Computer reload

I have a problem with my machines. Every one of them exhibits this problem. I can't get USB thumb drives to work AT ALL. They make the USB insertion noise, they show up on the device manager, but they never show in Windows Explorer, or when they do, it just says the drive needs formatting. If I try to format it, it says it was unable to format.

Tonight I gave up and reloaded Windows, which brought it back to working like a champ. I am sure that there's some piece of software that I load on all my machines which is causing this. I am going to do drive images every day, and try a thumb drive insertion after loading every piece of software to see what's causing it.

Reloading might seem extreme, but the way I set my machines up it's not really a big deal. It took about 20 minutes to restore the system image, and I was using the machine again about 15 minutes after that. I'll have to load a bit of software but I just do it as needed over the next few days.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that it's VirtualBox. It's the only software that I know for sure installs a driver that intercepts all USB traffic, so it certainly has the ability to bone things up if it's not written properly, but OTOH it's a pretty major piece of code and it's hard to believe that nobody has noticed that it screws up thumb drives.

The weird thing is,it's just thumb drives. USB hard drives aren't affected.

Speaking of thumb drives, I bought a couple of Kingston 16G thumb drives for $13 shipped and got them today. They're tiny, perfect for a key chain. It's kind of boggling when I stop and think about having 16GB on a little hunk of plastic that takes up about the volume of a quarter, and cost less than a pizza.

Blinkie progress

The replacement (5mm) green LEDs came in today. I soldered up a green demo unit, completely prepped 23 blue kits, and counted out all of the LEDs for 100 blue kits, 55 green kits, 20 red kits, and 5 white kits. Pink, orange and yellow LEDs haven't arrived yet.

I need to print another 175 battery holders, but I need to load black PLA in a printer to do that and right now I have black ABS in one printer and red PLA in the other. Black tends to hang about in the hotend for a while so when I switch away from it I have to find something to print that color doesn't matter for, so I am shy of loading black in if I have any non-black stuff in the queue. Right now I've got some switchblade combs for my son's friends, they're amused by them so I'm running a few off in different colors.

I'll probably do the battery holders this weekend. I didn't do them before now because I wanted to assemble a few actual, final boards with them to be sure that the design was what I wanted it to be before making all 200 holders.

Counting out the LEDs is the real time consuming part and that's pretty much done. I do need to write the assembly instructions. I've already taken all the photos that I'll need.