History of the Computer and reasons to buy a CarveWright Part 1 of 2

[Digitalwoodshop]

This is a open letter to anyone interested in purchasing a Carve Machine and is looking for some opinions about the unit. In addition to reading this, reading the many posting's in the forum will give the reader a good feel for weather the Carve Machine is for you.

I received a eMail yesterday from a couple interested in buying a carve machine and asked my opinion. My reply turned into a long winded letter, I make a few good points that some might find interesting and others might find annoying. I decided to post it for everyone to read. This is very long.


Thank you for your interest in my opinion. I am unusual, in that I have only done one test project just to see it work. For me, it's time management... I am in start up of a small business doing laser engraving, sublimation, and V Carved Signs. The sublimation part of the business is taking up the bulk of my time at the moment, that's the pictures on T Shirt technology. I use it to make tourist stuff, and just opening mid January I am trying to pay the bills.

As soon as I saw it on TV, I was hooked. I have a need to make V Carved signs and other carved stuff and from what I saw, I knew it would work for me. My plans to buy a Shop Bot were on the back burner due to cash.... For a $2K unit, this will fill a need between the hand carver and the Shop Bot.

Problems..... Well, I read the forum every day and I know that the bad Z or up down encoder problem has wrecked havoc with user confidence. The company has handled it well in my opinion and I don't see it as a problem. I have some electronic repair experience being a retired Navy Electronics Tech. My last 4 years in the Navy in San Diego, I was a Tech Rep and when the sailors on the ships could not fix the radars, computers, and electronics, they would call ME. So I have seen a lot of electronic problems. Then I went to Sony and made picture tubes for the first 2 years of 8 with the company. I was a Senior Tech on my 12 hour shift, keeping the robots, power supplies, test equipment, conveyors, and a bunch of other equipment going. I was in the middle of a 12 hour start to finish cycle and if my equipment broke, and I didn't fix it, my guys had to deal with 122 tubes per hour for 6 hours. Worked in the Calibration lab for 2 years then went to the Philly Service center and fixed PlayStation 2's and other Sony stuff. Learned a bunch there.

So now I am home and semi retired and starting a business Pocono Digital Woodshop.

I believe the system will be a great benefit to anyone willing to have the patience to learn the machine and the designer software. As to why all of the units were returned, in a word, my opinion is, "patience".... I believe they saw a TV ad and thought it would be easy to make it work.... Well, it is easy to some, others like myself, need to learn as I go. Reading about it on the forum has made me better prepared for receiving my machine. Some returns are from people waiting for later units, when all the bugs are taken care of, I don't blame them.

I have a specific task in mind for my unit, I am going to sell home 911 number signs here and on eBay, this is a excellent tool for that task.

I get a good feeling reading your letter, and the fact that you might go into this as a couple, is a very positive sign. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and a great couple can complement themselves many times over, presenting a unified and positive outlook on a project like this. There is money to me made with this machine, and a combined effort could bring out the best.

My feeling is you can't go wrong getting the machine for 2 reasons. 1. Your getting in on some "Consumer, home owner level" cutting edge technology, that has the potential to turn "Creative Ideas" into "CASH". A side benefit is the Quality time spent together. Everything from brain storming a project idea, designing, development, construction, and then selling.

One guy is doing a whole camp ground with people's names, to provide for a more "Family" feel for the guests. If they got to keep the sign when they leave, it could lead to "Hey, where did you get that??" at the next campground.

Reason 2 for buying the unit. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Lets say you get it, and 2 months later you decide it's not for you... It will be repaired under warranty if you do have a problem, so that's not a problem..... You can always sell it on eBay.... or to someone you know, that has an interest in it...

Kids and the Carve machine are a good thing... The Designer Software lets them be creative and learn the skills of developing, designing, planning, production, and selling a project under adult supervision. This will help by building self confidence and people skills. I am waiting to see a School pop up on the forum. Kids designing projects on individual computers in a classroom environment and later with their own memory card, take it to a bank of Adult supervised machines for production. Hey.... There is reason 2a..... Donate it to a school and take the TAX DEDUCTION..... if you don't like it.

Now the Sawdust problem.... The 2 belts that pull and push the board through the machine do not touch in the center. The bit is above that area. Some have sucked the sawdust down through the slot under the machine, this is good unless you use a 12 inch board in the 14 inch slot. I am working on a top and bottom suction idea. Have seen a side suction unit on the forum, really like it, but cutting a hole in the machine.... not ready for that yet... I even got an extra top plastic cover to cut for my machine's dust collection so I always have the original.

I believe the sawdust buildup has caused many of the errors, everything from roller problems with the sawdust getting where it shouldn't be, to blocked sensors.

