Comments for Jay's Technical Talk

Comment on Rostock-Mini: Fully Operational by Jay

Jay — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:58:52 +0000

I don’t know of anybody who sells full kits for the Rostock Mini, although I expect you can find a collection of the printed parts on ebay.
If you want a larger delta bot kit, you can get a Rostock Max from SeeMeCNC.com.

Comment on Rostock-Mini: Fully Operational by S. Machado

S. Machado — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:50:46 +0000

OK, so who or where can I find one as a kit?

Comment on Refilling laptop batteries! by Xavier

Xavier — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 22:13:32 +0000

I’m experiencing the same than #137 with my 3×2 CGR18650CG cells powering a HannsNote 10″, when the + current is not passing thorugh the PCB. I discharged the bateries by using a lamp and charged them later with the notebook, without problems (well it took something like 9hrs for a full charge). Anyway the full charged set was not feeding/recogniced by the notebook. Any improvements within this time?

Comment on Jameco potentiometer grab bag by Jay

Jay — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 01:06:26 +0000

Keep in mind that my sample was ordered a while ago, so I can’t predict what you’d receive if you ordered today. I was happy with the value received, and it had a good enough selection for me…but if you are looking for specific values you would be better off just ordering them directly. I was looking to have “in-stock” a good range, so that I could plug one of “about the right” value into a circuit (perhaps with an external resistor as well….) when needed.

Comment on Jameco potentiometer grab bag by Matthew Cook

Matthew Cook — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:46:34 +0000

This seems to be a broad range of values and for the uncertainty it does not seem to be worth the price. Would you suggest this grab bag to someone trying to compile a kit of potentiometers, and wants a good number of each range and not just a “metric boatload” of a certain range or would you suggest looking elsewhere?

Comment on Refilling laptop batteries! by Jay

Jay — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:48:56 +0000

I’m afraid I don’t have any specific solution to your problem. I recommend that you shut down your laptop completely, remove the battery, and re-insert it, and then leave it plugged in overnight. That may re-set the BMS chip. Alternatively, it may be that the BMS chip will never allow you to charge the battery as it detected that the cells “died” and doesn’t realize that they were replaced.

Comment on Refilling laptop batteries! by SUDDU

SUDDU — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:01:03 +0000

Hello Jay, am using Lenovo 3000 Y500 as my laptop battery dead in stage. It contained 10.8 volts, 4.8AH (6 cells, 3 sets of 2 parallel cells). As I saw the reviews on internet regarding refilling of Laptop battery, I had been working on it. I had opened the battery pack safely, and replac the old one with new one as they are before. After that I connected to my laptop. It is showing ” 0% available (plugged in,not charging)”.
Can you help me regarding this problem….
Thank you…

Comment on Rostock-Mini: Fully Operational by Jay

Jay — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 01:46:20 +0000

Your build looks nice, I especially like the smoked acrylic. I am mounting my extruder (and a spool roller, watch this blog for an update about that) on the top of the rostock-mini, so I didn’t do the cutout from the top of the frame. I figure by going vertical I can make it a true “desktop” printer fitting in a 1 sq.ft. footprint. I used a MakerGear hot end paired with the v3 Airtripper Bowden extruder and it’s working well so far with PLA (I haven’t printed in ABS yet with the rostock-mini…I am thinking of making it my dedicated PLA printer as the glass print bed works well with PLA).

Comment on Rostock-Mini: Fully Operational by Al

Al — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:00:07 +0000

I’m glad to see someone finally finished this (I saw one working on ebay too).

I’ve got mine half built but have been stymied by the lack of a finished extruder design. I printed out the parts for a v3 Airtripper Bowden, like yours, so it seems to be what the cool kids are doing.

http://makehacklearn.org/2012/12/31/building-a-rostock-mini/

Comment on Refilling laptop batteries! by Jay

Jay — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 11:46:51 +0000

HP Engineers would be able to tell you for sure, as I don’t know much/anything about the specific HP laptop you have. However, I doubt that your tech support contact knew what they were talking about. Unless the software/firmware on the laptop was badly miswritten, it will work with a higher capacity battery. It is possible that a particular BMS chip in a specific battery is programmed to expect cells of a certain AH capacity, but at least with the battery that I used (which was a generic battery, not an OEM battery) the BMS adjusted to the higher capacity cells.

Buying a replacement battery will always be easier and more cost effective (if you consider your time worth money) than replacing cells. Many replacement/generic batteries are as good as the OEM equiptment, but some brands are made with sub-standard cells and are not as good. Read reviews, try to avoid deals that look too good to be true, etc…

Perhaps you want to buy a generic laptop battery and use that for another year or two, and if you need another one, replace the cells in it with higher capacity cells. In my experiance, the OEM batteries have more restrictive programming on their BMS chips, which in some cases mean that if you remove the original cells the BMS refuses to charge new cells. (If it detects that a cell has “died” by going to zero voltage, it refuses to charge again.)