Long ago and far away (at least 2m) I designed and built a small temperature humidity display for my plastic bin filament dryer setup, as shown in the following photo:
Arduino UNO-based Temp/Humidity Display
This worked well, but the display wasn’t very readable, especially through the side of the plastic bin. In the years since then I also did a digital real-time clock display project using the much nicer ILI9341 TFT display. I have a couple of spare displays and a couple of Teensy 3.2 units lying around, so, I decided to upgrade the temp/humidity sensor.
The schematic for the Digital Clock is pretty simple:
Teensy 3.2 ILI9341 clock schematic
As was the breadboard:
Digital clock breadboard
So, how hard could it be to use the same setup with the RTC replaced by the original Adafruit-DHT22 sensor
Probably have it done by tomorrow – yeah, right!
18 August 2024 Update:
Well, I don’t have it done yet, but I Have made some progress. I dug out one of my spare displays, a Teensy 3.2 and may small plugboard and wired them together using the schematic from my digital clock project. And, amazingly, it all went together quite nicely. I loaded up the ‘graphicstest’ example from Paul Stoffregen’s ILI9341_t3 library, and damned if it didn’t work right off the bat! Here’s a short video showing the action:
That is a huge step in the right direction for this project. Now all I have to do is add the Temp/Humidity sensor and code, and convert the sensor values to pixels on the screen – yehaw!
19 August 2024 Update:
I now have the DHT22 sensor integrated into the system, and have adjusted the display parameters for a nice ‘across the room visible’ format, as shown below:
Then I moved everything over to a more permanent prototype board, as shown below:
21 August 2024 Update
After a lot of quality time with OnShape, I created a nice bezel to go around the display, and a nice box to go around the whole thing
And here is a photo of the completed project. The temperature and humidity seem to have stabilized at about 87ºF and 33% RH.
I recently purchased a new Dell XPS15-9530 with Windows 11 installed, and I have spent the time since that purchase trying to get Windows 11 to work like I want it to, and Windows 11 has spent that same amount of time trying to get me to work like it wants me to – GRRR!
Here are some of the things I want to change from the basic Win 11 Home package I received.
Win 11 photo viewer sucks, and the photo viewer from Office 2010 rocks. In the old viewer, I can move from photo to photo with left and right arrows, and I can manipulate the photo multiple photos at the same time.
The right-click context menu in the file explorer view now has multiple pages of context menu items, most of which aren’t useful. The ‘preview’ option, which I use a lot, is buried at the bottom of the second page
Win 11 insists on storing my files in the ‘OneDrive’ (cloud) folder, and I hate that. Even if I ‘unlink’ my PC from ‘OneDrive’, it still tries to put stuff on the cloud – grr. See this link for information on how to adjust this
I now have multiple ‘Documents’ folders with multiple icons, and none of them point to my Documents folder.
Win 11 insists on using the first 5 characters of my email address as the name of the primary user folder (‘C:\users\[primary user name]’) and I want it use my first name for this. See this link for some information on this. Also, this link seems to imply that I might be able to ‘change my primary alias’ in my Microsoft account, (which might then change the default user account?). I was able to create a fake Outlook account (Frankabcede@outlook.com) and (although I didn’t do it this time) make it the primary alias. In theory, if I do this and then start over with Windows 11, I should wind up with ‘Frank’ as my default user account, and C:\users\Frank as my default user folder.
Win 11 insists on saving screenshots taken with Shift-Windows-S key combination to a screenshots folder in C:\Users\paynt\OneDrive\Pictures\Screenshots, even though I have unlinked my PC from OneDrive.
The private LAN connection between my old and new PC’s seems to come and go with the wind. At one point I got it working by setting it to ‘not use passwords’ or something like that.
So, for the nth time, I’m starting over, and this time I plan to document all the steps, so when I have to do this again (on the Nth+1 redo), I’ll have a little bit better roadmap. To prepare for the ‘redo’, I printed out the list of apps currently installed on the new PC, as shown in the screenshot below:
4 August 2024 list of apps on new Win 11 PC
When I look at the ‘Home’ file explorer display on my old PC, I see the following:
‘Home’ display on my old PC
Which shows that Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, Music and ‘Documents’ have ‘Stored Locally’ shown – so apparently, I got that done correctly on my old PC. When I do the same thing on my new PC, I get the following:
‘Home’ display on new PC
Resetting to factory defaults while keeping personal files:
I followed the steps shown in this link to restore to factory defaults while keeping personal files intact. Unfortunately when it came back up again, it still had ‘C:\users\paynt’ as the default folder, along with another one labelled Frank.Frank_9350, wherever the heck that came from.
