Frank

Thank you for joining us.

This is episode 23 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 Codham, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and we have a special guest panelist. My brother-in-law, Carl Ballard.

Andy

And he’s not even here against his will.

Frank

Yeah, I know! He volunteered.

Well, I think his wife may have pushed him into it just a little bit. My sister-in-law is almost as bossy as my wife.

Chris

Well, he didn’t listen to any of the episodes yet, so maybe he doesn’t know what he’s in for.

Carl

No, he was a volunteer, honestly, I swear.

Frank

Why don’t you introdu…

Because I like to stumble over myself and then edit stuff out later. Yeah.

Carl, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Carl

So I’m Carl.

I work as a manufacturing engineer.

I’ve been working with machines and robotics for 15 years.

I got my start when I was in high school and then ended up getting a degree in mechatronics.

So a lot of my daily stuff is I troubleshoot equipment and manufacturing and write software for those machines to produce good parts.

Frank

Cool.

Carl

The fight against entropy, you know.

Andy

So I think this was…

Chris

Well, I would say…

Andy

Well, I thought this was Amateur 3D Pod, What do we do in having a professional on?

Chris

Well, he’s fighting the good fight against idiocy because, you know, if you’ve had any experience with production people, you know, you know what I’m talking about.

Frank

And he was invited because he also does the amateur 3D printing at home and…

How long have you been doing that, Carl?

Carl

I’ve been doing like having a functional machine that worked well. I’ve had about three years. I got a first shot IBM 3?

Frank

IBM? I didn’t know that IBM did a 3D printer.

Chris

That’s a Prussia?

Carl

I’m 3D printing.

Yeah.

The i3 Mk3, that’s what it is.

Chris

Oh, okay.

You know, Kevin and I know a guy that helped develop some of the pressure software.

Carl

Oh, nice.

Kevin

We do?

Chris

Yeah. Walt.

Kevin

Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn’t know he did that.

Chris

Yep, he did. He has a pressa himself.

Andy

Now we know who to blame.

Frank

All right, well, projects, Carl, why don’t you go ahead and go first?

What projects, have you worked on this last week or so?

Carl

This last week, so I’m a cub master for the Cub Scouts. And so this week was a, we did a blue and gold and this theme was jungles. And so I will 3D print up a bunch of like the necrotist scarf slides and I’ll do like a multi-tier print where it’ll be like green background and then I’ll change the color and then do the outlines and then do another layer and have like the pack number on there.

And so I printed those up this week and then I’m doing like 40 of them. So it takes up most of my print time for my free time.

Frank

How much of your print bed does it take for run or, how many do you get on your print bed? How about that?

Carl

I usually get, I usually try to stay in the middle. So I do 12 and if I can spread it out, I’ll do the 16, like four by four.

Frank

Okay.

Carl

I try to get to them on there, otherwise it starts failing on the edges.

Chrius

Ah, yes, I have run across that myself right on the edge. No, I just discovered that my printer does it last week or you know, you know, last episode anyway.

Kevin

Right, we talked about it last episode.

Chris

Yep.

Frank

How about you, Chris? You weren’t done anything this week?

Chris

Yeah, I did a couple of things.

So the wife and I, since I’ve been off work for a bit, we’ve been doing some, some, some cleanup and getting rid of things and what have you and she found a box of things that need to go in her curio cabinet.

So some of those were decorative plates, right? So there were some, some four inch plates and then there was like two regular size, you know, 10 and a half, 12 inch plates. And so I’ve made a couple of plate holders, you know, the little display stands for those. So that was kind of nice. Just use the same thing and then just scale it down for the 35% for the four inch plates and worked great.

And then as you guys remember last week, I was talking about how I screwed up the dragon, the dragon had to cover that hole in my wall, right?

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

Well, yeah, I decided, you know what, let’s just buy a, you know, a three gang light, light cover, you know, just make it a big gang plate, right?

Well, I got looking on online, you know, and in the local hardware stores and it’s about 10 to $15 for this three gang plate that I needed, I’m going, oh, I’m any, you know…

Andy

Was there anything special about it or just rare?

Chris

It needs, yeah, just, well, it needs to not be white. So I needed one that was either black or dark brown, that was three gang with the special rectangular thing to it for the rocker plate, for the lockers, rocker switches, right?

So anyway, yeah, so I couldn’t find one that was like less than about $10 or so. And even those were stuff I’d have to order on order on Amazon and have shipped.

And I’m like, “there’s got to be a better way.”

So I did a quick search on Thingiverse and yeah, there’s a guy that made a custom printable deal for switch covers.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

Yeah. So I had that thing printed in like an hour and it was nice, nice and neat. I popped up a picture earlier this week. You guys can see on the.

Andy

Yeah, I saw that. It looked like it came out pretty good.

Chris

Yeah, yeah, it came out almost, it actually did come out absolutely perfect.

I didn’t have to do any cleanup on it or anything, I was just able to take it straight off the print bed and right on the wall and everything looks great.

Andy

That’s convenient when it comes off that good.

Chris

Yeah.

So that was a, that was a nice little saving grace there.

Andy

Oh, I see. So I’m looking at your plate here and I guess it is a little bit kind of on the special side because even though it’s a three-gain cover, it’s only got one rectangular light switch in it. The rest of the gangs are blanks.

Chris

Yep.

Andy

That would be hard to find. Yeah, that’s a great reason to use the printer right there.

Andy

I mean, I’m sure an electrician would have a fit about it, but I love it.

Chris

Well, that’s the thing though is I’m going to, I’m going to make another, another, another plate like that.

That’s just a two-gang.

I’m going to put it on the opposite side and I’m going to glue those mounted dragonheads to them. So it looks like I did that on purpose.

Andy

Okay. Now let me ask you this.

