Category Archives: Projects

The Filament Buffering Problem

I’ve been thinking about a 3d printer filament buffer for a while, but haven’t really made the time to actually solve this problem, mostly because my multi-material printing has, to date, been pretty minor.  That’s not to say I haven’t been using my MMU, only to say that so far my prints have primarily needed tens of tool changes rather than hundreds.  At this scale, my “non-buffer” buffering solution worked reasonably well.  I’ve only had one or two jams, and it wasn’t that big of a deal.  Well, I decided to try a “big” project, and printed some miniatures with soluble supports which resulted in 216 tool changes.  This, I found, is why the filament buffer exists. Continue reading The Filament Buffering Problem

Math on the Weekends

Among those who know me well, it’s likely no surprise that there are two things I really enjoy – solving problems and doing math.  So, when I find a problem that turns out to be just a math problem, solving it is really fun.  That’s what I did this weekend – I wanted to 3d print an addition to my 3d printer that would help my filament buffering problem, but the design required that I obey some obviously mathematical constraints. Continue reading Math on the Weekends

Prusa Multi-material Upgrade – Part 2

After a week of troubleshooting, I’ve finally gotten my printer back up and running again.  If you read my last post, you’ll remember that I upgraded my Prusa with the new MMU2S, and while building the upgrade itself wasn’t too bad, getting everything working again afterward didn’t go well.  I didn’t document the time I spent troubleshooting, taking things apart, and putting them back together, but I did document the original build, so here’s the image montage of that, then I’ll talk through the steps I took to get it all back working again.

Continue reading Prusa Multi-material Upgrade – Part 2

Prusa Multi-material Upgrade – Part 1

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to build my long-awaited multi-material upgrade for my Prusa 3d printer.  I had planned on ordering this way back in March, but the combination of my funds and other things I wanted to order at the same time being out of stock stayed my hand.  Still, after lots of different delays, I finally got around to ordering it and building it. Continue reading Prusa Multi-material Upgrade – Part 1

Designing Breach Expansions

One of my goals this year was to design a game or a mod for an existing game.  This year, I decided to get back to poking at Breach: Starship Duels.  Right about the time I got my first 3D printer, I discovered Breach and this was the game that really made me say, “Yes, this has to happen”.  Over the years, I’ve printed multiple copies of Breach, and this year I decided I was going to print a copy for myself and add the ideas that were bouncing around in my head.

What I was able to create from this effort was two small expansions: Breach: Pirates and Planets and Breach: Dying Suns. Continue reading Designing Breach Expansions

Building a 3D Printer

A while back, I decided I was going to get a new 3D printer.  My old printer was becoming a bit long of the tooth, and there have been a lot of advancements in 3D printing technology in the last few (seven) years.  A good friend of mine was working at Aleph Objects / Lulzbot, and that gave me a lot of visibility into what was going on in the industry, and that convinced me it was again time to take the dive.  While I was initially investigating and looking into a Lulzbot Workhorse, I eventually decided on getting a Prusa i3 MK3S, the wrinkle was, I decided to get a Prusa kit, which meant I’d be building this one myself. Continue reading Building a 3D Printer

Website Unification

It’s been a while since I’ve had a unified look-and-feel to my website. The last time I went through unifying all of my pages, the web was a different place – CSS was the go to technology to make the look and feel of your website work and javascript was used really only if you had something more complicated. At the time, web design was more focused on delivering content than it was in delivering design, so you could get away with something simple that also happened to look decent.

Now, I won’t claim that my old site design was good for its time, but it was a simple implementation that achieved my goal of being able to deliver multiple different types of content: a blog (PivotX), a wiki (Dokuwiki), my web apps, and my static pages. As a comparison, my old design had less than a hundred lines of CSS and a handful of layout elements. My new wordpress theme has over a thousand lines of CSS, and the relevant layout hierarchies are over four layers deep. Continue reading Website Unification

What Am I Doing Besides Blogging?

It turns out I have a bit of project mania. I’ve got a lot of ideas for projects, some of which I start, and a number of small ones I have finished. But, it turns out, the last thing I typically think to do is to write about those projects. The struggle here is simple – why write about a project when I could be working on it (or the next one)?

The difficulty is simply that my writing and my project time have typically been the same. As a result, I was forced to make that choice every time I sat down to work on my projects. My hope is that this may be mitigated by writing on the bus. Now, these two are not coupled, when I’m on the bus, I can’t really work on my other projects! So, here is a brief outline of some things that I’ve been working on:

Continue reading What Am I Doing Besides Blogging?

3D Printing – Part 3

The last couple of weeks, I have talked about how I got started in 3D printing, including setting up my software toolchain, and selecting the 3D printer I wanted to get. This week, I wanted to talk about a project I’ve been poking at for a couple of weeks, and have finally gotten to the point where I have produced some positive results.

You see, I like spaceships. And games that feature spaceships. While the first game that probably comes to mind is EVE Online, the project I started with is actually for Sins of a Solar Empire. In particular, Sins of a Solar Empire has a very active modding community, and Ironclad has provided the community with a great tool chain for doing just about anything to the game – including messing with the models. So, with very little effort, a little bit of perl (and, actually, without having to download anything), I was able to extract the meshes for the capital ships and export them to .stl files. If you remember from my first post, getting an STL file is the first step toward getting something to print on a 3D printer.

Continue reading 3D Printing – Part 3