Frank

Craig is going.

Chris

Mr. Craig.

Frank

Andy.

Andy

Yes.

Frank

There he is.

Chris

There’s Andy.

Andy

Oh, you restarted Craig my mistake.

Frank

Yes, I did.

Andy

Forgot to say hello.

Chris

Craig got none of that about all of…

Frank

And there’s no sense in revisiting it either.

Frank

We’d like to thank you for joining us. This is episode 83 of amateur 3d podcast, a podcast by
amateur printers for amateur printers, where we share our thoughts and experience. Our panelists
this week are me, Franklin Christensen, and my friends, Andy Cottam, Chris Weber, and Kevin Buckner
decided that having a battery installed in his house was more important than hanging out with his
friends.

Chris

I think it’s a little more than just that.
I think his whole grid was out.
So.

Andy

Sometimes you got to pop open the battery compartment and replace them.
If you don’t have any at all.

Frank

Lift up the hood and take a look, I guess.

Andy

I’m kind of jealous that he’s got that kind of stuff.
I’ve always been into doing all the electrical stuff and stuff like that.
I haven’t put solar on my house yet or any kind of thoughts to a battery.
I know before you moved in with me Frank I did have that homemade battery lead acid back up with the two inverters but that was that was nothing compared to what Kevin’s doing.

Frank

Yeah, I don’t even remember that, honestly.

Andy

It was before you moved in.

Frank

Ah, that would do it.

Andy

Yeah, I had some I had three of those big Alt to Altima.
What are they called the batteries meant for storage not car batteries.
I forget what they’re called. Anyway, we had three of those and two 2000 watt inverters to give me both legs on the house.
And then I had made my own thing. That’s that’s when I started getting into those old Solaris microcontrollers.
And then I designed one that would monitor the power coming into the house and when it faltered it would turn the inverters on.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

And throw the magnet on the panel to shut off the main breaker to the house and all that.
And yeah, it was battery backup for the house it would it wouldn’t catch it like the power went out it would go black for about five seconds and then the inverters would kick kick on and everything would come back.
And then to go to go once the power came back on I had to go back and manually switch it back over.
But it was kind of neat it would power the house for those three ultimate batteries would power the house for five or six hours.

Frank

Nice.

Chris

That’s not bad.

Andy

Nice little system.

Frank

Would you go in and make some kind of effort to minimize the power usage or are you
talking just regular usage at that point?

Andy

Yeah, just regular usage just ran both legs on the house.

Frank

Half the lights in the house on, everyone trying to watch TV, all that stuff?

Andy

And I, but that’s also back when I wasn’t paying attention to codes or, you know, killing myself with electricity so looking back on it now it kind of makes me shudder like now I don’t freakin touch the breaker box.
I know better now.
But there was there was a day where I didn’t know better and I did crazy {omitted word} like that.
Thankfully, I’m still live.
I’ll count my blessings.

Frank

That’s quite a word to use on the podcast there, Andy. I’m absolutely going to have to censor it.

Andy

Count my blessings.

Frank

No. You used an SH word.

Andy

I’m still alive.

Chris

Should.

Andy

I don’t remember.
Sorry.

Frank

All kinds of anyway. What did you do this week on your 3D
printer? Anything?

Andy

Me.
I printed more of my drawer boxes. Let’s see I printed a rubber fish for my kids play. That was kind of fun.

Chris

That’s right.
You fixed your printer before you needed me to print it.

Andy

Oh, yes, I had that whole ordeal I could talk about that that was an adventure.
So, since last podcast, I had my printer throwing a fault code a thermal runaway fault code, and I was having a problem kind of tracking it down.
I’ve been gone so far as I made a quick multi meter with a PIC controller, and I was monitoring the power supply voltage levels, the levels of the power going to the head, the output of the therm resist the thermistor on the head.
And I also was monitoring the power to the Piezo buzzer on the board.
And I did the Piezo buzzer so that I can see when I’m correlating all my data together I could see when the printer actually started the fault, because you know it would start buzzing the the alarm when it faulted, trying to figure out what’s going on because on the printer there’s there’s no signs of anything like this it just says thermal runaway, and the minute you the minute it goes off I’ve been here where it’s gone off and I’ve got to the printer within two or three seconds, because I was right here, reset the printer really quick so I can see the current temperatures and seeing the temperature of the head falling from about 200 degrees.
So, to go from 205 to 200 degrees is not that big of a drop that tells me the temperature probably wasn’t going down or up from there.

Frank

like it was probably I would have expected it to be within spec just by what you’re talking about.