Trying again, but this time I chose the option to download the OS from the web rather than restoring from a local copy.
This didn’t work either, so I elected to reset from web download, including ditching all my files and accounts (everything is backed up on my NAS, so shouldn’t be an issue).
On this run-through, I opted to not restore from my previous PC, instead opting to ‘set up as a new PC’. We’ll see how this goes. Also, I used my new ‘Frank_Paynter@outlook.com’ as my email address for my Microsoft account. Hopefully that will result in ‘C:\users\Frank’ (first 5 characters of email address) as my default user folder
Decided to skip ‘Let’s customize your experience’ and ‘Use your phone from your PC’. Accepted ‘Always have access to your recent browsing data’, skipped PC Game Pass, and then it went into updates.
Success! (with a small ‘S’). The default user folder is named ‘Frank’ instead of ‘paynt’, and there is only one of them. Also, Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Music, and Videos are ‘Stored Locally’. Unfortunately, ‘Pictures’ are still stored on OneDrive.
So, I found this:
How do I Unsync a picture folder from OneDrive?
Open OneDrive settings (select the OneDrive cloud icon in your notification area, and then select the OneDrive Help and Settings icon then Settings.) Go to the Account tab. Select Choose folders. In the Choose Folders dialog box, uncheck any folders you don’t want to sync to your computer and select OK.
And UNchecked all the folders. The first time I tried this, I couldn’t UNcheck the pictures folder, and there was a message “we are unable to stop synching some folders” After I searched on this, I found another page that said:
May 11, 2021 — Can’t stop syncing folder · Right-click OneDrive blue cloud icon in the system try, click Settings. · Go to Backup tab and click Manage Backup.
So, I did that and told Windows to stop backing up any folders to OneDrive. Then I was able to UNcheck the pictures folder (and all the other ones too), so hopefully I am almost fully weaned from OneDrive at this point. Curiously, when I went back to the ‘Choose Folders’ page to verify that everything was still UNchecked, it took a while (a minute or two) for the page to come up. When it did, however, everything was still UNchecked – Yay!
And, another success! When I took a screengrab of the ‘Choose Folders’ page, the storage location turned out to be “C:\Users\Frank\Pictures\Screenshots” – Yay Yay! I also confirmed it’s not actually necessary to bring the screengrab up to center screen and select ‘Save’, as screengrabs are automatically saved to the above folder – Yay Yay Yay!
Next, I unlinked this PC from OneDrive, using the procedure below:
To unlink your OneDrive account from a PC, you can do the following:
Select the OneDrive cloud in your notification area to open the OneDrive pop-up
Select the OneDrive Help and Settings icon
Select Settings
Go to the Account tab
Select Unlink this PC
This actually worked, and now the OneDrive (cloud) icon has disappeared from the left side of File Explorer entirely – Yay Yay Yay Yay!
Windows 11 Pink Border on File Explorer
Apparently, Windows 11 has a weird sense of humor, as I have found that the border of the file explorer (and maybe others) dialog box is colored pink when it is selected, and gray when it isn’t. I hate the pink color, and naturally (because Windows 11) it can’t be changed! I found this page, where it says:
Windows 11 File Explorer uses Mica effect in the titlebar and toolbar and that’s why we can’t set any color in the titlebar using Personalization settings. In Windows 10, we could set any color in File Explorer’s titlebar by changing the accent color in Personalization settings. So, following the steps on this page, I downloaded ExplorerPatcher and tried to use it to get rid of the pink border around file explorer windows, but either windows 11 or ExplorerPatcher has changed, as this trick didn’t work -Rats!
Among other posts on the i-net, I found this one complaining about ‘pink everywhere’. The response by a ‘Microsoft expert’ contained a link to a ‘known problem in win 11’, bu the link is broken. Otherwise there was a long dissertation about display drivers (which I ignored because I haven’t changed the drivers on my laptop and they worked fine with the original win 11 install).
