Random Nonsense – Page 3

Printing with PLA again! [10/18/2010]

[I’ve been printing in PLA pretty much exclusively for several years now since it’s got way less particulates and VOC’s compared to ABS. However, back in the early days of MakerBot, printing with PLA was fraught with problems. It printed inconsistently, it was hard to dial in temperature and speed settings, and it caused constant extruder clogs. I think a large part of this was probably due to the design of early extruder nozzles. You had to very carefully build and wrap your own extruders back then and if heat creeped up the nozzle into the filament, it was easy to create a blockage. Modern nozzles have huge heat sinks which help prevent these issues.]

Yesterday I printed with PLA until my MK5 Plastruder jammed. I could print off a single pawn piece from Cliff Biffle’s brilliant chess set, but when I tried 9 at a time it stopped extruding. ¹

I had the Skeinforge settings all fouled up. I thought I was testing print quality starting at 200 degrees Celsius and decreasing at 5 degree increments. Instead, when I stopped

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When using Skeinforge’s multiple feature, it’s easier to create an array of 3×3 pawns to fit on the platform than it is to create an array of 2×4 to get exactly 8 pieces [↩]

An open letter to Ms. Word [10/18/2010]

[So this post isn’t taken as pure misogyny, “Ms. Word” and “Ms. Outlook” aren’t real people, this was my referring to a personification of “Microsoft Word” and “Microsoft Outlook”, playing on the similarity between the initials for Microsoft as “MS” and the greeting/title. Chances are I was having a frustrating day, being frustrated with having to use Microsoft Word at work. I have been using LibreOffice and OpenOffice before that for years and do everything I can to actively avoid using MS products. Many of the blog posts I’m dusting off have no tags, no categories, even when they’re basically fully formed posts. This one has the tag “ms word is bad for you”. :) ]

Dear Ms. Word,

I’ve done everything in my power to sever our relationship. I gave up on you years ago. I know this sounds harsh, but I just need to get it off my chest. You are a bloated hog. When you’re around nothing else works. You are more a hindrance than help. ¹

I don’t want to see you at work and especially not at home. I’ve moved on and I wish you could see that.

Believe me, I only put up with your good friend Ms. Outlook because my work requires it of me. But why Ms. Outlook thinks I need to have you around every few minutes is totally beyond me.

There’s no need to reply, just go.

Most sincerely,

MakerBlock

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Oh, and tell your yappy dog to quiet down. I’m tired of hearing of him too. [↩]

Weird new kind of spam [09/19/2010]

[Many years ago Phooky had mentioned seeing an odd kind of behavior online. I can’t recall if this was a phenomena on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter… but I think it may have been on Facebook. What he saw was some accounts going into an insular online group, starting an argument, and then taking those replies, sending them to the ideologically-opposite group, taking those replies and sending them to the first group, then lather, rinse, repeating. This was a very long time ago – perhaps in 2010 or 2011? In any case, at the time I assumed it was juvenile hijinks. With the benefit of hindsight, now I think it was something far more nefarious. I think it was likely the initial testing grounds for the influencing of online groups. This was around the time of the rise of the Tea Party Movement around 2009, then the Occupy Wallstret Movement in 2011. Maybe this is all just conspiracy mongering. Or, perhaps there were online experiments, sharpening the science of influencing online movements put into practice in 4Chan, QAnon, and other groups originating in online forums. Anyhow, my guess this weird spam was designed to pick a fight – either to mine the replies for data or get authorized to post comments for spam, or perhaps… all of the above.]

I noticed a few months ago a new kind of spam that sometimes wasn’t picked up by my spam filter. People (or their ‘bots) were leaving highly politically/religiously charged comments. The comments read as if they were written by real people – but they didn’t make much sense in the context of the post.

