3DPrinting

tl;dr: my cat was getting lazy, and was developing health issues, so i wanted to make something to trick him into exercising more. I did this by attaching a treat dispenser to a cat wheel, and giving him treats when hes ran certain distances.

This was my entry for the printables smart pet gadget contest. https://www.printables.com/model/1278945-smart-cat-treat-dispenser-for-one-fast-cat-wheel

There were a few back-to-back all nighters right at the end in order to get this submitted in time (managed to submit 7 minutes before the deadline!) - so the code is all kind of lumped in one file. Ill clean the code up in the upcoming weeks, but the short bullet point list of features are:

• Almost entirely 3D printed (other than a motor, 4 bearings, some sensors, and the nuts and bolts
• Detects that the treat level is low before completely running out! no more sad cats that hear the food dispenser going off, only to be left with an empty belly!
• Self hosted wifi configuration page (connect to the AP, go to 192.168.4.1, enter your wifi settings, and it will join your wifi network
• Completely self hosted web UI / API - configure all your settings, vend treats remotely from other smart devices, and track your cats stats!
• MQTT support - connect your treat dispenser to a platform like homeassistant to see graphs of your cats activity and be alerted to when the treat dispenser is almost out of treats.
• simple electronics (no analog components other than resistors for some LED's)
• cool design features like internal wire channels so theres minimal exposed wiring (other than power, and a single connector to connect a hall effect sensor to the treat dispenser for detecting cat wheel rotation)

I believe this was caused by the horrendous layer adhesion of this silk PLA. Didn't have time to tune the filament, and based it off of another silk one.

Recently started trying Silk PLA filaments for the first time. This was printed with Eryonone Silk Rainbow PLA. The glossy sheen seems to come out well, but there is this odd banding/striping as the hue changes sometimes.

I've printed with several Eryone matte filaments and I haven't seen this. Could this be a defect with the filament, or do my settings for silk still need some work?

Left: I opened a sealed roll of a filament purchased in 2018 and I printed that rose

Right: I dried that filament in the creality dryer overnight and sent the print again

This pic was taken on 10th April. After drying the filament I put it back in storage and I forgot about it until it exploded today

Hi!

I've daydreamed about getting a cutter plotter without actually planning on really getting one. Too expensive and shelfspace-consuming for something that I'm not going to actually use that often.

Then I remembered that I could "just" mount a dragknife on my Ender-3 pro to do the job (maybe get one of these fancy quick-toolhead-changing systems as an excuse to tinker with CANbus, or something ;).

After a bit of online search, I found that I'm hardly not the first one with that idea. I've found a few videos, posts on reddit and files on thingiverse/printables, but nothing too in-depth. So I wanted to ask y'all if you know any resources to check out on this. Some github-pages style homepage of someone would be ideal, but I'm not too hopeful that there's something out there if I haven't found it yet.

Things I think I've found out:

• Roland Cutting Plotter Vinyl Cutters are apparently the way to go. With 45° for vinyl.
• I can use gcodetools to create gcode from svgs. The exact details aren't clear to me, though. Probably gonna have to create a klipper macro for this.
• I can simply attach a cutter to my toolhead, or use something like the BTT hermit crab for a more fancy approach

Things I'm still not sure how to do:

• If I'm using a BL-Touch - how should I handle z-homing? Can Klipper use BL-Touch for z-homing with an endstop-failsafe? Should I just monitor the print by hand?
• Is there a comprehensive guide on the materials?

Do you have any experience on that topic?

I tried printing something on my bambu instead of my voron since I cant get the voron working properly. Why do the outer walls do this?

I've never been able to get a clean first layer with this machine. I have given it a beacon probe and it just made it much faster to get the same problem to happen again. Where am I going wrong?

Makerworld link

Comparing HyperFFF and "traditional" G-Code for Raise3D machines I noticed that the only difference seems to be the M99123 command at the beginning of the file (identical for different STL-models):

M99123 /RKIIyAfrgVn63QgWjcMv3w/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD/RKIIyAfrgVn63QgWjcMv3w/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6M/RKIIyAfrgVn63QgWjcMv3w/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6M/RKIIyAfrgVn63QgWjcMv3w/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0IpD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0IpD0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ip0Ipw/VGrHawCYdCJaNwKoDQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw/DQafsD84EnC8915R6MD0Ipw

Any clue how this G-code command works and what is written there?

The CFS upgrade kit is showing in stock on the Canadian store site.

The tip of my bed probe bltouch broke (new one underway, but the print must go) I glued on some filament. And it seems to just work fine again!

If you don't have a fancy-schmancy printer that tracks filament usage and warns you if you don't have enough filament left on the currently-loaded spool to complete the print, this is how you know. You can even double-check while it's printing, like I do in this video.

This is why you should always keep a kitchen scale and one empty spool of all the filament brands you use.

Low tech but useful. I figured I'd share.

This morning I came to work to a perfectly printed set of plates. So I started another instance of the exact same print, went for a swim at the municipal swimming pool nearby, came back to check on it just in case, and it had done the same thing it did on Friday.

This time, nobody was at the office (it's Sunday) so I know nobody monkeyed with the print. Clearly the plate hasn't moved. So those hypotheses are out.

The belts look tight - although the teeth feel a bit chewed up, particularly the table belt. But I doubt this is what caused the slip, as it seems to slip randomly in both directions at the same time.

At this point, I'm placing my bet on the print head coming so close to the edges that it hits the limit(s) when it's unlucky, or it causes the stepper motors' counters to overflow or something - i.e. it hits a firmware bug. The PrusaSlicer software seems very confident that I can print this close to the edges, and indeed the printer does it, but I wonder if it's overly optimistic.

So I bunched up all the plates closer to the center of the bed and re-sliced, so the printer never prints less than ¼ inch from any one edge. Let's see what happens with that.

I visited a friend who is a professional medical engineer, and watched him work on a 3D design on some software paid for my the university they worked at. The options and features looked very practical!

Although I am not even close to working on so complicated projects, I did love the funtionalities. So now i have decided to put in the effort and learn a decent program, instead of using Tinkercad. I have been very happy with Tinkercad, but some things are only doable with workarounds or very creative methods.

The question is, what software should i start learning?

-FreeCAD
-Fusion 360
-AutoCAD
-Sketchup
-Blender
-LibreCAD
-Something else entirely?

Yesterday before leaving work, I left a bunch of parts to print on our Prusa Mk4. This morning, I found all the parts with the same defect at the bottom: apparently the magnetic printing plate shifted ⅛¨ sideways on the bed 3 or 4 layers into the 7-hour print.

Unfortunately, I removed the magnetic plate without paying attention before I saw the defect, so I'm not really sure if this is what happened. It stands to reason, but it might also be both stepper motors somehow skipping at the same time. It seems unlikely, but maybe there has been a power brownout or something.

Or someone at the office interfered with the bed's movement at some point. But it seems unlikely too.

If the plate itself shifted, maybe it's because I had cleaned it with water just before and I may have left some slightly damp spots underneath, despite drying it as good as I could. I might also have failed to position the plate against the registration pins at the back of the bed, but I usually pay attention so that too is unlikely. Still, I might have been careless.

Has anybody had this sort of thing happen before? This is the first time for me.

I'm thinking of entering this world for the first time, and I was wondering if there are any models that you feel you would particularly recommend, thanks to anyone who would like to share their experience!