Forgetting to check the bed adhesion and end up getting a filament blob

So the other day I was trying to print this nifty funnel for Mokka pots - Mokka Pot Buddy from printables.com.  It's a fairly simple design, has multiple uses and stores in the mokka pot.

I just tossed it into BambuStudio, sliced the plate and hit print.

I mean it looks pretty straight forward what could go wrong?  

Plenty it turns out.  The bed adhesion wasn't good enough and the print came loose and stuck to the nozzle - much worse than getting spaghetti but at least this time it didn't consume the nozzle entirely like it did in my worst print failure I've ever had. It separated from the nozzle relatively cleanly - I had to scrape some extra gunk off and it had some extrusion issues on my next attempt but shortly thereafter it was back to normal.  

Turns out I didn't look at the sliced file and I should have.  If you look at the first few lines of the sliced file, you see that there are only two walls of filament touching the bed.  None of the inner parts, they're floating above the bed.  

So as we get taller the forces exerted on that thin connection with the bed just lets go.  By turning on supports the print was able to come out just fine.  Lesson learned - check how much of the print is actually touching the bed. 

Smooth train rides in Spain

 I love trains.

I especially love well run and smooth riding trains.

So here's another comparison video.  A few years back I had a post about the Shinkansen in Japan.

So here's the video:

We were going 152 MPH in this video, routinely ran at 168 MPH and was just as smooth.   I was curious why 168MPH - seemed like a weird speed but turns out it's 270 KPH so it's a nice round number in metric. (obligatory screen shot of speed app on phone) - Also sorry about the cough in the video.

The trains have very cool looking color schemes (livery is the word for that in the train world right?)

Anyway - 10 out of 10 would recommend Spanish Rail - Renfe - as a mode of travel in Spain. 

Accidental 3d printing art

 Every once and a while a print goes wrong and turns into a piece of art unto itself.

This is the print I'm trying to slice and print.  Nothing too crazy about it, except there isn't a lot of bed adhesion.  Add to that PETG's tendency to clump and string when not perfectly dry and you've got a recipe for a failed print.

The print looked kinda neat once I took it off the plate though.

Quick recap of Christmas Tree Project

I'll never make any money as a blogger.  Its never my goal or objective mind you, but it's abundantly clear to me that I could never make a living as a writer.  I just don't do it consistently enough.   These posts are mostly to gather and record my thoughts so I can remember later in life.

So I used NeoPixels to light my Christmas tree a 2022.  I put a post up about it when I was getting started and never followed up.  A lot like my photography posts.  Oh well.  The original post: 

Trying to NeoPixel my Christmas tree part 1

So I started to get it working quite well and had the tree wired up for the season.  I never went on to build the web front end so I could change the lights remotely.  Maybe in a future try.  

I even had enough lights left over to wire the tree in our office:

In both cases I'm running the color wheel code example from the MIT project.  I did make some that did alternate pattersn - like alternating red and green, sparkle/flashes, even did some hand mapping to do it by rows.  All the code is in my XmasTreeLights github repo.  In general it would be better to start with the Matt Parker code, the MIT code or AdaFruit's neopixel tutorials. 

BBr2 from Michael Baddeley's patreon on my new BambuLabs P1S

For last christmas, on a whim I decided to print a BBr2 (BaByR2) from a patreon I subscribe to: Michael Baddeley (I'm also printing a full size R2, more on that in another post).

So I sold all my camera gear and used the money to buy a BambuLabs P1S with AMS filament changer.  It is an excellent printer.  If you can afford one, get one.  Even the P1P would be a great printer to get.  Speed and quality in a single package that isn't "Prusa" expensive. 

The body came out great on the first try.

The dome prints very well without supports. 

 Printed two legs, some tires and a center foot and it was time to assemble. 

It's a very easy print and pretty easy to assemble with some screws and superglue.  It takes 3 servo motors and somethign to control them.  Since this was my first attempt I went simple with a FlySky FS-I6 from amazon. 

I initially printed the oversized "cartoonish" dome.  I just picked the default dome from the file list.  After gluing and assembling I wired it up to an adafruit crickit to test the dome.  Adafruit makes it super easy to control servos, especially when you're just testing things out. 

I later found the holiday themed dome.  I had some red filament laying around from a previous project idea so it seems a perfect time to test out the AMS.  Turned out excellent!  I bought some "metalic" paint markers from a craft store and started coloring the white in.  

*EDIT/UPDATE* - found the time lapse footage for the Santa hat print:

The AMS does create a lot of waste with the filament changes however:

Later I went back and printed a classic dome in gray PLA and colored it in (still have some more to do)

Super fun project, glad I spent the time on it. Wish I had better hand/eye coordination to paint it better.

3d printed Chewbacca Bowcaster

 

Catching up on my posting - last year I printed myself a Bowcaster for my Chewbacca costume.

The costume was pretty simple.  It started with a onesie I bought at target a while back on a whim.  I added the talking Chewbacca mask and it was pretty much done.  All I needed was the bowcaster.

I found some STLs on Etsy Designed by MysteryMakersStudio - Custom digital DIY Bowcaster with stand stl file(digital download) and I was off and running.   As an aside, Marko Makaj, the designer has a reasonably well priced patreon  as well if you want more than just one model.  It's important to note it's makers plural.

Anyway was off and printing on my new Ender-3 Max Neo 3D Printer.  I don't think I mentioned that yet - should probably post about it too.   I bought it because I wanted the large build area 300x300 and the NEO line with the SonicPad was supposed to be a game changer.  Meh. It prints.

The parts all came out pretty good.

Next came all the gluing.  So. Much. Gluing.   It went together pretty well.  The polarizers (the balls on the end) are a bit heavy for how thick the actual bows are.  I managed drop it and break them off more than once.

One of the tricks I tried in this build was to use UV Resin from my resin printer to fill in the layer lines.  It's very effective but smells pretty bad when you cure it with the UV flashlight. 

fully assembled! (It did drive me to drink.  A little Smith and Cross rum there on the table).

One of the resin printed lenses cracked when I took it off the plate.  I left it as is for "authentic battle damage!"

Primed.  I later used rattle-can gloss black and then some Rub and Buff silver to to make it look metalic.  Came out good enough for me.  

Lots of lessons learned, could do a lot better if I did it all over again.  Now I just need a place to store this bad boy.

Redoing my lightsaber

 The good folks at Adafruit made a revision to the feather wing light saber. based on their PropMaker RP2040.

The original:

 The Lightsaber Prop-Maker RP2040 is much smaller and fits better in the hands.

The single feather requires a lot less room than the stacked feather and prop maker feather wing.  I was able to re-use the blade and neopixel strip from the first build.  So I only had to get the prop maker rp2040 and the speaker. 

It worked pretty good straight away

The odd lighting at the end of the saber is from the code not being configured with the right pixel count.