Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...
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This is a trend that I find to be really cool:
Products being released where you print part of it yourself. In the video there is a set of (I think) high quality headphones where they give you the electronics and some hardware and you print the rest. They also made available the STEP files so you can customize them in anyway that you wish. In the video they debossed the Prusa logo and </HEAD> in to the earpieces.
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Oh, this is right up my alley:
Surprising Egg (Drop Inside) by Superbeasti
This is a remix of the original Surprising Egg (Prints Inside), and is is basically just an egg shell, which you can drop your surprises inside mid-print! You can then crack it open like a real egg.I would recommend 0,8mm wall thickness (or two lines) as it's already quite tough to break (use a...
Set a M601 (pause for user interaction, with a status display), drop in toys, kids have to crack them open to get the surprise inside.
I've figured it up that I can do 48 of them (full buildplate on the three "for fun" printers) in ~12 hours. We have 36 hours until we have to leave for an Easter egg hunt at a friends house.
I kind of wish that all of my printers were available, but some are tied up on paid work right now. the paid jobs seem to come in on Friday afternoons. You can almost set your watch to it. Luckily they usually only want them done by Wednesday at the earliest.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Oh, this is right up my alley:
Surprising Egg (Drop Inside) by Superbeasti
This is a remix of the original Surprising Egg (Prints Inside), and is is basically just an egg shell, which you can drop your surprises inside mid-print! You can then crack it open like a real egg.I would recommend 0,8mm wall thickness (or two lines) as it's already quite tough to break (use a...
Set a M601 (pause for user interaction, with a status display), drop in toys, kids have to crack them open to get the surprise inside.
I've figured it up that I can do 48 of them (full buildplate on the three "for fun" printers) in ~12 hours. We have 36 hours until we have to leave for an Easter egg hunt at a friends house.
I kind of wish that all of my printers were available, but some are tied up on paid work right now. the paid jobs seem to come in on Friday afternoons. You can almost set your watch to it. Luckily they usually only want them done by Wednesday at the earliest.
Holy shit, that must be way cheaper than buying 1000s of injection-molded two-part eggs on Alibaba, and the lack of reusability really ices the cake - who wants a reusable egg?
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@Gribnit said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
who wants a reusable egg?
Kinks thread is...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Gribnit said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
who wants a reusable egg?
Kinks thread is...
Well that's the kind you'd buy by the dozen vs the 1000.
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@Gribnit said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Holy shit, that must be way cheaper than buying 1000s of injection-molded two-part eggs on Alibaba, and the lack of reusability really ices the cake - who wants a reusable egg?
Those don't come with the wonder of how the item got in to the egg when there is no way to open it without destroying it.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Oh, this is right up my alley:
Surprising Egg (Drop Inside) by Superbeasti
This is a remix of the original Surprising Egg (Prints Inside), and is is basically just an egg shell, which you can drop your surprises inside mid-print! You can then crack it open like a real egg.I would recommend 0,8mm wall thickness (or two lines) as it's already quite tough to break (use a...
Set a M601 (pause for user interaction, with a status display), drop in toys, kids have to crack them open to get the surprise inside.
I've figured it up that I can do 48 of them (full buildplate on the three "for fun" printers) in ~12 hours. We have 36 hours until we have to leave for an Easter egg hunt at a friends house.
I kind of wish that all of my printers were available, but some are tied up on paid work right now. the paid jobs seem to come in on Friday afternoons. You can almost set your watch to it. Luckily they usually only want them done by Wednesday at the earliest.
Two things:
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The model has a flaw with the integrated support structure where it welds itself hard to the model. It works better with a plain egg model and applying your own sparse supports as they come off really easily.
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I think I have discovered a bug in Octoprint as after resuming print it just doesn't extrude. If I had to hazard a guess, when it executes the M600 or M601 commands it puts the extruder in to absolute positioning and then after resuming it just traces out the paths but doesn't extrude because the extruder commands have not reached that position yet.
I could probably fix the second issue with a G91 on resume. But with a full buildpate the gantry is moving over the entire surface so it is easy enough to just set a timer and drop stuff in as the gantry moves out of your way.
This is working out really well for Lego gifts. We got the boys some small Lego sets for Easter. I'm printing the eggs for each boy in different colors. Once they find all of their eggs and crack them open they will have all of the pieces to complete their gift.