I believe sawdust removal is causing problems too.... 1. Blowing chips into the wrong areas with compressed air has caused some problems and 2. Wood chips moving through the plastic hose of the vacuum cleaner cause static electricity to build up. Even doing cleanup in my wood shop picking up sawdust in the past, I can sometimes feel my hair stand up on my arm from the static charge building up. This is thousands of volts of static electricity. This can raise havoc with the carve computer and memory card.

I believe that a wrist strap grounding device like people use working on electronic circuit boards should be used to remove and install the memory card to your computer. Just walking from point A to point B holding the card in your hand could generate errors on the card under the right conditions. I venture to say a fix for that, is a anti-static transport bag used to move the card from the carve unit to the computer and back. It is the silver gray anti static bag that replacement memory chips and some ink cartridges come in. Putting the card in and removing it from the bag should be done with a wrist strap on.

If you read in electronic books describing what static electricity does to electronic chips, here is one of the many ways your memory card can be harmed and a little long winded history of computers and of how we got there.

End part 1

[Digitalwoodshop]

Part 2

It all started with Vacuum Tubes used as the first computers. The term "Computer Bug" came from this era, when a insect was found stuck in a electronic relay contact preventing it from working. The first Vacuum Tube Computer I ever worked on was in 1977, a US Navy Mk 47 Gun Fire Control Computer. It took target information and calculated the gun aiming point for a 5 inch gun for a target up to 12 miles away. The tubes just turned on or off or acted as a amplifier and in the big picture of things, just ran a basic program. Then Transistors were developed, and in the 1980's, I worked on a upgraded version of the same Tube Computer. Gone were the vacuum tubes, now replaced with circuit cards or circuit boards doing the same job using transistors, only with less power and heat of tubes. Then came TTL or Transistor Transistor Logic Chips, this was the first generation away from using an array of transistors to do logic circuits. Logic Circuits are the hardware side of a computer. The IC or Integrated Circuit, held the equivalent of many transistors in a small rectangular or round package with many legs or input and output wires plus power pins.

TTL computer circuits were very stable and people got used to poor handling procedures as they were just as rugged as a flashlight, handling physical and electrostatic abuse very well. The next generation of Chips saw more and more transistors being packed onto a IC chip for speed and this new generation of Chips was called CMOS or Consolidated Metal Oxide Semiconductors. This chip had a new feature of a capacitive coupled input and output pins. Without getting into how it was done, the why, tells the story better. The why, is less power required to drive the chip, and a faster turn on and off time with less heat. Then a series of unexpected failures started to stump the technicians and engineers. This sounds a lot like the Memory Card problems..... It was discovered that the input and output capacitive coupled leads to the CMOS Chip would fail for no reason.

A Capacitor in electronics, is a set of electronic plates, picture 2 big aluminum pie plates held 1 inch apart in your mind. Remember how we see lightning travel to the ground. Well electricity builds up on one capacitor plate like lightning on a cloud, very much like the metal pie plate. Under the right conditions, the electrons travel from one plate to the other through the gap like lightning. I mentioned "Capacitive Coupled" because between every input pin and the internal parts of a IC chip is a capacitor. The same for the output. Has anyone ever hooked a flash light bulb to a battery?, well it will light. Now hook another one the same way in parallel and you will see the light could be half as bright in both lights, now add 10 more..... They all get dimmer.... That is the reason for the Capacitive Coupled inputs and outputs. The older TTL Chips act like the light bulbs getting dimmer the more you hook up, and this limited the design of the circuits. The Capacitive Coupled, CMOS devices, would allow 10 light bulbs to shine brightly, not really possible as a bulb, but very possible as a CMOS IC Chip. This allowed bigger and more complicated circuits without using buffer chips that the TTL circuits needed to do the same thing. Less parts, less power required, better efficiency.

The Engineers found that the CMOS Chip could be damage by Static Electricity just by handling it in your hands, if you were not properly grounded. That same shock you get on carpet touching a door knob. This was the birth if the grounding wrist strap for electronic workers. There is a 100 ohm resistor in the wrist strap so if you had the strap on your left hand and your right hand touched a electrical circuit, the voltage and current could flow through your chest and past your heart killing you. The resistor limits the current and you might not die.

So back to the memory card.... As technology grew, more and more transistors were put on a chip, hence the very fast computers of today. Early computers used 8 bit data busses like a 8 lane highway. The program instructions went down the highway 8 bits wide. Then programs were developed using 16 bit words, it then took 2 trips down the highway or data bus for each word to communicate between computer chips. Then came 16 bit highways, like the IBM 286 computers of the 80's. Then 32 bit programs and 2 trips were again required. Then 32, 64, and 128 bit programs of today's faster computers. The CMOS and similar technology is used in that memory card we use and every hole you see in the end connector, has a wire or pin attached to it to transfer the information between the card and the computer or carve machine.

