I rather enjoy building the easy-to-use user interfaces for another website of mine. I’m always tweaking it and trying to make it better. Small change, test, ask for input, LRR.1
My last post gave me a great idea. A large physical console with actual knobs, switches, and dials that all operate Skeinforge. If I had one of these, I would want it to look like the center console of a TARDIS. Some of the best Doctor Who moments are when he’s zipping around the console, tapping, flipping, twisting, turning and generally being wacky.
Imagine being able to do that sort of thing and then have a plastic object (of a seemingly correspondingly random quality) pop out of the center?
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- Lather, rinse, repeat. [↩]
[...] Skeinforge UI suggestions [...]
[...] The brilliant scheme I came up with (I’m being sarcastic here) was to take those large files and split them up into smaller files of about 3MB each. This approach was problematic for a number of reasons. It required me to download a huge file and slice it up into small files between MySQL inserts. Copying and pasting 25,000 rows at a time was giving my poor laptop fits. It also meant I had to manipulate the full plaintext MySQL file, rather than a GZipped version. On top of all of that, I was paranoid that I would accidentally omit a single row and have to start all over again. In order to overcome the problem of server timeouts, I wrote a script that would load one small file, finish, then call itself again incrementing to the next file to be loaded, LRR. [...]
[...] The brilliant scheme I came up with (I’m being sarcastic here) was to take those large files and split them up into smaller files of about 3MB each. This approach was problematic for a number of reasons. It required me to download a huge file and slice it up into small files between MySQL inserts. Copying and pasting 25,000 rows at a time was giving my poor laptop fits. It also meant I had to manipulate the full plaintext MySQL file, rather than a GZipped version. On top of all of that, I was paranoid that I would accidentally omit a single row and have to start all over again. In order to overcome the problem of server timeouts, I wrote a script that would load one small file, finish, then call itself again incrementing to the next file to be loaded, LRR. [...]
I use a POT with analog in to adjust the amount of extrusion. My firmware multiplies the the extrusion rate with a factor and reports it on the console. This allows you to quickly adjust for differences in filament thickness and can prevent overfill conditions when you’re not properly setup yet. Instant feedback is very useful here. The important thing is that the knobs can also be ignored and a digital setting used, otherwise each file will require tuning. It should be for discovering optimal settings, not for making the process any less automated.
That’s brilliant! I totally recognize that this doesn’t help automation. But, in terms of finding optimal settings on the fly, that’s an amazing solution. Do you have a way to find out what the factor from the POT is? That would be useful for later adjusting the actual extrusion rate in Skeinforge.
Though, just knowing you need to increase/decrease the extrusion rate a little is still extremely helpful.