Yes, I am entirely prepared that some eggs may not be found, a Lego set might not have all of the pieces and that they will end up going through the lawnmower in a week or so.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Yes, I am entirely prepared that some eggs may not be found, a Lego set might not have all of the pieces and that they will end up going through the lawnmower in a week or so.
Not sure you will be prepared for the Lego shrapnel being flung out of the lawnmower, or stepping on the remains of it...
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@JBert we have two dogs and two foster puppies. Walking barefoot in our yard is not advisable and if you do Lego shrapnel would be the least of your concerns.
everywhere. It is a constant battle.
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Next endeavor, setting up Repetier Server:
It should smooth my workflow quite a bit. One of my current issues is that I work from several different machines and trying to keep all my slicing settings synchronized across all of them is basically impossible. In addition, Octoprint is pretty nifty for a starting point but trying to monitor multiple printers is a pain in the ass. I have to login to multiple different instances, running on several different Pis and let's say that you leave the tab open and reopen it on your phone the webcam feed is dead. So everytime you want to check on a print you have to reload the page.
I've partially gotten around that by sending images from the webcam every 30 minutes to my phone via Pushbullet. I was already using it for other things so that was easy enough to setup. But it only sends one image and it is not always optimal. Frequently the print head obscures the entire print so you can't see much.
Repetier Server also integrates with all firmwares, which will be handy soon enough. I'm working on a triple Z-axis HyperCube Evolution remix that will be able to three point level the print bed before loading the leveling mesh which should bring Z axis mesh leveling corrections down to a bare minimum and never need bed releveling. It should do it automatically before every print, and only take ~30 seconds to do so. Assuming that works out, I am going to build a few of those and standardize everything except for my Prusa with the MMU2.
So what have I learned so far? Some notable things:
- The i3 type printers (Prusa printers, Ender 3, most of the cheaper printers on the market) are great for keeping price down. But their kinematics are way below ideal. The moving bed has a lot of mass and inertia which causes print artifacts.
- HyperCube printers, and CoreXY printers more generally, are just a better design in every way except for price/complexity. In their kinematics the bed only moves up and down. The bed and support structure are the heaviest axis and i3 type printers move it to get the Y-axis motion. It works, and will print things. But you have to keep your speeds down because of the mass that is being moved. You also have a high risk of tall prints with narrow bases shaking themselves loose as they move back and forth.
- If anyone else decides to build a HyperCube or HyperCube Evolution, or any of the other iterations, and you want to print materials other than PLA, change up the cutlist for your extrusion order a little bit. There are four upright members on the corners, add 200mm to them. Also order 4 more of the top perimeter pieces. You're adding 200mm of volume to the top of the machine which so you can easily enclose the entire printer with Lexan while allowing for movement of the filament, wiring and such at the top of the machine. Easy peasy enclosed printer for high temperature prints
- Direct drive extruders are awesome. I had so much trouble with blobbing and "boogers" on my prints when printing PETG until I started to switch everything over to direct drive. I was running up to 7mm retraction on Bowden setups and still had little globs of shit all over the place. Also, every fucking material had different retraction settings that it liked so I was having to print retraction towers to dial it in and it was just a fucking pain. Now with direct drive I just set 1mm retraction for every material and it just works.
And I guess the most important thing I can tell anyone that reads my posts is this: If you think that all of this just seems too complicated and you were thinking that you might want to get a 3D printer but all my ramblings are dissuading you, ignore me. I take everything way too far and I really should put on complicator's gloves but I cut them up to use as part of an overcomplicated mechanism to do something that should be simple.
You don't need to do any of this shit. I take things too far. If you want to get a 3D printer and want cheap, go get an Ender3 V2 and have fun. If you can spend a bit more, get a CR-6 SE as it is pretty close to the same printer but includes some basic automatic bed leveling. If you can spend a grand then get the Prusa MK3+. You could expand that to the Prusa Mini at $400, but the build volume is significantly smaller than what is expected for some of the things you might find to print. In general, most models you find on Thingiverse will max out at ~235mm x 235mm bed size. The mini is 180mm x 180mm. You could easily find yourself running out of build volume if you only have the Prusa Mini.