Finally, while just randomly changing things on the color settings dialog, I switched the ‘Transparency effects’ OFF, and voila! The pink border around file explorer windows was removed! Halleluiah! Here’s a screenshot of this particular dialog with the ‘Transparency effects’ switch highlighted:
File Sharing on Local Network:
Before I reset my new laptop, I had file sharing (somewhat) working between my new laptop, my old laptop, and my wife’s laptop, so I was hopeful that I could get it working again. In ‘Advanced Network settings’ I enabled ‘Network discovery’ and ‘File and printer sharing’ for private networks (and disabled them for public ones). I also disabled the ‘Password protected sharing’ option and enabled ‘Public folder sharing’. Here’s a screenshot of the setup:
New laptop sharing setup
Then I verified the above settings were the same for my old laptop (they were). In File Explorer I navigated to the C:\Users\Frank\Documents folder and in ‘Advanced Network Settings’ set it to share with full control by ‘Everyone’ as shown below:
Then I did the same thing with C:\Users\Public.
When I went back to my old laptop to verify sharing, I noticed that that the ‘Documents’ folder wasn’t shared, but the ‘Public’ folder was properly shared with full control for ‘Everyone’. That might explain why I was having problems with local network sharing before. In any case, I set up sharing for ‘Documents’ and ‘Public’ the same as the new laptop. Then I restarted both laptops.
When the laptops came back up, I double-clicked the network icon on both. On my old laptop I could see the NAS and Jo’s laptop, but not my new one. When I did the same on the new laptop, I couldn’t see any other devices, but there was a popup message at the top of the explorer window to the effect that network discovery had not been turned on, and to ‘click here’ to do so. I clicked, and after that I could see all the devices on my local network. I’m not sure why this happened, as I was sure I had already enabled network sharing, as shown in the ‘Advanced Network Settings – Advanced Sharing Settings’ screenshot above (maybe I didn’t click on OK?).
So, after rebooting both laptops, I can access folders on my new laptop from my old laptop, but not the other way around. I successfully copied a ~2MB folder from old to new Documents folders, but I can’t go the other way – strange. I worked through a ton of potential fixes for this, all without success. So, I’ve decided to bend to the inevitable and just go with the flow here.
Applications:
Windows Office – installed OK
Upgrade to Win 11 Pro – Per advice from CoPilot, navigated to Settings->System->Activation->Change Product Key -> Click on ‘Change’ -> enter generic Windows 11 Pro product key (VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T), and clicked OK. That was all there was to it. First time I’ve actually benefited from AI!
Activate Application Guard: Done
AJC Active Backup & AJCSync4: Done
Arduino & Teensyduino: According to this Teensy page, I Installed Arduino IDE 2.3.2, copied in the URL, and then installed teensy-specific software as described. Everything seemed to go well, with last line of log = ‘Platform teensy:avr@1.59.0 installed‘
Bridge Composer: Downloaded the 30-day trial, Installed and activated using emailed activation key
CopyTransControlCenter/CopyTransPhoto: For uploading videos from wife’s iphone – Done
DipTrace non-professional Standard License: Done
Movavi Video Editor 2024: Installed and activated using emailed activation key, but I don’t like the dark background – fix later
Notepad++: Done
P-touch Editor: Done
Prusa Slicer 2.8.0: Done
TeraTerm: Done
TrackIR5: Tried to install but was stopped by McAfee. Uninstalled McAfee – Done
Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition: Done
Wixel Configuration Utility: Done
Get Legacy Office Photo Viewer Back:
This site has the procedure for getting the old photo viewer back as a stand-alone app. Following the link to this site, I downloaded Microsoft SharePoint 2010 installer and launched it. Then I selected ‘Customize’. Then I set all options to ‘Not available’ except for ‘Microsoft Office Picture Manager’, which I set for ‘Run from My Computer’ (see screengrab below).
All options except ‘Microsoft Office Picture Manager’ set to ‘Not Available’
Then I clicked on ‘Install Now’ to install Picture Manager as a stand-alone app.
The next step is to restore the ‘Preview’ context menu option for photos. I found this site:
Procedure for restoring ‘Preview’ option to context menu for photos
However, I found that ‘Default Apps’ had been moved to Settings -> Apps -> Default apps. From there select ‘Photos’, and then set’ Microsoft Office 2010′ as the default app for each photo extension (.jpeg, .jpg, .png). This worked great – and as promised, the ‘Preview’ option appeared on the context menu (unfortunately it appeared on the ‘second page’ so you have to first select ‘Show more options’ to see it).
