help-with-3dprinting

[ocean orbit]

yeah looks like a reough version of fusion

i could probnably work with it

[balmy pulsar]

so, i need to figure out how to roll some coloured epoxy out like a pie dough and laminate it on top of a guitar. hmm

[faint sky]

can you make epoxy that thick? by the time it gets to be that thick it's probably really close to hardening.

[ocean orbit]

roll it to the right thickness with a couple of guides and then drape it ontop?

yeah if its like, liquid resin you would struggle

[balmy pulsar]

yeah im thinking guides

its not liguid, it is a "dough"

[ocean orbit]

if its more putty you could roll it with guides to get a uniform length

er, uniform thickness

[balmy pulsar]

but ive never tried to roll it

id need it to be about 2mm

and then not smush it up too much when i lay it on.

i will cnc it to about 1.5mm after curing

[balmy pulsar]

https://www.smooth-on.com/products/free-form-sculpt/?pk_campaign=dynamicsearch&pk_kwd=

[ocean orbit]

thats all i would do, works for smaller sections of epoxy putty

idk about a large section

[balmy pulsar]

yeah. i do that for pies.

[ocean orbit]

you could make up a frame to hold the flat sheet and then drape it over the body

exactly 😄

[balmy pulsar]

but this stuff is super sticky

[ocean orbit]

work out a good release for it, there will be some sort of option for sure

if you roll it onto a plastic sheet ytou can then use that as a backing for draping it over your guitar

and then mill off the back sheet

[balmy pulsar]

could work yeah. seran wrap

[ocean orbit]

something liek that, only tricky bit is not stickign it to the rolling pin 😛

[balmy pulsar]

yeah

and not using my food rolling pin

hehehe

gonna do 3 colours. pale blue, purple, and i think black

[faint sky]

interesting, didn't know that kind of thing existed. well, there's JB-Weld but even that is more of a liquid.

[balmy pulsar]

yeah. the art paste epoxies are somewhat "new"

they are pretty friendly to work with

and cnc well. it is what i used for the keycap inlays

on the guitar, the principle is to have a hard durable top that isnt paint.

cncing from plastic is an option, but the colours and types are limited and tey are expensive

resin laminated paper is another option

but also, pretty expensive

the putty would maybe $15 per guitar top, which is pretty cheap

(thse guitars are tiny)

[ocean orbit]

Do a test first, some of those putties become less sticky as they start to cure

Might be a sweet spot

[balmy pulsar]

no, this one gets more sticky as it warms up

hmm. maybe put it in the fridge

that might be the right answer actually. fridge it, then roll out, fridge again, then position and as it warms up, press it in. it goes into the oven at 40c for an hour to cure

[ocean orbit]

Experiment time

[balmy pulsar]

yup

alternatively i can make one form aluminium. ha.

25mm thick plate.

no waste there

😛

[ocean orbit]

Metal af

[balmy pulsar]

heavy

[shy kelp]

The p1s doesn't have an option to auto print at 166% Speed?
There's the one click option from the slicer, but at the start, it often ignores/overwrites what you setted

[unborn imp]

Anyone have a idea on how to make cura slice faster? I'm scaling models to 300% because I have a elegoo neptune max but it's taking around 15 mins on the low end to slice...
I have a ryzen 7 5800x processor if that is any correlation to why it's going slow

[coarse coral]

5800x is a nice CPU, it shouldn't be taking so long to slice. I've seen some slices take a minute or two maybe three at a push but 15 minutes is long. I recommend removing all your settings and trying with defaults. You might want to export your settings if you've customised that first.

If you're still getting so long to slice with defaults I'd like to see what you're slicing.

Cura may use GPU for sliding, what GPU do you have?

[balmy pulsar]

slicing will slow down with sixe of model, and with number of layers, thicker walls, tops and bottoms, etc. anything where it has to do math.

ive had some models take several minutes cause i also have a jumbo large printer (chiron)

[vivid helm]

Slicing is mostly CPU-constrained.

[unborn imp]

Rtx 3060ti

[coarse coral]

Yeh there shouldn't be an issue with that I had a 1060 and never had longer than 3 mins. With ryzen 1700x and 1060

[unborn imp]

I think it might be because of the vert count of the files...

These both took over 10 mins to slice

But I'm also slicing at 0.12-0.2 rez

[keen raft]

Does this happen with other models?

[coarse coral]

It's also textured that might add significant time. I think it's Ariel's flippers taking all the extra time.

I'd say the same does it happen with other models, like boxes or buildings with fairly simple geometry and no major texturing?

Is there no setting in cura to increase threads or similar?

[vocal flax]

I think this is normal behavoir. Your usage is outside of the intended scenario, and not optimized for it. I can only assume how is annoying it is but I want to remind the days (it might be only me that remembers those times) when slicing normal sized cubes took 5 minutes maybe more.

[terse berry]

Hi everyone, i tried to download the Fusion 360 Files for the Guardian Shield+ Zelda Breath of the Files, it just says "Unauthorized". Could anyone Help me? This is the link to the Project: https://learn.adafruit.com/guardian-shield-zelda-breath-of-the-wild/3d-printing

[faint sky]

Sharing Fusion360 files was a feature that only worked for a while. Most of them don't work anymore. You can get the STL files from Thingiverse. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2461486

I submitted some feedback on that project guide. Hopefully they'll add it to Printables at least. Sometimes they don't make the Fusion360 files available anymore anyway only the STL's. You can convert an STL back into a solid object by converting the mesh to a solid. Recommend you look up some resources on converting mesh to solid with Fusion360 if you intend to change anything with the design.

[terse berry]

Yeah already done this with other model but it is easy with the 360 files 😄

[placid grail]

so what are the precautions for the filament that has been marinating on my 3d printer for the last 4 months ? print a small piece ? buy another ? am I going to get a lot of steam or something ?

[keen raft]

Print a test piece and see what happens. It's not going to explode 😉

If the filament is really moist, you might hear a very distinct crackling or sputtering sound from the extruder and it'll leak a lot more than usual. It's not unsafe to use like this, but the print quality will be bad.

[placid grail]

yeah I kinda expect it but I dont really have ways to dry it or afford to buy another filament roll atm. So Im hoping I can still make something out of it

Possibly something bigger so that the print quality will matter less for details/structural strength

[keen raft]

Do you have a heated bed?

[placid grail]

hum let me check

Max. heating bed temperature 100 °C (212 oF). So I guess yes

[keen raft]

You can use that to dry it. Get a box that fits on or over the bed and is larger than the roll, make some ventilation holes at the top and bottom, put the filament roll on your bed and the box on top of it so that convection pushes the air through the holes. 40-45°C should work for PLA. Obviously you shouldn't leave this unattended.

But you should do a test print first. If you're happy with the results, you can just use it as is, after all.

[placid grail]

couldnt I use my oven at 40-45oC as well with a fan blowing into it ?

Or maybe my bathroom with an heater and dehumidifier I mean this is probably the same concept as air drying clothes

[keen raft]

People seem to agree that you don't want filament in your oven, but theoretically any heat source would work, as long as you cycle the air (which is something that many professional filament dryers don't do, ironically)

Not sure about dehumidifiers. Maybe the heat is relevant for pushing moisture out of the filament.

[ocean orbit]

dont use your oven, the temperature setting on it is usually only vaguely accurate and even if the filament is safe you have no idea what the spool is made of. Plus i have seen about 30 pictures of people drying their filament in the oven and the filament has been fine but the spool itself has melted or warped

[ocean orbit]

etc etc etc 😛

[keen raft]

You're right about the temperature control possibly being imprecise and the food safety aspects, but these spools do survive the usual drying temperatures easily, otherwise they would also melt when put in a filament dryer. If they melt inside an oven, the temperature is too high.

I'd say it's a matter of common sense that you can only use your oven if the scale actually extends to below your desired drying temperature. If it only starts at 50°C, then you obviously can't use it to achieve 40°C 😉

[ocean orbit]

One explanation for this behaviour is that in an electric oven the temperature can vary throughout the volume and that the top of the spool being closer to the heating element gets a lot hotter, resulting in one side of the spool melting or deforming. Since many of these happen while people swear they had the temperature set correctly I am open to this interpretation. But I will happily concede many people have used this method successfully

[keen raft]

That certainly sounds like a good explanation. Black spools would be particularly sensitive to this, because they absorb more of the thermal radiation.

[faint sky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3jvuq-uq8

[keen raft]

Yeah that's what I was referring to earlier 😉

It works surprisingly well!

[faint sky]

Do not use filament in an oven that you also cook food with... that's just universally a bad idea.

Can you put filament and dry it in an oven successfully? Sure but the odds are not in your favor.

[balmy pulsar]

i bought a $39 toaster oven for filament. it has a "warm" setting you can leave on for hours or days safely.

a regular house oven often doesnt go below 180f which is way too hot

[placid grail]

Lol seems like I'm f*** and maybe broke my 3d printer...

Let it ran for 4 mins, nothing seems to have come out despite the 170oC filament temperature

I guess Ill have to replace the nozzle or something now...

ps: yeah Im trying to find a way to take a picture, smartphone camera is broken

pla+ 1.75mm black 210 to 270oC printing temp. Im going to wait for help before I make it worse. Tried "But you should do a test print first. If you're happy with the results, you can just use it as is, after all." with the buddha that came with it sliced at 180oC by elegoo

[ocean orbit]

i doubt you broke anything tbh

i would heat it up to like 200-210 and try and push the filament through manually, gently

see if the nozzle is blocked

[shy kelp]

No luck into finding just the tiny pcb and the fftc cable?
https://eu.store.bambulab.com/en-it/products/extruder-filament-sensor-p1-series
I managed to break it off when trying to unclog the extruder

[faint sky]

Warm up the nozzle and clean it with a dry rag. That much build up on the nozzle indicates over extrusion issue which can lead to clogs. If nothing is printing when it should be then that is most likely a clog. Clogs typically happen due to too low of a z-offset or over extrusion that eventually leads to backpressure, too much back pressure from over extrusion is the most common cause for clogs.

[placid grail]

I havent used my filament in 4 months I suspect it might be wet dunno if that could explain the clog

[faint sky]

depends on how you've stored it and what type of filament. very wet filament will hiss and spurt a little as steam is released. it will be noticeable looking at the tip closely.

[keen raft]

Is there a reason for printing at 180°C if the filament is for 210...270°C?

[placid grail]

It's just what the buddha is sliced at by elegoo so I just didn't know better. But yeah when I typed it I realized I was pretty stupid. I have to research how to warm up the nuzzle but please be patient with me I had a vehicle accident and my mobility is limited and I'm in pain for still some weeks so it might take me some time to try to do something about it

[keen raft]

If your print temperature is too low, the filament is more viscous and less sticky. The printer will have a harder time extruding it, until it cant extrude at all. It might even grind itself into the filament, this would persist as an extrusion issue even after raising the temperature until you manually give it a push. The filament will have a harder time sticking to both the print bed and itself when it's colder, the former leading to failed first layers and the latter leading to weak prints that break along the layer lines. Although I would dare guess that a wrong Z offset or dirty bed might play a role as well, if what we're seeing on the nozzle is indeed what's left of the first layer.

It is also absolutely possible that this filament will print fine at a setting of 180°C (remember we're only talking about what your printer thinks are 180°C and it may be way off) and that something like a wrong Z offset is the only issue here.

[placid grail]

I havent used the printer for 4 months and the bed was fine 4 months ago and we set it together and it printed the tool holder to my satisfaction. But the buddha was made for a demo white filament not my black pla+ one

[keen raft]

Hence my question whether this was intentional. You might have printed the same file with the same filament before with a different result.

[placid grail]

do you think if I retry it with the filament at 250oC it should unclog it or I must do this manually ?

[keen raft]

There doesn't have to be a blockage at all. It's just a possibility.

[placid grail]

well lot of plastic stuck on the nozzle and removed what I could but dont know if anything is stuck inside it

[keen raft]

It's an extruder. There's supposed to be plastic in it 😉

[placid grail]

Ill try a print that has worked before with that filament at 210oC (filament says 200 to 230oC) and 65oC bed. Let me know if you need oF

ie: first layer calibration model you guys had me print 4 months ago

[keen raft]

If you want to do a quick test, raise the print head a little, heat the nozzle up to printing temperature (210°C sounds reasonable). Then either release the spring tension on the extruder and manually push the filament through or use the firmware to extrude some for you. If it comes out in a straight line, the nozzle probably isn't blocked. If it curls back up, it probably is (partially, anyway).