Back to the metal pie plates again, if a static charge attacks a pin or pins of the memory card, the voltage of the static can jump the 1 inch gap in the pie plates, and when it does, it is like a BB gun, and shoots very small holes through the plates. In the case of the memory card, the static punctures the capacitor dielectric. Air is the dielectric in the pie plates but, a chemical paste is used as a insulator or dielectric in a CMOS chip. The dielectric is for the most part, self healing like jello, but ALL Static damage takes it's tole on the dielectric or insulator and it may not fail today, but it could fail tomorrow. Hence, the Vacuum job before lunch today cleaning the sawdust out of your machine, could be the reason you carve machine fails after lunch tomorrow.

Wow.... This has turned into an essay.... I hope I haven't lost you and you still consider buying a Carve Machine, for the many positive reasons I have mentioned. I believe in this company and it's product. My work history in electronics gives me a good feel for the big picture of this company. They are a honest and dedicated company with a cutting edge consumer electronic product. When I stopped fixing PlayStation2's, they were on the 14th generation of circuit boards, all improvements made with every revision.

OK... one last Sea Story... I ended up teaching electronics at Great Lakes, IL in 1984. I taught a system that was the digital upgrade of the original Analog Tube then Transistor Computer I operated and repaired in my youth. A engineer wrote a program for a digital computer to "emulate" what the tubes, gears, synchros, and servos did. All in a computer the size of a compact refrigerator..... That was progress, the Mk 68 digital upgrade system.

Four more years of sea duty on a ship then off to my last Navy School in San Diego in 1992. This was a Digital Radar System that aimed the guns and missiles, the MK 92 Mod 6. This radar was the inspiration for the modern Next Rad weather radar. Their are 5 micro processors or computers within the radar and timing everything so it all worked was a work of art. As a student in this class, we would trace signals on the paper schematics then go into the lab with a real radar and follow it with high tech test equipment. One day a wire broke on the connector to a circuit board. The wire was now too short to reach the pin so the instructor did a repair by replacing the wire. He knew it went from point A to point B. He did the repair and thought nothing of it. Later, it was found that sometimes things didn't work properly, but other times they worked fine. This went on for months, stumping the instructor and the technicians. One day the designer of the system was in town and visited the school. In passing, it was mentioned of the problem to the designer. It peeked his interest and he asked to look into it. He pulled open the drawer containing 3 of the 5 micro processors and immediately noticed a blue wire among all the white wires. He smiled and said that was the problem..... The instructor that had made the repair was stumped. He said let me show you. He worked enough wire to re connect the original wire and made the connection, removing the blue wire. Tests were run and no problem was seen. The designer said that the wire carried a clock pulse to the 3 microprocessors, we all knew that. Then he said, I needed a time delay so each microprocessor fired or clocked at different times vice all at the same time. He did it by using the wire length, microprocessor 2 had a longer wire than 1 and 3 had the longest wire at about 12 feet. He quoted the number of micro seconds every foot of wire caused the signal to delay. When we used the replacement wire we went from firing or triggering the microprocessors 1, 2, 3 to firing them 12, 3, then 12, 3. With microprocessor 1 and 2 trying to talk on the data bus at the same time.... That is why it sometimes worked.... If they both needed to talk at the same time a collision of words on the data bus happened.... The wonders of modern electronics...... Without his insight, the problem might still be there. From the school near downtown San Diego we would track the F-14's coming and going from the Top Gun School at Miramar 20 miles away.

If your still reading this, Thank You. Navy guys and sea stories.....

AL US Navy Retired, Chief Fire Control Technician

[Digitalwoodshop]

The first picture is me at the Great Lakes School. This is the input / output device for the digital computer.

For anyone interested in what a Analog computer looks like here is a picture of me in 1977 in Yokosuka, Japan on the USS Knox FF-1052. The hand cranks and dials were the manual inputs and output devices.

Fixed the pictures.

Yes, I have too much time on my hands..... That will change when the router bits show up.

AL

[The Bard]

*delays the shipment for more history lessons*

[mobident]

Part 2
Then he said, I needed a time delay so each microprocessor fired or clocked at different times vice all at the same time. He did it by using the wire length, microprocessor 2 had a longer wire than 1 and 3 had the longest wire at about 12 feet. He quoted the number of micro seconds every foot of wire caused the signal to delay. When we used the replacement wire we went from firing or triggering the microprocessors 1, 2, 3 to firing them 12, 3, then 12, 3. With microprocessor 1 and 2 trying to talk on the data bus at the same time....

This was one of the design elements on the old Cray super computers. No clock, everything running at breakneck speed and length of wires kept things in time.

Bruce