Recently I was playing with a fully Dockerized setup of Jenkins at work and found a curious issue there. Whenever Jenkins was polling the git server the side effect was that it created a zombie ssh process. The issue is actually remediated by the Jenkins team now by explicitly using a tiny init system called … tini started as the main container’s process instead of just starting Jenkins there. This tiny tini thing can properly adopt and reap the children. [Read More]

Hello ! Today we’ll talk about driving CNC machines, toolpaths and Debian, so stay tuned ! I have a separate old PC for driving the CNC machine via parallel port. This is, as they say, the Only Proper Way and It Was Always Like That. I’m thinking about changing this to USB+grbl in the future then ;) Up till now, my workflow went as follows; Do the research and drawing/parts modeling in FreeCad, on my main workstation Export to e. [Read More]

Update 2023: I no longer hosts those dashboards anymore and the server no longer runs in the form described. You could argue I still run sunpowered servers, as my new house has solar PV ;) Some, rather long, time ago I’ve added a custom python data acquisition and graphing to my sunpowered RaspberryPi installation on the balcony. Since then I’ve upgraded it to Raspi2 and ported the data thingy to influxdb + grafana. [Read More]

After 2 months of waiting - my CNC router arrives. 8 weeks lead time they said - 7 weeks and 4 days it was ! Who are they ? TanieCNC people [CheapCNC in Polish :]. Although it may look like they don’t know how to make websites AND their name does not instill a lot of confidence - but hey, they certainly know how to weld and make precise machinery ! [Read More]

I thought it would be cool to share with you the tools I find surprisingly useful. Behold the first in the series: the PCB holder ! I cannot overstate how much is that of a difference from the ’third hand’-type of holders. The grip is very firm but won’t scratch the surface nor short anything because the jaws are made from a soft plastic. And the whole thing ROTATES ! [Read More]

SD cards are not really a reliable storage, especially when used constantly e.g. while sitting in always powered-on Raspberry Pi. Because of that I’ve recently needed to perform lots of backup/restore operations ;) I wrote this script for backing up: #!/bin/bash if [[ -z $1 ]]; then echo "usage: $0 device_to_clone" exit fi device=$1 timestamp=`date +%Y%m%d` dest_file="/tmp/$timestamp.dd.xz" echo "about to clone $device to $dest_file" echo "ctrl-c or [enter]" read sudo umount $device? [Read More]

It was some time since the last photo-story so, please accept these pictures of my standing desk. On the actual desk, there is a laptop stand serving a role of a keyboard and mouse rest. Laptop itself is flipped on its back, motherboard attached to the back of what once was a lid. The whole thing is flying on standard monitor desk mount, using custom vesa-to-acrylic mounting system ;) Img 1238 [Read More]