And if there is a blockage, then a new nozzle is the easiest fix, unless it's a really expensive one. I wouldn't bother trying to unblock any of the Chinesium types.

[placid grail]

there seems there was no blockage. The printer just ejected around 9 inches of filament before printing

not seeing any splurge or blobs on the print either

[keen raft]

Glad to hear it!

[placid grail]

me too! I have 6 months left on my solidworks sub and I want to learn it before I give up on it (but training is super hard to find because it's never for the cloud version) and learning ltspice is my new year eve resolution as well

and being able to make my own enclosures, mountings, fixtures etc is a huge part of my motivation to not give up electronics

thanks a lot for your help! 🙂

[keen raft]

You're welcome!

[coarse thistle]

I found this laser engraver attachment for Ender 3 3D printers, but is this safe to engrave polished metal with? I have a back plate of an iPod Classic that I'd like to engrave a custom design on and I'm not too familiar with laser cutting/engraving but have some past experience with doing it with wood. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6MD1SH1

It's 5 watts and it also says in the title that it can work with metal, but I don't know if there's any specific precautions I need to follow. I was going to work with the local electronics/CNC studio staff to get more familiar with laser cutting and engraving and I probably will in the future, but this seems a lot different than the big industrial cutters they have.

[vivid helm]

No. It is not safe. Any unenclosed laser should be considered dangerous.

Rule of thumb: if it is strong enough to engrave or burn a hole in something, it is definitely powerful enough to

1. Burn a hole in your retina
2. Burn a hole in somebody else's retina
3. Burn a hole in your pet's retina

[coarse thistle]

That's what I was thinking. The laser has an enclosure thing, but it's small and only covers the laser part. Maybe I should get a full enclosure to go with it to be safe.

I'd rather not pay $129 just to go blind

[vivid helm]

Let me put it another way: awhile back Creality took their engraver to a 3d printing event and proceeded to run it unenclosed. Creality doesn't care about anyone's safety. I would recommend skipping it.

[coarse thistle]

Oh wow, that's rough. Did they at least get in trouble for it?

I'm just looking for something that can laser etch designs on stainless steel, whether it can do it with just a laser or needs a coating of etchant. Some people have said I'd need a fiber laser to do that and others are saying they've done with with a 5W diode laser with no problems. So I'm not sure what to trust.

Also on a bit of a budget at the moment, but if it's out of my price range I understand and can probably just save up for it or use the new engraver at the local art studio.

[vivid helm]

I would recommend using the existing one.

[coarse thistle]

Yeah I'll probably stick to that, I still need to learn how to properly and safely operate it on my own too so having an experienced staff member direct me sounds a lot better than going off of a poorly translated manual.

I'll probably ask them about the engraver module I sent earlier too, maybe there's an alternative to it with proper safety precautions? I'm unsure.

[vivid helm]

None that I'm aware of, and I have looked.

Anyone making decent engravers fully encloses them.

And adds fume extraction.

[stable zealot]

Wondering if anyone here could help me with a CAD problem. I've been using CAD for a long time and generally have zero issues copying and making parts. This simple simple cube has me scratching my head though. How would y'all attack this problem?

It's one of those "This is so simple, but also just weird enough that I'm not sure how to go at it." kind of problems. Not even sure where to start sketching though, the angles have me a little thrown. I'm not sure if I should be doing offset and angled sketches or...idk. I guess maybe cuts along a path might be the way? Ugh this is frustrating.

lofting?

[loud silo]

These all look like tilted planes, so you add each plane and delete everything on one side. I have only used TinkerCAD, which is really simple, but it could do this easily, for example.

[stable zealot]

I guess I'm just not sure how that's done in Alibre which I'm moving to after fusion360

switching CAD is a pain

Kind of here at the moment

[faint sky]

I could tell you how to do it in Fusion360, no idea about Alibre. :/

[toxic kite]

subtract some oddly angled cubes, rub a bit of trig on it?

[faint sky]

It's pretty much what Danh said. Sketch the lines into the cube and delete the faces. When properly snapped it shouldn't take more than a minute in Fusion360. I know that's not helpful. Maybe there's someway to translate that into Alibre?

[stable zealot]

I ended up doing the offset planes, but the lofting tools didn't work, I made what I think might have lofted in fusion

didn't work in Alibre

I'm not sure how I would have done it in Fusion either though

[faint sky]

looks pretty close to me

[stable zealot]

not offset, but planes, it's the same, 100%

@toxic kite I was trying to avoid doing math 😛

[faint sky]

you would create a sketch and use lines to draw to each point in 3d space.

[stable zealot]

man that's frustrating though

?

OH

[faint sky]

offset planes are a good idea for getting the exact measurements correct.

[stable zealot]

@faint sky shouldn't I be able to loft between the red face and the blue face?

Is solidworks a rather "Do sketch, then feature that sketch" kind of workflow?

I haven't touched it in a while, but what I loved about fusion was the ability to use existing geometry instead of doing everything with sketches

like...autodesk really nailed it with that

FreeCAD on the other hand will break if you think about using anything other than a sketch to do something

[toxic kite]

totally don't blame you, trig is alien stuff

[stable zealot]

Alibre seems somewhere in the middle. Like I can't seem to revolve a FACE but I can revolve a sketch

Anyway, thanks @toxic kite @loud silo @faint sky y'all rock.

[faint sky]

i'm not as familiar with loft as i am filet, chamfer, and sweep. I just tried it and yes it was more of a pain than I thought it'd be.

you can do it without offset planes but it's a bigger pain to deal with as you'd have to make the shape on 3 faces line up just right... and you'd likely end up redoing it with offset planes again for accuracy anyway.

[stable zealot]

gotcha

I just had this weird thing I had to cut away

well I ended up drawing that shape and then extruding to the 30mm mark, then it had some overhang I just cut away

[vocal flax]

The answer is not loft in this case

I will go ahead and say %90 of time anything straight doesnt involve loft

if its smooth nonplanar ,surface then its loft

[ocean orbit]

i would love a set of "make this object" puzzles to get better at CAD

[stable zealot]

@ocean orbit studycadcam.com or just google 'studycadcam' blogspot

[vivid helm]

Also competitions on printables

[ocean orbit]

Oh wow these look like exactly what I wanted

Thanks!

[faint sky]

I found it easier to setup the offset planes first. Extrude cut a rectangle, then fill in the rest with sketch lines to create the final shape. In this case I didn't find more or less efficient to delete the final faces because you have to draw the sketch lines anyway so might as well just have the sketch lines create the shape.

[shy kelp]

I can't get a decent desktop sized cnc for metal (alluminum / "cheap" stuff) for like ~1k right?
I was looking at printnc, but sourcing seems to be a pain

[tall locust]

hey y’all, i’m only on my second day of printer ownership so sorry for the noob question, but what’s the cause of these wrinkles/waves? they only seem to occur on diagonals on top/bottom surfaces

[keen raft]

Could be overextrusion. Make sure you've set the filament diameter correctly, that there aren't any extrusion factors >1 and check that the extruder actually moves the correct amount (i.e. if you extrude 100mm, exactly 100mm should go in).

[tall locust]

i just checked and didn't see anything you mentioned

i'm using an Ender 3 v3 and Creality filament, so i'd be surprised if the default extruder settings were wrong

could overextrusion also cause prints to stick to the bed? that's the other problem i had. it was bad - like, put-it-in-the-freezer-for-an-hour-and-go-at-it-with-a-knife-and-it-still-won't-release kind of bad

i fixed that one by increasing initial layer height but it could very well be a different problem

[keen raft]

Nothing would surprise me with any of the Chinese brands 😉

[tall locust]

fair enough. i'd heard these new Enders pretty much work out of the box (which it mostly has), which is why i got it

[keen raft]

That is probably the main reason, yes.

[tall locust]

as in layer height was likely causing the sticking?

[keen raft]

Not layer height per se, but the first layer being too thin. Usually this is not because of a layer height setting, but because of a wrong Z offset (too low, in this case). If the printer expects a clearance of 0.2mm and extrudes an appropriate amount of filament for that, but you really only have 0.1mm, the material is pressed into the bed structure way too hard. Some excess material also squeezes out the sides and causes issues for the following layer, this looks a bit like overextrusion but it wouldn't be visible many layers up on your top surface.

[tall locust]

ah, that makes sense

in fact a quick half-related google search brought me to a video talking about how the v3's auto-leveling sucks, so that could very well be part of it

guess i'm spending today calibrating everything. i was probably too naive in trusting the factory :P thanks for the help!

[keen raft]

Well I don't know the specific machine or its software, but both their BLTouch clone and Sprite extruder are actually pretty good, so you should be able to get decent results from the printer.

[ocean orbit]

i still manually level my printer with paper like an ANIMAL

[keen raft]

Yeah, getting the Z offset right is crucial 😉

[ocean orbit]

i have an ender3 v2 and it came with an awful levelling probe i immediately yeeted

[keen raft]

Doesn't the V2 also have a CRTouch probe? I found that to be quite good. Certainly not worse than the BLTouch.

[ocean orbit]

nah, it might NOW but when i bought it it came with a particularly shoddy inductive probe

is it inductive?

Capacitive

tjhats the one

anyway the one included in my kit was famously garbage

it takes me a few minutes to level with paper anyway and i print on blue tape for laziness so ive never had a problem

[keen raft]

😄

[ocean orbit]

might upgrade in a year or two

id like something that can push plastic a bit faster mainly, maybe get a core xy or something

[tall locust]

what i’ve read is that it is very good once set up, and way easier to set up than the older models, but still not out-the-box like quite a few reviews implied/said

the example gcode included actually was near perfect with the default settings though

[ocean orbit]

i will say if you are getting wavy lines on the bottom layers ity might be your nozzle is a little close, thats can do it

but if its top layers as well id definatly wonder if its overextruding

[keen raft]

No printer works right out of the box, except maybe a few of the very pricey ones. But you'll certainly notice that on the price tag.

[ocean orbit]

my e3v2 has been absolutely abused lol

but apparently the quality control on them is so bad some peoples just dont work lol

[arctic dragon]

I would argue against this, as there are plenty of such printers with very different tradeoffs made in exchange for out-of-box functionality. Smaller print volumes, less compatibility, etc…

[keen raft]

Are we talking about the same out-of-the-box experience here? What I mean by it is about what you'd expect from a paper printer, where you don't have to do anything except put paper in it and can't really do anything wrong either.

Many printers are easy to set up these days, but most aren't "foolproof" in that same sense

[arctic dragon]

Last I checked, BambuLab is pretty close to that. I believe other printers existed prior, but even with a paper printer you generally need to remove some packaging material and run a printhead cleaning.

It’s probably true that this is less common in the Ender 3 price range, but printers like creality sermoon and flash forge creator were designed to simplify setup to a similar degree.

[keen raft]

But these are all way more expensive.

[arctic dragon]

Right. Flashforge adventurer 3 is out-of-box ready for 350, comparable to a modern Ender 3. Nothing comes close to a microcenter classic Ender 3 at 99usd haha

It’s probably not going much lower than that for a fully enclosed printer today, but it could still happen in the future.

[keen raft]

I'm certainly looking forward to that! 😄

[tall locust]

trying to fix my wavy prints has sent me on a bed leveling adventure. turns out my bed was tilted by over half a millimeter corner-to-corner in each direction, so i used my laser cutter's metal focusing nugget and some printed washers to get it just about perfect

we'll see if that at least helps with the sticking

[ocean orbit]

i should point out when we talk about levelling we mean level in relation to the nozzle, not in relation to the floor or w/e

"levelling" is something of a misnomer, tramming is possibly more accurate

i say this because if you adjusted the bed to sit "flat" on your printer you will need to redo any auto levelling

[tall locust]

ah yeah tramming is what i was talking about

[balmy pulsar]

tram is actually surprisingly important on a printer, cause it can cause the extrusion to be pushed sideways

[faint sky]

that is quite impressive results for day 2. don't expect 3d printed parts to be perfect, they're good for prototyping.

calibration shapes plugin will allow you to dial in your settings though from what i can see the results are very good so far.

