LesHall
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Posts posted by LesHall
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I have noticed that Cura strangely does not set the temperature of the bed or the print head. The material selection on the LCD does that. It kind of makes sense in a way, this lets you switch materials without changing the gcode file. My question then becomes how do I set up new materials, cause as you know there's a heap big bunch of them out there, each with their own recommended bed and nozzle temperature. Is it in the menu somewhere?
Les
Make history!
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OK, I was told that printing with solder and other low temp metals is not practical because it sticks to the brass nozzle and would melt the PTFE feeding tube. OK, so about the nozzle - my buddy Matthew at printed solid sells hardened steel nozzles for dealing with abrasive filaments, can those nozzles be used? And the feeding tube, why can't that be made of similar material.
I know it may be a stretch, and greater, more familiar minds than mine have thought of this, so what is the reason we don't just use an all steel or all aluminum for that matter hotend and print with solder? Please educate me on this one.
Thanks,
Les Hall
Make history!
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Hi Sander, I can see your concept as one in a series of "Maker Gamer" Competitions. You use a standard numbering system of the value of each piece (pawn=1, knight=3, bishop=3, rook=5, queen=9, king=infinity).
You assemble your pieces into one or more than one mega-piece(s). Capabilities combine like rook legs give you XY motion, bishop legs give you diagonal motion. Similarly arms give you the attack modes of the pieces employed.
You must 3D print your monstrosities prior to playing the game(s), which are a series of best 2 out of 3 or so, so that you get a bit of gameplay. Experienced gamers will have collections of combinations ready-print to employ for impromptu games. Software versions of the game exist.
It's a chess variant, Maker style!
I'll trade you that envisionment for another of my own. "Maker Wearables Game" is where you create wearable computing, sensing, and actuating hardware, share the plans to gain teamwork points, and use your built hardware and software in your life environment for game points. Beginning with simple WiFi scanners (one that I built before), moving on to internet broadcasting cameras, heartbeat monitors (of both yourself and, thru infrared, others). Night vision, and getting really fancy to motorized boots/skates, rain deployable umbrellas, who knows where it could go.
Your mission is to create new technology and share it with the hive mind. In fact, maybe that's the name of the game: Maker Hive Mind!
Les
Make history!
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I used to be quite the Quake fan, played a Demo Man in the Team Fortress mod, which I gather is it's own game now. Rightly so, it was a lot of fun. I have lost touch with the gaming world, though I would like to create a game.
The game would have a chat component of some sort for communications between players, a 3D printing component so you would actually print stuff to be part of the game, and of course a computing component, possibly an electronics and software involvement. So basically a team-based Maker thing of sorts.
I don't have much of a specific feel for how the game would actually materialize, just I like to do those things and I figure other people would also.
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Hi Sander, I guess you want to reward both persistence and merit so that if someone keeps on trying but never seems to quite make the grade, that is it's own rewarding category. Then categories for the various themes of merit, as voted up by the membership. Maybe propose an initial list and ask people to prune / expand the list.
Ultimaker specific categories should be included but not take up too many slots so that people with other printers are welcome.
Then it's a matter of judging which as you mention can be community based. There can be short term as well as long term rewards, or perhaps once a week and a vote-off monthly maybe.
Then once a year there could be an annual competition including both voting of previous winners to become the annual super-winner of each category and a meta-competition. The annual process and results can be written up by those among us who are writers into a presentation for consumption by those outside of Ultimaker forums as an annual "Best of Ultimaker" type thing.
Make that annual thing a celebration and actually you know what? Rather than have the celebration later, let's kick the whole thing off with the first annual montly competition because there's never a reason to delay a party / celebration! It can be in July for Christmas in July and Independence Day as borrowed from our USA members and recognized globally as a celebration of freedom, how's that?
Les
Make history!
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It is with all the excitement of a child being praised by parents that I write you about having my 3D print featured. It could be thought of as a small honor with a 10% to 20% chance of being selected from recent peer work, but it sure makes me feel good.
With the photo displayed so prominently in the banner, it's like I got three gold stars from the teacher for my essay on 3D printers, lol. Add to that the fact that, at 49 years young, I am in my second childhood right now.
I really believe that this and the contest being run, and other types of modest rewards help keep people excited about 3D printing. How about more such selections in areas like most practical, most imaginative, most meaningful, most medical, etc. each month?
Just an idea!
Les
Make history!