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Getting my Plastruder MK5 running [09/06/2010]

[Only 300 draft posts remaining unpublished! What’s a little sad about these posts is that the things they used to refer to, no longer point to valid websites. The MakerBot store and all associated documentation links probably haven’t worked for more than a decade. But, I guess it’s just as well. I haven’t used my Cupcake CNC in a very, very long time and there’s not likely anyone building or upgrading a Cupcake CNC that could find the below of any use. That said… and when stupid legislatures decide to regulate 3D printers into oblivions, the only 3D printers people will have are those that they make themselves…]

When the Plastruder MK5 I ordered hadn’t arrived on Friday I was a little disappointed because I was hoping to build it over the long weekend. Luckily it arrived late Saturday! Huzzah! My weekend was saved! I had put off soldering the Relay Board I got with my heated build platform since I haven’t gotten around to picking up a hotplate yet. However, since the Relay Board was needed to run the Plastruder MK5, I busted out my soldering kit and got to work putting together the Relay Board, LED strip, and Plastruder.

Assembling the Relay Board v1.0 was pretty straightforward. I didn’t have a problem following the assembly instructions on the wiki. Follow the directions and you’ll be fine.
Unfortunately, the assembly pictures for the LED Strip v1.1 were… non-existent. (Do not be alarmed – this story has a happy ending.) For those first-time readers – I’m a complete soldering/electronics newbie. If I don’t have detailed pictures and directions, I’m completely lost. The good news for you is – if I can assemble a MakerBot and get it working, you definitely can. ¹ In any case, with the kind help from JohnA and Theron Trowbridge I discovered the secret to soldering this kit up. I haven’t tested it out yet, so I’ll hold off on posting the pictures. Once I’ve confirmed that I didn’t totally roast this kit, I’ll put up the pictures and some directions on the wiki.
The Plastruder MK5 assembly instructions and usage/troubleshooting guide were great as well. Once I get my plastruder online, I’ll add some notes.
- When attaching the thumb wheels to the bolts, definitely use a vise. I tapped the bolts into the thumb wheels – and smashed the threads just enough to make the bolts useless. :/ If I did this again, I would definitely put the nut partway onto the bolt and tap the NUT rather than the bolt itself. This would keep the force away from the threads and probably keep them from being damaged.
- When threading the nuts onto the retainer mounting plate, I found it easier to put the nuts about halfway onto the bolts – rather than almost all the way to the plate. If you put them halfway on, it’s easier to tighten each bolt individually.
- The MK5 thermistor preparation instructions direct you to the MK4 directions for wrapping the thermistor. The MK4 directions suggest you essentially sandwich the thermistor leads in between two long pieces of Kapton tape. This is exactly how I built my MK4 plastruder – and it’s not exactly easy to trap these two thin leads in between pieces of thin sticky tape. An easier way, and what appears to have been done in the MK5 pictures, is to separate the thermistor leads and wrap the Kapton around the leads – making sure they never touch.
- I would test the thermistor’s resistance and temperature measurement before attaching it to the plastruder. If there’s something wrong with the thermistor, I would want to know long before I taped it to the plastruder, insulated it, and mounted everything inside the ‘bot. Both tests are quick and easy to do before you assemble everything – just check the resistance with your multimeter then plug the unattached thermistor leads into the extruder board. This quick sanity check could save you a lot of time and supplies by not having to undo a lot of work. This would be a good time to test resistance on the power resistors too.
- With all the wires running from the plastruder and relay board, it can get confusing. I picked up some heat shrink tubing the last time I was at an electronics store and am using them to color code each of the sets of wires – one small band at each end. This helps me keep everything straight. By just looking at the end of the wires and doing a sanity check against the bands on the motor, thermistor, or heating element I can quickly verify I’m wiring everything up correctly.
- After adding a colored band of heat shrink to each end of the sets of wires, I braid the wires together to keep them all in check.
- Stupid mistakes I made that you probably won’t make:
  - I can’t believe this – but I actually mounted the drive gear upside down. The result was I couldn’t hand feed the ABS filament – since the base of the gear was blocking the filament’s path. Another symptom was that no matter how much I crunched down on the filament with the thumbscrew,² the filament would extrude about 1cm or so, then nothing for 30 seconds, and this cycle would repeat. The last symptom was that when I pulled the filament out it had some nasty chew marks in it. These are not the sort of marks I would expect to see from this drive gear with its super small teeth. Flip the extruder motor and the problem magically went away.
  - I replaced one of my threaded rods – the one that was the most severely bent. However, after installing a new threaded rod and

