Audiobook finished

Naked Empire by Terry Goodkind

Another good story. He is really ghosting Ayn Rand but that's OK.

I actually finished this last Friday (the 23rd) but just didn't get around to posting until now.

RepRap build

I am building a second RepRap printer now that I know what I'm doing, and will sell my original once this one is operational.

This will be a really huge post detailing everything about building a reprap printer and it will take a couple of weeks to finish. I will make additional posts pointing back to it when I add new sections, it's a work in progress and will be behind a cut because it's going to be pages of photos and videos.

My hope is that those of you who are thinking about doing this (I know you're out there) will have a specific example and walkthrough of the required steps so you can decide whether this is something you want to do. I'm happy to answer questions.
( Few will dare (or care to) click here )

And at the last, a solution

Tonight was incredibly frustrating RepRapping. I was trying to print one of Prusa's newest design X end idler with push fit connectors. This thing is kind of rough on the printer for various reasons I won't get into, suffice it to say that it shakes the table when printing.

I aborted two attempts at it last night and 5 tonight. The layers just were not stacking up. This means that the printer was skipping steps in both X and Y axes. I tried everything I could think of including replacing the motor drivers, retuning the drive current, changing the way the software was laying out the part, and a few other things. No luck at all.

In a final desperate act, I switched back to the older firmware. Bingo, problem solved. After describing the events to folks on IRC, it turns out that the default acceleration and jerk settings on the firmware are probably a bit too hight for my printer and it's driving the motors against inertia just a little too hard. For tonight I'm letting it finish up the print with the old firmware but I'm going to try reducing acceleration on the newer firmware, because the new firmware is SO much nicer - the old "Sprinter" firmware starts and stops at the ends of every line segment as it goes and that shakes the hell out of the printer.

I was having very dark thoughts about DIY 3D printing along about 9:30 this evening, but after putting the old firmware back on it's in the middle of a beautiful print with perfect bridges, and all is well again.

This is clearly the root cause of a lot of trouble I've been having over the last week or more, so I'm glad to have the actual cause finally isolated.

And Stephen Fry has a new miniseries about language that I'm watching so it's all good.