[tall locust]

thanks :) yeah the part is still totally usable, and it’s not worth the time or filament to redo it. it’s just 1/4 of a screwdriver tray. i want to get pretty precise though as one of the main things that got me interested in 3D was miniature kinetic sculptures, where tolerances matter a lot

i’ll check out calibration shapes

[ocean orbit]

you can get pretty accurate with a printer then you can finish to higher degrees of accuracy

lil bit of sanding etc

[sonic owl]

anyone have a 3d model of housing for adafruit chips specifically feather s3 and itsybitsy nrf52840

[ocean orbit]

Do you mean a case?

[loud silo]

https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-case-for-adafruit-feather

[sonic owl]

thank you

[coarse coral]

Not sure where to post this, but if I printed some pla and covered one side with kapton tape, would that provide enough insulation to solder through hole components?

Basically so the plastic doesn't melt 🫠

[ocean orbit]

as in, solder components against the plastic/kapton?

im pretty sure it wouildnt be enough

annoyinglyu i have some kapton somewhere but idk where or i would test it for you

[vocal flax]

My guess is pla probably will soften maybe slight deformation but mostly intact and usable (depending on application) after coolsdown

[coarse coral]

I might give it a try or come up with some other idea. A custom PCB would be overkill probably

[ocean orbit]

what is the use case?

[coarse coral]

Just a raspberry pi handheld (pi4)

I did one before but decided to make it again with a bigger screen and try to find better switches etc

[ocean orbit]

right that sounds cool but why do you need to solder against PLA?

[coarse coral]

Within the case I have standoffs , on which I will attach a PCB like print. On this middle piece I can mount my buttons and sticks

[ocean orbit]

ahh

[coarse coral]

I can glue the buttons, but yeh the buttons will still need wires

[ocean orbit]

have you considered perfboard?

[coarse coral]

Yes

Actually it was part of version 1

Maybe I'll think about that again

[vocal flax]

If its something i can design and layout for within 2 days i always go for custom pcbs

but I have facility to manufacture in house (literally)

Generally speaking all my custom PCBs just worked (except one that I didn't have know how and rushed.) On the other hand I have so much scrap for parts perfboards

[coarse coral]

Yeh I did a kicad for a board but with my hardware changing in different ways and my design based on a screen mounted to the PCB I felt it was too risky and easily a waste if I get dimensions wrong which I have a habit of doing

It would be so much easier to assemble on a custom PCB if I got it all accurate but I feel I won't so I'll just try the pla and kapton tape but I'm kinda over the custom handheld stuff

But I do know that I should stick with the pi sugar. Those little charge circuits have never worked for me

I would love to do this with a pi5 but I don't see any news anywhere about portable power due to the requirements of pi5

[ocean orbit]

it would be good to get some draw measurements under heavy load for the pi5

[toxic kite]

a few watts more than the pi4, under max load, I think? most of the increased PSU is to support USB devices, I also think.

[ocean orbit]

so you could posibly do it but you would still want a hefty supply

[toxic kite]

for the same levels of compute, it draws less power

[ocean orbit]

yeah, minimum amp recommended looks like 3amps

[toxic kite]

plan on overclocking it?

[ocean orbit]

dont even plan on buying one

im just curious and thinking of how i would power the darn thing

[toxic kite]

it might underclock itsself if it reaches an undervolt situation

[ocean orbit]

most likely does, depends if you need it at full spec for your use case scenario though

a lot of the basic lipo boards everyone sells do a max of 2amps lol

[coarse coral]

Pi sugar puts out 5v/2.5a max

[ocean orbit]

yeah 5V5A is super weiord

[coarse coral]

It would be so nice from an emulation view to have a pi5 in this but I just don't know. Maybe someone is working on something. But with that power draw a 5000mah battery basically needs to be double to get reasonable hours with a screen attached

But I don't know much

[ocean orbit]

gonna be a chunky battery if you are running a handheld at 5A lol

[toxic kite]

if you draw 5A, and you care, you might be doing something wrongish

[ocean orbit]

yeah i dont think even at heavy load without USB devices you wont hit 5A

but still

[toxic kite]

USB limit is 1.6A with a 5A supply, so pi itsself should be max 3.4A

USB limit is at 0.6A at 3A supply

[coarse coral]

Like I've seen people use the pi 4 power supply on the pi 5 and the os will say it's undervolting. It works but that's not good at all, since I was able to fry the 3d chip on a pi 4 whilst ignoring under volt messages

[placid grail]

My alleged 10Ah powerbank with usb/usb-c should support 5A for 2 hours but it's kinda big for a small handheld. Cant see how I could draw 5A in public thought especially without an hdmi monitor. Iwas going to joke rpi4 for portable 3d printer but it exists so 😦

[ocean orbit]

does your powerbank actually supply 5amps tho

[placid grail]

good question. Id have to find the manual. I know it works with the rpi 4 or I wouldnt have bought it

says 5V@3A. But again it wasn't proven in court neither was 10Ah. But since it has 4 outputs at 2-3A each I can power multiple MCU with it or an rpi/mcu and that was the point. But I think this is starting to get offtopic from since mentionning rpi 15 lines ago

Id be happy to discuss it in another channel

[vocal flax]

Small tip on getting dimensions right. Print your layout and do test fit. Most you'll lose is a piece of paper

[coarse coral]

Thanks for the tip @vocal flax I always find new ways to get things wrong lol

[sudden lion]

Anyone here have a flashforge creator pro or similar printer and tried printing a shim for a 3mm glass bed? All the ones I tried never trigger the z-axis switch

[faint sky]

Wouldn't a shim for any bed made of filament just melt eventually? The concept sounds weird.

[sudden lion]

It goes in the back it doesn't touch the bed

But I finally found one that works

It goes back here so the z stop switch gets hit sooner to prevent the nozzle from colliding with the bed due to the added thickness of the glass

This is a random make I found. I printed mine in black so you can't see it

I'm also not using the heated bed anyway. Just some purple glue stick and the pla sticks just fine to the glass

[faint sky]

Ah thank you for the context. A shim for a limit switch makes more sense than a shim for a glass bed. 😉

Not sure anyone here has one. Sounds like you'd have better luck with that on thingiverse or printables. Glad you got it sorted out.

[ocean orbit]

i couldnt go back to a non heated bed

[misty gyro]

Not using the Bed heater might reduce the effectiveness of the trick I uses to get models off. They generally stick like glue to the glass baseplate I'm using, so I pop them in the freezer for five minutes or so when the print is finished. Makes them pop right off, I think because of the different coefficients of thermal expansion for tempered glass and PLA

[ocean orbit]

I mean honestly if it works for you then why not lol

[sudden lion]

I decided to go back to heat bed. Not as messy. No adhesive needed and the print comes off with my bare hands easily when glass cools

When it's hot it's on very strong

But unfortunately i had an issue unrelated to the bed. Had the filament snap after 5 hours printing 😦

Hate when that happens

[iron remnant]

awww snap.

[faint sky]

Are you overdrying your filament? I have had some snap before especially when they're new out of the box. I think some companies have started pre-drying their filament before shipping so it definitely can happen through no fault of your own.

[sudden lion]

Might be the opposite problem for me. I'm using old filament. Maybe too much humidity exposure

Not sure the shelf life of pla

[faint sky]

more humidity would make it more pliable not more brittle, strange.

[ocean orbit]

old PLA gets brittle

likely due to humidity

I couldnt tell you the exact science behind it but its noticeable

[keen raft]

I'd say that's a bit oversimplified. In the case of PLA, water makes the polymer break down through hydrolysis. The immediate effect of water absorption is that it "only" prints bad, but long-term exposure chemically damages the filament. That damage stays, even if you dry it before printing to get rid of the immediate printing problems.

With that in mind, I don't think there is such a thing as overdrying. Can't be dry enough!

[ocean orbit]

this would follow my personal experiences yes

[keen raft]

You can overheat it, though. We've covered that recently, I believe 😉

[balmy pulsar]

i cook mine like spaghetti in boiling water for 12 minutes until al dente.

[placid grail]

Add parmigiano-regiano ABS flakes and it's perfect

[sudden lion]

Lol

[light aurora]

does anyone have a 3d model of the 2mm jst jack that the Feather ESP32's use for their batteries?
I purchased a 3.7v 400mA lipo from amazon, but it has the wrong size jst header (2.5mm)

[faint sky]

The model is usually on the 3D files for any feather board. I think they might be in the adafruit store.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/261

[light aurora]

thanks

[wind glade]

Anyone know of a reliable 3d printer with a bed larger than 220mm (x&y), is fastish, and under roughly ~$200?
need something to keep up with all the modular storage systems I’m going to be printing lol.

[faint sky]

Will that do? I don't think that plug is in the 3d files only the male recepticle on the feather boards.

It's not a hard rule but the price is typically higher the larger the bed size. Larger than 220 for about $200 that is reliable would be tough if not impossible to find at that price point.

Here's a nice list that sorts by build volume. https://3dpros.com/printer-categories/volume#Midsize (300-400 mm³)

[placid grail]

I was going to suggest the neptune 3 max, but it seems to have had a 30-60% price hike since not being in stock in september
now it's back in stock but 60% more expensive
my pro was 225$ back then and the max 300$ and now the max seems to be above 430$

better in here than #help-with-circuitpython 🤣

I wish the max had been available back then but I have a 25cm bed instead

this is manageable if I use those huge metal rods screw to put parts together

[faint sky]

holiday sales are usually pretty good for 3D printers. actual savings vs sticker price at any other time of the year.

I got my Ender 3 S1 Pro for about $200 less during a holiday sale 2 years ago. It was a really good deal.

[placid grail]

anyway elegoo printers are just direct ender clones but with a OSS board and firmware (but not the 4th)

[faint sky]

so are Sovol's

[placid grail]

so additionally you kinda have a MCU dev board in the neptune 3, that was the biggest factor of why I bought it + since it already handle mains to 24V I could probably add my own mcu in it as well

[faint sky]

Sovol actually uses Creality parts too, at least they did in the beginning. not sure if they've started branching out with their own stuff now.

Most 3D printers are clones of clones of clones at this point.

[placid grail]

If only I could find solidworks cloud/3d experience tutorial... I regret paying for it

Didnt expect every tutorial would only be for the half a million dollar version rather than the hobby version

[faint sky]

There's still a free version of Fusion360

[placid grail]

yeah, my subscription expires in august. If I cant figure it out until then Ill switch to fusion 360. I mean i paid for it might as well try to use it until august

Someone taught me how to make an enclosure from a 2d drawing in it then extrude it but I forget everything

[faint sky]

with highly technical programs if you don't use it often it's easy to forget how.

[wind glade]

What do y'all think about the SunLu S8 Pro https://www.sunlu.com/products/sunlu-s8-3d-big-size-printer-310x310x400mm-printing-size?variant=45913964871962

looks like it's got a decent sale right now.

either that or a not-sale (fake higher price)

[faint sky]

if it's anything like their filament driers i don't have a lot of confidence in their engineering team...

[wind glade]

I can't seem to find any of the more well known 3d youtubers out there talking about it. as best as I can tell the highest view-count video is 53K views

[faint sky]

nozzle temp will limit you from using filaments that require higher melting temperatures, no filament runout sensor (which is pretty important).

[placid grail]

Didnt buy a sunlu because reddit is against it in their purchase guide from a guy that has like 20 printers:

[faint sky]

sounds about right

[placid grail]

creality is also not recommended - both used to be recommendations

[wind glade]

dang. thought I had found a good deal.

[faint sky]

no mention of what kind of hotend their running, it's a bowden tube setup. might be a good first printer but you're going to find a lot of issues that other printers don't have.

seems more like a printer that might be very competitive with a smaller bed and much lower price point. i wouldn't trust it for large prints, accurately.

[placid grail]

I went with an elegoo neptune 3 personally but the maxc (above 24cm beds) have gotten very expensive. But I have personaly experience with other elegoo products and I thought they were good value for their cheap products. Like the breadboard that cames with my arduino kits had many different sized holes and was generally a board breadboard but I have 4 from elegoo and their holes are all fine. All the sensors in their kits works correctly as well etc. There was another model at a similar price point as well from their purchase guide

[faint sky]

i mean even the animated gif on their website showing it printing something has horrible quality issues

[wind glade]

Yeah I kinda had panic attack watching that gif. 🤮

[placid grail]

I didnt like the neptune 4 btw, I think the guide recommend it more than the 3 but I disagree because of the lack of open source and toolbox step file

[wind glade]

Would a refurb be trustworthy to buy?

oh... uh ebay links are apparently blocked by the server...?

anyway there's a refurb'd neptune 3 pro for $189

[vestal thicket]

No, there is a banned word in that link unfortunately

[wind glade]

oh hahah.

