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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I’ve used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I’m comfortable with it and it’s supported in every cloud environment I’ve touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

    I’ve got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I’d go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don’t find much of a difference beyond package management.





  • How the hell was that even issued? Ianal obviously, my recollection from uni engineering was that Prior Art matters.

    Also, given that there’s a lot of skilled people in the field these days, you’d think some of these patents could be challenged as being “obvious to a skilled person”, bed levelling to me could fit that bill given it’s a common issue that would make sense to pursue a solution for. Granted I’m not versed in us patent law (I barely have a basic understanding of Canadian Patent Law), so maybe that’s different.





  • Was more a thought about if you are concerned about micro fibre particulate (what I took from your post, sorry if I misunderstood) plastic on plastic or plastic on metal are fine for sure, maybe a little exaggerated. Do wonder though about the wear of 3d printed bushings, surfaces won’t be smooth, some of the glass filled nylon I’ve used has almost a soft surface to it, it’s really hard to describe, some post processing though would probably make my (mild) concern moot though so.

    Wrt composites hobbyist/prosumer grade manufacturers (some that target engineering customers in that bucket too) claim they don’t experience the same warping or shrinkage in general, whether or not that’s true I don’t have enough information to tell you unfortunately. Have found both common types definitely have more rigidity, I use them in places where that really matters.

    It’s pretty common to see cheap bearings in 3d printed parts, actually mildly interesting to me that bushings don’t seem to be, at least at the hobbyist level. To go further, how many designs do you see with heat set inserts or pressed in nuts?


  • removed just even for filament printing, there’s some solvents that get thrown around online that yeah, you really shouldn’t use in a home setting, it’s really easy to get things like MEK, which work, but starting to get into nasty territory for stuff that will dissolve filament.

    Most people do not have adequate ppe or ventilation to deal with chemicals at home, or a fire cabinet, or even know how to find an SDS.

    Semi related, lithium batteries are straight up terrifying, primary cells more than rechargeables, but same idea, I honestly hope no one ever gets to experience an actual full on cell failure, I avoided them thankfully but heard stories of just how much energy is released in even one C or D sized cell going.

    On the composite filaments, abrasive filament sure sounds like a great thing to make wear surfaces out of! There’s a list if things that idk if I’d print, and that’d be up there, ots oil bronze bushings are like, a buck, maybe 2? And they’ll last a hell of a lot longer.



  • Do you have an iPhone or any phone with lidar built in? It’s been a while but I recall it being an option for scanning, make use of tools you already have. I’m not sure what exists for Foss related apps though sorry, and afaik they’re not super accurate (dedicated scanners can get <0.01mm resolution from what I’ve seen but they’re expensive) but if your goal is layout that’d do the trick in my view. Heck, as you said, camera scanning would work, there’ll be cleanup but should be good enough to get you dimensions.

    Another thought, could check with local makerspaces or the like, totally possible they may have scanners you could use, or could put you on the right track. Diy wise, kinects as mentioned, I’m not experienced with these but there are photogrammetry tools, micmac could work, there’s meshroom but that needs some compute hardware and COLMAP could also be worth looking into

    Edit: Photogrammetry is decently accurate afaik, recall sitting in a tech meeting at my last job where the process engineers from the material handling department presented a poc they did with some cheap drones and cheap cameras, they did a fly over of the pier to scan ore piles and apparently were able to get fairly accurate weight estimates from the photogrammetry results, which was really cool to me.


  • If you live near a microcenter

    I’m like a stone’s throw from the border, if they’re cheaper very much consider crossing for that (closest looks like Detroit though, wrong crossing :/) at least for the tap carriage and mount.

    Layer lines are unavoidable imo, I’ve sorta just come to terms, I think I run a tad hot and haven’t fully tuned my profiles, but happy with it for my purposes, and definitely heat soak as well, got a process where I do it right after plate prep/cleanup, then I go do my plating and slicing, gives lots of time.

    LEDs I’m mixed on, I moved my gantry cam because they seemingly were aimed right at it and you couldn’t see anything. I keep thinking about a nozzle camera, but with my current setup I really don’t feel like running another umbilical and I’m not 100% sold that it’d survive or really be that handy.

    How is the rapido? I’m using dragon HF/UHF for spares and using my existing v6 nozzles, have heard the rapido has some good results.


  • Are those machined idler blocks‽ if not you have some really solid prints! Impressed with how clean everything is! Just took a shopvac to mine friday, printing parts for a Stealthmax, so lots of buildup.

    Need to get into that good enough mindset, definitely caused myself some headache (grabbed a Knomi for the heck of it, tons of interference issues with the blowers I use (sunon and gdstime) but got it going on the fanken-prusa


    Instead of running LEDs to the toolhead. It’s cheesy and heavy, but rule of cool right?

    If you don’t feel like printing parts, could run the usb umbilical through the chains.

    Is your other printer still up? Having a backup has come in really handy.



  • Fair enough, visually the ModernUI made it similar to what I was used to, I pretty much bounce between part design, sketch and assembly workbenches for everything I do, been a bit but I think ondsel swaps automatically to sketch from part workbench and the dimension tool is way nicer, general freecad doesn’t really have that smart dim tool, but the keyboard shortcuts make it better.

    Workflow wise, I found it pretty much exactly the same as I used SW and other parametric cad packages, make your sketches, extrude your base and then build sketches for other features. Toponaming fix seems to make external geometry references a bit more reliable, have a few cleanups if I change way back in the tree, not all sunshine and rainbows though, definitely had some frustrations and clunk. What’s sold me honestly is I dove in with a largish project (more than I expected tbh, I’ll post it when it’s more mature) and it’s so far totally met my needs.




  • Seriously give Ondsel a try if you haven’t, has a different ui on top of freecad and a few workflow changes/sketch tools that make it less clunky. I use realthunder + modern ui for freecad and while yeah, there’s clunk, it’s useable and importantly, no limits on your files. Modern UI gives freecad a ribbon bar and some other enhancements that I like, swapping between benches took a bit to get used to, draft at least the hotkeys are kinda sorta intuitive and make the flow a lot nicer.

    I switched cold turkey off of SW Maker for that reason, it limits where your files can be opened on that license, plus kept trying to save my files to a cloud storage by default. I’ve said it before, yeah freecad isn’t perfect, has clunk, but it’s provided to me free of charge with no limitations on its usage, I’ll gladly accept that.