shinyhappyrainbows

My primary printer, an Ender 3 Pro mk2 that's been an exercise in sunk cost fallacy, Is now running a stock Creality 32 bit board, the kind the E3P mk3 runs. I'd tried an SKR mini E3 but one of the downsides of open source are the manufacturers building with project branding but cutting corners, like using double sided sticky tape instead of a double sided heat transfer adhesive and no heatsink on the heater mosfet! Jesus!!! The board went buggy and started crashing the firmware, board cooling fan never stopped screaming, trying to shift the heat but couldn't. I've completed 5 prints on the new board and 3 of those have been done at 200mm/s! The fans work hard during intensive jobs, like perimeters or top and bottom layers, but infill, even high density, everything calms down and I'm printing at 200mm/s, twice as fast as I've ever got this beast up to! There is another factor to this speed, the linear rail mod. My $250 printer has had another $300 spent on it ...

When you go a-scrolling, entering the search terms "drum robot" into your default "sengine," a few things come up, like Compressorhead's heavy metal covers, a million dollar pneumatic actuated robotic live band. Then there are the usual, incomplete, or niche, hobbyist things, basic busker gimmicks or student science projects. All good, valid stuff, sure, but none of it generalised. Well, there's some SparkFun stuff and an art project, too, but the generalisations are perhaps... too general? So, generalising a robotic drum kit development kit seems the unfilled niche. So that's what I've started to turn my own drumming robot system towards. Meanwhile, looking at the other kind of drum robot, arguably the first modern ones at least, analog drum machines, the latest crop of 606 clones from both Roland and Behringer, have MIDI, a luxury the originals couldn't afford while aiming for a sub-1980s pricepoint with 1980s tech in the 1980s. MIDI is the l...

The linear rails modified Ender-3 has its new, high flow, high heat hot end and printed lift feet for the new telly. No new land speed records, like what killed the cheap nasty hotend, but this was a cosmetic print, anyway. But seriously, these machines are like an abusive partner we keep going back to. They rarely fail at the start of a print or, if they do, it's your fault for not setting it up right. No, most of the time, they'll fail ten minutes from the end and waste most of the roll of your most expensive, least recyclable filament. Still, we makers keep patching up the beast in what looks, from the outside, like a bad case of sunk cost fallacy. Today, this "grandfather's axe" of a machine delivered. I must have modded it enough to have doubled its AU$300 ticket price, so it bloody well ought to deliver, but it really delivered. It's only a practical print, the new telly doesn't quite have enough clearence underneath its stumpy by elegant legs for ...

First there was the Tronxy, a Prusa i3 clone, which was rebuilt more than grandad's axe. Then there was some cheap-assed, no name brand delta printer with a tiny, circular bed that really couldn't take the size of prints I wanted. These two overlapped with my Ender 3 Pro which, quite frankly, wasn't as good print quality as the $150 nameless delta but it sure was reliable... well, except for the stock hotend. Those old hollowbox extruders with the hidden, red, undersized heatsink... ugh. Then there was the Ender 3 Pro II. Same shit extruder and hotend, but, yeah, 32 bit control board. Now we're taking. The Tronxy and the Delta are now retired due to beyond economical maintenance. You can only throw so much money or effort at a steamer, and the more you print, the more stuff wears out. They were also fire risks, no thermal runaway protection. The E3 Pro II churns out basic engineering prints up at Splodgenoodles' place, but nothing pretty, really, it needs work. and...