Is that actually covering a three-gang box or is it a smaller gang box and a hole?

Chris

That’s a single-gain box and then a hole.

Andy

Oh, okay.

I had to, the way the wall worked out for me to put a switch there for all the lights, I had to put a hole right there just because of the way that the studs came out. And so I had to put the hole there, but I want to leave the hole there just in case I have issues later.

So I want it to be in case I have to change something about the lights.

Andy

Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. That looks great.

Chris

Oh, yeah.

Andy

Impressed, sir.

Chris

Thank you.

Frank

Yeah, it looks pretty good.

Chris

Yeah, that’s what I did this week.

Frank

That reminds me I need to make a cover for where all of my cables come into my pantry and my condo.

Hey, Andy, have you worked on anything this week?

Andy

I actually did.

I had a little bit of time, all last night, last-minute stuff, though.

My brother has an air compressor that he did a rebuild kit on the compressor itself.

He got it from a friend.

It was seized, so he bought a rebuild kit for it and was fixing it all up. But one of the things that it’s got a problem with is the air inlet filter on the compressor is broke off. It was only the small section of plastic sticking out of the compressor.

I don’t know what you would call it, the housing, the actual compressor itself where the inlet goes in.

And so he pulled that apart, pulled out the little piece of plastic and sent it my way. And so we sat down and redesigned just like a cup filter for it that would use that same kind of design where the way it hooks up to the compressor. And I just got done printing that one today to send back to him.

I know my compressor gets pretty darn hot when it’s compressing air. And the plastic piece that came with it looked like it was high-temperature ABS. So I got nothing like that out of my filaments of choice, especially with my open-bed printer, kind of limited. So I figured I’d go ahead and print it out of PETG.

Frank

Shocker.

Andy

At least if it gets too hot, it’s not going to melt, it’ll more bake than anything and still be fairly one piece. That way he doesn’t have to go digging pieces of plastic out of the compressor itself. But at the same time, though, it’s the air inlet. And out of all the places in the compressor, it’s going to be the coldest, it’s going to be that.

So I don’t know if it’s actually a problem or not, but I went ahead and printed it out of PETG to deal with that. And noticed a lot more like Z-wobble in my prints.

I got something going on with my printer. I need to go through and maybe just clean up all the tracks and make sure all my belts are tight and stuff like that, because my prints aren’t coming out looking very good.

I mean, PETG kind of a hard print anyway compared to like PLA, but it’s still not where I would like it to be. So if you look at the picture I sent you guys, the print just doesn’t look that great. But it doesn’t have to look great for this particular job, so it’ll still work fine.

But I got some work, more work to do on my printer and see what else do we do.

Oh, and I worked on my phone case a little bit and I’m getting a little bit kind of distraught about it because I went and measured the phone case that I had printed and it’s not as big as the model.

It’s four millimeters shorter than it should be. And I didn’t notice that when I got the phone in it and stuff. I thought maybe I had misdesigned something because it was too short, but after going in and checking it, no, the model is bigger than this. And so my whole attempts to redo Merlin on my printer to accept the bigger bed, make adjustments to get that little bit extra out of the bed, something else is still going on with that printer because I did not get the full 360 millimeters that I needed on this phone case.

And I’ve only got a 300 by 300 bed. So printing 360 is really close to the edges there, but something still just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And I got frustrated at dealing with it. And so I gave up on it today, but I think I’m going to have to take, oh, sorry.

Frank

Is that your original case that was too small then or?

Andy

No, my original came out like three millimeters bigger than this one.

So it’s not supposed to be like six millimeters bigger than the original.

Frank

And so it’s not a long time issue. It’s something new that’s going on.

Andy

Yeah.

And I don’t know what it is.

I think it’s because I brought, I put the old case that I made the original one on the print bed and printed the first layer and it came out just fine.

But then I go and put this one on it and that’s larger and it comes out a little bit smaller.

So I don’t know what’s going on.

I really don’t.

It doesn’t make any sense. And I walk the printer head in the X and Y direction to its extremes and everything seems to line up.

I check the absolute positioning that Cura’s output in the file to see what max X is it going to to make sure it’s within, you know, what the printer can do and it is.

So I don’t know. It’s all kind of weird.

Frank

And it’s not deformed? it’s like XY, one of them is deformed or anything like that?

Andy

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not.

And I did run into that before where it was deformed because it would get like Merlin would the interpreter would take it all the way out to its max. And then it just would stop. It wouldn’t try to push it any further, but it would stop it, but it would still continue printing the Y and when it came back into the area that it could print it, it wasn’t de-indexed at all either.

It accounted for that.

So it’s like, you sure the G code’s telling it to go over to 315 and but it stops at 310. So it still counts out 315, but it doesn’t actually move the carriage out further than that.

So there’s no crash.

There’s there’s no de-indexing.

There’s nothing, but it definitely makes the print come out funny. And since it does the same thing every single time, the object prints fine. You just got some sudden weird angles in it, you know, it’s kind of weird, but I’m not going to complain too bad because I’m trying to make the printer do something it’s clearly not designed to do.

So I think I’m going to wind up using Chris’s idea and print my phone case in two separate parts because I want it to be lying down and not standing up, although I might try that standing up just to see how it could come out.

Because if I stood the phone up on the edge and printed it like that, you’d have massive layer lines along the surface, but it would work.

Frank

I would worry about it because it’s TPU, it would also flex a lot as the head is going over it.

Andy

Well, I am printing this at three millimeters and that is fairly taut.

I think that would print okay, but I would also have to take care of my printer’s current problems with the Z-wobble because I’m getting about a quarter of a millimeter difference between every single layer, some squish out more than others.

So I got something weird going on there, but definitely if I printed a phone case vertically, you would see those lines terribly, it wouldn’t look good.

