• 12 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

    Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

    (Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)



  • Absolutely! You just have to ditch those silly luxuries like food and shelter. You could even start working 80 hour weeks in hopes of getting passed over for that promotion again. Until then, you can just dream about how that extra $100 a month could possibly bring the total time down to 9,989 years.


  • I just let it run without the resin vat and the RERF default print (with the characters) does actually trigger different exposures.

    But yeah, the filename is super important as it triggers a test mode where the plate is exposed at 8 different spots at 8 different times per layer.

    I’ll need to create my own test file and test it with and without the characters. It’s something I can test, but was hoping someone knew off the top of their head. (I was in the middle of my first ever resin print when I banged out this post, actually.)




  • Nah, this is not really a tech support community, but whatever. (Unless it is a tech support community? I always thought pcmasterrace was supposed to be a hair on the sarcastic side.)

    It looks like a self-signed cert that is on your DSL modem (The subdomain was ‘dsldevice’…) and I am guessing you are trying to use the web interface for your modem?

    If you aren’t making a connection to that device (which would have an IP address in 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x) and you are trying to browse to an external site, then:

    1. There is no internet connection and your device is injecting a local address for an external DNS query to give you a hint that you need to fix yo’ shit or
    2. Your device is super old and cannot handle HTTPS correctly. (Unlikely)
    3. Your DSL device is hijacked and is doing an MTM attack on a HTTPS connection. (Highly unlikely, but you never know.)

    Do regular web sites work correctly, or does this happen regardless of the site you are attempting to browse to?



  • Quick addendum: Cheap digital hygrometers from Amazon can be off by as much as 10% or more and are kinda pointless, poorly designed and a waste of batteries.

    Simply using some color changing desiccant will save you a few bucks. (It’s something I use here in Colorado for my jars of… “entertainment products”… that is legal here, in addition to my filaments.)

    There is desiccant available that is formulated to hold specific humidity levels but filament is better served by pure silica gel.



  • I started to design one myself but realized it was a bad idea. For starters, and effective design wouldn’t use much plastic: Bamboo or other kinds of material used for the tubes already stack together really well and it is much easier to stack them in a box glued together or use thin wire to bind them. Any additional design components translates to waste, IMHO.

    And like you said, the plastic is bad to keep outside. If it wasn’t for the moisture, direct sunlight would deform most common materials.


  • Yeah, I got several replacement bits from them for no charge. It’s also super easy to get past their level 1 support if you present an issue clearly and with evidence. (… as opposed to being forced to perform every step in a level 1 playbook. (DiD yOu tUrN iT oN aNd oFf agAiN?))

    I have been following the power loss recovery issues on GitHub for a while. They finally came out and said, on GitHub, that they can’t implement. It was super shady of them to just quietly delete that feature from their product page.

    However: If your first layer is tuned correctly and you lose power long enough for the bed to cool down, the print (depending on the material) will likely pop off the bed anyway so power loss recovery is moot. IMHO, if the print is super important it should be supervised and attached to a beefy UPS.


  • Random rambling and opinions ahead.

    It’s $10k if anyone was wondering but as far as commercial products go, that is still peanuts.

    Prusa acquired the companies responsible for this product a couple years ago(?) and I believe it is a good thing that this product was in limbo for a bit. (It likely means a more refined product, but just speculation.)

    Unfortunately, Prusa is not beyond beta testing with their customers or making false promises about future product features. (re: Prusa Mini, as a good example.) I only say this because if you were planning to buy this for production immediately, I would personally wait a few months.

    That previous paragraph sounds bad, and it is, but their support channels are amazing and that is where most of the product cost is. My personal experience with Prusa support has always been excellent.

    (I was a Mini early adopter, so I expected some rough edges. Power loss recovery functionality was quietly buried over the last couple of years as their original board+psu wasn’t up to the task.)








  • For starters, I have a Prusa printer, Moose 3D scanner and a full license for Fusion 360, a small custom built CNC and a good selection of specialty tools.

    If needed, I can revert to photogrammetry for capturing high detail on small parts. (Probably within 15um/.5 thou? I need to test the limits of what I can actually do before I say for certain…)

    I can scale printing super fast and am lucky enough to have a Microcenter near me so I can buy more printers and filament in a hurry. (Now that I think about it, I’ll probably order a resin printer this evening. It’ll be useful for my own projects where I need to duplicate some injection molded parts.)

    For now, I am going to let the jobs determine the scale of my operation and how I invest in additional equipment. Thankfully, I am decent enough at the mechanical aspects of this stuff to handle issues fairly quick.

    But yeah, I already have a few thousand dollars in tools, assorted parts and filaments. It’s the odd tools I have that give me a good starting advantage, me thinks. (Nobody else I know has a full set of pin gauges, as an odd example. My electronic component and fastener selection is also fairly substantial.)

    Honestly, it’s time to get an ROI from all of my own, personal projects that I have made substantial investments in over the years.