Restore Windows 10 context menu with ‘Preview’ item near top:
Now that I have the old Office Photo Manager back, the next trick is to move the ‘Preview’ context menu item to the ‘front’ page of the context menu. After some research, it appears that the easiest way to do this is to simply restore the Windows 10 context menu style. This involves adding a key to the registry. There are a number of ‘HowTo’ videos on this – pick one. After editing the registry, this is my new context menu for photos:
Windows 10 context menu, with ‘Preview’ 3rd from top
End Game:
At this point I think I have things pretty well recovered, without all the crap about multiple ‘Document’ folders and wrong-named user folders. I’ll let this play out for a while and make any other adjustments as necessary. Hopefully I can now settle into my new laptop without cringing every time it opens a File Explorer window
I’ve been a 3D printer enthusiast for many years now and have accumulated a fair collection of filaments for my Prusa MK4 and Flashforge Creator Pro IDEX printers. All these filament supplies are hygroscopic to one degree or another and so have to be kept in a low-humidity environment to avoid deterioration. Early on I created my own ‘low humidity storage bin’ using a large plastic storage tub and a 40W lightbulb with a custom-made temp/humidity meter, as shown in the following photo:
Filament dryer with temperature and relative humidity readout
I adjusted the relative humidity to about 30% by creating and/or taping over holes in the plastic tub. This worked pretty well, but suffered from two significant drawbacks. First, the 40W lightbulbs are hard to find anymore, and they don’t last very long, so I have to keep replacing them. Secondly, the storage tub is mounted on a high shelf, so it is inconvenient to add or remove filament rolls. Also, the inconvenient placement means I often leave unused rolls out, and of course their printing performance slowly degrades – oops!
Coincidentally we had the floor in my office redone a couple of years ago, and in preparation for this I removed a lot of books from my wall of Ikea book shelves, and wound up with several empty sections. Over the last couple of years I have started storing unused filaments in those empty sections rather than in the dryer tub where they belong, as shown in the following photo:
My Ikea bookshelf wall with my not-so-dry filament storage
So, I had the brilliant (I hope!) idea that if I were to fabricate a transparent cover for one of the empty bookshelf sections and install some kind of heating element, I could transform my current room humidity filament storage into a much more convenient dry storage area.
My current filament dryer tub actually does a pretty good job of reducing the humidity using just a 40W lightbulb, so I reasoned that an approximately 40W heating element should do fine in my new design. I have an old Dell laptop power supply that supplies about 3A at 20V, so that should work as the power source. For the heating element I think I can use a length of #26 Nichrome wire as shown below:
I need about 10Ω at 20V to produce 40W, so at 1.61Ω/ft, I need 10/1.61 = 6.2ft = 1.8m. The Ikea shelves are about 0.9m long, so I’ll need to do an ‘out-and-back’ run with the wire, but that will actually make wiring it up easier.
Yesterday I went down to Lowes and purchased a 6-foot (~2m) section of 5/8″ (16mm) wood dowel as the choice for supporting multiple filament reels. After some experimentation, I settled on 87mm spacing between rod centers, and designed a spacer piece in OnShape to space the dowels and lift the reels off the shelf surface by 69mm, as shown in the following OnShape sketch:
3D printed versionFilament roll support rods with three 3D printed rod separatorsFilament support structure in action (pls ignore the V1 support hiding behind the central V2 support)
Nichrome Wire Heating Element:
I didn’t have a 20V 2A power supply handy and while my DIY lab power supply could easily get up to 20V, it couldn’t simultaneously deliver 2A – bummer. However, I did have an old-style PC power supply with multiple 12V 5A outputs, so I used it to see whether I could generate 40W-ish power dissipation in a length of nichrome wire. Using a 60cm length (approximately 4Ω) the 12V supply delivered approximately 3A (36W) and it definitely got quite hot (but not glowing hot). As part of the experiment, I placed one of my old V1 rod separator parts on the heated wire, and noted that the wire slightly melted into the PETG material, implying that I would need some heat-resistant insulation where the nichrome wire goes through the holes in the V2 rod separator part.