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Gotcha Sander, I will experiment with temperature and measure the filament's actual diameter to make sure the extrusion is ok, plus double check the Bowden tube.
The cracks happened when I used my putty knife to lift the print off of the bed, not waiting for the glass bed to cool. Actually I think the infill of 20% is the culprit here. It is a thin-walled shape but with 20% infill it becomes two outer walls of 0.6mm and an inner space that is mostly void.
To fix that I have bumped up the infill to 100%, though I wonder if bumping up the wall thickness would be better? either way, there will be more than twice the thickness of wall so the cracks will not occur so much when i remove the part from the bed.
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I'm gonna sit this one out, looking forward to seeing the awesome work that y'all do though!
Les
Make history!
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Here are top and bottom views of the first print after all the fixing. Kind of stringy, eh
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Thank You All for your kind and patient responses! I have slept (twice!) and had a moment of reflection. Thinking out loud I truly was negligent in not reaching out to the community for support. It's kind of like a slippery slope. You want to fix it right away, then one goofup leads to another thingamafuzzle and next thing you know you have learned something the hard way instead of relying on the true experts. Ah well.
In the photo posted, notice how the black netting wraps to the left, down, and tucks in the bottom? Well when I looked at my printer just after the clog, it was covering the upper left screw, and the bottom of it must have pinched off the flow of filament. I have gremlins around here, people who should know better than to play practical jokes on me, and that is always a possibility but really it probably just came loose during shipping and was an accident waiting to happen. The fact that there is no fastener there is in my mind a design flaw. Do you see what happened now?
I will check that the Bowded tube is perfectly flat and recut with scissors if it is not. Also I will take the extruder apart and reassemble it so that the tension adjuster works again. Today I finish repairing this thing! Also will check linked references before continuing. Thanks again, I just gotta learn to lean on my community better!!!
Les
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Actually now that I got that off my chest, I feel better. Maybe I'll keep the Ultimaker 2+ after all, maybe I have no choice, not sure of return policy for a printer I've so modified. It really is a thing of art and beauty, delicate, fast, nimble in executing it's precise and controlled extrusion. I feel better now... Next to see how to fix that extruder and then test it.
Les
Make history!
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Yesterday morning I received my Ultimaker 2+ brand spanking new out of the box. My friend Ryan Beltran, founder of elequa, helped with the unpacking and it felt like Christmas morning. The printer gently crafted the test robot print with finesse, delicate and precise were it's movements, and I was one happy camper.
Fast forward to the second print, a two hour job that would have produced a water purification device of my own design. While on a Skype call and watching the printer run I noticed something was wrong. I paused the printer, then started it again and the problem continued. My Skype friend, a new business partner (possibly), noticed I was preoccupied and scheduled a routine of calls in the future.
Fast forward to now. Its nearly 3 AM the next day and I'm just so very disappointed with how very badly this printer just literally destroyed itself all because of a simple extruder clog. It seems that the webbing around the wires that goes to the print head, well it had gotten tangled with the filament and the printer's Hobbed Bolt (or equivalent drive mechanism) dug into the filament, making it ever so slightly wider than it originally was, such that it got stuck in the Bowden tube. The filament then proceeded to travel up the length of the tube to nearly fully at the end but stopped at about three quarters of the way there. That's when it built up enough friction to clog the Bowden tube.
Not realizing the source of the problem, and unable to pull or push the filament, I felt that there must be an extruder clog (though it was really a Bowden tube clog), so I looked through the sparse Troubleshooting Help and to my dismay found nothing about clogs in the feed path. Disappointed with no help on such an obvious problem, I proceeded to remove the backing plate of the extruder. Then for some reason I decided to put the plate back on and did so. The upper right screw would not tighten all the way.
Next I removed the whole extruder and watched the "captive" nut for the upper right screw fall out. No problem, I just put it back into place on the extruder. Next I dealt with the clog which of course was extremely difficult. I ended up using the end of the Bowden tube to pry out the filament just a smidgen of length at a time (prying with my flush cutters), and in the process decided to open up the other end of the tube to push on the rope with some loose filament that I cut from the spool for this purpose.
Between the pushing and the prying I managed to clear the tube. That's when I saw the clog was due to the Hobbed bolt or gear had dug into the filament. What cause that? Oh yes, as I mentioned before it was the cable netting getting caught in the filament feed. So next I had to disassemble the hot end to find the little blue clip that had fallen into it, then I reassembled the hot end.
