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Last week was entirely consumed with fighting my 3D printer. It's been working well for 3 or 4 years since I got it but last week (of course when I had a printing deadline) it just wouldn't co-operate. I had ruined prints one after another. Just couldn't figure it out. In the end I wasn't able to fulfill the order, took what I had to the con and promised to ship the rest later.
When I got back, I decided it was time for a new printer. I have a new Creality K1C in the shop and I'm very pleased with it. It prints about 2 or 3 times faster than the old one and produces much higher quality prints.
I also did some work on the old printer; determined after a LOT of headache that the electronics board was faulty in some minor but irritating way. I ripped its brains out and put in some old RAMPS/Arduino stuff I had lying in the junkbox, and now it's printing happily. It's going to be my test bed for future experiments. I hadn't really paid attention to the 3D printing world for the last 5 years and I missed a LOT. There's some really cool stuff that's all open source that I can experiment with.
Anyway, Windycon was pretty good but short. Seems like we barely got there and we were going back home.
On the computer front, between the new printer software and Zoom and some other resource-hungry applications, the 10 year old tower PC just ain't cutting it anymore. Yesterday I swapped it out for the new laptop that I bought last month, which is an 8th gen i5. Should be good enough. I dug around in the junk boxes and found the old USB C hub I used when working from home, and a 150 watt USB C power supply I rescued from the trash at work, and I have an extension cable and a 10 port hub on the way from Amazon, so I can just plug into the USB C port and charging and everything else run through that. So far it's looking OK - though my old slicing software, Cura, isn't happy; it won't load models. But I did get the new Creality software to export a usable print file for the old machine so maybe I don't care.
When I got back, I decided it was time for a new printer. I have a new Creality K1C in the shop and I'm very pleased with it. It prints about 2 or 3 times faster than the old one and produces much higher quality prints.
I also did some work on the old printer; determined after a LOT of headache that the electronics board was faulty in some minor but irritating way. I ripped its brains out and put in some old RAMPS/Arduino stuff I had lying in the junkbox, and now it's printing happily. It's going to be my test bed for future experiments. I hadn't really paid attention to the 3D printing world for the last 5 years and I missed a LOT. There's some really cool stuff that's all open source that I can experiment with.
Anyway, Windycon was pretty good but short. Seems like we barely got there and we were going back home.
On the computer front, between the new printer software and Zoom and some other resource-hungry applications, the 10 year old tower PC just ain't cutting it anymore. Yesterday I swapped it out for the new laptop that I bought last month, which is an 8th gen i5. Should be good enough. I dug around in the junk boxes and found the old USB C hub I used when working from home, and a 150 watt USB C power supply I rescued from the trash at work, and I have an extension cable and a 10 port hub on the way from Amazon, so I can just plug into the USB C port and charging and everything else run through that. So far it's looking OK - though my old slicing software, Cura, isn't happy; it won't load models. But I did get the new Creality software to export a usable print file for the old machine so maybe I don't care.
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