Andy

And, yeah, yeah, it was looking like it was, yeah, it was looking like it was inspect when I ran to the machine and witnessed it a few seconds after it had faulted, but checking it, you know, getting more proof of that the first thing I tried was you know hooking the printer up to the computer and polling the
thermistor the temperature of the head from the through Marlin, but no matter how fast I could do that, which the the one code that you gave me for Marlin would give it to me no faster than about every 100 milliseconds or so.
It was fast, but it wasn’t too fast, you know

Frank

That’s really fast. Just not fast enough, I guess.

Andy.

No, not not fast enough for my liking, but it was pretty fast, and it was showing everything running temperatures all the head running perfect up to the fault, no real fluctuations at all.
And so I’m thinking well maybe I got like a broken wire or something like that in the thermistor, and of course it’s faulting before it posts the temperature so that’s why I was trying to monitor the thermistor from the outside of the of Marlin you know just directly using a multi meter essentially.
And I was polling that about 100 times a second, and that showed me like the power supply I have in there now a while back.
This is a little bit of repeat from last podcast a while back I replaced my power supply because it just died on it, it had a six amp power supply, and I run my water cooling system off the printer’s power supply, and it doesn’t pull that much more it’s about an amp and
a half of juice, but the printer doesn’t use that much either, when it’s running because my, my bed is relayed for 110.
So, I don’t need all the power because most of the power for a lot of printers goes into the the heater for the bed, but since my just relayed, there’s a lot of overhead.
And so I was just using that, and, you know, I’m sure put a little extra wear on the power supply and might have been one of the reasons why it died prematurely.
I say prematurely, but I was like three years into using it.
And so I figured okay well I’ll buy a slightly larger power supply for it to kind of compensate for that, you know give me more time with it so I bought an eight amp power supply.
And when I received it, and tested it, it, I could only pull about two amps from it before the voltage started to drop so it’s it’s only like a one and a half amp power supply, which is stupid, but excuse me, that was tired of fighting with it a lot.
And so I figured okay fine I’m just going to use this new crappy power supply anyhow. And that led me to my printer warming up really slow it would take about two minutes or so for my hot end to get all the way up to temperature, which is a long time for a hot end to get a temperature, but it could maintain it. And looking over you know what’s going on when the printer is running, I am polling the voltage from that power supply down to about 17 volts, and which is which is low it’s a 24 volt printer.
And I mentioned before the control board will run off of about six and a half seven volts is as low as it can come before the control board will stop functioning and all the rest of the like all of the stepper motors, they’re all stepper motors, so they’re more current based
than voltage they’ll run off of anything you throw them. The only problem is is the lower amount of power you’ve got to push it to them the lower current you get at the stepper motor so it becomes easy for it to be d indexed. That’s the only problem with it it’ll it’ll keep on running until you’re putting nothing to it.
It’s just, you know, it gets weaker and weaker to be able to move stuff around. And gosh out of everything else on the printer. I, there’s no reason why the printer wouldn’t function if I just strap seven volts to it.
You know,

Frank

Right.

Andy

so I didn’t realize that this could have been a problem and here I am running 17 volts only to the printer when it’s fully up and running.
And so when I put all my multimeter when I set up my multimeter thing to monitor a bunch of voltages.
The, looking at that, right before it has a thermal runaway air, the voltage has been kind of dropping down to float around 16 and a half volts before it falls.
And right before it faults, the temperature is being pretty consistent, you know, with the Marlins maintaining the temperature well.
And the head is the amperage that the head is pulling is being about the same for the whole time.

Frank

Its, its running temperature… Yeah.

Andy

And it just, yeah, yeah, and it just comes to an end before it falls out.
So I don’t know. I don’t know. I gave up on it because right now I’m kind of thinking, well, gosh, I’m monitoring a lot of things here to try to figure out what exactly is going, but something is going out that I’m not picking up on.
I definitely need to get a new power supply. This is ridiculous. I’ve been running this bad one for so long. And so let me just replace that and see what happens.
So I replaced it. I got a nice slim one. The power supply that was in my control box to start with was unusually small.
And I had a hard time finding one. These eight amp ones I got are much taller. And it did fit, but it was because it was much longer, but only barely.
Like, I’ve got some electrical tape up against the power supply because it touches the control board that’s at a 45 degree angle that’s got the screen on it.

Frank

Okay. Yeah.

Andy

So I mean, it’s right there pushing against stuff, but I was able to close the box without putting a whole lot of pressure on that control board on the the display and controls the actual control board is stuck to the roof of the box.

Frank

Right.

Andy

And then the power supplies bolted to the bottom of the box and the control board is at an angle on the front.

Frank

And your box is a little bigger than mine is. It looks like the same construction,
but yours is about twice as wide as mine. So…

Andy

Is it, is your power supply inside of that control box?

Frank

Yes.

Andy

Is it okay?
I’ll be curious what yours looks like or if they just made their own or something like that. But I could see yours.
It is. Yeah, that looks very similar to mine. You got a Creality, don’t you?