[vestal thicket]

Even though it's separated by a = sign

[faint sky]

"https://www.sunlu.com/cdn/shop/files/S8_8899b9eb-36e5-48eb-8669-bcabbcb0c836_4100x.gif"

[placid grail]

lol it's 10$ more new...

[wind glade]

OHHHHHHHH wow.

[placid grail]

dont buy that

[vestal thicket]

sorry

[wind glade]

Yeah that one also has a smaller bed.

[placid grail]

yeah 24cmx24cm

[wind glade]

no worries. didn't even see that. sometimes botfilters are weird.

[faint sky]

that's the gif on their website, quite obvious quality issues. they don't have their retraction setting dialed in. can't even be bothered to make a nice print for their advertising...

[placid grail]

but it has a heated bed, magnetic thing on it, autoleveling etc

[faint sky]

maybe it's their slicer as it seems to be on the z-seam for that character. still, not a glowing advertisement of quality with all those jagged edges.

[placid grail]

I removed the elegoo slicer and used the newest cura thought their slice has little options. The whole 3d printer is too geared towards newbies. Good for some parts for me but not good for others

I want to learn not have the fisher-price version of a slicer for 5yos...

[wind glade]

oh.. that gif is at least watchable...

https:// www.sunlu. com/cdn/shop/files/S8PRO_2f9b55c2-13a2-42f1-834a-262adad285c1_540x.gif?v=1661409529

here's the one that bugged my eyes out

oh no how do I remove the gif preview

[faint sky]

i've heard good things about the Neptune 4 but it's not within the $200 budget... most printers in that budget will have small volumes.

[placid grail]

click X on it and confirm remove embed

[wind glade]

I just spaced the link out. haha

[faint sky]

thank you that was making my eyes bleed

[wind glade]

yeah hahahha. so bad. Ok. staying away from sunlu for good.

[placid grail]

I have animated gif turned of in discord cuz I dislike memes 😄 so I was protected

remind me of the doubleclick (now google) animated banner ads that screamed in the 2000s and popuped

[faint sky]

With 3D printers you get what you pay for. If a price is really low it's because they skimped on something even if you can't see it.

[wind glade]

Yeah... That's what I'm starting to see.

[placid grail]

newbie opinion: they are all hard to use anyway no matter the price

I need about 20 hours of help on 3 discord and a forum to make mine work

[faint sky]

Assembly is another aspect. Some come almost pre-assembled, some are in hundreds of parts.

[placid grail]

and even then every different part you print might need more reprints and hours of remodeling to print correctly etc. Anyway you didnt say your level so I might be answering questions you didnt ask

[faint sky]

and even the ones that come pre-assembled for a newbie you'd never know if everything is square and working like it's supposed to until you get about 20-30 hours of print time under your belt.

[placid grail]

also sometimes peopes will give advice that is too advanced 🤣

Like people that told me to open it and adjust stuff under the bed (which has to be unscrewed)

20% of efforts to fix 80% of it is enough for me without resoldering stuff in it or buying expensive tools (Im not refering to here, this discord is much better at adapting to the asker skills)

[faint sky]

then there's calibration but if you're new then you have no idea if a calibration print is doing what it's supposed to. that was a frustrating hurdle to get over when i first started. flow rate, retraction, esteps, z-offset, tramming, autoleveling. there's definitely a learning curve but manufacturers love to try to advertise that you can start printing perfect prints from the time you turn it on... that's just not true. unless you get something like a bambu or really high end printer.

[placid grail]

and now I dont even have a camera to troubleshoot anymore 😦

[faint sky]

taking pictures and/or video is the best way to get help for 3d printing stuff yeah. trying to get help via text only for 3D printer issues might require a long long time.

[placid grail]

whats with makerspaces keepign huge industrial printers ? Like they are donated, usually full of dust and alledgedly still works.

Like my makerspace has one and the enclosed bed is like 6 ft x 6 ft x 1 feet

[wind glade]

well then I"ve had amazing luck with my enders... both print half decent out of the box!

[placid grail]

but it just seems like an antique waste to me.

do these actually works ?

[wind glade]

I'm no newbie, but I've only been 3d printing for 2-3 years. Snagged an ender 5 for $75 bucks, and runs smooth as butter.

In other news, thoughts on this item? Seems like a decent deal. https://www.ebay.com/itm/404752447641

oh, it's an auction, but it'll still be good if the price can stay lowish.

[faint sky]

The really large printers are more of an exercise in automation. It's a means to an end. Without a super large and super hot nozzle with a pellet feeder it becomes a hassle to keep something like a 6ft printer running not to mention the maintenance it would require. Gathering dust after a few years for an impractically large printer sounds about right.

Buying a 3D printer secondhand from ebay instead of the manufacturer is just a bad idea. You never know what kind of condition it's in. I think Steg went that route twice and regretted it both times. His first one sheared a motor gear and the 2nd one I think looked like it fell off a barge into salt water and was completely rusted out of the box.

If you're an enthusiast that can maintain and repair them then ebay might be acceptable as a way to get extra parts but don't count on it working 100% out of the box. If you're new to 3D printers buy it direct from a manufacturer.

[wind glade]

What do you mean by automation?

[faint sky]

Something that large has to be custom built and can be a stepping stone for getting into factory automation. It might be a short term project and not necessarily the end goal.

[placid grail]

I heard they arent really precise either

I mean they are meant to print large parts up to 6 or 12 cubic feet not small parts

[vocal flax]

Those requirements seem like you want to have your cake and eat it too

[vocal flax]

That's considered advanced these days? Omg we've come so far.

[faint sky]

Compared to the price point vs features a decade ago things have come a long way to making advanced features more affordable.

Auto bed leveling today isn't truly auto leveling. I think a decade from now true auto leveling will be a standard feature.

[vocal flax]

What do you mean true auto leveling? If you're meaning auto tramming, it is situational but usually that introduces more stress and bad for the printer.

There are a few cases where it's done right but other than that it's better to compensate it by movements than physically

[faint sky]

Most autoleveling is done in software but if one side of the bed is off by 2mm it can't compensate enough for that. True autoleveling will tram the physical bed for you so that z-offset is identical on all 4 corners.

There are only a few printers that do that instead of solely relying on probes or lidar to compensate in software without physically adjusting the bed surface.

Currently the trend with new printers coming out is a solid non-adjustable bed and probing or lidar compensates to it. Those types of printers compensate 100% with software.

[vocal flax]

That "true auto leveling" will introduce unnecessary stresses because bed is not flat

On i3 style machines gantry should be same height but that doesn't mean parallel to bed

If gantry is trammed to the bed and bed is not flat (even glass is not flat enough not to mention random thermal expansion) you are bending smooth rods

Tramming to the bed works on some printers like ratrig corexy thing (vcore?) Because it uses kinetic bed mounting that bed can move on some linear guides

Kinetic mounting costs money and/or not applicable (bed slingers) so they compensate in software instead of introducing hardware stresses that will result in print problems at some point

Even if you do kinetic bed mounting and tram the bed you still need software compensation because random thermal expansions

Honestly why bother with kinetic mounting and over engineering when software compensation works

Note. On my custom i3 I have been running separate z drives. For a while I tried to run auto tramming using probe but it was so tedious and it was worse than not using it or using parallel drive

[faint sky]

Fair points. I've trammed mine so well that I think autoleveling can actually introduce issues with imprecise measurements. Guess I could experiment by disabling it.

After doing a lot of electronics projects I've learned that electronic measurements are rarely repeatably precise. I don't really trust that each measurement is 100% accurate every probe. It's usually fairly close but never 100% perfect.

I think that's part of 3D printing and calibration, you're always chasing perfection.

[vocal flax]

Well if the probe or machine is not repeatable that's real thing to worry about. Good thing is that's measurable with marlin and klipper

If the measurements are within 0.2 mm (layer height difference) they you're good

Different types of sensors have different quirks that might require different repeatability but touch based sensors shouldn't be having issues with 0.2 range

[pliant jay]

Seeing some of the discussion above, 4 corner auto tramming will always create stress and over constrain, after all 3 points make a plane... Only case where it's viable really is very large gantries (smallest I've got it on is 1.2m). You're not adding stress to the frame with 2/3 point auto tramming if it was manually done correctly first, so you're just removing sag that would be, getting back to nominal, that's the correct path

Mesh based, especially with the tendency to leave fade height enabled, can cause parts to have distortion and be out of square so for actual engineering parts worth truly tramming

Good machines mean good hardware and software.... It can be ok with good software and bad hardware.... Bad software you're just screwed lol

[vocal flax]

Agreed. For a fixed gantry system you are trying to catch correct line not plane. And the correct line is where two guide rods are straight (in their x holders for i3 style system) for moving bed yeah 2 3 point does not overconstrain.
Also on the fade height stuff it's good idea to use raft and set fade height to raft height that way you don't get distortion and good bed adhesion as well.

[pliant jay]

always using a raft with fade of 10 is something ive recommended for some over priced really crappy machines over the years...

on the 3 point systems, it amazes me how resistant to proper kinematic couplings people are sometimes lol

dirt cheap and easy to do... just takes thought

[iron remnant]

It sounds really... tri-ing.

[placid grail]

oh those cams actually works together with the 3d printer....interesting

[coarse coral]

Sounds like you guys have great 'core' (xyz) knowledge

[placid grail]

yeah great channel with very qualified peoples but Im not one of them im still at the "my print doesnt work halppp!!!1" level

[balmy pulsar]

im at the 'ugh i dont wanna set anything up ill just pay a service" level 😛

[velvet radish]

i was wondering if anyone has experience with the ender 3 v2, if you can pause a print and then turn off the 3d pritner, and then turn it back on and resume it?

[vestal thicket]

I used to have a v2 - if I remember, you can pause and resume, but you cannot turn it off and resume

[faint sky]

The power loss recovery on the V2 and many of Creality's printers running Marlin have a fairly well known issue. There is an undesirable pausing during printing so most people disable it. There is a slight 1ms pause as it's capturing the x/y/z position and this can cause zits to form on the outer surface.

[vivid helm]

Power loss recovery is problematic in general because parts tend to detach from the build plate when they cool. If you are concerned about power loss, get a UPS.

[faint sky]

That's a great point too especially with a metal PEI build surface. As soon as it cools the parts will detach. It only takes a power loss of less than 5 minutes or more specifically when the build surface goes below about 50C. You cannot reheat the build surface to get it to reattach. Once it detaches it's done, period.

[vivid helm]

The only time it might work is with PLA on a smooth sheet.

[balmy pulsar]

even running out of filament for 10 mins can botch the print i find

[faint sky]

Can't speak for all Creality printers. My S1 Pro when paused will keep the bed heated indefinitely. If the runout sensor triggers it will pause the print. This is why runout sensors can be a lifesaver. It's better to pause than to turn off the printer.

[vivid helm]

It's fine as long as the runout doesn't occur on an outer perimeter, the head is immediately moved away from the print, and the bed temp is maintained.

[faint sky]

I've had a very large print that was about a 30 hour print. Went to sleep and woke up to find it ran out of filament. The print automatically paused and kept the bed heated for about 6 hours. Was able to load a new spool and resume without incident. There is a small line where you could tell where it paused/resumed but other than that the runout sensor saved my butt on many occassions. I wouldn't want a printer without a runout sensor, they're lifesavers.

If I were to shop for a new printer a runout sensor would be mandatory for my purchase.

[vivid helm]

I do feel like firmware could be a lot smarter when it comes to filament runout and pauses in general though.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement an algorithm that finds a the next "safe" place to pause such as during a layer change, at a seam, or in the middle of infill.

It's something I would like to mess with once I build a Voron.

[balmy pulsar]

bed temp only does so much, my prints are usually large. so even on a hot bed they shrink. ive had it happen more than a few times.

[faint sky]

thermal expansion and contraction is just one of those things you have to pray doesn't happen with very large prints. there's only so much you can do and warping can cause a really nice print to eventually turn into something... not nice.

I have more than few project enclosure prints that became useless due to warping. The difference in ambient air temperature plays a role too which is why enclosures around the entire 3D printer are a popular way to attempt to combat it.

Example of warping that can ruin an enclosure project. It took weeks before I figured out a setting that would minimize warping. Finally figured out it was due to the colder temperature in my room during winter + my overhead ceiling fan that was creating additional cooling that contributed to the issue.

The temperature difference of the build surface vs ambient air is like going from a sauna and then jumping into an icy lake.