Frank

There’s something to be said for having that smooth factory finish from the bed.

Andy

Yeah, and it looks great too, but

Chris

Yeah the ironing on that is nice.

Andy

Yeah, yeah, it’s nice, it’s shiny, doesn’t even look like it’s printed.

Frank

I can see detail in the reflection, that is awesome.

Andy

So I mean, that’s a 3D printed surface and rubber, I love TPU, but so I might, my default plan is to use one of you brought up, um, building it in two parts and then gluing it together.

So I might be able to make part of the case, you know, one in one third long and then make the other one or yeah, and so it glues together.

I might try something like that, but glue doesn’t really stick to TPU very well either, so I guess it’s experimenting to do.

Chris

If you use the right glue, it does.

With TPU, I would suggest trying to use some, all that stuff you use on tires,

Carl

Rubber cement.

Andy

I got some barge, which is like a form of rubber contact cement that works really great, but with as much, with as much flex as this has, I got a three millimeter case, so I might be able to take it down to like 1.2 millimeters on either side.

Chris

So just rough up the contact points really well before you use the contact cement, use the contact cement, and then make sure you’ve got a good clamp on it or heavy book or something like that.

That would probably give you the best glue area I would assume.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Frank

A carpentry method that I’ve encountered fairly recently again is if you taper, like take the long taper for everything that’s going to be in contact, you can extend the contact area and have it look smooth when it gets to the end so that you don’t have any edges to catch on or deal with that way too.

Andy

You know what might be a good idea is I might be able to be able to just print in a zigzag pattern that interlocks with itself on both sides too. That would more than double the surface area.

That’s something there.

Anyway, it’s kind of fun.

I’ve never had a problem with my bed being small, and this is the first print that’s been too big for my bed.

So it’s been an adventure. It’s caused me to do some fun things with my printer that I never think I’d get into. So it’s been worth it, but unfortunately, I’ve only learned how things work. I haven’t been able to improve anything. I get about an extra 10 millimeter.

My bed’s like a 310 by 320 now. That’s about the only benefit I’ve had so far, and that’s still not enough to do my phone case.

Frank

So when you’re done, you’re going to go back to the 300 by and just leave it alone?

Andy

Yeah. That’s where I got it set right now, but I have written down my settings that I can do and even got the version of two separate versions of Marlin compiled for the two different bed sizes.

So I’ve got the original, the way the machine’s supposed to be ran, which I’m a lot more comfortable with, and there’s the one I could put on it if I wanted that extra 10 millimeters or something.

If I’m printing something that’s just a little bit bigger than 300 and I need just that 305 or something, then it’s an option I could take advantage of. But until then, I’m just leaving it the way it is.

Chris

Sounds like when you put a turbo on that little Hyundai aviars, you know, you didn’t always use that until you were out muddin’, then you’d need that extra little bit of horsepower so you’d kick it on for just a little bit just to get out of the mud.

Andy

You can get a lot out of that little bot’s 1000cc, I tell you what, that was a lot in car.

I got more airtime with that sucker and I did my bicycle growing up.

Frank

I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten airtime with a car. My dad has.

Chris

Well, there was one time Andy got enough air on that thing that when he landed, all four tires blew out.

Kevin

Oh, wow.

Andy

Yeah. Blowing beads was a big problem with that car. But that was also back in the day when $70 would buy me four new brand new tires at Walmart, you know.

Frank

Oh, I thought we were going to say victors.

Andy

Really burning out and things was totally worth doing.

Frank

Go to victors and get the nearly out of tread tires to go off-roading in and then just go back and get another set when you blow them up.

Andy

Yeah.

Chris

I did that for a decade with my work car.

Yeah.

Frank

All right.

Andy

So that was my week. I didn’t really have much more than those two main projects.

Oh! in my process of using FreeCAD and really buckling down and make sure all of my sketches are completely constrained, solved like 90% of my problems. I got sloppy when I was using solid works and just not constraining anything that it didn’t need to be. And then so my move to FreeCAD just was a nightmare of getting out of that habit.

Frank

So Andy, not to be overwhelmingly, “I told you so” but the same process works with programming where if you clean that up, then you can improve your skill.

Andy

That’s my spaghetti code. Leave it alone.

Chris

That’s something that I came across a lot actually programming CMM things for tooling inspection is if you don’t have things properly constrained and if you don’t have your datums properly constrained according to the blueprint or if the blueprint and the engineer that made the blueprint didn’t constrain things properly, you can get a lot of variants on various features and you’ll get things that are out. But when you put them back into the proper situation, they’re actually in and everything’s fine. So you can get a lot of variation that you don’t expect if you don’t constrain things properly.

Carl

So in manufacturing, we’ll get a sometimes we’ll receive packets the whole thing together and we’ll be looking at the assemblies and it’ll be like, well, if I make these all with intolerance, it can still not fit together. So please, you know, reengineer and evaluate before sending it back to us.

Chris

Because you know, engineers are people too… snd so sometimes they’ll do something

Frank

Slow down!

Andy

that’s too far.

Frank

That is stressing my ability to willfully, um, willfully suspend disbelief is what I’m not able to do there.

Chris

But honestly, it’s not my first go to to blame the engineer, but when it ends up happening because it’s like one of the last things I look into, unless it’s obvious when you first look at the blueprint and saying, oh, hey, they missed this, you know, but most engineers are cool about it and go, oh, yeah, I can, okay, I’ll fix it and send it back to you.

Frank

In defense of the engineers, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and think you’re done because everything looks good.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

And it’s not until somebody who hasn’t been staring at it for the last three days looks at it and goes, yeah, but it doesn’t work, does it?

