Things have been slow this week, but I was able to get a few small projects finished.

I picked up these 30 mm magnets a while ago to help hold down my material when cutting with the laser.  They work fine, but they are a real pain to separate when stacked up together.  To help things along I printed these simple holders that give the magnets a bevel to grip on, and that adds a few mm of distance at the top so they can be pried apart easier.

I used a few drops of super glue to hold the magnets in place, and I alternated the orientation of the magnets so they could be stored in pairs easily.  There working great, I have not had any trouble separating them since.

A while ago I picked up this variable speed controller for my shop-vac to try and vary the suction, and to try and quiet things down.

It turns out there is a potentiometer you can adjust inside the unit to set the range on the speed controller.  You want to carefully take things apart, then set it to its minimum speed and adjust the potentiometer till the motor your driving starts to complain, then back it off a bit from there.  Be very careful here, your exposed to mains voltage, don't touch anything.  Doing this I was able to bring both the suction and volume down quite a bit.  It is still an annoying sound, but you can't have everything.

I also picked up this switch for my air compressor.  It is much nicer than plugging and unplugging it all the time.

When I was trying to speed up my feed rate to make pocket hugs faster I stumbled across an issue with the steppers missing steps when burning my Tin-Tin image at 1500 mm/min.  I figured I would just need to dial down on the acceleration to make this work, however that does not seem to be working.

I tried accelerations from 10 mm/sec*sec to 200 mm/sec*sec and none of them completely solved the problem.  Even in the most extreme cases there was still some loss of steps.

You can verify this by etching the same image twice and using a loop to see if the lines shifted.  

I need to play around with junction deviation to see if that is a better way to approach this.  It seems this only happens when rapidly changing direction so there is some hope that this will help.