05 August 2024 Update:
My order of heat-resistant flexible tubing came in, so I was able to make some more progress:
PET heat-resistant flexible braided sleeving
Unfortunately, I discovered that the sleeving was too large to fit through the holes I had designed into the V2 rod supports, so I wound up hot-gluing sections of the sleeving to the sided of the first and second supports, and then a longer section around the last support, as shown in the photo below:
Filament rod supports with nichrome wire threaded through sleeving
12 August 2024 Update:
I finally got my MeanWell EPP-120S-24 open-frame power supply delivered, so I can now make some more progress on my bookshelf filament dryer project. While waiting for the power supply, I went ahead and acquired a piece of 1/4″ acrylic for use as the door, as shown below:
As shown above, I tried out my idea for adding temperature regulating holes to the design. I started with a very expensive ‘Ryder’ diamond-encrusted hole saw, guaranteed to cut anything. Unfortunately it didn’t incorporate any means to keep the saw cutting in the same place, so it immediately shot off to one side every time I tried to use it. Fortunately Lowes has a nice return policy, so I took it back. My other efforts were with a regular hole saw I had around with a 1/4″ centering drill, and this worked OK if not great. The other option was a 1″ wood drill as it has a nice centering tip. I found I could drill through most of the thickness on one side with the wood drill, and then, when the tip was all the way through, turn the piece over and drill out the rest. Both of these last two methods worked fairly well, but I discovered that each hole took a lot of work and sweat to get right, and the idea of drilling 8-10 holes (4-5 at bottom, 4-5 at top) wasn’t too appealing. For now I’m going to leave the holes out unless I see that they are needed.
I installed the acrylic front piece on the bookshelf section using metal hinges. I wanted to use printed ones, but I found they weren’t strong enough (and the metal ones I got may be too lightweight as well – we’ll see)
Now that I have the power supply, time to test my theory about producing approximately 40W of heat from the nichrome wire length under the filament roll supports. I hooked up the supply to AC, checked the output (24V – yep), and connected it to the nichrome wire. As shown in the following photo, The supply held 24V and produced a little over 2A in the wire, for a power dissipation of about 50W – a little more than I had in my previous (40 lightbulb) setup, but should be OK.
24V power supply hooked up to nichrome wire heater. Note non-contact DC Ammeter reading of about 2.2A.
I let this run for about 30 minutes so far, and everything seems pretty stable. I did notice that the hot-glue material is getting somewhat soft where it was used to glue the pieces of heat-resistant sleeving to the rod separators, but nothing significant. I also noticed that the wire run is too loose at the moment, and part of the run rises up high enough to touch the bottom of a couple of the filament holders – definitely something I will have to address. Maybe I’ll need to print some more rod separators with larger holes that will accommodate the heat resistant material.
15 August 2024 Update:
Well, I soon discovered that the ‘heat-resistant’ tubing may have been heat-resistant, but it did not stand up well to actual use. When I started cutting it into small lengths, it almost immediately unraveled and became near useless. I also discovered that the hot-glue I was using to attach the tubing to the sides (the tubing was too large to go through the pre-printed holes) was melting and running all through the tubing, making it very difficult to remove the tubing from around the nichrome wire – yuk!
So, I came up with another brilliant plan; I found some high-temp silicone tubing on Amazon, 2mm OD, 1mm ID and my plan was to use this as a replacement, with the added advantage that the new tubing would fit through my pre-printed holes. My plan worked great, right up until the point where the nichrome wire got the tubing so hot that the wire/tubing combination melted right through the PETG printed supports – oops!
Those nichrome wire runs were initially very taut – until they melted through the PETG supports 🙁
OK, so my next great idea is to use a 1/4″ (7mm) wood dowel rod mounted through each support with small holes drilled into the ends to pass the nichrome wire. The wood will insulate the wire from the PETG support, so no more melting —- maybe :).
rod support with pre-drilled hole for 1/4″ (~6mm) transverse wooden dowel
This idea actually worked – except I forgot about that the wire had to somehow go around the end support without melting anything before being routed through the holes on the other side of the transverse support rods. The solution I finally came up with was to add a +/- 45º spread of rod segments around the end piece, as shown in the following photos
Before adding wooden wire supportsfilament reel support/dryer with power supplyend pieces shown from the topupside down to show end piecesupside down to show transverse rods. Note wire wrapped several times around end dowels for tautness
With the addition of the two end-piece rods, the nichrome wire is held well away from the printed parts. Also and the wire run can now be pulled taut and looped around the dowels on the power supply end – much nicer installation.
Here are a couple of photos showing the mostly-finished installation, minus only the cabling from the power supply to the filament reel rack and the reels themselves
Ikea bookshelf filament dryer with clear acrylic cover. Small blue box is temp/humidity sensor
Just as an aside, I have now been using OnShape for just over one year now, and I am beginning to really like it. I am by no means an expert, and I still have to spend as much time researching a particular technique as I do implementing it, but I now firmly believe it has taken top spot in my pantheon of good, bad, and ugly 3D design packages.