Carl

So I work on the manufacturing side, but I’m like, I’m an engineer, but then I’m working with other engineers who don’t have manufacturing experience and they will be very adamant about how they need something to be a very specific way. And I’ll be like, well, it’s going to be really expensive and I like to start laying up quote numbers. And they’re like, oh, well, it doesn’t actually have to be that way.

Andy

Suddenly things get a little bit easier when you put dollar signs in front of it.

Frank

And that quantifies it with something that they do understand. So there’s that too.

Kevin

Yep.

Frank

So Kevin, are you done, Andy? It felt like you were done.

Maybe I was wrong.

Andy

Yeah. I got one more small complaint that I need to get on my chest.

Frank

Go ahead and whine, Andy. Just whine.

Andy

Okay.

Are you ready for this?

Here it comes.

You ready?

Here it comes.

In free CAD sketches, the points at the end of lines are only on one side of the sketch. And I spent like an hour and a half trying to constrain stuff without the damn points at the ends of lines, because I was looking at the backside of the sketch instead of the front side.

That has got to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a program, the easiest problem to fix. And I went researching it, which is how I found out.

And it’s a bunch of people complaining like, this shouldn’t be this way. And then the devs for the software are saying, well, then use something else if you don’t like it.

It’s just like pulling your hair out.

Chris

Like Why?

Andy

There’s nothing about it being free, though, I guess.

Frank

I don’t know that I ever encountered that problem. So I can’t even commiserate with you.

I can agree that that is a, that would be a bug. And the engineers are not acknowledging that it’s a bug.

Carl

So I’m a very simple…

Andy

Any folks at SOLIDWORKS that’s listening to this, please reach out to me and hook me up with a version of SOLIDWORKS that you use that isn’t the web-based stuff, please.

Chris

If we can get SOLIDWORKS to sponsor us, that would be awesome.

Frank

There we go.

Andy

Anyway, I have dreams about the stress and move into FreeCAD and Frank, I’m not trying your software.

Frank

I told you that you needed to speak over us the way we speak over each other, Carl.

Carl

Well, all right, so it’s like in my, I have my CAM systems from my period of manufacturing.

If I get a Z-line mess up, so it’s like it’s a thousandth off in the Z, and I’m trying to join two lines together and it’ll be like, it just won’t work. But now I just select the whole document and just say, force Z-depth zero. it will not mess up now!

Andy

A good way to handle it.

Frank

That would do it. Kevin, have you worked on anything this week?

kevin

Yeah, actually.

So I woke up this morning and thought, oh geez, they’re going to ask me if I’ve done anything with my printer this week and I havn’t.

Andy

Don’t you feel obligated now to do something once a week so you have some talk about it?

Kevin

Right.

Yes, I do.

Because I just hate being like, “Nope, didn’t do anything.”

But I know I’ve been really busy this week trying to finish my Ravenclaw scarf before the end of the month because in March, I’m going to be doing knitting projects to raise money for St. Jude Hospital and I kind of don’t want to have to put the scarf off for a whole month even though I did that last summer.

Anyway, so I woke up this morning and I had been having issues with bed or build plate adhesion on one side. And so I got up, I re-leveled my build plate and then I printed the parts to assemble a medium-sized dragon for my son’s character.

So he’s playing a summoner in Pathfinder and the summoner gets to summon a thing called an Eidolon. His Eidolon takes the form of a dragon and it’s probably about the size of a Saint Bernard.

So I got up, I printed that. So my son was kind of funny, he was looking for, he was saying we need to go on Thingiverse and find a dragon or go on Heroforge and design a dragon.

And I said, “Dude, remember, I subscribed to Lootbox, I’ve got dragons available.”

Now, these are huge dragons that I had to scale down to 25% to get it to the right size and I might have gone a little too far.

I could have probably done it at 30% and had it be about the right size.

Chris

So does your slicer tell you what dimensions you’re at when you’re getting ready to print?

Kevin

Yes.

Chris

Okay.

Frank

Well, I would imagine that it’s the same as ours where if you’re too big for your build plate, it just gives you nothing that you can print.

Kevin

Well, if I’m too big for my build plate, I sliced this one in Chitubox and it has things that are too big for the build plate, red.

Frank

Okay.

Kevin

Photon workshop would have it be like dark gray and they’re like, no, it’s too big for the build plate. And it’ll print whatever you tell it to within the build plate constraints, but it won’t do anything that’s outside the build plate.

Chris

Anyway.

Frank

Okay. So not like Cura, where if part of the model that you’re trying to print is outside the build plate, the whole thing is unprintable.

Kevin

Really?

Frank

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

It’ll say I’m not, it’ll just say, “nope, not going to do it.”

You need to.

Andy

it will allow us to print under the build plate though, but not onto the sides.

Well, that’s annoying that it would do that and there’s sometimes you might want to just use the edge for, you know, like a slicer to be, or to cut off part of…

Frank

the shave off a thing.

Andy

Yeah.

Kevin

So Chitubox, if you do it like that, it’ll pop up a warning and say, part of this model is outside the build plate size, do you want to proceed? And then you just say yes, because it’s only the edge of the skate left at the base of one of the supports.

Frank

Hmm.

Kevin

Like I don’t need the whole skate. So whatever.

Frank

So now I’m wondering if there’s a configuration in Cura that allows us to…

Andy

I’m actually looking that right now to see if there’s an option for that, because that’s interesting.

Chris

Yeah. That would be cool.

So anyway, yeah.

Well, I mean, so when I’m looking at Cura, you know, I look at, it’ll tell you what X and Y and Z dimensions you’re printing to.

And so I use those as a base for figuring out, you know, how I should scale things when I need to scale things.

A good example is this, like I did last week is, you know, I went from a 10 inch plate down to a four inch or a 12 inch plate down to a four inch plate.