The cooling fan that blows on the filament will react completely different if it's blowing 80F ambient air vs 60F ambient air. The warmer the ambient air the less chance of warping.

[coarse coral]

I had warping even with pla whilst printing next to a wall radiator.
The change in temperatures when it was on off was enough to cause the problem. The solution was to move the printer away from the wall radiator. For pla this was enough but for petg or abs I imagine the warping would still be a factor. So enclosures seem to be the way forward when looking to minimise warp risk but maybe a simple environment change for the printer would be suffice

[faint sky]

Yup that enclosure was PETG so the cold ambient temp made even more of a difference when printing at higher temps. I'm a prime candidate for an enclosure I just don't have the room for it.

[coarse coral]

What about putting the printer under a table and then even using some vinyl table cloth that's larger than the table itself to act as a 'sort-of' enclosure

Sort of like building a base camp for your printer if you know what I mean

You can even put a toy gun next to it for the full effect

*chortles

[faint sky]

With a concrete slab house the closer to the floor the colder the ambient temp. If i could mount it closer to the ceiling that would be better but impractical and inconvient.

[coarse coral]

Yeh I really considered a high place for storage of the printer. It's just not practical

To start you would need a step ladder for removing prints

Next you couldn't visually monitor as easily

You'd have to deal with filament loading high up which would be awkward

[faint sky]

Yep, completely impractical.

[coarse coral]

Nice idea but yeh doesn't work 99/100

Unless you could lower it on demand . That might work

I got a ps 5 last week. Really enjoying it so far

[iron remnant]

I am in the middle of a Voron build and there's the "Toasty Marshmallow" thread on their discord that's all about keeping in all of the heats.

[wind glade]

I just switched my ender 3 over to a direct drive printer. When I prep move my extruder motor with positive values, it now retracts… negative values extrude.

I did have to swap cables to a non-creality cable.. can anyone tell me which wires I have to reverse?

[faint sky]

Sounds like the new cable you're using has the pinout reversed. Compare your new cable that goes to the E-MOT (extruder motor) plug to your old one. You'll likely find the order of the pins on the new plug is different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgyNM7FQrmk

Here's a generic Ender 3 PCB. Find the E-MOT plug and compare your old cable pinout to the new cable pinout.

[wind glade]

Problem is the old cable is 4 black cables….. so I can’t tell which cable ends up where. Wish I knew where my multi meter was.

[faint sky]

A continuity test will tell you the order for both cables. 👍

[wind glade]

Found my tester! Left is stock ender. Right is my cable. Bottom is working start, top is working end, middle right is current new cable end, and instructions to swap cables. If I'm doing my work right, new cable goes 1234 to 3241, but should be 4231.

yeah typing that out helped. Gonna try it. How much is a new motherboard if I fry it? 😬😅

[faint sky]

Seems like you're taking the right approach. Making a diagram is a good idea.

[wind glade]

it really helped... Then I can verify before I do the work, and verify after.

and I don't have to hold so much info in my brain's buffer.

alright... powering it up.

https://tenor.com/view/hold-on-to-your-butts-jurrasic-park-hold-on-switch-off-samuel-l-jackson-gif-19953750

[faint sky]

https://tenor.com/view/nacho-libre-jack-black-nacho-squeeze-butt-gif-4867990

[wind glade]

Oh my.... 🙈 lol

Ayyyyyy! It works!

*properly!

[faint sky]

https://tenor.com/view/congratulations-cheers-smile-leonardo-di-caprio-fireworks-gif-14641420

[wind glade]

haha thanks! it feels good that I didn't let any magic smoke escape.

[faint sky]

Now go print something and make a great day!

[wind glade]

Yes! Now I can finally print with this 2 year old tpu!

[iron remnant]

Hopefully getting it to work won't get you all bent out of shape.

[coarse thistle]

So I've been looking at ways to dry my filament, and I saw that having my oven at around 104-113°F for a few hours would do the trick. However, my over only goes as low as 170°F. Is this too hot for the filament even if i only leave it in for about 10 minutes?

I've set it to broil on low, so only the top heating elements are on, but I'm worried I'll melt the filament and end up with an oven smelling like plastic so I'm periodically turning it off for a few minutes.

[faint sky]

We've had this discussion many times here before. Ovens are a horrible idea. Click here to see why. #help-with-3dprinting message

Something like this is a much safer and better idea than an oven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3jvuq-uq8

[coarse thistle]

I see, thanks for letting me know

[faint sky]

Just keep in mind that drying your filament regardless of method is "at your own risk" and that even includes devices specifically marketed for drying filament.

[short crag]

is there any resin slicers that are as good looking and as good as bambu slicer and Form Labs PreForm

[coarse thistle]

Unsure if you mean risk of damaging the filament or health concerns or something else but the filament I have that's not dry is at least two years old and isn't from a reliable brand so I'm not too worried about damaging it.

In fact I'm probably better off just buying new filament, but at the same time I'd like to have a way to dry other filament in the future that might be of higher quality.

I'll probably just pick up a dedicated filament drying machine when I have the money.

[faint sky]

Yes I meant damage the filament sorry. Have to treat every roll of filament as unique. The chemical composition can vary slightly from roll to roll. There is no silver bullet method that applies to every roll the same because not every roll is the same. There are ranges and thats good enough for most applications.

[vivid helm]

Well, Bambu's slicer is based on PrusaSlicer, which does support resin slicing.

[vocal flax]

For future reference old a4866 type of "dumb" drivers are prone to failure. Afaik all TMC type drivers use closed loop feedback so they can't really fail due to some unexpected load. They regulate the set output in short circuit that means the voltage will be super low and current is whatever you set it, and on open circuit or high impedance circuit it'll be capped to safe supply voltage.

[shy kelp]

I don't remember how the spring and the tiny metal thing were assembled in the extruder
I check bambu lab video, and at the start he has one way, at the end the opposite way, random videos are the same
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLlT1RV-oJE&pp

[short crag]

no what im saying is is there a sicer thats like the UI of both

[vivid helm]

Like I said, Bambu Slicer is a fork of PrusaSlicer, so the UI should be similar.

[faint sky]

If you slice a fork enough times you get a knife.

Sometimes tracing the lineage of forked projects can take you back decades.

[ashen moat]

finally located a rare glass bed on aliexpress to replace my acrylic, but turned out to be slightly too large and a local glass place didn't want to trim it, so working on printer mods to accommodate it. or the glass place might source some borosilicate and try to sell me a new one in the right size. I mean, after years of searching for an off-the-shelf, custom might be the way to go.

[balmy pulsar]

O_o

what printer. glass bed kits are super cheap all over ebay and amazon.

i got some spare ones from anycubic for a custom printer

$30 something with the heated bed plate

[ashen moat]

Deltaprintr, 350mm (well, ~348mm) diameter. no heater.

[balmy pulsar]

round? ah

thought i saw a 300mm one, but nope. i see nothin

just 220

what was the reason the glas shop wouldnt cut it?

it should not be tempered. cutting should be fine

[ashen moat]

not sure; they seemed to think it would cost a lot more than cutting a new one? I was proposing cutting a flat in the circle just to let it sit in the frame. wouldn't take much, maybe 5-10mm off an edge. maybe I called a bad shop. 😆

[ashen moat]

the piece I ordered was listed as borosilicate, not tempered AFAIK. the guy at the glass place said he'd call me back if he could get a quote on sourcing borosilicate and cutting a custom piece.

[balmy pulsar]

you probably called a shop that doesnt actually cut glass

a lot of them send it out

(unless its a straight line in plate glass)

[ashen moat]

I did spot that in shop listings; Google identified shops as "on-site" vs. send-away work, and this one was supposed to do stuff in-house. but yeah, could be? it'd be a good idea to check with other shops, too.

[balmy pulsar]

i used to have a glass shop. all the glass workers here work together. one person is good for bevels, grinding, edge work, cutting, circles, casting, blowing. walk into one store and you have basically hired all of them

ha

[faint sky]

Depending if you have access to Amazon some sellers on there will custom cut glass or acrylic for you. It's how I got a huge 20" acrylic circle. It's the shipping that's dangerous with glass.

[balmy pulsar]

might check mcmaster and misumi too. they sometimes have streamlined custom selections

the custom glass shop near me doesnt list borosilicate as an option.

[ashen moat]

huh, I've seen custom sellers on like aliexpress/etsy, didn't realize they could do that on amazon.

there are also a couple stained glass shops, wasn't sure whether this fell more on the art side or the industry/construction side.

[faint sky]

I have no experience with it but my guess is stained glass is mostly artistic as the dye would create weaker glass. If you want different colored glass it's probably easier to put a colored tint on it.

[ashen moat]

I meant for cutting rather than sourcing, but yeah

looking at mcmaster, I do remember checking them; they list up to 6.5" for borosilicate (I'm at like ~13.75"). I hadn't noticed the note about custom sizes, good call.

misumi's new to me, but they don't seem to do flat borosilicate

[balmy pulsar]

stained glass guys can do it. they will just have more interesting smells in their shop

[ashen moat]

I sent mcmaster an RFQ email, will see what they say.

I've been trying out a magnetic PEI sheet in the same size on top of the glass. I was having trouble getting PLA to stick, and in a last ditch, I dug an old glue stick out of a drawer and tried that for the first time. seemed to work really well! I'm going to try that as my new process for a while. my history is all blue tape, which works great a lot of the time, but I always had problems with large prints; they'd lift the tape right off the bed and curl anyway. 😭

[balmy pulsar]

pva glue works well

[ashen moat]

how often do you put it down? I've avoided bed goo (slurries, hairspray, straight liquid glue or dilutions) for a long time to avoid wet messes; a stick seems like a nice compromise

[faint sky]

Don't get me started. I didn't see that. 🙈

[ashen moat]

on bed adhesion goo?

keep in mind: cold bed. 😉 I hear heated beds help a lot with adhesion and anti-curling. this whole glass bed upgrade could be a stepping stone to a heated bed.

[balmy pulsar]

glue? after every print i wash it off and spread new

[ashen moat]

sounds like a lot

[balmy pulsar]

its pva. water soluble. wet cloth taks it all off in 30 seconds.

then brush on new

[ashen moat]

fair

[balmy pulsar]

(i use liquid white glue, not glue stick)

[faint sky]

I literally don't even touch my print surface with my hands let alone smear something all over it. Seeing people bend their build surfaces to release a print makes me die a little inside too.

That is just me and my personal preference. You can do whatever you want with your printer.

[ashen moat]

you sound like a Prusa owner =D

[faint sky]

Actually Ender 3 S1 Pro

I consider myself a normal 3D printer owner, it's just that my habits are different.

I think it's from fighting against poor adhesion and failed prints for so long that when my printer is working correctly I don't even want to blow on it.

[ashen moat]

a friend picked up an Ender 3 Pro (non-S1) last year and likes it a lot; the S1 looks like an upgrade. did it take a lot of tuning to find the sweet spot for adhesion & release?

my hardware's a lot less refined; I took delivery in 2015 on a printer probably designed in 2013.

[faint sky]

I was up and printing pretty quick but with almost no knowledge of what to do if things go wrong. Honestly the real learning begins when things go wrong.

I was printing PLA great for about a month then decided to try PETG. I'd heard how much harder it was to print. It took a lot of trial and error before I was able to dial PETG in like I had with PLA. If I would have stuck with only PLA I would have printed fine for longer but the same issues would have come up eventually. You must run into everything that can go wrong before you learn how to make everything work right all the time. There's definitely a learning curve.

[ashen moat]

the last time I tried real PETG was before I had a hot end that could go hot enough for it, and I ended up returning the roll. I've printed lots of t-glase (PETT), tho. t-glase prints cooler and, when you nail the adhesion, prints really nicely.

[ashen moat]

$150 delivered for that borosilicate glass bed from McMaster. 😬 2 week lead time.

[balmy pulsar]

ow

[iron remnant]

Clearly this is a problem.

[pliant jay]

@ashen moat I wouldn't use glass on anything nowadays tbh, garolite / fr10 plates are much lighter and better thermal conductivity

Engineered surfaces exist now that don't require the weight

Also on glass, be sure it's float glass if you stick glass, it has a mostly flat side, other side will still be a bit curved

And I've moved to nano adhesive from vision miner over pva nowadays, much less maintenance, longer between reapplication and no cleanup

[ashen moat]

@pliant jay thanks for the advice. every product has an attribute you can care deeply about, but which is never disclosed in product specs; float glass sounds like one of those!

