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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Doesn’t the “missed step detection” on the Prusa printers already achieve a lot of that? I think it monitors the current to the motor and flags any abnormal behavior, without needing extra hardware on the motor.

    That’s not to knock the value of positional feedback, which is clearly superior, but just to say that I don’t think this idea has been entirely neglected.









  • Could still be temperature if the thermistors on e printers read differently–that is, the same setting doesn't necessarily work out to the same physical temperature on two printers, even if they're the same model, because the thermistors vary. My suspicion would be that you're printing a little hot, and the filament is contracting after it's extruded. On the first few layers it can't shrink much because of all the material in the middle, but on the vase mode layers there's nothing preventing it.

    Another possibility is that your overlap percentage between your infill and perimeters is too high. This leads to something that basically is overextrusion, but it's usually visible as more of a ripple.

    A third possibility is that it's just the filament.



  • And when you say "laser or printer" here, are you referring to a 2d printer, or a 3d printer?

    The questions are because, fundamentally, a wireframe image like the one you linked is just a different way of rendering the same file. So if what you want is literally an image like this, then there are tools to do that, which will depend a bit on what operating system you're using. Blender, as mentioned in another comment, is one such option.

    If, on the other hand, what you want is a 3d printable structure that resembles a wireframe rendering of the object, that's a more complicated task. The STL file just lists the triangles that make up the surface of the object; in order to make a solid structure that resembles this, you'd need to create a solid (e.g. a cylinder, maybe with balls at the ends) for every edge in the file (3n / 2 edges for n triangles, since every edge in a properly printable ["manifold"] STL is shared by two triangles) and then takes a boolean union of all of them. I don't think a tool to do this exists currently, as it's a rather specialized need, but it wouldn't be too hard to throw together a python script that could take an STL file and generate an OpenSCAD script that you could then render with OpenSCAD to get the STL.


  • So, one thing to consider is whether you could have remnants of a previous filament getting stuck in your hotend and carbonizing and causing partial clogs. That depends a bit on what you were running just before running this filament. If this is the issue, a cleaning filament can help. Another possibility is that your nozzle isn’t tight against the heatbreak, in which case plastic can accumulate there and cause issues. The only way to fix that is to disassemble the hotend and put it back together correctly–this usually involves tightening the nozzle when it’s hot, but check the details for your specific printer.

    But yeah, it could also just be bad filament. That’s probably the easiest thing to fix, anyway.



  • Lots of people post STLs because you can feed them directly to the slicer for printing. But it only represents the surface mesh of an object, and only as polygons. A STEP file basically captures how the part is designed in CAD, so it’s much better if you need to modify the part. It also gives you the original form of things like curves, where the STL would be quantized into a fixed number of polygons.


  • I’ve thought about this too, and for a similar reason. About a third of the way through my first sock I realized that knitting was contributing to tendonitis, at least on top of my day job which was non-stop typing. I’ve got a tub of yarns waiting for me to figure out what I’m going to do about them. I’ve watched videos from various folks about the 3d printed options.

    One thing I’ve never really figured out is how the socks compare to something like a smartwool. It seems like they might be pretty prone to becoming loose. I’d be interested to hear your evaluation of the actual end product.





  • I can’t find very good images of the bed mechanism in the machine, but it looks to me like there’s a separate piece for the machine that mounts the nut for the leadscrew to the bed. The easiest way to make it more adjustable might be to design and print a replacement for this part that allows you to use a screw to offset this connection slightly. You could probably get away with just making the front two adjustable and leaving the back one fixed.