Having spent much of the past week of my December Adventure working on OpoLua, I decided it was time for a change. I again consulted the Organiser II lucky dip, which called for, ‘Series 3a hinge replacement’.

While this prompt is slightly incorrect (it should read ‘reinforcement’), it was nice to have something come up that isn’t purely software; a perfect change of pace for the weekend. There’s something incredibly cathartic and soothing about the process of maintenance, and I immediately found myself thinking of other tasks I’d also like to get to: I need to check the batteries in my Libretto 50CTs, finally get my Greaseweazle working, and tidy up my home rack a little.

While some readers will be disappointed that I didn’t immediately break out the JB Weld and launch into reinforcing my Series 3a’s hinges, I decided to pace myself and approach a few of these tasks over the course of the weekend, picking whichever spoke to me in the moment.

Greaseweazle

Like many folks who play around with retro hardware, I picked up a Greaseweazle some time ago to allow me to read whatever floppy disks I encounter in my travels. And (I suspect), like many, my Greaseweazle has been sitting in a box since I got it: I managed to buy a 3 ½" floppy drive, but failed to pick up any cables, and certainly didn’t start looking for a case.

Since I can’t do much with it until I have the appropriate cables, I ordered a power cable and floppy drive ribbon cable, and set about looking for a case to print. While I usually design parts for myself, I wanted to try a community design this time and, after some browsing, I selected this design by Dekkia, remixed from this one for earlier Greazeweazle models.

The case, designed in OpenSCAD, prints in two halves and ended up being a pretty good color match for my floppy drive, when printed using Bambu Labs’s Matte Bone White filament.

I regret not noticing that the design had been modified to remove the threaded inserts from the original, but thankfully I was able to drill out the holes and fit some I had lying around—the goal was not to produce something perfect, but something that helps me get the Greaseweazle up and running.

The top case with threaded inserts installed

With the threaded inserts installed, it was just a matter of screwing everything together and waiting for the cables to turn up.

Mini Patch Panels

I have a small home 4U rack that hosts—amongst other things—my Raspberry Pis in a UCTRONICS 1U rack bracket. This holds up to 4 Raspberry Pis on individual sleds:

Since I only need to use two of the sleds, I decided to replace the other ones with custom keystone-compatible blanking plates to allow me to manage the ethernet and USB cabling within this single 1U of space, obviating the need for a separate patch panel. I designed the prerequisite part, printed, and fitted it.

With these new mini patch panels in place (one serving each Pi), I now have a whole 1U of space to play around with for more adventures in the future.

I hope to publish these designs over the next few weeks. If you’re excited to get hold of them before then, please feel free to get in touch.

OpoLua

I couldn’t get through the day without making a couple of tweaks to OpoLua: I renamed the macOS Qt builds to ‘OpoLua Qt.app’ to allow them to live side-by-side with the Mac Catalyst versions, and I switched to using a pre-built version of Qt which cuts build times by about 55 minutes. 🏎️