LordLatch

I had several nights of non constructiveness and now... It looks better with a spool mounted to it: I should be able to do my first print this weekend. I modeled my house last night for the first print: Looks like I need to change the slope of my roof.  Now that I have everything to print, I'm scared to do it. Heh. I've been doing little things in preparation but it's clear to me I'm dragging my heels. Here's my house: I think I will print that first rather than some calibration thing. Then I can figure out what I need to do to handle overhangs. One would think the slicing software would handle adding support material, but we'll(meaning me) see.

Tonight, I will be working on getting my computer to watch for the mailman. I made huge headway last night in that I was able to access the camera and save an image to the program directory from within Processing. It was far easier than when I was doing it in VB. Bleh. No hunting for an obscure library reliant upon an outdated windows framework or any of that nonsense! Heck, Processing comes with it's own freaking openCV, but I'm not going to use it, though. Imma do my own thing! *the next day* Here's what I was able to come up with last night in Processing: The beginnings of my own computer vision. Reader: How are the red particles distributed?   I took the average of the value of the blue and the green in the pixel and if that number is half the value of the red of or less, I max out the red and zero out the other colors, giving it the full red. Code: float comp = r/((b+g)*.5); if (comp>2){r=255;g=0;b=0;} I'm really just trying ...

Reader: I was kinda enjoying the sounds of the stepper motors and seeing the work in the first part of the vid. I'll have to do a music video.. So... I have some lovely Altec Lansing speakers I hope to have till I die. I paid $70 for them and I like them more than those Bose ones you get at Sam's club(I have a pair of those too). They(the Altec Lansings) are loud enough I had the police called on me because of them. The cop said, "All of that is coming from your computer?" Aye! I did not photograph the other one! Anywho, a few weeks ago I started getting a loud thump and they were losing power and I was sad. This morning, my intuition told me what the problem was. I took out the amp board and.. Lo and behold, I was correct- cracks in the solder! Weeee! The end! . . . . . . . . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . I kid. Here they were: You will have to imagine them repaired because they are. The woofer is back togeth...

view the hotend affixed to my printer: As you can see the bowden extruder is mounted on the right side there with the guiding teflon tube which runs to the hotend. This setup lowers the amount of inertia the little X axis motor has to overcome. The hotend is mounted with an L shaped bracket on the ink cartridge carriage. I didn't even have to drill a hole! Weee! Also a smaller L bracket holds the cooling fan pointed at the hotend. I will have to come up with a little fan shroud to guide the air where I want it. And now.. I must order some filament. I hope I'm right when I think it's 3mm. I took the hotend totally apart and the hole through it is just about 1/8 inch which would be .125 inches(I have a reciprocal button on my calculator- bow before my button power! I kid- I had the fraction memorized). 3 millimeters is .1181 inches(this one I did use the calculator). That's only a 5% error! Ok enough numbers! I'm going to order from the US this tim...

The other day, prolly the one before this one.. I receive the goodies pictured here: And today I got one of these things: It's cold out in the garage and what I need to do with the printer is really a weekend thing. Sooooo.... Last night before I got the sensor, I spent some time figuring out how to do PWM to control LED brightness and multicolor control. Today with the sensor I could implement my plan. Milo lays on the bed at night till it's time to go to bed and I kick him out and he goes to his crate. Sometime between 3 and 6 he awakens and asks to get in bed again by whimpering very quietly. I always hear him though he's very quiet- he's a very considerate dog. About two years ago, I started leaving his crate open so I would no longer have to get up to let him in bed. Sometime since then, I have found a way to make the room very dark. Milo can't see it's so dark and I hear him doing this hopping thing trying to get the nerve to jump up i...

As I'm still waiting on parts, I decided I needed a 555 circuit module because I build the circuit so often. If I had the circuit ready to go, I could just plug it in without worrying about messing with that part and get to the nitty gritty. The 555 circuit I have built a zillion times looks like this: Or like this depending on your perspective: Any ways looking for resisters and hooking all that crap up every time I need it gets old so I needed a ready made reusable dealie I could just plug in. However, since I'm not too interested in doing all the math, I wanted to work everything out without thinking about it. So I made the sound card oscilloscope so I could measure the frequencies and see the waveform right on my computer like so: That picture is an actual capture of my computer reading the 555. The circuit for the probe looks like this: And I didn't photograph the actual probe circuit because it doesn't look impressive and this kid would pop ...