So, you know, I just scaled it down like 30, 35% and it was a really good fit.

kevin

And actually I could do this, this does one better.

I’m going to share my screen here in a second and I can show you what it looks like when I’… Frank just for all of our, you know, listeners.

Kevin

As I’ve said before that visual things make great listening, but I love the way the color blue sounds, right?

Frank

You know, if you guys ever heard of synesthesia.

Kevin

Yes,

Andy

Yes,

Kevin

you’ve told us about that.

Frank

Well, I love the subject because when you can see color, or um, hear color, it’s awesome.

Kevin

So if you look here, I’m sharing my screen, this grid system here is actually a digital representation of my build plate.

Frank

Right.

Andy

Okay.

Frank

And we have the same thing in Cura actually.

Kevin

So… So I can see exactly what is going to fit on there and what is not.

Andy

Is that grid in square centimeters?

Kevin

Probably.

Chris

That’s what it looks like.

Andy

Yeah.

I would say it’s, for those of us who use Cura, it’s fairly identical. I don’t see a, well, not, it even does have an origin logo on it, doesn’t it?

I’d like to see the Chitubox as far as the slicer goes. I’ve never seen it in use. I’ve always felt or just thought it was more simple than what you’re showing, but it actually looks like it’s fairly complex and capable.

Kevin

Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Frank

Fun.

Chris

Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Frank

Have you made any progress there, Andy?

Andy

So I looked it up real quick to see if there’s anything online that somebody’s complained about or said anything about and nothing came up right off the bat. So I don’t know if it’s an option with Cura to force it to slice anyway, even though it’s outside the build area.

Chris

Yeah, we’re just going to have to open more menus and push more buttons and find out what we can.

Andy

I know you could always use a support blocker to cut up a model if you need to, so, which would be even better than using the edge because then you could still print in the middle of your bed and just cut off parts of the model with a support blocker.

Frank

Yeah. There you go.

All right.

Well, this week, I had a relatively slow week because I spent most of the time designing.

I printed off some Nintendo Switch Joy-Con holders so that you can treat them like an actual controller in your hands instead of trying to pinch them with your big hands like I’ve got.

Chris

I mentioned that they, yeah, I printed those because they work with so much better in adult hands than like the stuff, the ones you buy at the store, they’re great for kids.

You know, kids have smaller hands, but when you’re trying to play, use the Joy-Con grips as an adult, they end up giving your, at least me and the wife, they ended up giving us hand cramps trying to play Mario Kart, you know.

So we use the printed ones and they’re awesome.

Frank

Yeah.

Carl

I get hand cramps just from normal controllers like the adult ones in the relationship.

Kevin

Yeah. There’s that, too. Well, I’m pretty sure Nintendo is still operating under the assumption that the majority of their audience is children.

Frank

Which is weird because I feel like they have made a push to appeal even to the adult players, even though they maintain their child-oriented games, they’ll do other things trying to make sure that parents know that it’s okay to sit and play video games with your kids and stuff like that.

Chris

Well, I’m still schoolin’ my daughter with Mario Kart, so.

Kevin

Not to mention that we grew up with Nintendo.

Frank

Well, I mean, I’m one of those people that played on the Game Boy that was as big as a sheet of paper with buttons as, you know, comparably as big in the monochrome screen. So you go to any of the other Nintendos and they’re all tiny by comparison anyway, except of course for the Switch, which has gone back to a larger format.

Frank

Well, the great thing about the Switch is it combines both the moveability of the Game Boy with the power of the whole console, which is the first time they’ve been able to do that.

Andy

I don’t know.

GameCube successfully pulled that off.

Frank

I feel like they tried really hard with it.

They got pretty far with the Wii, too.

Andy

I remember having a battery pack for the GameCube and the screen that clips on the top of it and the controller holder for the front that holds on to the excess wire and kind of mounts that sit to the plug and all that other kind of stuff to make it a mobile gaming unit.

I still got that screen somewhere.

Chris

I still have the size of a suitcase, but you know.

Andy

Yeah, I guess that’s like calling a lot of our first generation laptops as portable.

Frank

Technically, they were portable. I don’t think that they qualified as the “lap top” description.

Carl

Well, before they did solid-state hard drives, people were like swinging their laptops around with their disks degradingly fast.

Chris

Yeah, I always made sure I turned off my laptop to move it because I lost my first hard drive that way. And I said, never again.

Andyhx

Have you guys kind of noticed after maybe about six or seven years ago, hard drive quality just kind of stopped being an issue for, you know, spin and rust storage and it’s just, it’s reliable.

Now I used to have to buy like warranties for all of my, you know, spinning hard drives and I just realized why I stopped utilizing these.

I don’t use them anymore and I don’t have any more failures really.

Everything’s nice and solid.

Frank

Maybe that’s as much procedural, Andy. Maybe you’ve leveled up to the point where you don’t destroy hard drives within the, the allotted time.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah.

Me not using something like what it was designed for, let me tell you, stuff’s really changed.

I still got this, the stack of spinning rust on my desk that’s, you know, 16 inches tall because I refused to throw away a hard drive I spent, you know, 300 bucks on, even though it don’t work no more.

Chris

That’s, no, that’s, that’s fair.

I still haven’t got all my old data off of my IDE hard drives, you know, I’m still working my way through those. That’s why I actually had to fix my adapter last week.

Andy

That’s the one you had to resolder, right?

Chris

Yeah. Turns out it just had a bad ground on the USB end of it So…

Andy

that’s convenient when you could just reflow stuff like that.

Do you actually go through with like each pin and reheat it up or do you use like a rework station to heat up the back of the board or what’s your method there?

I know it’s kind of 3D printing related because a lot of us get into that kind of stuff for a print, but what was your way of handling that?