Frank

Yes.
And it’s like I’ve seen yours and I thought why is his control board so wide?
Or his control box housing so wide?

Frank

Because it’s, well, it’s still the open source model that they were all using with yours and with mine and Chris’s, right?
And even Kevin’s, I think, his Ender 3 is still got, no, he’s got the touch. Never mind.
But it was the open source model and everybody was just using it.
Yours is just an earlier generation than mine. So.

Andy

Yeah.
I’m not sure. I’d be curious what kind of power supplies they switched to because I was having a hard time finding a power supply small enough.
But again, though, too, I am using these CNC power supply things. I mean, you guys have seen pictures of it. They’re huge.
And so maybe they’ve switched over to using a smaller one. There were other options for switching power supplies.
I mean, the printer uses a lot of power, but it doesn’t need that much power. I mean, we look at some of our laptop power supplies.
And I mean, we know that those are getting pretty large, especially for gaming laptops. I’ve got mine here that’s almost eight inches long and about an inch thick and four inches wide.
And it’s 230 watts of power. That’s 18 volts at three and a half amps. And that would be small to put inside of that case.
So, I mean, I know they can cram those switching power supplies into a smaller housing, but generally speaking, they’re made to be in slightly larger machines.
And so I’m having a hard time fitting a normal sized one in the mine. And so when I bought a new one here, I figured, OK, I’m going to get more amps because the eight amp turned out to be a two.
I kind of want to prepare for that because they don’t really change in price for how much, you know, how high the amperage is.
They do get less efficient.
If I put something that’s can provide way too many amps, it’s going to be less efficient than, you know, one that is closer to what you actually need.
But like you’ve mentioned, if you’re under utilizing something, you’re probably going to get a lot of more time out of it as well.
So I went with a 14 amp power supply that I found. It’s like 14 and a half something. And it’s slim. It’s not very tall, but it’s got the same footprint as the eight that was in here.
So, OK, I’ll grab that. That’ll work really good.
When I got it, turns out the measurements they had on the ad were not what the actual measurements for it were. It was a half an inch longer and like a quarter inch wider than the measurements they gave on the ad.

Andy

The measurements they gave on the ad were the same as this this eight amp form factor that I have. And so I don’t know what happened there, but I’m kind of tired of fighting with it.
I’m just going to use that power supply, even though I can no longer close my box.
But I will tell you one thing, looking at the voltage coming from that, when I set it to 24 volts with everything off and everything, when I go and turn everything back on and my Peltier cooling system kicks on and all that, there is no difference to the voltage delivered down to 100th of a volt.
It’s when I was adjusting it, I got it to 24.05 was the closest to a solid 24. I could kind of tweak with, you know, the little potentiometer.
And it doesn’t it doesn’t budge at all, man. It’s just it’s a solid 24 volts, no matter how much I’m pulling from it.
So I think I’ve got an actual 14 amp power supply.
I did take and put a, I don’t have a load tester that isn’t like 50 to 200 amps, you know, low testing capabilities.
But one of the things that I do do when I need to test something like that, that is the high amperage, because I’ve got some ceramic resistors I could use for loads, for smaller loads, you know, up to about an amp, maybe two.
But for bigger stuff, I usually just take a strip of what’s it called, they use it for heating element wire chromium, usually just take a strip of chromium, and the longer the strip you’re putting power through the more resistance you got.
And so as long as you’re not burning the chromium up, you can, I can probably test very accurately a certain amount of current up to about maybe 10 amps or so.
And when I did it on this power supply, I tested it up to eight, I got a little bit above eight amps and it was just solid before my wire this, you know, three feet long started to grow glow red.
So I figured I know it can do at least eight amps without budging from the 24 volts. So that’s really nice to have.
But then my printers back to, I mean, I showed you guys graphs like oh it’s so nice for it to be, you know, heating up so quick anymore.
But it’s, it’s working out well now. And I might 3D print a new housing for my printer if it starts to bother me that it’s not large enough for this type of this style of power supply.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

Oh, with all that said, that’s pretty much it for me. I haven’t really done that.

Frank

I did looking at the power supply on the Creality website.
They have a 24 volt rated power supply for the Ender 3 or Ender 5.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And they are 215 by 115 by 30 millimeters, translated that’s approximately 8 and a half by four and a half by a little more than one inch.

Andy

Okay, that is smaller.

Frank

So that sounds much smaller than the one you’re using.

Andy

Yeah, I’m kind of looking at these here yeah that is nice and tiny. And is that right only 36 bucks.

Frank

Off the website, yeah.
I’m sure you can find something very similar if not the same thing on Amazon too.

Andy

Wow, I wish I would have seen that before.
Yeah, possibly.

Frank

So you don’t have to ship from China necessarily.