Whatever printer you get, look for "silent stepper drivers" as a feature. The stepper noise of A4988 drivers is pretty loud. Not super loud, but well in the realm of getting annoying. Printers with silent stepper drivers are fairly silent. The rest of the noise they make is just fan noise which blends in to background noise pretty easily as long as the fans aren't obnoxiously loud. My Longer LK4 ended up getting some weird vibrating noise when the part cooling fan ran but that was a fairly easy fix.
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@Polygeekery Any of the lateral drive steppers good enough to do a non-linear push, but a cancelling waveform vs wobble?
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@Gribnit cut back on the mercury dosage, perhaps some chelation, then repost and I will try to answer.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Gribnit cut back on the mercury dosage, perhaps some chelation, then repost and I will try to answer.
Offset with tistismulants. So the high models with narrow base problem. A linear impulse from the lateral control will induce wobble. A cancelling waveform impulse will induce less wobble. Calculating a cancelling (vs amplifying) waveform is, the fun part!
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I have no idea why I still have friends.
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@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
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@boomzilla said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
3D printing is probably cheaper.
Not mentioned in TFA: Demand for plywood specifically, which has been spiking since last summer.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear Who buys lumber?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@boomzilla said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
3D printing is probably cheaper.
Not mentioned in TFA: Demand for plywood specifically, which has been spiking since last summer.
Well, you'd only need a single 1x4 from the looks of it.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@boomzilla said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
3D printing is probably cheaper.
Not mentioned in TFA: Demand for plywood specifically, which has been spiking since last summer.
What price would lumber have to hit for it to no longer be the "cheap building material to make 4-story apartment buildings out of"? Since the price of almost everything is rising, I guess concrete's price is doing similar silly things, but surely it's not tripling?
I found this other article, but it's clearly not talking about the same things as your article. It does mention 110% + another 28% for lumber, and 35% for concrete, so it seems like brutalism might be the style until lumber gets sane again.
Construction commodity prices rising | Business Observer
Hikes in the cost of lumber, copper and other necessary materials could result in higher rents and prices in 2021
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Demand for plywood specifically, which has been spiking since last summer.
Boarded-up windows?
Filed under: "Breaking" thread is
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@boomzilla said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
Of course. Or a spade bit, forstner bit, etc.
The problem is getting around to doing it. What I did took 5 minutes in Fusion 360 and then send off the print job.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@boomzilla said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery anyways it looks like a bit of lumber and a drill with a hole saw could get 'er done there.
Of course. Or a spade bit, forster bit, etc.
The problem is getting around to doing it. What I did took 5 minutes in Fusion 360 and then send off the print job.
Wow, it prints right onto the ceiling?
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
forstner bit
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@HardwareGeek I knew that already. Either autocorrect on my phone thought that it knew better or my mildly inebriated brain was unable to type it correctly.
I also feel like lately when Android updates, sometimes it moves things around slightly on their keyboard. For several years I could type quickly and accurately on Android keyboard. Then roughly coinciding with an update I started accidentally closing out the keyboard as I typed. Like they had increased the margins on the "key" that collapses the keyboard or closes out of menus.
I've given Google Assistant enough grief that it is not unpossible that their developers are targeting me.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@HardwareGeek I knew that already. Either autocorrect on my phone thought that it knew better or my mildly inebriated brain was unable to type it correctly.
I also feel like lately when Android updates, sometimes it moves things around slightly on their keyboard. For several years I could type quickly and accurately on Android keyboard. Then roughly coinciding with an update I started accidentally closing out the keyboard as I typed. Like they had increased the margins on the "key" that collapses the keyboard or closes out of menus.
I've given Google Assistant enough grief that it is not unpossible that their developers are targeting me.
I have finally succeeded, as of a couple days ago, in an important task. As soon as I got an Echo, I asked it, "Alexa, play me a memory, I'm not really sure how it goes, but it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes". And it went "b'leep".
So I kept asking it every couple days for maybe, I dunno, a year?
Well lately, it plays "Piano Man".
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Today's 3D printing tip: Always preview your sliced models. Always. Slicers do goofy shit sometimes.