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And probably do a better job of it too! [↩]
The only thumbscrew to survive my testosterone driven smashing. [↩]

Open Source Makes You Smarter [08/27/2010]

[I mean, the chutzpah of a man who starts a blog post… for the purpose of linking back to his own blog post from two months prior? Oh, young MakerBlock… You rascal!]

One of the nifty things about examining the designs of others is that looking at those designs can give one ideas for ways to improve those designs or come up with my own. In short, open source tech makes you smarter.

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The ultimate in customer service [08/26/2010]

[How wild was it that I could write a blog post namechecking pretty much all the people in and around an open source project in a short blog post? All of the people mentioned below were super happy to help troubleshoot and get printers working. Gotta love open source – and the people committed to keeping these projects going. Plus, this was still the “wild west” of 3D printers. People were building printers, innovating, shipping, fixing, and trying new things constantly.]

There’s been some interesting discussion following We Alone On Earth’s post (Plus the updates)) in the comments. I think WAOE and the various commentors would probably agree that although anyone could build a working MakerBot Cupcake CNC from a kit with enough persistence and help, DIY kits¹ just aren’t for everyone.

It’s the “help” part that is the most amazing and enabling aspect. There are not a lot of products out there where the best customer service actually comes from the customers themselves. We’ve collectively built up wiki, posted problems and solutions, taken pictures and videos. It probably took me about three months before I progressed from total newbie posting basic annoying questions to being able to help others with their problems. ² With each shipment of MakerBots, the product gets better with customer innovations and input, customers improve the instructions and wiki, and there are even more people out there to help you.

Bre, Zach, Adam, and Marisol
Andrew Plumb aka Clothbot
Rick Pollack aka MakerGear for holding my hand in diagnosing a blown thermistor
Rick Pollack aka MakerGear and Neil Underwood aka Spacexula for talking me down from the ledge when I clogged my extruder
Scott Small aka Tox for PLA printing advice
Eberhard Rensch aka Zaggo and J. E. ‘jet’ Townsend for helping me create a mini-mug
Conrad Farnsworth for helping me figure out how to install my XY opto-endstops

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And all that they entail [↩]
It only took me about another month or so before I started posting regularly here. I find it’s a wider platform for annoying more people than just those that read the MakerBot Operators‘ group. [↩]

Dear Anonymous [08/25/2010]

[A blog post about trouble shooting in the early days of MakerBot printers. It was entirely possible for a regular person to build and operate a MakerBot 3D printer – but if they weren’t already technically inclined, they’d have to really want it. I really really wanted to have a 3D printer, and with the help of kind souls and absolutely stubborn pig-headedness, I was able to get mine working reasonably well. Sure, I had to rebuild the extruder every now and then – but that was just part of the maintenance cycle back then.]

You have nothing to feel guilty about for your WAOE post. You were frustrated with the time you were spending on a DIY kit and some of the limitations. I really liked two of the points you made in reply to my post on your MakerBot woes. First was that it may just be a matter of time before getting good Skeinforge settings isn’t as challenging. ¹ Second was an analogy:

I’ve been thinking of MakerBot as ‘using linux before Ubuntu’. At first you had to build the kernel yourself and compile and manage your own packages, but eventually it got to the point where Grandma can use it.

As you note, this is an open source project. If there’s something you don’t like, dive in and fix it! I had a lot of trouble getting my X and Y axes tight, so I designed X and Y axes tensioners.