Chris

Normally what I’ll do is I’ll get it on my desk and go over it with an eyeglass and see if there’s anything obvious first and I’ll fix anything that’s obviously got a solder crack or something like that.

And I would say almost all the time that’s what it is, is there’s something obvious on the board that’s cracked.

And then I’ll take stuff that seems kind of suspicious. If that doesn’t fix it, anything that seems kind of suspicious and looks kind of out of place or whatever else and I’ll touch those up next.

And then I’ve never gone so far as to, well, actually I have gone so far as to heating up the whole board with my heat gun. And that always fixes, that’s fixed at 90, almost all the time except for the one time that I actually had a blown chip.

Carl

I usually approach projects like that like, “well, it’s already broken, can’t make it worse.”

Chris

Exactly.

Andy

Yeah, it might as well try, yeah.

Frank

That’s why Andy welded on his laptop while it was still running.

Chris

So yeah, the one time I had, the one time that I can remember that I had the blown chip was actually on that control board for my wash machine.

You guys remember I ended up spending 200 bucks to get another control board, which lasted, and it lasted six months and it blew again. And I said, okay, this washer is gone. I’m getting something that’s not gonna keep blowing the the board.

Frank

Yeah, that’s fair.

So we had a topic this week…

Chris

which is one Carl here.

FRank

Well, it’s a big part of it.

I think he might be warming up to everybody by now, so we invited him specifically though, because the topic this week is Robotics.

And so Carl, as the expert, used in the nicest way possible, what would you say is the greatest advantage to 3D printing with robotics?

Carl

This is the big, it’s like 3D printing ultimately is like what robotics is.

You’re taking software and you’re programming a piece of hardware to operate in a manner that you want it to. I mean, we have a lot of like place where robotics that we use around daily lives that we really don’t think about like just a normal printer printing paper.

But as you get more advanced in 3D printing, you start to see more out of the box. So a lot of people build their own 3D printers and they start seeing, oh, well, I have these stepper motors and what do these stepper motors do?

And they’re really controlled. A lot of them are controlled by like Raspberry Pis and you can get those off the shelf from a lot of hobbyist places and they’ve come down a lot in price. And you get the stepper motors stuff that plug almost directly into these things.

And you can automate nearly most things in your home using sensors and robotics and it’s like I feel like in the last five years, robotics has become something that someone who doesn’t have experience can almost Lego it together to put together the pieces and you can you can achieve a goal as something like, oh, I want to build a automatic sprinkler system for my houseplants that keep dying.

These are things that you can control with relays and you get some plumbing from the hardware store and you can piece this together with a couple of YouTube videos and it’s doable. It’s not, back when I started robotics, we were dealing with PLCs and it was like these pieces of equipment are thousands of dollars and you just couldn’t, it’s like I would save parts from scrapped machines with the idea that I want to use this in the future and I put it in my box and my wife hates this box.

Chris

And then you got introduced to Arduinos?

Carl

Yeah, and then I got Arduinos and then back when I was first doing it, we had these chips and they were programmable chips and you’d throw them on your breadboards.

It wasn’t so elegant as Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and things and it was like, and then eventually you got the point where this box is like, man, I’m just going to throw everything away in this box because if I need something for a project, I’m just going to go out, I’m just going to get in, I can get what’s right for the job.

I’m not trying to piece together something I have from way before.

Frank

Sure.

Carl

Yeah.

I still keep like my power supplies around, but now it’s like 15 bucks for a 12-volt power supply.

It’s like everything is…

Chris

One of us.

Carl

Yeah. Everything you can get.

Chris

One of us.

Carl

Yeah.

So I feel like robotics is like, this is like 3D printing is a great intro to robotics, especially when you’re building yourself.

Frank

That’s fair. I appreciate that.

I completely agree.

Frank

When I think of robotics, I think more androids and that sort of thing or specifically cybernetics and we already talked about prosthetics a little bit and how 3D printers would help with that, but if you’re going to go as far as cybernetics, being able to print a casing for the robotics, so it looks still kind of human or if you’re going to go non-human with whatever, like reverse knee joints or something, you can still print the casing for it to look how you want it and have the robotics, like you said, to the point where it’s basically fundamental to do whatever you want.

Chris

Well, not only that, but yeah, not only that, Frank, but you’re also going to be printing actual robotics parts with the 3D printer too.

Frank

Things that don’t need to be metal for structure or whatever. Yeah.

Chris

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

A great example is, um, When they were setting up the robots for this automotive cell at the aluminum plant I was working at, one of the engineering interns pulled up this great little model to where you could run a wire through this ball socket so that it would move with the robot arms and not pull on the wiring or anything at all.

The robot arm would move and the inside socket would just rotate a little bit as the robot arm moved this way and that way and the other, so it still had great communication and could also have an air pressure line.

That was the big thing, is it needed an air pressure line for some of the cardboard stuff it was doing, and so yeah, worked great.

So you can print actual robotic components also with this. So let’s say you need a specially designed gripper at the end of your robot arm, right? You can 3D print those to fit whatever part or whatever that you’re dealing with.

Frank

And you can print the ends of the grip with PLA, TPU, whatever and have it so that it is less likely to damage the part that it’s holding as well.

So that’s fair, yeah.

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

Andy

Gone are the days that our project boxes are blue and purchased from Radio Shack.

Chris

You’re soldering your own resistors on there trying to get to work.

Andy

I’ve been tempted to see if I can etch a PCB board by taping it down to the printer bed and printing a single layer of plastic on top of the PCB before etching it to see if something like that would be feasible. Most of the time I just use the laser printer and do it that way, and it comes out pretty good.

But being able to do it with just one pass of the printer instead of putting the same piece of paper 10 times back through the printer again, hoping it winds up perfectly. It’d be nice to see what kind of detail you could come off.