So one of the puppies decided that a Duplo slide would make a good chew toy. Off to Thingiverse I go! So I find one model and the designed has two options. One with designed in supports and one without. Well, I find that models that have supports designed in are usually garbage, and are also probably pretty old and from before a time when slicers adequately generated automatic supports. So I grab the other one, import it in to my slicer and:
Well, that's a new one. I've imported stuff designed in inches that ended up tiny due to the slicer assuming units to be in millimeters. No fucking clue how a model becomes gigantic. But whatever. I don't feel like figuring out the scaling. I grab the other model, the one with the supports designed in to the STL:
That's better. Open a slicing 0.2mm slicing profile with light infill and tree supports turned on, slice model, upload to Repetier-Server (I'm really liking it so far, much better than OctoPrint in many ways, but lacking some features I really miss) and start the print. 20ish minutes later I check the webcam feed and it doesn't look right. It started to print one side and then after a millimeter or so only built up the other side of the print. That's odd. Let's check the GCode preview:
The dark gray banded areas are what will be printed. I have no clue what the light gray areas are but they seem to denote regions where the slicer knows something is but is for some reason choosing not to print them. I assume that those sections of the model are not manifold or something?
Always check your GCode preview. It can save trouble on print. In this case I would have only lost ~3 hours and 25g of filament, but it can really prevent heartache on long prints that use large quantities of material.
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Seems to be a Cura bug because PrusaSlicer fixes the STL when you import it.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
So one of the puppies decided that a Duplo slide would make a good chew toy. Off to Thingiverse I go!
Did you know that, at least as long as you don't do it too often, lego doesn't ask why you're ordering free replacement parts?
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@PleegWat true shit? I might have to give that go.
For the record I wasn't even aware that Lego offered free replacement parts.
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If you're new to 3D printing and have had issues with your prints, watch this:
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If you're new to buying manufactured goods and using them, there are many articles
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@mikeTheLiar said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
I was a far bigger dick to you than was ever warranted.
But that's the exact amount of being a dick that's warranted in every situation.
I must meditate on this.
ed. he must meditate on this, he says
ed. fuck. he's doing it. sorta
ed. wow he's awful at this
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@Luhmann said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery
so tell us ... how did you got fucked by an emu?This could include being struck by an emu, under the original root
fichen.
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I just got my tax return, and coincidentally Amazon showed me this inexpensive 3D printer, the GEEETECH Prusa I3 Pro W. I haven't been able to determine if it has quiet stepper drivers as mentioned in @Polygeekery 's giant post
, but as far as I can tell it's a decent kit for the price. Before I buy it, is there anything aside from that to watch out for?
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@hungrier remind me tomorrow and I will take a look at it.
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@hungrier said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
GEEETECH Prusa I3 Pro W. I haven't been able to determine if it has quiet stepper drivers as mentioned in @Polygeekery 's giant post , but as far as I can tell it's a decent kit for the price. Before I buy it, is there anything aside from that to watch out for?
I don't think that it has quiet stepper drivers, but it does have replaceable drivers and the board seems to be one of the better 8-bit boards on the market. But it is still an 8-bit board so higher printing speeds with arcs (lots of instructions to decode) will cause it to stall. Not a deal breaker though.
How DIY are you? Because it seems that part of the cost savings comes from it being a kit printer, meaning you will have to assemble the entire thing. It is basically a box of parts. Lots of assembly and lots of tweaking and tuning. Which is fine when you have some experience, but less so when you have NFC what you are doing yet.
The only other issue I see is the smallish build volume of 200 * 200 * 180. Not too small, but for instance I printed some self-watering planters a couple of weeks back and they barely fit on my firmware modified Ender3's as they were 235mm long. No reason you couldn't scale the model down to fit, but something to consider.
I do like that it has what looks like a Prusa MK2 direct drive extruder clone. That's a big plus. But unless you're printing TPU or PETG a Bowden can easily print really well with PLA or ABS.
If I were you I might take a look at the Ender3 on the Creality store or Amazon. The older version, non-Pro is the same price as the Geetech one that you linked,at least here in the USA. You still wouldn't have silent stepper drivers but you'd have a 220 * 220 * 250 build volume out of the box and an easy upgrade to an SKR Mini board which would get you silent steppers and the ability to add a BLTouch for automatic bed leveling, plus the Ender3 has massive aftermarket support if you really get in to things. That upgrade would also let you expand your build volume out to 235 * 235 * 250.