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I’m sure others would say difficult. :) [↩]

Upgrades and obsolescence [08/25/2010]

[This is an excellent example of the kinds of abandoned, nearly finished blog posts sitting around in my drafts folder. This was essentially a fully formed, fully edited, and formatted blog post that was relevant at the time. It’s hilariously still relevant in a world where electronics are less user-upgradeable and user-repairable than ever.]

I mentioned my experiences owning a first generation Rio PMP300 MP3 player. I liked that model because it was “upgradeable” – I could pop in a new SD chip for an additional 64 Megs of space. ¹ This brings to mind different kinds of “upgradable” products:

Limited upgrades. My Rio could only be upgraded with a maximum of an additional 64 Megs. This made it comparatively insignificant to other market options fairly quickly. There’s just no reason why the Rio needed to limited to maximum SD card upgrade. It had great battery life and was a little bit hackable – I’d still be using it today² if I could upgrade it in the 4-16Gig range. Limit a consumer’s upgrades and you basically guarantee they’ll be a consumer again in the future. Just not necessarily for that same company. ;)
Planned obsolescence. Perhaps it was Rio’s plan all along to create a product that would be useless as soon as a 128 Meg chip became widely available.
Scheduled updates. Antivirus software, antispyware software, and firewall software.
Service and subscription plans. Why would I update the maps in my GPS now that my trust ‘Droid has Google Maps?
Abandonment/lack of support. Any closed source/proprietary consumer product that gets abandoned is put in a tough spot. Perhaps if Rio had published the source for their firmware I could go back and use my old Rio. We’ll never know. Once most companies have moved on to a new product, there’s no reason for opening their old source code. In fact, they probably think of it as proprietary³ when really it’s just a festering chunk of old code that’s useless to everyone.
Expensive upgrades/refills. This is some of the worst kind of upgrade nonsense. Inkjet printer cartridges and razor refills are prime examples of offering a loss-leader/cheap entrance price in the hopes of sticking customers with expensive refills. This business model is specifically designed to trap the unwary. One of the most annoying side effects of this business model is the original product, the printer for instance, is only just barely more expensive then the refills.
Unique upgrades/proprietary connectors. This list just goes on and on. You must use their special batteries, special film, special applicator, unique power adapter, special charger, super special speedy charger or you’ll void the warranty. My personal favorite of the above is the “super special speedy charger.” Why would you make a slow charger, if not for the sole purpose of selling a better charger? Why not just charge a little more for your product and include a good charger??
Lock-in. Inkjet printer cartridges and razor refills are prime examples of offering a cheap entrance price in order to lock the consumer in with expensive refills.
Lack of future compatibility. It’s easy enough to make a product backwards compatible. You have all the information you need, namely existing products, in order to build backwards compatibility into your newest products. However, there’s precious little reason for most manufacturers to do so.
No upgrades. Can you imagine a product that could include an “upgrade path,” but doesn’t? Yeah, you can. They’re called the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Why can’t you install a new battery, more memory, larger hard drive? Why doesn’t it have a USB port or expandable memory? I’ll tell you why. So that you have to invest in a more expensive model initially. This forces the consumer to choose between overspending initially on something they may never need and buying a product that will become useless too soon.

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It’s amazing how insignificant that seems now. I routinely carry more than 100 times that in my pocket on a regular basis and more than 250 times that amount in my phone. [↩]
Probably. [↩]
Even if it is now behind the times. [↩]

Makerspace: Just a few more things for the shopping list

Is there a word for the feeling when you place an online order and the moment you hit “Purchase” you realize there was something else you wanted and now it’s too late? No? Um… me neither.

Since publishing a large blog post about my wishlist / shopping list for building a makerspace two days ago I’ve got two new things to add to the list. I wonder how best to maintain this list. While a wiki would be the best for maintaining evolving content, the tone of my posts tend to be a mix of useful things and nonsense and I’d have to heavily edit / format the content. Maybe one day I’ll get organized and create a page on this site that’s something of a shopping list with links back to the rambling posts.

