The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

The New Hotness

  • Frank-O-Squid Calibration

    The saga of rebuilding and reconfiguring my old Thing-O-Matic around an Azteeg X3 controller and Marlin software at Squidwrench continues apace:

    TOM286 - with calibration scrap
    TOM286 – with calibration scrap

    A major benefit of doing this at the group meetings has been showing everybody that 3D printing isn’t a mass-production process. The pile of calibration objects includes an inordinate number of those thinwall open boxes that take about five minutes each:

    3D printed calibration scrap
    3D printed calibration scrap

    But it’s producing reasonable quality stuff again:

    TOM286 - First Dodecahedron
    TOM286 – First Dodecahedron

    The loose threads on the outward sloping sides of that dodecahedron show that I forgot to lower the temperature after a bit of trouble with adhesion to the platform; the problem turned out to be an interaction between Slic3r’s minimum layer time and minimum printing speed settings that I didn’t notice.

    A disadvantage of doing this at the group meetings is that two or three hours of tweaking and printing, once a week, draws the whole process out far longer than anyone else expected… [grin]