Hardware
Labels Printing Off-Center? Calibrate the Print Offset Once
After getting the label printer to fire its printhead, the next problem was that the text missed the sticker. I stopped guessing and printed rulers and corner markers to measure it, then clearly separated paper size, printable area, and offset into three distinct values.
Drawing SVG Electrical Panels You Can Measure on Paper
The electrical panel drawings I generated from HTML looked good, but the technician said the proportions were wrong. I rebuilt the whole sheet, anchored it to actual catalog dimensions, wrote the viewBox directly in millimeters, and added a scale bar so the technician could use a ruler to verify that the drawing in hand really was at 1:10.
VM Sees the Dongle but Has No Internet Without a Windows ECM Driver
After passing a USB LTE dongle through to a Windows VM, the system sees the device but no network adapter appears. The cause is neither the SIM nor port passthrough, but the dongle exposing a CDC ECM interface that Windows has no built-in driver for, along with storage-mode pitfalls and dhclient overwriting the host's resolv.conf.
Reading ID Cards from the Web with a Localhost Agent
Browsers cannot access smart card readers directly. A workable approach is to write a small agent that opens a port on localhost and let the web page call it. This article covers secure contexts, CORS preflight, port conflicts with other agents, PC/SC in SHARED mode, decoding TIS-620 manually, and the day antivirus flagged the program as a backdoor.
Cannot Delete Faces from a Terminal: API Returns notSupport
The door's face recognition terminal advertises a command to delete faces from FDLib, but every variation I tried returned notSupport. People who had left could still scan their faces and get in. This article covers the dead ends, the approach that actually worked using UserInfo/Modify with the smallest possible body, and the two-way user registry sync that runs every night.
No kWh Meter? Estimate Daily Electricity Costs from Current
Notes on converting CT current readings into energy usage and daily time-of-use electricity costs, from the three-phase power formula and the sampling interval built into it, through skipping outages and separating peak from off-peak with epoch arithmetic, to a daily summary table that made the web page seven times faster.
Reading an Unknown Modbus Device: Verify Before Interpreting
My notes on tracking down an undocumented device on an RS485 bus, from scanning baud rates and addresses one combination at a time to proving which registers hold live values and which are dead, and the lesson that guessing a device's type from number patterns alone can lead to months of misinterpretation.
Shared Neutrals Across Transformers: Why Phase Balancing Is Not Enough
A case involving two transformers with interconnected neutrals and houses tapped into one side's main feeder, leaving phase A 30-40 A higher even on days off, plus a meter-reading trap that can suggest a 200 A difference if the CT ratio is not verified first, and a repair sequence that must be followed in order.
Sizing Main Cables and Breakers by Installation Method
Notes on choosing the main cable and breaker for a new 253 A feeder, why the same size CV cable can carry 227 A or 364 A depending on how it is installed, and the option of downsizing to 95 and compensating with operating rules, at the cost of the main breaker tripping if anyone breaks those rules.
Diagnosing Feeder Overload from Melted Insulation and Duty Cycles
My investigation of a 95 mm² main cable with insulation melting at scattered points even though the system seemed to work normally, from the nameplates of 6 washers and dryers totaling 234.7 kW to a minute-by-minute current model explaining why a 482 A load on a cable rated for 180 A had not caused a visible system failure.