ISS SSTV Awards

The awards for the ISS SSTV event have started coming in. 

I think that's all I've applied for:

 

There appear to have been a few awards I missed for this event which is a bit annoying but such is life. I also notice that there were a couple of short events earlier in the year that I missed. 

I really haven't done all that much since this event. I rearranged my HF antennas so that the Xiegu G90 is on the dipole rather than the vertical - something that was intended as a temporary change given that the vertical being on the IC706 makes it fairly useless for SSTV - there's just too much noise compared to the dipole. I've thrown out the odd FT8 CQ but responses haven't been particularly good of late.

In other news: 

The 3D printer has finally stopped. Mostly due to a problem. 

I put a levelling kit on the unit - basically a probe that probes the bed in various points to determine the level of the bed. It can be temperamental and is prone to landing in a failed state. A few people have had issues with the rather fine wiring harness causing obscure problems. I wound up in a state yesterday where it was trying to go below the Z axis limit and just continuing to push the stepper. A few suggestions were that people have had similar issues with high resistance on one of the cores in the harness. It's too fine and fiddly for me to be bothered testing it. I'm fairly sure one of the points on this cable was too tight when I secured it, and may have damaged it.  The safe option is to just replace the whole kit. They're cheap enough and I can salvage the probe pins as spares.

I was also having issues with the printer misbehaving and constantly needing to be recalibrated. It dawned on me why when I was dealing with the above - some loser (i.e. me) left the firmware on the SD card. It was reloading the firmware each time I restarted it. ID-10-T error that one. 

Hopefully a fresh wiring harness and not having the firmware reloading might result in a reliable system.

I did also put a Raspberry Pi on the printer, running Octoprint. I borrowed the Pi used on my Reef tank's Seneye device, put in a new SD card and put this image on it. Seems to be pretty reasonable. Tied into an app for my phone, and it allows Cloud based monitoring. I've ordered a Raspberry Pi camera - costing only a couple of dollars, to connect to the Pi to provide video monitoring. I've tested it initially with a web cam and that seems to work. The web cam though is fairly bulky compared to the small size of the R Pi cameras. 

This allows me is direct printing from my computer via Octoprint with integrated monitoring back through my cutting software. Much easier than dealing with the micro SD card all the time. It also allows me to pause the jobs and make fine adjustments from my desk, rather than having to open up enclosure and letting in cool air. 

Off to tinker.

73s