Author Archives: paulwallich

Fat Marvin

Posted on November 5, 2015 by paulwallich

While I was fiddling with the acceleration settings on my Printrbot JrV2 to get less shaking and perhaps more accuracy, I discovered that reducing the acceleration below 1000 mm/sec^2 pretty reliably caused the machine to stop working  partway through a … Continue reading →

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True North

Posted on November 1, 2015 by paulwallich

Well, except for declination error and any nearby metal objects, and within the resolution of the stepper motor… Ingredients: Adafruit 9-degree-of-freedom accelerometer/gyro/magnetometer, wired through a slip ring to an Arduino clone with lots of spare 5-volt power, driving one of … Continue reading →

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Sometimes the old ways are best

Posted on October 22, 2015 by paulwallich

So after HP finally replaced the lemon laptop that I’d gotten this spring with a brand spanking new touchscreen laptop, I waited until I had a few completely open days to do a dual-boot install of ubuntu on it, just … Continue reading →

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The Roombaphone

Posted on October 21, 2015 by paulwallich

It might not be the most over-engineered way to make low-quality 8-bit sounds ever, but I think it’s in the running. This is what comes of allowing a 10-year-old access to the basement. My mother-in-law got a Roomba for christmas … Continue reading →

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I’m a little puzzled by these loops

Posted on October 6, 2015 by paulwallich

(PET+, 250 degrees, .25mm layer height, 60 mm/sec, no additional acceleration control) I think I know what most of the other issues are — the blebs are from not retracting enough on layer change, the ringing is from running too … Continue reading →

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Ubis 13: Just a better hot-end?

Posted on October 6, 2015 by paulwallich

So the all-metal hot-ends finally arrived, and I fixed the Metal Plus so I could actually use them, and I’m a convert. First, of course they make it possible for me to print with filaments I couldn’t use before, like … Continue reading →

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Clearing the deck

Posted on September 29, 2015 by paulwallich

Back in my misspent youth, I was a stage lighting geek. Lots of time on ladders with a speed wrench, hours poring over swatches of filters with names like “Surprise Pink” and “1/4 CT Blue”. So years later, when I … Continue reading →

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Champlain Mini Maker Faire

Posted on September 27, 2015 by paulwallich

We all went this afternoon and had fun. I think that the Faire is in an interesting transition: there were fewer geeks trying to sell toys to other geeks and more activities for ordinary people. 3D printing was just assumed … Continue reading →

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You get what you pay for, yet again

Posted on September 17, 2015 by paulwallich

Dunning and Krueger strike again. I thought I knew the retail PC industry well enough, just because I’ve chatted with so many of the people who invented it. But times have changed. This spring I bought a refurb windows laptop … Continue reading →

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Yet another tiny robotic car

Posted on September 9, 2015 by paulwallich

Yes, it’s made mostly out of random parts I had lying around. That’s sort of the point: even if you had to buy all the parts, this thing would be cheap, and if (like me) you accumulate toy and electronic … Continue reading →

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