Andy

I was really, really looking for these though that that is that’s like the original one Mike came with. That’s a that’s a 5.9 amp supply. Yeah, I think that’s the one that are extremely similar one that mine was using that I was calling a six amp.
Well darn, I spent like $25 on this 14 amp one.
I’ve looked, I was I was really looking. Yeah, and then switch back to this.

Frank

So ride it until it dies.
Ride the new one until it dies and then go back to an OE version, yeah.

Andy

Yeah, I’ve really looked all through Amazon when I was looking for a power supply, because I’m interested I’m interested in that kind of stuff I was browsing for I probably put a good half hour of browsing through power supplies to settle on something.
And these ones here just weren’t really popping up on my Amazon searches.

Frank

Maybe you had a price limit or something that was blocking it.

Andy

No, I was seeing a lot higher than you know 40��40or50 one so this one should have. But still, I just might not have stumbled up on it but that’s. Oh it’s so tiny that would have fit perfect. Well of course that’s probably what it was designed for.

Frank

Boolean search is just different for everybody, right?

Andy

And that’s what I get for trying to utilize Amazon’s normal traditional search hate Amazon search so dumb, so dumb.

Frank

That’s why I shared that link you append to the search after the results come up and it
will rank everything by review count.

Andy

Yeah, that’s nice. Yeah, if I’m looking for like reviewed stuff, but when I’m looking for, I don’t know.
There wouldn’t have been any really description of size for this power supply or anything like that. I really should have like one of the things I should be slapped on the wrist for is not looking for the power supply that originally belonged in my printer.
That’s something I could have searched for.

Frank

Okay, here’s the thing.
You did so much searching that it’s easy to make assumptions about how you did the search.
But it’s like I struggle with did you not search for 3D printer power supplies?
I would have seen expected to see a bunch of these if you had.

Andy

Oh yeah.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Now my biggest search term was 24 volt power supplies but I did the 3D printer power supplies and terms alike. Yeah.

Frank

That’s weird.
Okay, so at this point we can just blame the algorithm because the algorithm screwed up.

Andy

Well, I mean these the power supplies I was coming across our 3D printer power supplies. They’re just not the really small ones that Creality used.

Frank

Well, now you can add Creality to the search parameters for your not Creality 3D printer
and get the ones that…

Andy

Yes.
Yes, I’ll probably sit back and and wait for this one to die.

Frank

And by then we will have forgotten this conversation too, I’m sure.

Andy

And yeah, yeah, because they do it they did have some some small, I don’t know what form factor they are but they’re even smaller than the Creality one but they were more expensive.
But yeah, I don’t know. It’s something I’ll worry about later right now I’ve got it working really well, even though I’m kind of in the same situation with my last power supply where I fought it quite a bit.
Got a solution that wasn’t quite right and I’m just going to run with it. And in this case I’ve got an actual good power supply, but now I’ve got, you know, physically can’t fit in the box.
I put all the six screws in my little tool bin for my printer, and I just got the top just kind of sitting on there.
I can’t even like 3D print a spacer or something to compensate, because it’s too wide to go in the box as well so it kind of shifts the entire top off to one side so
if it really bothers me out 3D print a new one or go with something.

Frank

This 3D print a whole new base and put the housing on top of it.

Andy

Yeah, actually, you know what, that’s a really good idea.

Frank

I was even kind of being facetious.

Andy

That is.
Yeah, no, because I mean if I if I just printed the base to house the the I mean it would that means it would be like an inch, about an inch box underneath the control box, and then, you know,

Frank

Mm-hmm.
But everything was still screw together and you’d have some desk control and it would

Andy

that’s that’s so much better than that.

Frank

be stable so you could move it all as one unit and…

Andy

Yeah, that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll do that. Yeah, thank you for that.
That’s a lot simpler than just redesigning a whole box, and that’s a lot more like

Frank

3D print your way out of this, man.
Come on.

Andy

that is a lot more temporary kind of solution that I would be looking for in this situation.

Frank

Mm.
There’s that.

Andy

That’s good. That’s good. Yeah, thank you for that.
On my drawer boxes, you know I was talking about the methods I was using.
Before I was just going to be able to print whatever drawer box I wanted for however many components I had, and decided against that later on that now I should have a little bit more of a standard where I can have different size drawers, but I should kind of keep to a more,
you know, using trying to stick with one standard for almost everything. And I printed.

Andy

Yeah, I printed one box.

Frank

So it’s kind of uniform.
I appreciate uniformity myself, so…

Andy

I printed one box that is bigger because I have a lot of those components.
And it’s the only one I’ve done it so far.

Frank

And there are larger components too, right?

Andy

No, no, they are smaller. I could they they would have been just fine to print in the normal size box, and I printed them in a large one.
I’ll show you here if I find my mouse, but it is. So, for our visual listeners. Let me walk around here.