1. Low Rider CNC.
2. Hot Foam Cutter.

Low Rider CNC.
1. My buddy Andrew suggested the Low Rider CNC belongs on this list. I haven’t done a deep dive on this yet, but just checking out the main documentation pages, it looks amazing. While a full table sized CNC can run $7-10k, this Low Rider CNC appears to be community supported, open source, and designed for people to build themselves for ~$100 in hardware and electronic parts, plus 3 kilos of 3D printed parts, zip ties, conduit/rails, router, table, and wood. An affiliate appears to sell partially assembled and fully built options from $900 – $1,500, which appears to include shipping.
Hot Foam Cutter.
1. I was reminded these existed after seeing this Mastodon post from Concretedog about his 4D CNC hot foam cutter. However, it’s possible to build a hot foam cutter with little more than some nichrome wire, a battery, and some random stuff.
2. While I don’t have a ton of uses for a hot foam cutter… but I did purchase some nichrome wire two years ago specifically to make one of these for … reasons I no longer recall. I made the purchase some time in October 2024, so it couldn’t have have been for Maker Faire and likely not for Halloween…
3. A little extra research brought me back down a rabbit hole to rediscover why I started thinking about hot wire foam cutting.
4. At Maker Faire 2023 I was excited to see Robert van de Walle’s “composite structures with low VOC materials” 2023 Maker Faire project. The project showed off how he would avoid the use of fiberglass and resins in favor of laminated paper using glue over an insulation foam structure.
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5. Robert also has an interesting tutorial about using Harbor Freight floor mats for making inexpensive, lightweight, and flexible structures using contact cement instead of expensive pink insulation boards. Robert’s video was in turn inspired by Evil Ted Smith‘s video demonstrating how to copy forms into inexpensive foam mats by covering the object in aluminum foil, that in duck tape, taking the coverings off, cutting them into flat shapes with “darts” for alignment and to allow the formation of curves, cutting these out of foam, heat forming, applying contact cement, then reassembling. Both of these videos had previously sent me down a rabbit hole of looking into making “poor man’s fiberglass” to make a foamie using cloth and wood glue over a lightweight structure. And, more recently Nighthawkinlight’s videos about making strong lightweight structures with what amounted to lumber made from cardboard, covered in a water proofing coating. I remember watching a video about biomimicry and how the how the toucan’s beak can be both strong and lightweight because it is essentially a lightweight, nearly hollow, sparse structure wrapped in a tight hard shell of keratin.
6. Anyhow, I think I was researching these things after Maker Faire because of how miserable it was to cut sheets of foam with a craft knife which then lead to soooo much sanding. I figured in the future I could design something that would let me create almost a small hot wire cutter to consistently and easily cut shapes and beveled edges into foam.

Sometimes I want to add an update only to discover that I never published a blog post about a thing I wanted to link back to. I guess it’s time to dust off my pictures from 2024 leading up to Maker Faire to share information about how we made my kiddo’s Fallout inspired combat armor from Harbor Freight floor mats.

With the magic of time travel, I’ve now created that post and can now link to it. :) Share and enjoy.

Making a Makerspace

CopyLeft Trolls, AI, Lesser Evils of Autocorrect and OCR

This is likely to be a rambly kind of a post. I typed the blog title first, but, as Hector Barbosa might say, they’re more of what you’d call guidelines than actual titles. Fair warning – as at least one reader will point out, this may be some more AI bellybutton gazing.¹

I basically stopped using Creative Commons pictures in my blog posts and websites a few years ago when I learned of some CopyLeft troll nonsense litigation. I did my best when using these pictures to provide proper attribution and even wrote a WordPress plugin to help others do the same.² Learning that a picture from Flickr or posted for free use under Creative Commons could lead to abusive litigation and extortion was so disheartening that I pulled a lot of pictures from my various blogs and either left them with no images, broken images, or if they were very important to the post/page making something to go there. From that point, I generally trended towards using/making memes to add visual interest to the blog posts.