I'll take a look at that adhesive. and I've seen people talk of garolite/FR4, though mostly for heated beds and exotic materials. you like it for a cold bed with PLA, too?

[pliant jay]

@ashen moat the big thing is the weight and actual flatness

It's been so long since I've tried cold bed pla though.... Lol havnt bothered with cold bed in probably 7-8yrs lol

[ashen moat]

lower weight would be nice, and flatness is key. If it's stiff, it could still make a good substrate to lay e.g. PEI on top of. I was going after glass for flatness and potential heat resistance if I also added a heater down the road, but it sounds like garo/FR4 would also fit

[pliant jay]

Gotta look out for mcmaster tax for sure too btw

Example would be the ceramic terminal blocks I use on industrial IR ovens... Mcmaster wanted $22ea.... Found em at a authorized distributor, same OEM, $3ea....

Bathroom mirrors will be thin borosilicate float glass btw

Mirrors must be float glass or there will be optical distortion

Bathroom mirrors have to be tempered or borosilicate in order to withstand thermal cycling

[ashen moat]

thaaat's a cool tidbit, thanks! and yeah, I'm not under any illusion that McMaster's the cheapest. does garolite come in discs, or would I need to find someone to cut it?

[pliant jay]

It comes in plates

[ashen moat]

so would need it CNC'd, maybe?

huh, I might maybe have a backdoor source thru work

[pliant jay]

Most common machine sizes available readily

https://a.co/d/7g1tgYW for example

And if you want pei on top.... I usually use the 40mil (.040in/1mm) from cshyde

[ashen moat]

the trick is I need it round, heh

looks like e.g. sendcutsend does garolite

[pliant jay]

Ah some kind of delta?

Scrolled up a bit.... I've got a 350mm delta and just stuck the pei right on the bed plate lol

[ashen moat]

yup; 348mm round bed's kind of exotic

[pliant jay]

Weight of material is irrelevant there, doesn't move

[ashen moat]

yeah, just for ergonomics and FSR leveling sensors

[pliant jay]

I've got a bltouch on nearly all my machines... Contact probe doesn't care what surface lol

High temp is manual leveling and z height

[ashen moat]

yeah, I'd need to switch to a probe type if I added a heated bed; I don't think the FSRs would survive the heat

what delta do you have with a 350mm bed?

mine's a Deltaprintr; I haven't seen many others that large

[pliant jay]

I'd have to look lol

[ashen moat]

and yeah, PEI sheet came with an adhesive magnet sheet, plan was to stick the magnet to the glass and then leave the glass in place.

[pliant jay]

Tevo little monster is my taller one

Was some odd brand that was sent for a local buddy to review but he never even managed to assemble it correctly

So it landed at my feet lol

[ashen moat]

ah, so nothing with a shop full of exotic beds somewhere. 🙂

[pliant jay]

Lol I rarely look at that one tbh

I have 80 machines

[wispy canyon]

Very new, hope this isn't a silly question... do they make 3d printers with a dual filament system, where one filament is dissolvable (for supports)?

[faint sky]

garolite... someone is a fan of makers muse. 😉

I've heard many people mention that one but I'm perfectly happy with my textured PEI sheet. To each their own. I would be a fool not to listen to your advice though with so many printers and probably thousands of hours of printing experience. Welcome. 🤗

[balmy pulsar]

? garolite G10 was the original plate on many printers. was a common upgrade on makerbots

[pliant jay]

Pretty sure my use of that type of surface long pre dates maker muse lol

I actually pay little to no attention to media guys. I know a few of em, but I don't even really watch my friends stuff unless they specifically ask me to watch something 🤣

First sheets like it were the marubot polypropylene, really just any epoxy resin fiber board.... PP base made it release nicely when cooled

I remember he tried to sell it to Creality before going independent.... They probably regret walking away from that one now lol

[pliant jay]

Tons of em

My preferred method is IDEX, but it's a bit more complex for beginners. Single nozzle dual extruder Y splits are the cheapest and most common, just tons of waste

[balmy pulsar]

soluble supports has always been a bit experimental. not sure if any rteally work as you hope they should

[pliant jay]

Not as easy to deal with as people assume lol

Simplify3d has a nice dense support option to use e0 materials at a different density till close to the part then switch to full density e1

[balmy pulsar]

hm

we need soluble resin supports

some printers are able to half cure resin for support so it can wash away.

but not hobby ones

[pliant jay]

Some have done odd stuff with syringe based resin printing too

[balmy pulsar]

i always wanted to take an old tektronix wax printer and see if i could just have it reprint over and over to make 3d

[pliant jay]

Lol

[balmy pulsar]

i mean that is basically what a solidscape printer is

[ashen moat]

sendcutsend quotes a 348 x 3mm garolite (FR4) disc at $120 plus shipping. pretty comparable to glass. will check around.

[balmy pulsar]

mcmaster does garolite 304mm squares for way less than that. you can cut it yourself

[ashen moat]

ha, I probably don't have the PPE or the tooling

[balmy pulsar]

(they have bigger too)

[ashen moat]

maybe outside with a respirator, heh

[balmy pulsar]

cuts with almost anything. its just fibreglass.

[faint sky]

Ah my experience with 3D printers started in 2022. A lot of stuff pre-dates my knowledge.

[balmy pulsar]

ha

mine starts in the 90s

[faint sky]

I got an Anet A8 in like 2018 but I never finished putting it together after I found out it was a fire hazard and didn't have the electronics knowledge on how to modify it.

[balmy pulsar]

ah

[faint sky]

just looked it up to see when i got that A8. wasn't as long ago as i thought.

i did try to put it together in like 2021 after learning about electronics here for a bit. by then the rods and rails had completely rusted. so even if i did get it to work in 2018 it wouldn't have lasted long anyway.

I kept it for years just in case I could find a way to resurrect it. Talking about it has forced me to realize that it's complete junk and would be a waste of time. I would never be happy with it compared to the Ender 3 S1 Pro. It's still sitting on my shelf. I'll probably dismantle it and throw it in the trash tomorrow.

[toxic kite]

stepper motors and such are good stuff

if the concern is temperature sensor decoupling from the heating block, there might be firmware to sanity check that

[faint sky]

Here it is in all its glory. An original Anet A8 about to go where the rest of them went, in the trash.

[ashen moat]

that corrosion's wild. yeah, the steppers are probably worth hanging on to...

[toxic kite]

I expect the driver board is a programmable arduino, good for stepper control projects, PSU looks like it goes with the spooky scary skeleton dance (but maybe harvestable inductor, capacitors and silicon switching element(s))

[faint sky]

Hard to see but looks like an ATMEL 128 chip. I'd have to break out my microscope to read it better.

Already tore it down. Kept the blower fan, rods, motors, couplings, and linear bearings. Everything else is already in the trash can outside.

Lead screws are a little warped, doubt they're salvageable. Just gained back an entire shelf worth of space.

[pliant jay]

I would keep the motors, everything else is trash lol

[pliant jay]

It's a 1284P, 128K program memory 16K RAM but they also had problems with voltage regulators and undersize MOSFETs so the boards had a tendency to catch fire too.

[pliant jay]

Basically any modern firmware does, but so much of that machine was made out of acrylic no guarantee it could catch it in time and with the MOSFET issues on the board, may not be able to shut off heat either

Most known enough to use polycarbonate nowadays instead, which is not flammable like acrylic

[iron remnant]

I feel like one day, someone's going to buy a vintage new-in-box A8 on eBay for an absurd amount of money, just to relive the heady days of 3D printers that catch your house on fire.

I mean, two of my friends are archivists and there's a very big film festival once a year where they show old movies on the original nitrate film, where "nitrate" means "nitrocellulose" and really means "the projection room is a bomb shelter and the projectionist is specially trained because yeah if it goes, it goes"

So.... not even weird.

[peak fiber]

Has anyone 3d printed a case for the metro esp32s3?

[faint sky]

Not to my knowledge. There's nothing for it on Adafruit's Printables page. It uses the Arduino Uno form factor so you could start with that and it should be fairly close if you're willing to edit it. https://www.printables.com/model/455932-arduino-uno

[peak fiber]

Awesome, thank you.

[faint sky]

Actually the Metro ESP32-S2 might get you even closer. https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CAD_Parts/tree/main/4775 Metro ESP32-S2

[ashen moat]

see also: the Ultimate Box Maker
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1264391

IIRC it has support for panel cutouts and PCB mounting standoffs; I used it for a raspi project years ago and really liked it.

[gloomy anchor]

how do people get their FFF 3D printers to print over 1000mm/s stabily?

[faint sky]

Speed printers usually have a more rigid structure/enclosure, run custom firmware or Klipper, and ultra lightweight parts (such as carbon fiber) for the gantry allowing the power to weight ratio of moving the hotend much higher. Most speed printers are coreXY designs where the print surface only goes down with each layer height and the gantry does all the fast moving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcMxEkVvIdE

It's not impossible to reach high speeds on a bed slinger but you must have resonance probes and input shaping and other mods to make an attempt at higher speeds with Klipper. If your printer has Marlin firmware it's recommended to use Klipper instead if your goal is higher speeds. Also keep in mind that faster doesn't mean better, you'll lose finer details on higher speeds. Speed vs Quality is a tradeoff. You can typically have one or the other. Speed without accuracy is meaningless.

[gloomy anchor]

ah yea thats interesting

[coarse coral]

How is your friend getting on with the Neptune 4 @faint sky I'm looking to get back into printing again over the next couple of weeks. Trying to simplify my model for less headaches and actually know my Neptune 3 will just work

[faint sky]

I never even got him to take it out of the box. Was one of those "I need to do A, B, C, D before I can set it up". I was very disappointed. We got some other projects done but that was the one I was really looking forward to.

[coarse coral]

Yeh it would have been great to see how far it goes for speed as a bed slinger. I really had huge speed improvements over all Ender's and cr series I had with Neptune. It just worked. yes it wasn't 200mms but it was very very good at 80mms and above with the elegoo profiles. The accelerations and things must be really dialed in because I was having print times with super results

And layers always stick so well I did see a bit of warping but overall it's a joy

[faint sky]

Even 80mms I would have been impressed with as that's twice my usual print speed, at least with PETG. I can go to about 60 with PLA.

[coarse coral]

If I remember to last year I was printing at 120mms with all the other profile stuff so it was snappy

And it's huge

I'm going to try soldering to a pla backplate with kapton tape. Will let you know how it goes with pla. I'm hopeful af

[faint sky]

My only concern with going faster is I'd have to constantly babysit it. The faster it prints the faster it could make a massive ball of spaghetti or a blob encrusted nozzle.

[coarse coral]

Yeh I never had that issue. Temps seem consistent

That said I don't even know what nozzle I'm running on it at the mo but I'm probably going to print in .4mm and be done with it

I did some tpu also and it had no issues at reasonable speeds

[faint sky]

It's never an issue until it is. Never thought I'd have a nozzle unscrew itself but was able to add that to my 2023 3D printer bingo card. :/

[coarse coral]

Wow haha nozzle unscrewing itself. I reckon Egon Spengler is in your corner

[faint sky]

It's from over extrusion and buildup causing friction. The movement of the hotend itself pressing against cooler material in a linear fashion will unscrew it.

[coarse coral]

No doubt

[faint sky]

like constantly going around the outside edges of a box.

[coarse coral]

Yeh

I messed around last year with a rockpi and it wasn't a nice experience. The board components literally were falling off

Some terrible "official" software too

[faint sky]

I still have yet to do TPU. I think you and the Ruiz brothers have been using it for tactile buttons. It's a good use for it.

[coarse coral]

Overheated way too fast aswell

[faint sky]

I remember the experiments you did trying to get the feel of the buttons just right. That was a great read.

[coarse coral]

You remember correct I did try it for tactile buttons but there was two issues, one at that fidelity the details ended up blobbing no matter what nozzle and also at that fidelity you didn't really feel much softness with it, yes infill played a part but really pla for buttons plus soft switches on the actual push switch does a better job so I dropped the idea of tpu for buttons. It seemed like the obvious thing but not really worth it. Plus tpu colours never matched the pla counterpart e.g black pla Vs black tpu there's a big difference even from same manufacturer

[faint sky]

Hope you get back into sharing more printing stuff. I always enjoy looking at pictures of your progress. Almost lunch here gotta take off for a bit.

