During my week+ virus battle I didn’t have the energy to even think about a project or a build. In fact I spent nearly one entire sleepless night being tortured by this nightmare about trying to 3D print a set of houses and being especially frustrated tying to attach the roofs. That just kept running in a loop all night.

Very grateful I can now at least contemplate a small project. Probably setting up digiPi for my radios. And no more nightmares 👏🏻

Covid

I have finally been admitted to club Covid. I’ve been sick for 4 days with no fever so thought it was something else. Finally tested today and oh well, engaging hibernate mode.🦠

Viral

In today’s news, I haven’t felt this sick since I got the second Moderna Covid vaccine. No fever though.

But being super-dad I still went out with my daughter to find and buy a car. She’s happy with it.

Into the lion’s den tomorrow.

AKA going car shopping with my daughter 😠

OK, time to get your art on mastodon.social/@kagihq/113958

My first real PETG carbon fiber print. These are parts to replace some existing ones on my MK4S. Very happy how easily it printed and how well it turned out.

Finally got a chance to use a refill unit for Prusament Galaxy Black. Saved money, saved plastic and this is an American-made refill. 👍🏻

I got my hackerboard GPIO today and installed some headers then 3D printed a case to mount it to the MK4S’s frame. I’ll probably try to implement some sort of light control. Some day.

My Magic Mouse has gone belly up - mouse clicks are often missed. I'm hoping to get by without this one until Apple introduces the rumored new/improved model.

Yep, just sitting in this hotel room bed eating a Hershey’s bar with almonds. And I don’t even like milk chocolate. 🤷🏼‍♂️

I played Mysterium with my two kids today. The rules are pretty simple and the game play moves along well since there is a hourglass timer. It definitely provided some glimpses into each other’s thinking. Looking forward to playing it some more rotating the ghost character.

Mysterium - Libellud libellud.com/en/our-games/myst

Matt does some great hardware hacking videos but this one seems to have really caught the public eye. “Hacking a Motorola Automatic License Plate Reader”:

youtu.be/yvINGzIa2fg?si=ZFXOz6

It is a chilly day with a dense fog advisory and rain. Trying to motivate myself to do something other than curl up under a blanket. Current status: binging NHK 72 hour videos.

As per tradition I’m up early and first up on Christmas Day. We had a nice family dinner last night and as always used our china and inherited silver ware (which is not silver but looks kinda fancy). Usually we have a ham dinner on Christmas Day but this year we decided to go the open kitchen route.

As our kids have gotten older our best gift is they’re both still at home on the holidays. Best wishes on this Day to you and yours! 🎄🤶🏼🧑🏼‍🎄

Shawn Hymel in collab with Digikey has started a “Introduction to FreeCAD” video series. I found the first video focused on background info informative. I liked the comparison to other CAD packages, the FreeCAD basics and now I know what the topological naming problem is 😄

youtu.be/8VPYTTnqmfs?si=-pW0hT

Interesting filament experience.

Nothing groundbreaking but two days ago I printed hundreds of grams of yellow Prusament and it went great. Put it in one of my vacuum bags. Today I took it out to use up the last ~50g and got this.

Popped it in my dryer for 6 hours, tried again, and it printed perfectly again. I was surprised by the how quickly it went from “just fine” to “horror show”.

My day of printing dangerously: I have an 8 hour print to do but by my measurement I lacked about 40g of filament for it to complete. Played with several slicer settings to no avail. Then I resorted to lightning infill which saved enough filament for it to work, in theory.

I’m skeptical lightning infill will provide enough support but desperate times… At least I’ll learning something.

This is my chosen VPN provider FWIW mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/11

Just a reminder of what a 💩pile Adobe is. mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy

It’s the small things. Like that satisfying “pop” a model printed with PETG makes as it releases from the Prusa textured sheet even when the temp is still over 40C. Like magic.

Also, why have I never found a white filament I like. I think I've had 5 different brands and they're all 'meh'.

Filaments you ask? I notice that for some reason I have 7 different black filaments: 1 Flex, 2 PETG and 4 PLA. Eight if I count the spare Prusa Galaxy Black spool. I may have a problem. No other color comes close.

I went all in on Jessie filament and received 6 colors of PLA the past few days. The samples all look great. I like that unlike other companies if you buy more than 1 at a time they come in 1 box. Prusa, Hatchbox etc always do the box-in-a-box thing.

TIL and this is great! mastodon.social/@rosenz/113603

I currently use Fusion as my modeling tool for 3D printing (free version). I looked at FreeCAD a couple years ago and it seemed lacking in features. But I’d like to take a look at 1.0. Do any of you have an intro blog post or video for moving from Fusion? I’ve done some searching but not found anything good.

I can already tell the FreeCAD UI is going to give me a serious headache so anything to ease the pain of trying it out will help.😉

A triangle in the sky