Next I went to go put the extruder back on and I noticed the adjustor with the five little marks on it, that is supposed to be left in the middle, was at the top position. No amount of torquing the adjustment screw would fix it, so I presume that my blunder of taking the backing plate off of the extruder to get a look at it must have let loose a key little piece of that assembly.
Next I plan to disassemble the extruder and put it back together to fix that adjustment device, and also in the process of prying out the filament the Bowden tube got ugly, so I cut off 1/4" (6mm) or so from the end so that it is nice and clean looking now. I will reassemble, check for proper operation of all pieces, level the bed, and then I have a decision to make.
Do I want to keep such a maintenance nightmare or send it back in exchange for a Lulzbot Taz 5 if I can, or just give up any notion of having a printer at all. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to do this on my own without any help from a search of the forum or the documentation, for a simple Bowden tube clog. I think now I see the wisdom of the direct drive approach, you don't have that damn tube clogging up on you.
This, coming from a guy with 2.5 years experience in 3D printing, is really quite disappointing. My new printer, the object of joy, is no longer new. I just cannot keep riding the emotional roller coaster of printer repair. I want to use the funds to pay Shapeways and 3D Hubs to make my prints at this point. So upsetting! I'm very disillusioned at this point. Sigh.
Les
Make history!
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Organic forms escape me too, though I was able to make pretty good wyrms using low poly spheres spaced along sinusoidal position paths. It you point the axis of the sphere in line with the direction of the path, then the low poly of the spheres makes them looks like segments with scales (somewhat, YMMV).
Also you can use a for() loop or if you can figure out recursion, that is another way to go. I just a while ago learned how to do this in OpenSCAD using recursion and it makes you feel like a math wizard, even if you're not lol...
Les
p.s. but so far that's all i can do thought I did make some interesting things with the hull() feature. Hull and recursion? Worth a try!
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Oh, and the 3D printing tie-in is that a 3D print will be needed to hold the electrodes in place just so!
Les
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Here is an interesting video that teaches some powerful lessons:
This shows two things: first that more than one cell (0.6V each or so I recall?) can be connected in series within a single electrolyte, and second that enough current can be coaxed from a lemon to create a spark sufficient to make fire in tissue paper.
The tie-in here to water purification has to do with some experiments that I'm doing in the context of elequa, which is a small startup non-profit that i am helping to get off the ground. I hope that I am within forum rules to mention the company, am I Sander?
Anyway, elequa is getting it's start by applying electricity to water to accomplish electrocoagulation / impurity clumping of some sort and as a side project (bear with me, it's a bit complex this roadmap) I am planning to explore the Baghdad Battery.
The long and short of this is that I believe that we can create water purifiers with dissimilar metals arranged properly and a solution of impure water plus fruit juice poured into a container with the electrodes in place. Is it practical and possible that the cell will provide it's own energy source so that external electricity is not necessary? if so, there are a lot of people who would like to learn how to do this type of thing in the third world!
Les
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James! I cannot thank you enough for this offer! Together we can save humanity from itself. Here is the link to the latest design, unprinted and unproven:
Les - great idea ad nice and simple!
It triggers a few thoughts - so I will think aloud when I get a chance!
James
good to hear James, although i know that |Robert| is correct in his practicality assessment, and I thank him for his assessment, the design does also serve to spark creativity and inventiveness in others. Hey, if i was trapped on Gilligan's Island with nothing but trash on the beach, I'd build these things and do whatever other McGyvering I could figure out to survive! Haha! At least in my imagination it's possible!
Les
p.s. looking forward to whatever you have to share.
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Today was victorious! Haha, I got the software working for the new MQTT cloud at e-NABLE. This means that the beginnings of web based hand / server communications of small data chunks (i like my data chunky!) is now tested and working int he hand to server path. Next we need to do server to hand and hand to hand, but not before adding a 9DOF sensor and maybe even a camera.
That's a lot of acronyms and I'm deep into the project ATM, just know that it works! It works! It works! And just in time for Friday!
Les
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Hi Les - love to know more about it.
Having been one of those people that goes off grid every now and then there is no 'killer' answer to providing all your water, but anything that can provide some in a passive way (while you are out doing other things like looking for food) is a boon (It is all about energy in for max output) - so ANY contribution that is energy neutral helps the equation.
Happy to test printing and try in a benign climate (UK) if that is helpful.