[coarse coral]

I'd just say get some silicon caps on clicky buttons or get the soft feel buttons with silicon already on. That's better answer

Yeh no probs, I will definitely share results of my final attempt to make a rpi 4 handheld here, when it gets to a good position. It's more off the shelf again and seems more simple in my mind but there's always something with me lol

Hope it's tasty. Enjoy

[pliant jay]

Marlin is perfectly capable of over 1m/s as well contrary to popular opinion

[pliant jay]

largest issue comes down to material properties... typically going that fast means very weak parts

above this actually stalled the DM556S drivers... not a firmware problem lol they just couldnt process the steps... died at 120k pps even though the driver is supposed to be rated to 200k...

[faint sky]

That's a big one. Ouch that seems quite the violent stop.

[vocal flax]

It doesn't look that fast probably due to big frame, maybe low acceleration as well

Cantilevered PSUs make me uneasy😶

[pliant jay]

1.2m

thats over 1m moved in a second, accel and decel included lol

80k accel in the video iirc

[vocal flax]

Wow

[balmy pulsar]

vurry fast

my older cnc went, uh.. 600mm/s which is crazy fast.

[pliant jay]

Worst I've done was a 1.5t gripper on a gantry moving 2m/s lol

That was on Y.... Z had a 3m travel, dual arm, with a 200mm X, and a rotary gripper.....

[balmy pulsar]

ive seen some linear motors at 10m/s. basically you cant see them. ha

[pliant jay]

Yeah, done lighter stuff that kinda fast, 5m/s is the fastest I can recall working on though

But now we're talking my day job stuff, not the toys lol

[balmy pulsar]

i was at a place with a 20ft laser that went 18000ipm. which is... 7.6m/s

you arent allowed to be near it when it runs haha

[pliant jay]

Yeah lol forget staring into beam with remaining eye....

[balmy pulsar]

also 4kw laser is scary on its own

[pliant jay]

It'll do ya worse lol

[balmy pulsar]

the gy who owned the shop had 3 fingers

[pliant jay]

Yeah lol I was asked to quote a laser weld cell yesterday....

[balmy pulsar]

laser welding seems quite dangerous. i imagine it needs a closed cell

(dangerous as in stray laser possibilities)

[pliant jay]

Oh absolutely

Especially on a fanuc that can go everywhere lol

[balmy pulsar]

yeah.

[pliant jay]

So that's what I'm quoting 🤣

[balmy pulsar]

im temped to get a a fanuc suplus, but im not sure i have a good use for it

[pliant jay]

I've got a fanuc and a nachi

[balmy pulsar]

i see them for $500 or less

[pliant jay]

Just on my floor for trial etc

[balmy pulsar]

motoman yaskawas too

[pliant jay]

Doubt they work for that, never seen a decent size working one anywhere near there

[balmy pulsar]

want it to load my cnc all day

[balmy pulsar]

mostly these are older mig robots

[pliant jay]

Don't like yaskawa mostly because of underhanded salesman

[balmy pulsar]

i have no idea if they run or are missing parts

tony?

hes... special

[pliant jay]

Lol

[balmy pulsar]

they are on my blacklist

[pliant jay]

Ask them for a robot quote, he went around us to the end user and tried to offer low robot pricing to steal the whole project

[balmy pulsar]

ha

nice

[pliant jay]

Because they just started a tooling group

[balmy pulsar]

its say they own siemens now

[pliant jay]

Made it to German HQ at my customer.... Who told them if they ever try it again global spec will be ABB within 24hrs

[balmy pulsar]

ha

[pliant jay]

So nowadays more fanuc and UR, touch of nachi and Kawasaki

I get asked about abb often but hit rate is almost nothing

[balmy pulsar]

wat? a robot bran is censored by the bot

ha

the k one

no idea what was a bad word

[pliant jay]

Lol

Silly bot

[balmy pulsar]

we had a giant fanuc robot on a tv set once.

i wanted to keep it after shooting

but alas, it was too big to go anywhere

must have been 12ft tall extended or more

[pliant jay]

Here's mine

[balmy pulsar]

nice

soo many expensive motors

ha

[pliant jay]

Nah.... This is the expensive motor....

[balmy pulsar]

bit rusty

ha

[pliant jay]

That looks to be in really bad shape lol

Could maybe be used as a training robot if you could get it up and running but that would be about it

[balmy pulsar]

i just want it to take things out of the cnc and put stock in. that one is 5x the size i need

[pliant jay]

Lol you want an LR mate

[iron remnant]

Hey, stop talking ihavenofish out of it. Protect the right to bare arms.

[pliant jay]

And then you give it a planet fitness t-shirt....

Only the cool ones though, like Yogi

Got to give him lots of picnic baskets though

[iron remnant]

I want a robot arm with a "DO YOU EVEN LIFT BRO" tank top.

This sounds great.

[balmy pulsar]

ha

[pliant jay]

I would put that on one of the robots at the body and white shops that does the full car body assembly

[balmy pulsar]

ha

autodesk has a bunch or robots for decoration at mars

thats cgi, but ive been there and they did install them

i dont think they move

[pliant jay]

Lol

I know of a place that took a dead arm and posted it in front of their building and mounted their mailbox to it

[balmy pulsar]

ha

i wonder if i can make a robot frame a hose

house

[pliant jay]

That's just a problem of scale, sure you can but get the robot around to enough of it to be worthwhile

[balmy pulsar]

xy ceiling gantry

[iron remnant]

I mean the hard part is less the frame, it's all of the little details like getting pipes and wires and stuff in the right spot, which is too interactive with framing.

[faint sky]

A bunch of companies are always claiming 3D printed habitats for Mars or 3D printed houses are the future. I'm just like, have you ever actually lived in a concrete house where you had to run conduit on the walls for all hvac, plumbing, and electrical? It ends up more like living in the basement of a large building. Yet those facts are always ommitted or glossed over. I've lived in a concrete house. While it's great during a hurricane the aesthetics are that of a bomb shelter. Adding new electrical outlets or lights is done the same way as an industrial building and wifi barely goes through 1 wall not 2 so you must have an AP in every room.

[coarse coral]

@faint sky I had this 'sorta' working

Both were cool as they had a rotational rod printed within the housing. The bands perished and the springs needed more work. Ultimately I'm going for digital only triggers.

[coarse coral]

Love this black. It's eryone matte pla

[faint sky]

ah that's a cool design with the springs. 👍

[coarse coral]

Yeh the springs were cool, for emulation and SBC I can't imagine a reason to make analogue triggers. I don't even think PS2 had analogue triggers

GameCube also I think they were digital even though they had long travel triggers

Plus it gets super annoying when trying to mount a rotary pot for those triggers. Mechanisms eh

[iron remnant]

Yah, the 3D printed house thing is kind of an interesting technology looking for a problem.

[shy kelp]

I've always been perplexed about american films where you could destroy walls with a punch, untill I discovered that you do build houses with paper.
Anyhow it's all sponsors in the end

[iron remnant]

I have an IMDB credit for set construction and my main complaint is that we built a really cool temporary wall and then at the end, we couldn't recreate any of the classic wall-destruction scenes.

[ashen moat]

looks like the Dual Analog and DualShock controllers starting with late-model PS1s had analog triggers. the DualShock 2 and 3 had analog face buttons, too.

[vernal jay]

hello, anyone have suggestions on what Raspberry Pi to upgrade my Pi zero to? I want to use for my Prusa Mk3 printer and a camera hopefully to do some timelapse and webcam

[ashen moat]

a Pi 3B seems like a nice compromise, before the 4 and 5 started adding high power requirements and heat output. I run my printer on Klipper with a 3B and it's idle most of the time; I'd think it would have plenty of cycles to spare for a webcam.

[vernal jay]

Thanks!

[coarse coral]

That's cool, I don't actually remember triggers on either despite having PS1 and 2. I seem to remember it was PS3 that added it with the console bundle. Who knows what games supported it

[toxic kite]

You can probably underclock the new pis if you don't want the heat, they tend to be more efficient for their work, more work done within the same heat profile if you press the right keys

That said you don't need a monster to run octoprint. Conversely for light work the pi should naturally not go full-bore power hog.

[coarse coral]

@faint sky @karmic brook the good news is kapton tape on top of pla with through hole components resists enough temperature without warping the pla noticeably to reasonable solder the pins. It's a hack for sure! A great one though.

I'm using fasteners on the other side of this pseudo back plate (super glue and extruded housing for the component). Never used kapton in my life. I'm ready to go to space

[ashen moat]

I don't even run a heat sink in the (vented) enclosure for my Pi 3B, heh. stays under 60C, so why bother. underclocking is a great idea, though!

(a heat sink is a good idea, mind you, and if the pi is doing anything besides driving the printer, including video processing, it may get hotter)

[coarse coral]

Unless it's an open enclosure I'd never not active cool a pi4+ I never had previous gens. Also on rock boards the thermal throttling happens even with open air. So active cooling there also

At very least heat sinks. They're like 50c

[coarse coral]

I took a break from my project for a while and came back to it over last couple of days. Who knew it became easier the more you learned

[faint sky]

@coarse coral I'd like to see some pictures of it. Sounds like a neat alternative to a soldering mat.

[coarse coral]

starting with the case back plate which is super simple this time round

place for a lipo and fan cut out and also removable media. the posts are for the screen to rest on. to the left and right will be the button layouts and within those area there will be the mounted pseudo backplates. under the left side button layout i'll keep the itsy bitsy

[faint sky]

Maybe I misunderstood the application. Thought it was for a soldering rig.

[coarse coral]

you did not, i posted an irelevant area of the build. still need to design the backplates for the new config and these backplates will have kapton tape. will definitely post when get to it!

[faint sky]

something with built in fume extractor sounds pretty neat too. maybe something like a vacuum forming table that has a bunch of holes could work too.

[coarse coral]

that's the idea. the kapto just allows me to solder close to the pla. previously it was never going to work as the the case would literally melt when iron was near it

didn't you make your own fume exractor, seem to remember this some 6 months ago

[faint sky]

that's a great discovery. i honestly thought it wouldn't stand the heat of a direct soldering iron touch. kapton is some amazing stuff.

it was a hair too big to fit on my print bed at a 45 degree angle. 😦

[coarse coral]

the heat travelled down the pin rather than to all heat affected areas which shows the kapton basically stopped a 300 degrees iron from disapating into all thermal areas. just realised this, so when soldering it would be wise to keep the pins steady because that's what will melt the plastic rather than the iron

[faint sky]

I'm looking into other methods to augment the existing lamp and build an attachment instead of the entire thing. In the US the type of lamp I have is extremely common so anyone shouldn't have an issue finding one and then printing a fume extractor addon vs the entire lamp head.

Oh looks like you're using PLA/PETG as a PCB substrate replacement? That's a neat idea too.

You could use thin gauge solid core or thin rods then embed them in the 3D print. As long as they only carry low voltage and don't get hot that could work as a large PCB.

[coarse coral]

that's a pretty amazing hack also. like make trenches to embed the wires. such a hackers life haha

essentially a cable run, i did have mounts for wires but not like you suggested. i don't think i'd take it that far it would be a pain to design in sketchup but if it were ever to be as optimised for what it is you'd do something like that. i'm only going this road since i'm using a pi4 model b..... i did do a pcb in kicad but decided against because that's better suited to a compute module

[faint sky]

If flux gets on the filament during soldering it does leave a yellow tinge. There's no way to get rid of that other than alcohol, best to make sure that it's done on the bottom side.

[faint sky]

Yup that was my thought, you'd have to make tubes in the print, pause the printer at a certain height, then inlay your wiring or rods.

[coarse coral]

it's probably a good learning exercise for traces and how they work, i bet there's something like that in education somewhere

[faint sky]

Was just thinking that. Being able to cast it in clear resin would make a better teaching tool for a PCB design class.

[coarse coral]

yeh for sure, it would be a great learning tool

going full send on this concept print which for some reason before this project break would have taken 2 days to design whereas this time 3 hours

[faint sky]

the better you get at something can be measured in time, efficiency goes up with experience. very nice.

[coarse coral]

100% - you realise how bad everything is 🤣 and often with my work, even when finished i still realise how bad everything is lol

[faint sky]

we don't talk about that. that's like looking back at your 12 year old self and realizing all the dumb things you did before you knew better. part of experience is failing every way possible first.