Another thing using the 3D printer, not what it’s designed for, but just offsetting it more to compensate for the PCB and then printing a mat or a, what would you call it when it’s like the inverse?

There’s a word for it, I forget it, but so you can etch the board.

Frank

So..

Andy

a mask.

Chris

Mask, yes.

Frank

Yeah, there we go.

Since we’ve already done a commercial for Nintendo, I might as well do a commercial for Fusion 360 too.

Fusion 360 without the subscription allows you to design boards like that.

There’s no reason you couldn’t transfer that to an STL instead of whatever design you would send to the chip maker or the board maker.

Andy

Yeah, got a good point.

Carl

Some canisters would probably even allow you to do like a really detailed XY mapping where it’s just a single layer and then just copy your own code in.

Chris

So do they have conductive plastics that you could lay across a PCB like that?

Frnak

I know that there has been an effort to do that, kind of like with the like a graphite toy that lets you draw stuff on the paper and transfer electricity through it and do stuff like that.

I would be surprised if there wasn’t a plastic that was embedded with graphite or some other conductive carbon that would allow you to do the same thing.

Chris

But I think the resistance on that would be kind of…

Frank

I do believe that every attempt I’ve heard of anyway has had issues with conductivity like it doesn’t always work, probably for the exact reason there that it would be embedded in plastic to do the thing.

Kevin

Well, I know that such plastics do exist.

I don’t know if they exist for 3D printers though, but the immunoassay analyzer that we use and actually the one we had before that uses these black disposable pipette tips for sampling the patient sample and they’re black because they’re embedded with carbon and they do that so that the pipe that picks up the pipette tip can use that to sense when the pipette tip has gone below the fluid level of whatever’s in the container.

And so it’s sensitive enough that it will stop within just a millimeter of going down into that sample. So it does work, but I don’t know if you could 3D print with that stuff.

Andy

I don’t know how easy this would be, but Chris got me thinking of something.

Now, initially when I was talking about the PCB etching, you’d be doing like a mask and so you would be leaving the copper on the board where it needs to be conductive. But to do it the other way around, solder melts to the same temperature range our printers print at.

Chris

That’s a good point.

Carl

It probably wick onto everything.

Andy

I mean, you ain’t put through a brass nozzle, that’s for sure, but you know, it did make me kind of wonder.

I wonder if anybody’s played with something like that, you know, so we talk a lot about additive manufacturing with metals and things like that. This is not that.

This would be for like PCB design makes me wonder how well that would work.

Chris

We’re going to come back next week with Andy saying, “yeah, I didn’t do anything this week because I

Andy

totally messed up my hot end

Chris

and it’s totally plugged up with solder.

Frank

Well, he’ll have bandages on one side of his face because he started a fire and tried to put it out with his face and because his fingers were soldered together on both hands.

Andy

Why does this burn more than hot gun glue?

Carl

It gets too hot, starts off gassing vaporizing the solder.

Frank

Yeah.

Well, that’s actually how the fire would have gotten started is you would have passed out from the gases and then when you woke up and saw the fire, that’s when he, oh, there we go.

Chris

To be fair, though, I think Andy is one of the most fire conscious people I know about because he’s so prone to start them.

Andy

Yeah.

Frank

Yeah. There was a reason he had a fire extinguisher in every room.

Andy

It’s more in every room.

It’s like you’re within like 30 feet of a fire extinguisher wherever you go in my house.

They’re everywhere.

Awesome thing about going and swapping out your fire hidr… your fire extinguishers when they expire is that gives you fire extinguishers to be able to practice with the kids on.

We’ve shot so many fire extinguishers off into the garbage can so the kids would know how to use them and thankfully they haven’t used any in the house playing around yet.

Chris

That’s brilliant.

Mine are all going out next year, which I’m not looking forward to because they’re, you know, if you can find them on sale, they’re still like $20 to $30 a pop.

So yeah, I want to go through and replacing a ton of them in my house.

It’s like, oh,

Andy

yeah, I had a bunch of kitties, like really cheap ones that I just really didn’t like and I wanted to get a bunch of badgers for them all because I really liked the badger fire extinguishers, but oh my God, they’re so pricey.

So I went with something else that’s kind of the in between.

Carl

With my kids, we practice fire safety.

We do our gingerbread house every year and then after Christmas is over, we take it out back and burn to the ground and say that gingerbread kids were playing with matches.

Andy

Oh, that’s fun.

Keven

I like it.

I approve.

There’s a moral to the story.

Chris

New traditions.

Carl

So my kid comes back from school and he’s his teacher calls and is like, oh, we’re doing pictures of your family drawings of like a family traditions and he drew a picture of the gingerbread house burning down.

Andy

Nice.

Chris

Have you, has your son seen a psychiatrist? He might be a pyromaniac.

Carl

Yeah we’re working on them.

Frank

So I do remember Carl and his youngest and going to see a movie.

It was Venom. I think it was Venom, too.

And my wife got a picture and she’s like, oh, look at the little psycho.

And I was like, yeah, he brought his son with him, too, but it was the son’s idea to go there. Right?

Carl

Yeah, my youngest, he’s a unique child.

He definitely likes the more gritty and grimy things of life, even though he’s so young.

Frank

Macabre. I think the word for that is macabre.

Carl

Yeah. So yeah, he definitely, he seeks that out where my other two are like, you know, they’re normal kids.

Frank

There’s always one in the family.

If they’re an only child, then they are the one just for everybody.

Chris and nudge, nudge.

Chris

I’m not, I’m not going there.

Frank

Well, we are approaching the time limit.

Does anybody have anything else they wanted to mention about robotics, 3D printing?

Andy

Really cheap Chinese servos are really cheap and fun to play with.