James
James! I cannot thank you enough for this offer! Together we can save humanity from itself. Here is the link to the latest design, unprinted and unproven:
And here is the link to the 2014 stuff with the video and the magazine article:
The new design is more of a mold for the aluminum foil, so that one 3D print makes many devices. Please contact me by email or here with any questions or comments: deltamodulator(at)gmail(dot)com. Supposedly and hopefully I'll get my new printer around the end of next week and I can catch up with you.
Les
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http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/emergencies/qa/emergencies_qa5/en/
7.5L per person, per day. I feel like you're going to need a hell of a lot of coke bottles to meet that requirement. Even if you cut it in half I'm having a hard time seeing how this would be practical.
I think I've also heard some "survivalist experts" say that the tiny little solar stills that are included in life rafts and the like are mostly pointless as the yield is just too low. The solar stills I've seen built for the purpose of emergency survival usually use a large(ish) tarp stretched over a decent amount of water, and even then you only get about a cup of water a day.
But I'd love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, the yield is an issue, so I expect that this may prove to be more of a teaching tool than a sustainable provider of clean water. Then once the concept of solar distillation is taught, people are then free to create all manner of more productive devices. Plus if you were stuck in the path of a hurricane's aftermath, you could survive on the low yield of a dozen or so bottles.
It's very simple: we have to do something about the horrible conditions that the majority of humanity survives under. Here we sit in our air conditioned houses with our 3D printers and our diamonds and gold and devices and entertainment while every five seconds a child dies of poor conditions. Its sickening and I intend to do something about it. I also work for elequa but that's a whole other story.
And I know that I'm preaching to the choir, that you are likely just as compassionate as I am. Let's team up and do something!
Les
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I'm not a researcher, just an enthusiast, and I am wondering if the small scale of this work can be used to make fluidic circuits. If so, a 3D printed calculalting machine could possibly be created, perhaps?
Les
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Ah yes, you are totally right. Of course.
I get quite an amount of information presented a day, so sometimes I need to think twice, or in this case thrice to remember where I read it
Ahh ok. So basically you want to grab the condensation from the vaporized water tank?
Wouldn't this require a way bigger container than a bottle? How would you grab it?
Even though you may not have all the questions yet, by asking them we may become more aware and perhaps someone else who reads it does have an answer
I actually don't think they have a forum. I think they are not very fond of communities, as they closed all of them. Have you ever heard of tech for trade?
Sander, no problem about mixups, you are not a machine!
Actually it's people like you that make a forum even lively or existing. You are key / core to it's very being so thanks for that! I don't have an idea what the yield per bottle will be but certainly you would need more than one bottle per person.
I just had a look at techfortrade - wow amazing, exactly who i've been seeking. I sent them a message with a link to the Thingiverse listing. Hopefully this will help!
Les
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It was in the contest as an entry. Well, I can certainly understand the misunderstanding, as everyone seems to not "get it" right away. All it does is turn a soda or glass bottle into a little water distillation device, solar powered by the heat of the sun's rays.
You see, if you take an ordinary soda bottle and put some water in the bottom of it, then put it out in the sun, and wait long enough you will notice evaporation occur which rises and collects on the upper part of the bottle as droplets, right? Well this gizmo uses that phenomenon, providing a way to collect the water droplets and thus harvesting cleaner water from the dirty water.
A lot of work remains to be done to figure out exactly how well it does it's job. What is the yield? Does it kill bacteria? Does it filter bacteria? How does it affect all these other impurities that may exist? What about related technologies?
So I gotta start somewhere. I went to Thingiverse but there is no forum (or wasn't hmm there is now isn't there?), I'm trying here next. Basically I want to introduce this simple technology to like-minded individuals who also want to help out. Maybe someone can point me to an existing forum on the topic also?
Les
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Yay \o/ congrats to the winner, an assistive device deserves first place for sure! And it's all in fun! Plus the prize goes to a good cause. Cheeers!
Les
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HI all, I'm into water these days, specifically water purification. I combine that with my goal to help minimize human suffering from a global perspective, and what percolates is simple water purifiers.
I am writing to see if this topic takes root here, as 3D printing is one helpful part of the solution. I have come up with a gizmo that can be 3D printed and solves water purity problems for hopefully many people. I also work for free helping a small startup non-profit get off the ground.
Well that's all for now, please feel free to ask questions and I'll answer accordingly!
Les
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Do Ultimakers fancy a game from time to time?
in Coffee corner
Posted
Sander, please see this link for a chess monster print.