Frank

Flip your phone over, it’s upside down.

Andy

You can kind of see this one here.
See I got these super capacitors that I really like six farad super capacitors, and they’re not large in size.
I use these a lot of my projects. And so I’ve got a lot of them last time I bought a lot. And that particular box you can see is much larger than all the rest, but I’ve kind of stuck with one standard size for the most of it.
And then I’ve got some really small ones for much smaller components like diodes and ceramic capacitors.
I’ve decided to go ahead and swap out that six, that big six farad capacitor drawer box for a normal size one.
I’ve got a bunch of my ceramic resistors that are are unusually long and won’t fit in a normal drawer.
So I did wind up designing a drawer for them that would function, but I want to put I want to keep all of my resistors together, and that big capacitor box there’s in a good spot to be able to move everything around.
So I’m going to go ahead and take and and get rid of that big drawer there, the one that I’ve been talking about before I started deciding just to have a back stock available for my drawers.
And so I have been working on designing that. But that’s pretty much it for me. I haven’t really done a whole lot more other than that this last week.
And this weekend, unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to wind up getting too much either, because I don’t I’m not a gamer, I don’t play games, but I got stuck in a game this weekend and I’m sitting here right now doing the podcast thinking ah, soon as I get to with all my chores, I’m gonna go play my stupid game. I’m excited about it.

Frank

Sometimes you need to fall down that hole, dude.

Andy

Now, you know what, a while back, like when Minecraft had gotten big before it became much more of a kids game when it was just a game.
I fell down a hole in it and I lost about a month to my life to the original Minecraft. This was before Microsoft bought them out back when it was still not just Minecraft, but the old Java.

Frank

No, I remember we all fell down that hole for a little while because you hosted your own server.
And so we all did the thing for game night.

Andy

Yes, yes, that was a fun time. I’ve got fond memories of doing that kind of stuff, but there’s a method of play that I really enjoy myself and that’s like the manufacturing, the setting up systems to do work for you kind of stuff.

Frank

Automation.

Andy

And I really automation. I really like that kind of stuff. And not necessarily with automation, but there’s a lot that still kind of scratches that itch that I’m good at gameplay for that kind of stuff.
And when I lost that much time to Minecraft, it bothered me at one point. I realized what if I was putting that much effort into my life instead of a video game.
And so I had that thought and I haven’t played really a video game since every once in a while I’ll fall down a hole like like now where I’ll take a weekend and lose a weekend to a game and that’s pretty much it.
But that’s like once every two years or something that’ll happen because now I just got this guilt where I could be using that energy around the house doing stuff, you know, I look back to last night when I was playing that game and it’s like I wasn’t playing with the kids.
I wasn’t doing any of my projects down here, or any of that and there’s a lot of stuff that needs to get done. I still got a big trailer of sticks that I got to go dump from Kevin’s house when we helped him with his tree a couple weeks ago, you know, that I got to do this week.

Frank

You mean when I help them with this tree?
You guys came and cleaned up?

Andy

Hey, we took an entire tree.
An entire tree that whole first tree that was yeah that well.

Frank

I’m kidding.
I didn’t get to say it last week, so…

Andy

Oh, yeah.
Well we had, we had a funeral to go to. So that that was a pretty good excuse I think

Frank

I do.

Andy

but we didn’t not pull our own weight once you guys left.
We cleared out that entire tree, the entire front yard that you were kind of helping with we got cleared up, and then the backyard had two trees in it, we took one of them home, the entire tree. So,

Frank

Okay.
Was it the one that was still whole when you got there?
yeah, it was the one that was occupying the most backyard space, land space, it was the one that was mostly up against the front fence.

Frank

Okay.
And that one, we cleared out the front tree because we didn’t want Kevin to get in trouble for having an eye sore tree down in his front yard.
So we dragged it to the back and then we cut down the second tree and basically cleaned up the branches on it.
And that’s when everybody had stuff to go do.

Andy

Yeah, we got that whole.

Frank

And when you and Chris showed up.

Andy

We got that whole thing chopped up and thrown in the trailer and hauled off but it’s spent still sitting in my trailer this entire time because I haven’t had the chance to go to the dump or the green waste down here is where I’m going to take it but that’ll be after the podcast after I get some food and the kids’ bellies
so

Frank

For some reason, I thought you were gathering all that wood to take up to your property and use as firewood.

Andy

No, no, that’s not not none of that was good wood for that that was just all the branches and things like that so.
And after we got it in there it wasn’t worth the effort to really differentiate between the two and then in house it.

Frank

Okay.
Gotcha.

