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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Plus humidity is bad for your filament.

    I keep on hearing this but it does not check out for me.

    I have a Prusa 3S+, self assembled. I do not do a great deal of printing and go through phases. I did a flurry of prints during the pandemic and then it rested idle in our rather cold and slightly damp study for a couple of years. When I bought it, it came with a spool of silver Prusament which worked nicely. I then bought a spool of “Sunlu” filament (Chinese firm off of Amazon) and then a box of 10 colours of the stuff.

    I recently got the printer out and updated the firmware, re-calibrated it and so on. I’ve done several prints with filament that has been open to the environment for at least two or three years and its fine. I have done a print using some transparent filament which was unopened and that was fine too. The unopened stuff was vacuum shrunk wrapped so could not possibly be damp. The opened filament was stored in the original cardboard box in a slightly damp and unheated room.

    For me the main issues for a decent print are:

    • Adhesion on the plate. I actually used glue for a print for the first time recently
    • First layer calibration. If the first layer is wrong, the rest is wrong. You need to get the right amount of “squashing” to get a smooth bottom
    • Always clean the plate between prints - a squirt of EPA and a decent rub with tissue whilst the bed is heating up does the job
    • Keep the guide rails lubricated - Mine whined that all three axes were too tight or just wrong and yet the Prusa app to check belt tightness and forum and wiki advice said it was fine. Any engineer will tell you to lube up when in doubt - do it! X, Y and Z.

    I will try repeating a challenging print with filament that is way older now and see what happens. I printed a couple of tank models in red around four years ago. Both involved their turrets with the barrel facing upwards - that’s a lumpy cylinder about 4cm long and 2mm wide.

    I have seen some notes about PLA being hydrophylic (absorbs water) on the Prusa website’s official advice but I don’t personally think it is an issue and people are probably missing another factor or factors that is fucking up their prints. I think the filament dampness meme is “cargo culting”.

    PLA is heated to around 220C whilst being extruded so any water will steam off very quickly as water vapour - which is not even “wet”, well before worrying a print job.

    PLA is touted as bio-degradable and it is … eventually. It is extremely stable, despite being derived from corn starch. It really doesn’t seem to care about a bit of water hanging around. That’s why I can print new hinges for a plastic garden storage thing to replace the original ones and they last through winters and summers in the UK.

    So, if you think moisture is an issue for PLA filament used for 3D printing, why not do some experiments and then decide for yourself.

    I’m happy to be proved wrong.


  • gerdesj@lemmy.mlto3DPrinting@lemmy.worldMy new specs
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    1 month ago

    That is superb. Sadly my eyes degrade faster than the frames wear out!

    I see you are on the John Lennon specials which makes it a bit easier to model. I haven’t worn circular specs since college (~1990) My current Tesco specials only have lens frame from the nasal bridge clips, over the top to about 5mm below the temple joints.

    Just a thought but you might like to investigate using spring steel for the arms and PLA just for the frames. You could create a jig for joining and heat the ends of the arms up with a brazing torch (kitchen supplies) and sink them into a suitable cylinder close to the temple joint. If you go all in you can make the straight part of the arm rigid and the over ear part flexible with careful heating and cooling and whacking with a hammer!

    Now, that metal work will be comfortable but might be a bit chilly. What about PLA tips over ear instead of steel?

    Anyway, great job. I’m very impressed.





  • If the boy has a gaming rig, then he also has a CAD workstation.

    I managed to get a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2 running on my 80286 with an 80287 maths co pro that I persuaded my parents to buy me for Chrimbo. Sadly, it was a bit shite. The next version of AutoCAD needed a 32 bit machine with 32 MB (yes MB) of RAM. That was way out of my league.

    Depending on the age of the boy and given how long the little darlings are tending to hang around these days, a constructive bribery system in lieu of rent or pocket money enhancement might be in order 8)


  • Problem: I want to sync data from a Linux PC to a NAS Samba share. You do impose a constraint that a GUI should be available. I’ll bear that in mind.

    If you can access it via scp (which is very likely, but you don’t mention the NAS model) then use rsync or similar - multiple GUIs are available and it sounds like you’ve found some already

    It’s a Samba share, mount it and then sync data. GUIs are available for the sync bit. Depending on your distro a GUI may be available for the mounting thing. If you specify a mount in /etc/fstab then it is a permanent mount.

    I suggest you break the problem down into two bits and solve those independently. The first one is data access ie via Samba and the second is the sync bit.



  • Good on you mate. I have no idea why you are being downvoted when you are being the big man when called out.

    I do understand your position - it is bloody annoying to have to remind people how the web works but in this case you are doing a “show and tell”.

    When doing something like that I think you should show all and tell all. “Here’s what I did and how I did it and here’s how you can do it too”. That’s why I went in with the rather dodgy ankle reference! Think about when you see those influencers with worryingly pneumatic lips and arses that might double as seating for a friend. They show all, really all and some make a decent living at it. Now think about what sort of response you want for one of your show and tells.

    I do confess that I used to do the same as you - I blasted away at someone on The Register a fair few years ago and was called out and subsequently apologised. That was a game changer for me and I suspect for you now. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get riled occasionally but make sure it counts and you are in the right or at least nearly right … OK you think you are right 8)

    Cool beans!

    Cheers Jon

    PS I’m 53 today


  • Perhaps but if you are doing a show and tell, why not do the full tell?

    I can remember when Google didn’t exist and Altavista was the cool kid, or when the www didn’t exist and gopher and WAIS were the tools of choice. … and I can go much further back.

    My real point is: If you are going to show a bit of ankle, and it is yours, make sure that everyone realises it is your ankle. If it isn’t your ankle, then tell us whose it is. It’s not fair asking people to search for pictures of ankles and then try to guess which one you have posted about.


  • SO: Next door have got their lights up, why haven’t we? Me: (Enable NodeRed flows for gutter and pergola light strings that switches them on at dusk and off late evening) Right, that’s the missus pacified for a week or so. I should probably get BigTimer to sort that out itself.

    Employee: I’ve got all the printers for monitored using an auto entries card. (Good skills) Me: (Installs an addon that can use VoIP to do text to speech to a phone) We warn off the customer and now they get a phone call from “things” that tells them what consumables to buy and also sends an email.

    When I finally get around to sorting out my glasses so I can see what my soldering iron is up to, I’ll get many more gadgets installed. My computer room at work needs a tiny ESP8266 and four 1 wire Dallas SC temperature sensors, a bit of vero board, a resistor, power and probably a buck convertor and a case, which I’ll print.

    I adore HA.


  • Start off with Thingiverse or similar. I recommend something like: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3553160 There are a lot of models there - those are .STL that you “slice” and send to your printer. There is this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2187167 which is CAD models with the working left in - OpenSCAD in this case. You load it up, generate a .STL and then pass that to the slicer.

    I have a large plastic cabinet in my garden for storing a lawn mower etc. The hinges died years ago. I have printed new ones. At least 20kg of plastic waste has been avoided being dumped a lot longer. I am well aware (now) that I should not have bought the bloody thing in the first place!

    If you go the OpenSCAD route, you might like this: https://github.com/JustinSDK/dotSCAD - the author sadly passed away recently but his work is legendary in my opinion.

    Once you get printing sorted out, then move on to your own stuff. … or not - give it a go! I have a large bag of very strangely shaped PETG experiments that went badly wrong and need recycling.




  • So you “make config” once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.

    I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry’s lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.

    make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel’s options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven’t done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don’t miss those days.


  • They will if enough people whine about it.

    In the old days (I’m 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I’d have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don’t have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn’t see them unless I wanted to.

    This really isn’t the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.