, I have used an M6 screw to make right angle joints. The inside hole of the extrusion needs to be tapped and an additional hole will help for tightening the screw with an allen tool: Corner by misan on Sketchfab Other times the profile is so tight that no screw can fit in the inside channel, so then this other approach can be used: Corner2 by misan on Sketchfab My original CAD had the screws with a distinct color but that was lost in translation :-( If you clic on the images below you can have a look at the same model in Autodesk A360 Image viewer (unfortunately it only works for a month).

For my closed-loop control project I considered brushless motors to be a superior choice but the lack of affordable models in the marketplace let me down a bit. I was able to find some cheap models on eBay but those were lacking of built-in encoder and my attempt to add them one was a bit of a mess: the optical disk and sensor require better alignment that my poor skills could provide, so it ended up not being reliable. On the other hand, most DIY can get a small part 3D printed and my previous tests with magnetic encoders encourage me to use them more often. So I took some time to tinker with a motor from Nidec and how I could get an encoder attached in a simple way. The end result is what you can see in the picture below, that just consist of a 3D printed part with three fingers that attach to the back of the motor's plastic cover notches. You can see in the picture below the hole in the plastic box through which a small plastic part holds the magnet to the motor's sh

Since 2000 I am on a Windows-free diet. But that does not mean that I am totally ignoring Windows, after all, it is what most people use. So I have a few computers still running XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Last week a couple of my laptops offer me the chance to upgrade to Windows 10. A few weeks a friend bought himself a nice Bang & Olufsen laptop equipped with Windows 10. My friend is a long-time Windows sufferer and he seemed to be quite happy with the latest Windows version. So I decided to bite and try the upgrade by myself. My first system was two years old Toshiba laptop with an i5 and 8 GB of RAM. I started the upgrade and everything went smoothly though terribly slow, the whole process taking perhaps ten hours (not sure exactly how long as I went to bed, bored of waiting. And I do not think download speed is to blame here as I have fast Internet connection at home (apparently a bit more than 2 GBytes are downloaded). My second system was an older, low performanc