Andy

Because I mean we got it to where we could just pull the whole brick out of the back of the trailer, you know you throw everything in the top, and then when you’re unloading it you take off the back and you pull it slide it out the back.
And at that point, it will be easy to if we’ll want to throw a lot of the good logs back into the trailer and haul them back home and throw them into the the wood pile.
It’s a big Box Elder tree that occasionally sheds branches when it’s really windy and we chopped them up because its branches are about six inches around eight inches they’re pretty big.
And we bring I’ve got a pile of that that needs to go up to the property to for campfire with because we move for the listeners we got a little campground up in the mountains property that we got so.
But yeah, so lots to do.
That’s my projects for this weekend I think.
What about you.

Frank

Well, because I missed last week, I am in or was we saying our last concert for six months or so.
I was in a community choir and we’ve been singing a song from Money Python.
Look on the bright side of life.

Andy

Oh cool.

Frank

And it’s been fun.
The last verse we decided we were going to do harmonicas instead of whistling.
We’re issued these tiny little two inch harmonicas to do it with and every we’re talking about adults in a community choir.
We’ve all played with a harmonica before none of us could get these harmonicas to work right.
So almost immediately I thought I need to design and print my own harmonica.
And it took me six months to get around to it, but I finally got it designed and printed and test fit and all that other fun stuff.
Saturday before the concert, which was on Monday.
And it worked great.
I do have a few things I still want to tweak about it, but yeah, it’s a functional snap together harmonica.

Andy

That’s cool.

Frank

My brain keeps my mouth keeps saying harmonica. It’s a kazoo.

Andy

Yes, yes, a kazoo.
I didn’t, it didn’t trip. I didn’t catch that either when you were saying her Monica, I knew you were talking about a kazoo but my brain was automatically changing the word.

Frank

For years, my, my head imagines a kazoo, and my mouth says harmonica. It’s weird. Anyway.

Andy

The way it works.

Frank

So I did that.
I’ve been working on a kind of personal service project for the park I next live next to because it doubles as the dog poop bathroom park.
And there are people in my community, my neighborhood who don’t pick up after their dogs.
And there’s a lot of trash all over this park and all that. So what I’m doing is for our visual listeners,
I have acquired a couple of shovel…

Andy

Sticks… handles.

Frank

sticks handles. Yeah.
And I am designing something to go on the end so that I can print off some of the standard broomstick threaded stuff.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And I’m going to print some tools to go with it.
I’ve also got a nail in here now. I’m going to turn it into a trash spike.
I’m going to be picking up the trash and the dog poop. And it’ll probably I imagine take two or three hours to just trawl through the whole park. But once it’s done.

Frank

What?

Andy

My phone went off I apologize.

Frank

Too many layers. There’s no such thing as too many. Anyway.
So that’s how I’m going to clean up my park and I’m only barely broadcasting that I’m doing this because I don’t really want any attention for the service project.

Frank

I just want to get it done and have the park somewhere that these kids who like we’ve got a skate scooter pump track out here and all kinds of stuff and kids.
I want the kids to be able to play in this park and not have to worry about running through a pile of dog poop.
So and now that I’ve got a dog and I’m out there all the time, I see how what bad shape this park is in.
And it’s like, well, expecting the city to manage all of the parks as effectively as I want them to manage mine might be a little unreasonable.
So I’m just going to do my part to pick it up.

Andy

That’s really good. I commend that. I know you don’t want the credit for it as such but that’s still awesome that you’re doing that. It’d be nice if more people would put forth that kind of effort into the community we’d be a lot better off a lot better situation.

Frank

It would be.

Andy

Sounds like a neat opportunity to make some tools though.

Frank

Yeah, there’s the spike I was just talking about. I’ve kind of got an idea for something that’s a mixture between a rake and a hoe.
Something I can use to put on one side and I did buy a spade. I’m not going to mess around when it comes to a spade, right?

Andy

True.

Frank

So but using something to help shovel the poop onto the spade and then I’ll just drop it into a bucket.
And once I’m done, I live next to a wild trail area.
I can go out there and dig a little bit of a hole and bury the bio stuff and throw the trash away.
So yeah, once I get that done, that will become an occasional Saturday project for me to just go out and walk through the park.

Andy

Yeah, okay. That sounds nice. Got any up.

Frank

And sorry, go ahead.

Andy

Got any upcoming plans or anything for this next week.

Frank

Nothing special, not this week. Week after that is my birthday week. So we’re doing we’re doing some plans for that.
But

Andy

Be nice.

Frank

I actually have hardly turned on my printer since I finished the kazoos.
No, I haven’t turned on my printer since I finished the kazoos. So I actually haven’t done anything this week.
Maybe it’s a good thing I missed last week, which by the way, I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing.
I was helping a neighbor move.
And the coordination left everybody showing up at the neighbor’s house at nine.

Andy

Really.

Frank

And it was just one of those. Yeah, we’re not going to be done with the podcast by then. I might as well…
Might as well miss it.