For the entry level market the Ender3 is hard to beat and instead of a box of parts you only have to bolt together the X gantry, the Z gantry and plug in a few wires. I imagine the one you're looking at would take several hours of assembly and potentially many more of calibration.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
silent stepper drivers
To further clarify, silent steppers are not mandatory. They are however a pretty significant convenience. My 3D printing area sort of adjoins my office. Before I switched I could easily hear the stepper noise through the walls when my printers were running. It isn't really that loud, but it is noticeable. If you live in an apartment of smaller home where you will have to be in the same room as your printer, and you are sensitive to noise it might become more mandatory. Different strokes for different folks.
When I build new printers, before they to in the rack I usually assemble them on a table here in my office so that I can make changes to firmware, reupload, see what I fucked up in this iteration, reupload, the cycle continues until everything is correct or I decide to say fuck it and move on. Those printers are 4' behind where I am typing this right now and with good fans I cannot even hear them running. There might be some whirring noise as they home but after that, very nearly completely silent.
The other benefit is that the most common non-silent stepper drivers you will get on a printer are A4988 drivers. They are cheap, have a long track record and are reliable. But they will also introduce print artifacts akin to ghosting. New people to 3D printing probably won't notice, it isn't that bad, but TMC2208 and TMC2209 and other variants don't have those artifacts.
Before I upgraded my Longer LK4 to a SKR board so I could run dual extrusion I printed a bunch of drawer bins to organize stuff in my shop and reloading areas. They were just open top boxes with a radius on all corners that I printed with a 0.8mm nozzle in vase mode so they would print quickly. Four straight vertical sides, which is where the A4988 artifacts show the worst. I can easily pick out every single one that was printed with A4988 drivers, no problem.
They don't look bad, they look perfectly fine, but the ones printed with TMC drivers are basically perfectly smooth on the sides and the A4988 ones have some salmon skin.
Here a result from GIS that shows the difference:
They're called salmon skin artifacts and are intrinsic to the A4988.
The TMC2209 is currently the favorite stepper driver. You get StealthChop (silent stepper mode), StallGuard (lets you do sensorless homing on X and Y without using endstops, which is a plus if you are wiring your own printer), and they handle higher amperages and have a lower resistance so at any given driver output they will run cooler than most other drivers. None of the Trinamic drivers have any noticeable print artifacts like is seen with the A4988.
The only other driver that might beat the TMC2209 are the TMC5130 and TMC5160. They have the ability to detect the current abnormalities that occur when you lose steps and can alert your firmware to the potential step loss. Then your firmware will rehome X and Y and resume your print, which could prevent layer shifts.
Layer shift can happen if you your print head crashes in to the object you are printing. This is more common when printing in ABS, which will curl up from the print bed and cause an obstruction. 3D printers are blind. Until they home they have no idea where they are in space, and if they hit an obstruction that causes them to lose steps they will continue printing but offset by the number of lost steps. Closed loop steppers are starting to come on the market, but they are currently comparatively expensive (~$50/per versus ~$12/per) and seem to be fiddly to setup. Most require programming via USB. When they get the price down and are able to have the parameters programmed via SPI or something else, they will likely become more popular. But honestly, step loss isn't that common of an occurrence. Even if it does happen, chances are your part is fucked anyway because the bottom surface will be curled all to shit anyway.
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@Polygeekery I'm ok with DIY, and I like to tinker around with stuff so that part isn't really a problem for me. But I looked around a bit and it seems that Geeetech units have/had a problem with bent rods. Not sure how common that is, or if it's been addressed in the past couple years, but it does give me some pause.
All the Ender units I've seen so far on Amazon are quite a bit more expensive (non-Pro Ender 3 from the Creality store is $282, and there's a Pro model for $327, discounted from $399.
I'm in and out of meetings all morning, but I'll look at it some more when I have time.
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@hungrier said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
All the Ender units I've seen so far on Amazon are quite a bit more expensive (non-Pro Ender 3 from the Creality store is $282, and there's a Pro model for $327, discounted from $399.
Man, the prices are a lot higher in Canada.