You could buy like 10 for like $15 and also make a little 3D printed robotics projects. Really, really super simple and you can use so many different kinds of microcontrollers to control them or even using like RC gear to control them.

Chris

Yeah, wireless relays.

Yeah.

Andy

Yeah.

Just the sheer cost of them is just awesome and I’ve got a bunch and ready because anytime I want to make some kind of project, I think, how can I integrate something like that? And then I just haven’t found a use for them yet, but they’re there.

They’re ready.

Carl

Yeah.

So when I was doing early robotics like college and I was poor, a lot of my projects were built with a website called Sparkfun and they have huge amounts of just like projects like maybe they have complete kits and stuff, but they have like for registers, they have like all the hobbyist things that you’d want.

And they’re usually easy to put together a lot of breadboards and they also have a lot of video guides on how to put things together and a big fan base like on their forums on how to put things together. And that really helped me through college when I was learning robotics.

Andy

That’s cool.

Frank

Yeah.

Chris

So lots of people are online and willing to share, you know, you can start with, with, with obviously Google finding some of the bigger sites to where you’ll get lots of information for those sorts of things. But yeah, you can automate just about anything you want.

And if you have a 3D printer and a little bit of CAD software, you can design it to interact any, any which way you can think of.

Frank

And if you want to abuse the, the AI technology that’s been growing up, you can put the AI in a robot to control the computer to play a game.

Andy

There you go.

Carl

That way they can’t track you for like invalid input.

It can’t prove anything.

Frank

Just make sure that it still doesn’t understand how to click on the little box that says I’m not a robot.

Andy

That reminds me of a meme seeing a robot clicking, physically pushing the button down on the keyboard with a pencil or something.

And then the robot just spinning over to the camera, looking at it like, yeah, we’re done.

They trick our computer safeguards.

Kevin

You know what I find ironic about those though is that you’ve got a machine say determining what images to use and which ones are valid and invalid to try to trick a machine into not being able to pick the picture to show that it’s not a machine.

Chris

It’s like on eyes of a robot, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got robots designing and making robots that can’t hurt us in any way, can it?

Frank

You go to the earlier days of CAPTCHA before they started doing the pictures though, and it was actually from documents that were difficult to read.

And so they would take letters and put them together and whatever people thought it spelled, they would take the highest number, the quantitatively average, high average, and say this must be how you, what this letter is.

And so now we can spell this word. So they weren’t even checking to see if you were a human in the first place. They were just crowdsourcing the ability to read these words.

Carl

And Google transcribes millions of books that way.

Back in the day when you saw the literature CAPTCHAs, and it’s like now when you’re doing like the, what is a streetlight or what is a bicycle? And you’re just feeding it into their AI algorithm for self-driving.

Frank

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

Frank

There you go.

Chris

And if you’ve ever dealt with, if you’ve ever dealt with microfilm, you’d be amazed at how monumentally incredible this achievement was.

Kevin

Yeah.

And I was just going to say FamilySearch has taken what Frank was just talking about, and all those algorithms and stuff, and they’ve used that to train their AI to read old documents to make family connections.

Andy

That’s impressive.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

And it speeds up the digitization of it too, because, you know, before all of that was going on, they had to not just scan it in, but they had to interpret everything that was being scanned, and that was…

Kevin

Right. And that… I did some of that. It is slow.

And I’ve done a lot of that to help out where I look at the documents that they’ve scanned in and said, well, this is the name, and this is the father of the name, this is the mother of the name, this is spouse, this is where they died, all that stuff.

Chris

This is illegible. Move it onto the next person.

Kevin

Yeah.

Yeah, because what I’m…

I’ve…

Frank

Crowdource the answer to this one, because we can’t figure it out.

Kevin

Well, and I’ve done exclusively Dutch records, because their handwriting is illegible in a different way from those who speak English, and so they haven’t gotten that far with those yet, because they’re…

Frank

You got to include accents and weird characters, weird runes that English people aren’t accustomed to and all that.

Chris

Like Cyrillic?

Kevin

Dutch doesn’t actually use that many… any weird letters.

They do have the occasional accent, though.

Frank

Still, if they forget or they draw the line instead of the dots or something like that, you’re just kind of… you’re left interpreting what it could be.

Kevin

Yeah.

Frank

That’s always fun.

All right. Well, why don’t we call it?

Kevin

All right.

Carl

It’s fun, guys.

Andy

Not too bad. We spent, like, 20 minutes on the actual topic this time. That’s a good record for us.

Carl

Yeah.

Frank

That is real good.

Carl

I’m talking about all the other topics.

Frank

And that’s why… you pointed out earlier that that’s what a podcast is, though, right? So I guess we’re good.

We would like to thank everybody for listening to the very end. And if you like what you hear, please give us all the stars and subscribe.

We’re available through a wide variety of podcast vendors and are easy to share.

If you have any feedback or if you have any content requests, please let us know.

You can find us in our Facebook group, Amateur3Dpod, or you can email us at panelists at amateur3dpod.com.

If you must reach out individually, you can do that at Franklin, Kevin, Andy, or Chris at amateur3dpod.com.

The music for this episode was written by Kevin Buckner, and we are now going to have transcripts in the episode linked to the description.

Our panelists are me, Franklin Christensen, my brother-in-law, Carl Ballard, and my friends, Kevin Buckner, Chris Weber, and Andy Cottam.

Until next time, we’re going offline.

Kevin

Keep your FEP tight.

Chris

Sign off, are you suckers?

Andy

Words, words, words.

Frank

There is one thing you do have to speak for Craig to recognize you.

Carl

Like just say hi?

Frank

Yeah.

Andy

Say hello to Craig.

Frank

That works.

Carl

Hello, Craig.

Frank

That’s what we do.