Andy

You know, I did have an idea for a project. I don’t know if it’ll come to fruition or not but I was talking with my little brother and he’s got a rotary tool, an angle grinder, cut off saw that works too fast.
And I’ve got the same cut off saw I believe, and I totally understand it’s, it’s not an angle grinder, but it looks like it’s designed from an angle grinder.

Frank

Like it’s almost the same form factor just with a what is it a four inch blade on it or whatever.

Andy

It’s got a seven inch blade.
And that’s the problem like the housing and everything is all seven inch and it takes seven inch grinding blades it’s it’s huge and it’s great it works wonderfully.
But it’s it’s it’s like the housing and stuff is a cut off saw, but the internals are an angle grinder.

Frank

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Andy

And just like the motor and the gearbox and stuff come from an angle grinder and those turned very quickly. And they’re, it’s scary to operate I do not like operating mine at full speed and and they’re either on or off because they’re cheap.
What I wound up doing with mine is, because it’s like 300 some odd watts to run it it’s not very much. And so I bought one of those heavier duty dimmer switches that was like a 400 or 500 watt dimmer switch.
And I put that in a, in a junction box with an outlet, and so that I can control the.

Frank

You can back it off as much as you need and all that. Yeah.

Andy

Yeah, and it works great and, and my brother loved the idea. And, you know, they those circuits use TRIACs, and they are clipping the AC current to control how much currents coming down there they’re clipping the wave there.
It’s almost the equivalent of PWM for alternating current,

Frank

Okay.

Andy

and they’re awesome the way they work it’s really neat the way they work.
And my brother.

Frank

As opposed to how the stove works, which is depending on how much of the coil is well traditionally anyway I think the newer stoves are different but how much of the coil is is used controls how much power goes into it right.

Andy

Yeah, a lot of them still use that same exact technology. It works yeah with the bio electric thermal switches that click on and off. It’s essentially a very low frequency PWM system for the the oven.

Frank

Well, and it was quoted before we started the podcast but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it right.
It’s it’s a bulletproof approach just keep using it.
Right.

Andy

No kidding, no kidding and it.
The way it functions is pretty like it works really well for a heating element.
So like, it kind of correlate since it’s switching on and off due to thermal properties of the bio electric tabs and the switch itself.
The stove top is so like when you switch it from like on hot to going back to cold and stuff like that like if it’s if you’ve got it cranked up to hot to really hot and you go all the way back down to cold that switch will stay off for a much longer time while it’s cooling down and vice versa if you’re going back to cold and you crank it up to hot the switch is going to run the burner for a much longer time before it starts switching on and off, because the biometric switch or yeah tabs need to heat up to great system, but anyway.
So I was talking to my brother and he was talking about he’s got an eagle grinder but it’s it’s scary to operate he doesn’t really like it.
He wants to put on a different blade, but it’s hard to find anything between the seven and the four inch blade and the four inch blade is too small to do the cutting that he needs.
And I told him well this was my solution to that problem and it works out great and I told him that’s back before I had knowledge of, you know, how not to burn my house down with electricity.
I would recommend getting a, what’s it called a router speed controller, because they’re designed more for these heavy duty motors, and then just just do it with that and so he’s like okay I’ll give that a shot.
The same concept of what I’m using here, it just uses a much more heavy duty TRIAC or multiple ones for the switching so it can handle more amperage, a little bit safer to use.
And because mine out in my shop, I’m probably pretty close to the limit I mean it’s like a four or 500 watt switch, and I’m pulling like 300 Watts from it.
But let’s face it, a motor, when it turns on an AC motor like that is pulling a lot more than 300 Watts.
I mean the initial spike of current that goes through it to start the motor is pretty heavy duty.
That’s why like our breakers and stuff are like essentially slow blow, because there are times you definitely pull way more amperage starting something up, you know, then, then the breakers actually.

Frank

And it needs it needs that start off but maintaining is much lower. Gotcha. Yeah.

Andy

Yeah, yeah. So that startup problem though is probably way more than the dimmer that I use can actually handle I haven’t burned it out but if I’m going to be recommending something to somebody, you know, I should tell them the more safer thing to do.

Frank

I recommend the more modern, more intelligent…

Andy

appropriate tool yeah so he bought it.

Frank

more experienced solution.

Andy

Yeah, so he bought it and called me back a little while and he’s like yeah I tried that bought one for like 25 bucks and when it is almost turned like he says when it’s off it’s off and the minute he clicks it on.
His rotary tools like at 75% power at its lowest.
And so you only get from like 75% up to.

Frank

It’s a full speed.