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@Polygeekery well yeah. Consider the following:
- Low low prices!
- ⧘Low low prices!⧙
- ⦕Low low prices!⦖
There's evidently something not quite polite about center-market or below.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
where you will have to be in the same room as you
Yes, this is a problem I frequently suffer from.
How DIY are you? Because it seems that part of the cost savings comes from it being a kit printer, meaning you will have to assemble the entire thing. It is basically a box of parts. Lots of assembly and lots of tweaking and tuning. Which is fine when you have some experience, but less so when you have NFC what you are doing yet.
I definitively had problems with this in the beginning. Rebuilt the kit for the fourth time from scratch now (between debugging+relocating), and things are fairly reliable at this point. But, damn, things were frustrating and error prone in the beginning (see posts in this thread).
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@cvi said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
where you will have to be in the same room as you
Yes, this is a problem I frequently suffer from.
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@cvi said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
I suffered from this in the beginning. Rebuilt the kit for the fourth time from scratch now (between debugging+relocating), and things are fairly reliable at this point. But, damn, things were frustrating and error prone in the beginning (see posts in this thread).
Yeah, when I saw that it was a kit and many of the reviews said it needed tweaking and tuning to print correctly I thought of that. Now it is something I could most likely troubleshoot and figure out pretty quickly. When I was first starting, not knowing what I did not know, I probably would have been super frustrated.
I spent far too long troubleshooting a BLTouch issue this weekend on a new build. Marlin works great, when it works. But when there is any sort of failure it does not give you any meaningful information. It just kept telling me there was a BLTouch error. It had worked right before I swapped stepper drivers (I tried to run TMC2208's on Z and extruder, but the extruder one kept overheating). It turned out that the BLTouch input to the Z max endstop had come slightly loose and wasn't making connection. That seems like something the firmware could tell you, but it doesn't.
Another tip for noobs, stay away from any board that uses poly fuses. They can end up in a strange state where they have not tripped, but just run high impedance, causing all sorts of interesting errors. The reason I finally replaced the board on the Longer LK4 was because I thought I had ruined a stepper driver or something, causing the extruder to not work well. I swapped everything that I could, even the stepper motor, but it would just randomly either stop extruding or start underextruding horribly. So I put in a SKR board and everything worked great.
So the stock board sat on my desk for a while and then I saw mention of the RAMPS board having weird issues due to the polyfuses and decided to check it out. Sure enough, that was it. Failing polyfuse that had not failed quite far enough. That
caused me to waste a fair amount of filament. Had I known what I know now I could have diagnosed it pretty easily and swapped out the board a lot earlier.
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@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Man, the prices are a lot higher in Canada.
Yes, but the temperature is a lot lower, so it all evens out in the end
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@TimeBandit said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
@Polygeekery said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
Man, the prices are a lot higher in Canada.
Yes, but the temperature is a lot lower, so it all evens out in the end
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@Polygeekery The most insidious problem that I had was a tiny screw (threaded only, no head) had come loose in the extruder and was randomly blocking the motor axle from rotating (mostly in one direction only!). I only found it when fully disassembling and reassembling the extruder, and even then it was partially hidden away due to being pushed into the plastic housing.
Lots of problems were related to belts slipping and losing steps. Still haven't quite figured out what caused it. It doesn't happen anymore --*knocks on wood*-- but that's after a full rebuild, printing my own sliders and replacing the brass bushings with some special plastic ones.
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@cvi said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
tiny screw (threaded only, no head) had come loose in the extruder and was randomly blocking the motor axle from rotating (mostly in one direction only!).
Thanks! I am going to try to figure out: how to arrange for a software bug to manifest in an analogous fashion, and then how I might have noticed and prevented it - then implement an improved version of the bug that is harder to notice and prevent.
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@cvi said in Today in Blakeyrat is always several years behind in every tech trend news...:
replacing the brass bushings with some special plastic ones
Brass bushings where? Are they running brass bushings on the linear rods?
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@Polygeekery Yes.
Edit: Here's a link to the printer in question. https://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=438412&country=us&lang=en. I hope "bushing" is the correct term for those little brass bits that run along the steel rails. It's a bit outside of my day-to-day vocabulary.
Edit2: I hit all the wrong buttons.
