Month: July 2016

Creating a Win10 install Thumb Drive on Mac

Company I work for is in the process of upgrading all it Windows 7 netbooks to Windows 10. They supplied us with a limited number of thumb drives with installer. Nice setup, log in as Administration, press ‘Start’ and walk away. However with just under 500 netbooks to upgrade and 10 thumb drives, this process could take a few weeks.

As you can see by earlier post, I snagged a few $4 thumb drives at Target, 16 GB.

According to the Win10 thumb drives they are 32 gb, but only using a little over 8 gb.

Enter Paragon Software’s “NTFS for Mac”. I was able to format my thumb drives as NT, then using an older version of Carbon Copy Cloner (5.3.7) and Snow Leopard. I was able to create a sparse image of thumb drive, then use CCC to image the thumb drive.

Took almost an hour to create each thumb drive on a laptop. But in the end it saved hours of work and allowed for more imaging of netbooks per hour.

So the process is, 1) Partition thumb drive using NTFS for Mac, 2) Erase/Format thumb drive again, as ExFat then 3) use CCC to copy the sparse image onto the thumb drive. Using a USB thumb drive on my MBP, cloning took almost 2 hours, deadly slow. So try to stick to USB 2 thumb drives.

Solidoodle – Rest in Peace

Seems Solidoodle, the 3d printer company, has ceased operation (as of March of this year).

Can’t say I am very surprised, we have two different Solidoodle printers. Neither has worked well, and tech support was a joke. The last resolution was to send the printer back for trouble shooting, had it boxed up ready to go, but thought better of it. Glad I didn’t send it back now. Although it still has an issue, at least I still have the printer.

Sad an American company couldn’t make a go of it and the Press is a pretty printer.

WeMos D1 Mini

Being that they were ordered from China, I ordered a few items from WeMos. OLED Display Shield, Temperature Sensor, Relay and Button shields. All were cheap and using Arduino fairly easy to program just took awhile to get to USA (say a month to the day) [Not complaining, just stating, pay a little more get from USA seller MUCH faster].

IMG_8734

We were able to create a web server, that reads and displays Temperature (T), control a relay over the web (R) and have it display its IP number (within our subnet). HOWEVER, you can’t read temperature and control relay, in the same ‘stack’. So more parts are on order to deal with that minor complication.

IMG_8736The biggest issue was getting the OLED display to work. Seems there was an issue with one of the libraries;

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36768562/wemos-oled-sparkfun-print-text-does-not-display

Just a matter of deleting two lines of code, and it worked. Course that took two days to find.

Being a true believer in scattering projects over over the place, wireless would be great. But as always, there is the matter of POWER. If I have to run power, I can run an ethernet cable.

Nailed it! – Target Sale

Talk about good timing. Saw Target had a sale for 16 gb Lexar Twist Thumb Drives, for $3.99. Didn’t really have a need, till a project at work came up, image 500 netbooks. So ran to Target and purchased all they had which amounted to 8. For a total of $31.. Sometimes sales are handy.

Oh, on another note while confirming they had the drives still, I found out Best Buy also had 16 gb thumb drives on sale, for $3.99. Just no Lexar.

Score!