[coarse coral]

got u. first rule of fight club 😉

this tab system for printing areas without support is too good. makers muse to thank for that tip, i use .5mm for these

they just snap away with no troubles

[faint sky]

yup there are things you can do in the 3d design to make supports unnecessary. the slicer will still attempt to add supports. when you can tell your slicer not to use supports you've reached a new level of awesome.

but lets say the part is too large for the bed and you have to print it on a 45 degree angle to fit. sometimes there's no way around not needing supports.

[coarse coral]

yeh, what build plate size do you have today?

[faint sky]

same S1 Pro. 220wl x 270h

[coarse coral]

yeh

no plans to upgrade to bigger size?

[faint sky]

still in the works yes but i have soooo many projects. currently working on writing a touch display driver.

[coarse coral]

only experience i had there was copying an existing driver in android and adding my device as supported hardware with a copy of that driver

[faint sky]

there is an existing driver thankfully but it lacks a lot of features that have since been added to circuit python. i have to amend and update it with more capability. i've never done it before so it will likely take considerable time... perhaps weeks.

i can't do 3d printing projects while my nose is deep into writing a new touch driver. :/

[coarse coral]

more power to you

[coarse coral]

@faint sky https://www.elegoo.com/products/pre-owned-neptune-3-plus

Bargain at $130

Direct from elegoo pre owned

Not sure if it's the plus or pro from that oembed, titles says plus but body text says pro

[faint sky]

At least it's from the manufacturer and not a 3rd party? So you can contact them to clarify which printer it's for.

[vocal flax]

That's so much more work than using toner transfer and single/double sided PCBs

[faint sky]

i think it would look cooler with tented via holes you could see through the epoxy. i'm talking abot a huge scale resin pcb for classrooms.

i think JP has a huge arduino in his shop. it's like 3' long. though resin can get heavy.

[coarse coral]

another idea would be just do little trenches in any pla and have the student run a trace / bare wire e.g. power to led and then explain that this is essentially you drawing a trace in kicad only a much larger scale without the industrial qualities

then also have cut outs at various trenches to show them what a trace with a via looks like, this can then be sandwiched for multi layer pcbs

this whole concept would be limited to components that can take a wire. the fidelity wouldn't be there for smd chips with many connections, not impossible but would take a while to setup with a set of breakout pads

[faint sky]

aren't there conductive filaments? 🧐

[faint sky]

Yes it's definitely impractical but that's part of the fun.

[vocal flax]

Those have resistance of kilohms doubt it's viable for most applications

[short crag]

anyone have recommendations for a resin 3d printer with wifi

[faint sky]

Bambu Labs A1 Recall. If you or someone you know has one tell them to stop using it immediately. https://youtu.be/ue8lnOy0Jv0?feature=shared

[coarse coral]

Sorry fdm printer here

[coarse coral]

Imagine a non volatile conductive tpu you can print like spaghetti

Oh wait you wouldn't print that lol

You'd just buy some wire

Lol pointless inventions

We developed a plastic that looks like thin strand copper wire, it feels like thin strand copper wire and it behaves exactly like thin strand copper wire. Genius. Let's approve this for mass production

[iron remnant]

ESD filament with the controlled high resistance is at least immediately useful.

There was a startup that was selling a machine that would 3D print, albeit not with the FDM process, circuit boards, tho.

[coarse coral]

@faint sky it just works, auto calibration and using the adjustment knobs. I've done this once, moved house with the thing, re attached a broken wire and it still makes me so happy

[faint sky]

Looks good. What are you making? Looks like a panel with a fan mount?

[coarse coral]

Just an increment update to the original handheld. Same hardware with some updates. Soft feel buttons, itsy bitsy hid for input instead of a python uinput and mcp3008 combo, larger screen and external storage.. fan too

This is the base to the case, 12 hours print time at .2mm later height

[faint sky]

can the itsy bitsy process hid fast enough for handheld uses?

[coarse coral]

I do hope so

Lol

[faint sky]

maybe you should breadboard it and find out if you'll be happy with it. if it's only a couple of buttons with key scanning should work ok.

[coarse coral]

Yeh , I sorta ruined my chances there as I don't have any headers currently and can't be bothered ordering some plus I've bodged into the holes already so I'm just going to get some wires in it and hope for the best. That said I tested over serial briefly and it felt instant enough. Will report results in the next week or so if I get the code together

[faint sky]

Amazing design. How thick do you make your supports? I'd like to learn more on how you're designing in your supports. Are they just straight across? How can you be sure they'll all snap off easily and correctly?

[coarse coral]

Tried and true they always snap off for me and any snags you can use a sharp edge or file to deal with it but 9/10 there's no need.

So basically under anything that would other need a basic support you place a tab, I stick with anything that has an overhang of 1cm a tab will go there. That way it has a mid anchor point or if it's an open overhang then the tab goes at the end. 3 examples coming up

[faint sky]

That is so smart. I guess it takes experience to know the distance your printer wants for mid supports.

[coarse coral]

Yes I would think so. There is a thingiverse I think which lets you figure that out. I watched some vids and just settled for 1cm as it seems reasonable. The trigger buttons may not need it but I just drop a tab anyway to be sure

[faint sky]

Thank you, that's the view I was wanting to see.

Yeah a couple more supports won't hurt. I suppose you could do a gap test. I don't think there's a calibration shape for gap testing, that would be a good one for Cura to add.

[coarse coral]

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:284380

🙂

[faint sky]

Nah that's a lot of wasted shapes. If I was going to do a gap test I'd do something like this instead.

or use a V shape and just measure where it starts sagging with a caliper.

Gap testing is something I'm pretty familiar with. I designed a circle jump test course in Quake III based on the same principle. Each gap gets progressively longer.

[velvet radish]

Any idea one why this happens with the filament? This has ruined 2 prints already. (My guess is rapid retraction and extrusion grind down the filament so it gets flat?? If so, any idea how to fix this in my slicer or how to design to avoid it?)

[coarse coral]

Nice skills, I used to things like that in football (soccer) games to learn the moves, now I just play f zero

[coarse coral]

That's interesting, has your filament been out the box for long? The plastic may happen to be more brittle than it was due to moisture and drying and moisture and drying. Or.... It could be a not great filament, I don't think retraction on the gears should mash it so badly it would break. Plus that's a metal feeder so looks like it's pretty well designed and probably has had some quality control before being sold. That's said, maybe you have a bad extruder (that's also a possibility)

You could check to see if the gears are tightened (a gentle turn with an Allan key will he enough!)

They may be badly seated in the housing. It's always a wise idea to check the assembly of various areas on your printer. I've tightened my extruder gears before as it was slipping

[gloomy anchor]

are glass plates kind of bad?

they often cause more issues for me

than PEI

for some reason glass makes things de adhere more easily

or warp

[gloomy anchor]

great deal

might be better to cash a bit more for a new one though

[fathom pulsar]

I went from manual-leveling to auto-leveling during the same upgrade that moved from glass to PEI, and so I'm not sure what to credit, but bed adhesion went from a constant problem to out-of-mind immediately.

[coarse coral]

Glass has its positives. You can get a glass like finish on one side. It's actually so nice to do that but I'm enjoying this plate which shipped with the Neptune 3 plus. Not sure what it is

[coarse coral]

@faint sky

[coarse coral]

Glass gives to a completely awesome face finish but I ended up using a lot of glue stick

[faint sky]

Glass is harder to stick to yes. People use glass surfaces to have the face layer of a print become a single flat surface. The opposite tends to happen with PEI textured sheets. Unless you're printing face plates for consoles like Stej there's little advantage to using a glass surface vs a textured PEI metal surface.

[faint sky]

It's much easier to get great quality results when your printer is working correctly and not shearing off motor shafts. 🙂 Looking great so far, better than my quality.

[velvet radish]

No, it's new and the environment is pretty dry. Maybe it's because I choose the cheapest filament on Amazon lol, the filament that shipped with the printed doesn't have this problem.
My 3d printer also had an enclosure that can get to 90 F, is that a problem?

[coarse coral]

At least there was support from sainsmart on that matter, although it was a new motor replacement . Total cost about £12

Just need to drop the handles a bit lower the triggers are a touch narrow. Seem to have got most of the measurements right this time. I think next one is a final. This went so much quicker than expected

[vocal flax]

There are no gears on that extruder.

[vocal flax]

Four possible reasons that come to my mind. Two of them not that common.

1. Hotend full or partial clog
2. Looks like a creality printer so PTFE tube in the hotend degraded and/or not sitting flush with the rest of the hotend
3. Too much idler pressure
4. Motor heats up the shaft and feeder gear and soften filament

I've never seen or experienced 3, but that's still something possible. I've personally had 4 but my printer is completely custom and I myself adjusted the current to upper range. Unlikely to happen if your machine is stock.

[vocal flax]

I have yet to use pei but ever since I added automatic bed leveling to my printer no issues. If there is something wrong it's usually a probe offset error. Considering how much I crashed the nozzle into the bed before (custom project printer) I see glass as superior.

Only problem is non uniform heat distribution. But you should always give enough time for everything to come to equilibrium. Thermal expansion and stuff

[velvet radish]

Thanks, I'll check these out. What is idler pressure?
Tbh there is a good chance it's the filament being super cheap lmao

[vocal flax]

The force created by spring on extruder transfered to filament by idler

I don't think this helps it clear out but best I could do

[coarse coral]

@faint sky all fits now to get the kapton taped backplates and hookup the itsy bitsie

[faint sky]

That is neat. Are you using the guts of a PSP or did you load it onto a Pi or other device?

[coarse coral]

Yeh it's got a pi and a pisugar for battery

Just hoping to play the 16 bit and playstation games on it

[faint sky]

I would love to read a playground note on this when you finish. That's really neat.

[coarse coral]

Screen is lovely

I'm not sure it's worthy of much in writing and re building

But I'll do one regardless and post to thingiverse

[faint sky]

Yes it definitely is. I've never seen that done before. I'd read it.

[gloomy anchor]

do people use blender for modeling for 3d printing?

[iron remnant]

Yah, you just need to be careful about generating geometry that can be printed and everything

[vivid helm]

It's good for organic shapes, but not for mechanical designs.

[ashen moat]

@worn solstice one thing to note with the PiSugar is that the battery's soldered in and there's no full-off mode. I used a PiSugar 2 for a holiday decoration, expecting that its slide switch fully turned off power, but it's actually a soft switch and the fully-charged battery was completely flat after a year in storage. the company confirmed there was no zero-consumption mode. I had to splice a secondary hard switch into one of the battery wires for long-term storage.

[random urchin]

Sometimes. I use OpenSCAD for mechanical modeling. If I need something to have a more organic look, I'll rough it in using OpenSCAD (left), then use Blender's sculpting tool to smooth it out and add details (right).

[civic aurora]

I want to hold a ESP32-CAM inside a (mostly) light-proof box that is 3D printed. [The box will have an LED inside to provide a uniform and repeatable light source.]. The plan is to leave a slot around 3 of the 4 edges of the ESP32 board, and then a hinged door that latches down to keep the card in the slot. The door will have a groove along the non-hinged edges so light can’t get in there.

What issues would you predict I’ll have to design around? Which hinge style should I choose that is (mostly) light proof? How thick should a PLA layer need to be to be light proof? How hot can PLA get (from the ESP32) and would I need a fan (with a light baffle) to extract that heat? The device will be active for hours, and this ESP draws 300 mA (@5v) when it’s really active, so 1.5 W — fortunately, the dual cores and radio chip (BLE, wifi) will be just outside the box, but the camera is inside, and generates some heat (I can’t find out how much).

[tight drum]

I'll take a poke at your questions:

Which hinge style should I choose that is (mostly) light proof?
~ I'd print whatever Hinge style that's structually supporting the weight that's weighing against the hinge if i'm thinking of a vertical, pantry cabinet type hinge. If it's a latch hinge with not much weight on it then it'll be okay

How thick should a PLA layer need to be to be light proof?
~ Could make the infill 100%, but then you'll still have to do trial and error with whatever lumen your light source put out. If you plan on finishing the 3D print with coats of paints, that could help with light going through

How hot can PLA get (from the ESP32) and would I need a fan (with a light baffle) to extract that heat?
~ Compare whatever your PLA melting point is on the spool with the heat output from your ESP32, but i'm super assuming your ESP32 isn't flesh burning temperature right?

[ashen moat]

1.5W doesn't sound like much. maybe it's low enough that the box could naturally dissipate it thru the walls?

for light-proofing, paint could work, but you could probably also line the box with matte black cinefoil, as used in theatre lighting.