Mr Pearce's Mechatronics Blog

Trying out the small 5ml syringes with a 40cm long tube I found that there was little force transferred in a pneumatic system. I could easily hold the plunger in syringe whilst moving the other through its full range of movement. With no load the syringe only moved 3.5ml when the drive end moved 5ml probably due to the friction inside the syringe countering the pressure change. After filling the system with water much more force was transferred and much more quickly. I didn't try to stop the syringe moving too much as I didn't want the tube to pop off and spray water all round the room. I found a 6cm length of masking tape cut in half lengthwise and wrapped around the syringe nozzle made a good seal.

Inventor 2019 Wow, another new program to figure out. I need another HDD in my laptop, this has left me with less than a gig of space!! When I started playing in Inventor it couldn't get it to draw a simple sketch of a rectangle with a semi-circle on the end. I was working on the XY plane and the curve kept going the wrong way. I tried it on the XZ plane and it worked. Now I can't replicate the original, frustrating actions that Inventor was insisting on doing. So I can now create a 2D cross-section sketch, set dimensions on it, extrude it into a 3D shape, draw new sketches on faces, extrude those new sketches or create cuts through the solid and drill holes by setting a point and then creating a hole. Next steps - find out how to move out of Inventor into a form the milling machine can understand and then look at what needs to be done in Inventor to create sufficient into for the mill to cut shapes out of sheets of MDF. UPDATE - I found that it all depends on which way

Putting photos onto blog posts To put photos from my phone onto my blog I had to share them to to Google Photos rather than to my Google Drive. On Blogger, when you click the Insert Photo button you get options From your phone and this lists all photos that you've uploaded to Google Photos. Is there a better way to add photos to your blog? If you know of a different way let me know in the comments. Cheers Adding Video !!! It looks like two options for adding your own video to the blog. Either Upload - send it to your computer so you can upload it to Blogger or My YouTube Videos - upload it to your YouTube channel and then link to it.