France Visit, Golf at Brive and a Shumatech DRO350 connection pod

We have had a few days in France to chill out and cut the grass …. lots of grass. The first weekend was spent in Vichy supporting our son at the IronMan event. It was very hot but he did well, coming 7th in his age group.

Once back at our home in the Lot we had a few friends and family drop in to visit which was nice. Euro exchange rate is awful, almost parity with GBP, so things are a bit more expensive than normal.

Brive Golf Course

Our son arrived and he also plays golf so we played Souillac Country Club course and a few days later decided to try the Brive Municipal course. As members at Souillac we got a discount at Brive from the normal EUR40 for 18 holes down to EUR32 which was worth having. The Brive course is long and runs along a valley with a stream running through. Lots of holes with water as a result. The weather was warm so we drooped quite badly after the half way point. Between us we lost quite a few balls. Given the choice I think we would all prefer Brive over SGCC.

Always things to do but Fusion 360 connects

Done quite a few jobs about the place while here and also some home workshop related activity. One of the many things that is good about Fusion 360 is the cloud storage so I could log on in France as if sat at home. We get a 9Mbps connection in the village which for rural France is very fast so connecting to Fusion 360 is no problem.

Shumatech DRO350 Pod

I bought a ShumaTech DRO350 readout kit for my Myford Super 7 before we came out. It is a well thought out kit but sadly the originator of the product no longer seems to be around and promised later versions never appeared. Wild Horse Innovations are the US outlet and they are promising a replacement kit some time in the future. The UK source is Model Engineering Digital Workshop. There are allegedly electrical noise issues with the product and looking at the PCB layout I can see why but I have yet to power it up.

The kit comes with a box with all the connections out of the back face which is not ideal for mounting over the Myford Super 7. My DROs are cheap Chinese caliper devices and have RJ11 connectors on them which is not compatible with the kit connectors. Some of my time here in France has been spent designing a pod in Fusion 360 to fit on the end of the readout box to allow the connections to come off the end. Looking forward to getting home to run the 3D print of the pod and get the project up and running and of course getting back to the Tormach 440.

shumatech 350, DRO — DRO350 connection pod for RJ11 devices