I was reminded of this after reading a well written post on Mastodon about various alternatives to using AI generated images in blog posts.³ While I don’t think these are all necessarily practical when it comes to finding an appropriate and aesthetically pleasing image to go along with a blog post, I thought this was a worthwhile and thought provoking suggestion.

I do like adding pictures because it adds a little bit of visual interest to what would otherwise be a wall of text. Many times, I will add a screenshot from OpenSCAD or a photo of a sketch / sketchbook page. And now, a short digression…

Someone far more pithy than I comment recently that twenty years ago regular people were sued for posting song lyrics, sharing MP3’s of music, and low quality movies, while these days people are becoming AI millionaires by shoveling the entire internet and the collected written works of the human race into machines.

…What should people opposed to AI slop do, then? Do we stop driving because of license plate scanners and stop going out in public because some asshole will be wearing Google Glass Goggles or Facebook Meta Glasses and feeding our information into facial recognition software? ⁴⁵ I don’t share photos of myself or family on social media, but should we not store our photos in the cloud and avoid fun community events at the local library? Even writing this post, I’m unwillingly contributing the corpus that will be fed into the next version of an LLM.

I feel damned either way. If I don’t use any LLM, they will consume my writings and original pictures, use my original pictures to track me across the internet, sell me things or sell me to other things. If I do use an LLM it will do all of that plus train on my interactions.

What is the most defiant thing to do when this blog post is almost certainly going to be read by more web crawlers, spam robots, and LLM’s than humans? Should I only post new pictures to add visual interest to my posts at the expense of embedding even more meta data into each post? Is it more subversive to use an AI to generate a fitting copyright-free but soulless image that adds little new information to the algorithm’s endless hunger?

I don’t have answers to any of this.

As I was working yesterday another thought occurred to me. Where is the line between “software” and “LLM/AI”? I had just run optical character recognition on a large document to help figure out what was in it. All OCR is just pattern recognition, making trained “black box” guesses at what’s a given letter/word/pattern. I’ve never liked the auto-suggest “feature” of my phone’s texting app or gmail, but I like the auto-complete feature of LibreOffice when I start to type a date. I don’t mind when my text editor suggests the name of previously used variables and functions – it’s actually quite helpful.

Why am I comfortable with an heuristic’s OCR/autocompleting dates/autocompleting variable/function names, but I hate auto-suggesting messages? Perhaps because it’s no something I can turn off. I just know I find these kinds of “helpful suggestions” to be far more intrusive. Maybe I don’t mind these helpers in documents – but I don’t want them stepping the communications between myself and another human?

I don’t mind using an AI image generators for a stupid joke, but I hate seeing them in advertisements. I would never use an AI, local or otherwise, to write something to someone I loved, client, colleague, coworker – but I don’t mind it when I’m trying to wrap my mind around a new API, updating an old program when certain parts I’d written are now deprecated, or even writing something in a brand new language. It’s hard to tell if I’m justifying my uses or if there really is a decent use case for these things.

I guess I’m trying to come to terms with what kinds of AI/heuristic usages I like, am ambivalent towards, and those I hate – to better understand why I feel/think these ways.

Hi Pete! [↩]
More than twelve years ago now! [↩]
TLDR: Take a picture, use Wikimedia Commons, screenshot from video game, lego diorama, use art supplies/image program to make a picture, stickers, pictures of a shelf. [↩]
I read once that Meta had figured how to associate photos with people based upon the scratches and dirt on the lenses from photos that had been uploaded! [↩]
This is why I generally rescale/blur/distort images before posting them online. But, I mean, how much time am I going to devote to this if I just want to share a quick picture of something? [↩]

Low Rider CNC.

Hot Foam Cutter.