Andy

Yeah, up to 100% with you. So it’s not working the way he wants and I told well that’s kind of weird I didn’t expect it to be that bad.
Mine seems to have full control when I’ve hooked mine up to an oscilloscope just playing around with seeing how they work and stuff before I understood how they work.
Mine does clip all the way back on the wave it’ll it’ll take it all the way down to zero. And so I asked Dave, my brother because I, you know, what’s it look like and I don’t think it’s, I think it’s starting somewhere in the middle and going up.
And so he’s kind of unhappy with the whole thing.

Frank

Like the middle range is not there.

Andy

Yeah, but that kind of made me think and like that might be a fun little project I could 3d print down the road for him as a gift because we’re all adults and it’s hard buying adult siblings gifts right.
It’s hard buying friends and family that are adults gifts because if you want something you just get it or you know you just go get it but it’s those those odd things that someone might not think about or something you can create yourself like in our 3d printed
we’ve got that that is something that they can’t necessarily accomplish and it’s like I think and I wonder if I can make it dimmer for him.
That would be a fun little project because I can make it exactly how he wants it to work.
I could use a microcontroller to do it to so that it can that whole like the way the knob works works exactly the way he wants that tool and that that could be a good a good kind of gift.
And so I was just kind of thinking about that that would be kind of nice and and for the first time I thought well if I’m going to be printing something as a gift.
I should print the housing for it using the SLA printer and actually make a nice 3d printed item.
But yeah, that was just a thought that I had this last week.
I don’t know if I’ll actually do it because it borderlines that yeah, I might make something like that for myself.
But that’s messing with 110 volts, although you don’t mess with it a lot.
You know that part of it is simple you got the plug coming in, you go through the TRIAC, and then the plug going out.
That’s the entire 110 volt side of the project.
So I feel like I could probably do that safely, probably, especially if I stuck using there and stuff like that, but you know, it is kind of the borderline.
Burn your house down territory so we’ll see where that thought sits for a little while and if I ever actually do with it.

Frank

So, assemble the project in your wood shop, then you’re only burning down the wood shop, or not, not wood shop.

Andy

Well if it’s a gift going to my, yeah, but if it’s a gift going to my brother, the outside of my house.
Yeah, there’s a reason why my shop doesn’t connect to the house.

Frank

If you burn it down and you lose a bunch of tools but you don’t burn down the house so

Andy

So true. So true.

Frank

Well, Chris stirred once and he fell out.

Andy

Yeah, I see him.
He’s out. He is so out.

Frank

He had it, we can tell everybody he had a good thing happened last night and he celebrated all night.
He got his wife’s car running so he was understandably happy and celebrated and showed up for the intro of the podcast and fell out so we’re going to let him sleep.

Andy

Yeah, I don’t think he’s been to bed yet I think he stayed up all night last night so poor guy.
We love you anyway Chris.

Frank

Yeah, that was the impression I got so we’ll let it go this time.
Yeah, well, I think that we have covered it all, unless you’ve got something I missed.

Andy

Not necessarily know nothing that I could really think of.

Frank

All right, I will add, you know, the one of the effects of having people in your life, especially a significant other and having interests like ours.
There is an official moratorium on Frankie buying toys for a month before his birthday and a month before Thanksgiving, because he will buy things that he shouldn’t.
Why don’t we go ahead and kick this off and we’ll come back next week, probably with everybody.
We would like to thank everyone for listening to the very end.

Andy

The very, very end.

Frank

Good man.
If you like what you hear, give us all the stars and subscribe.
We are available through a wide variety of podcast vendors and so are easy to share.
If you have feedback, you can find us in our Facebook group, amateur3dpod.
You can also email us at Franklin, Kevin, Andy or Chris @amateur3dpod.com or email us collectively at panelists@amateur3dpod.com.
Why did my brain tell me that was wrong?
Anyway, Kevin Buckner wrote the music for this episode.
OpenAI’s whisper completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which are linked in the description.
Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber and Andy Cottam.
Until next time, we’re going offline.

Andy

Always use hairspray.
And you know that I’m a proponent for getting good therapy, but I think my printer needs it as well. It goes layers and layers and layers deep.

Frank

Kinda like an onion.

Andy

I didn’t have much time to look when up. I’m sorry.

Frank

That’s fine.
Hasn’t that one been used before?
Maybe that’s an old Andy-ism that got used before.

Andy

Possibly. I don’t have a lot of jokes. I’m not good at dad jokes. I love dad jokes, but I cannot come up with them on my own.

Frank

I do okay with dad jokes.
I find them hilarious more than I tell them, though.

Frank

Like the queue joke that I shared.
That one still makes me laugh, which is the only reason it came to mind.
For our listeners, the word queue is kind of ironic.
It’s literally the letter queue followed by a bunch of silent letters patiently waiting in line.

Andy

Yes, yes, yes.
I love it.

Frank

It’s good. I like it.

Andy

It is.

Frank

Alright Stop, stop, stop.