Frank

Yes. Got my script right.
Alright!
Thank you for joining us.
This is episode 81 of Amateur 3D Podcast,
a podcast by amateur printers for amateur printers,
where we share our thoughts and experience.

Frank

Our panelists this week are me, Franklin Christensen,
and my friends, Andy Codham, Kevin Buckner, and Chris Weber.
And we’re going early today, guys.
How’s everyone doing?

Andy

doing good

Kevin

Doing well.

Andy

doing well

Chris

Hey, awkward silence. Yeah, you can tell you can tell it’s early.

Frank

I only just got my caffeine, so it needs to set in.

Andy

Early? We’re a half hour later than our normal recording time

Kevin

No, we’re not!

Frank

No, we’re almost an hour earlier than our normal recording time.
We’re a half hour after we normally get together to record.

Andy

there you go

Chris

Yeah, we do.
Pony around a little bit before we actually hit the recording every week.

Frank

Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that, normally.

Andy

this is all for social anyway so

Chris

I prefer it.

Kevin

From what I understand from listening to other podcasts, that’s normal.

Frank

Yeah, I hear that, too.
I usually fix my gain before I start recording.
Let’s see if this helps.

Chris

Mic turned red. It must be evil.

Andy

there you go

Frank

Well, it’s a…
When you can see the graph on your voice from audacity, I just turned mine down until there’s almost no background.
And then it seems good.

Andy

that works

Frank

So, Andy, did you do anything fun this week?
Or, you know, anything printer-oriented?
I guess that doesn’t necessarily need to be fun.

Andy

Yes. I did
This week’s been kind of interesting as the week closed. I was using the printer to print some more of the stuff that I normally print.
Some more drawer boxes.
I got in last weekend after the last podcast sat down with the kids and we wound up 3d, or not 3d, using the lazer to cut out a puzzle.
So we printed off a picture of our family that was a kindof a fun colorful one and then we glued it onto an 8th inch board and then cut puzzle pieces out of the board and it worked really well.
the other day I was complaining about, you know, we had bought some paper, special paper to be able to make playing cards and the paper we bought was like that plasticized paper that was looking to be really good.
but it wasn’t cardstock, it was like normal printer paper, but it was plasticized it wasn’t very heavy weight paper at all.

Frank

Okay.

Andy

I wound up using that, but it did the neatest thing when the laser hit it, it melted back just a little bit of a brim of the paper is now like this melted ring around each puzzle piece.

Frank

Nice.

Andy

it looks really cool and it looks actually really professional. So I was really impressed.

Frank

Like it was on purpose or something.

Kevin

Nice.

Andy

Yeah. So that that’s pretty cool and I wound up putting the puzzle together with the kids and it worked out great. I mean the only problem with it is that the burnt edges of the board, you know, get on your hands and stuff, and excuse me, that will probably go on for four or five times of playing with it.
But that’s that seems to be the only downfall the rest of it looks pretty good 3d printed a box for it. And that worked out really good just like a normal box that you would you’d see puzzles and you guys can see my little 3d printed spray.
And then I wound up printing another one this this last week, so I could do another puzzle on the weekend here with the kids.
Since the first one worked out so good. So we’re going to do that. And while I was printing this kind of stuff I ran into a problem. I got a thermal runaway error on my printer, which usually happens when your temperature goes outside of the thermal envelope it’s supposed to be in.
And so I played around with the wires and things like that and nothing seemed to lose connection like a break in the therm, the thermistor wires or anything like that. All that seemed to be fine.

Frank

So not the issues that me and Chris had.
At least not obviously the issue that we had.

Andy

Yeah. Yeah, I mean it halts the entire printer with an error code when it does go off which I’m glad to see I love that it’s got safety mechanisms like that and it’s nice to see them work.
So I’m.

Frank

Right.

Chris

Well. I would think that a runaway issue would be the opposite problem of what Frank and I had.
Our thermistor broke so our printer was not heating up properly.
Sounds like a runaway…

Andy

Well, see that’s the thing when the when the thermistor breaks it you with an open circuit on the thermistor you get a really low temperature.
So if the printer was being dumb and the thermistor broke and it started reading this really low temperature, it would try to heat up and continue heating the head.
But since it’s now an open circuit and you’re not actually reading the temperature anymore, it would never stop heating the head. That’s why it would be a thermal runaway.

Chris

Ah.

Andy

So it gets too hot not too cold, but anything outside of the thermal envelope throws that same error, I believe, because the next thing I’m going to check for that I was thinking about that I haven’t done yet is I’ve got a while back I had to change out the power supply.
The power supply that was in my printer burnt out, and it was a six amp power supply. And so I am also running Peltier coolers off of it as well.
So I figured, okay, I’ll get a higher amperage power supply, because I got some good time out of the power supply but it was probably all the extra stuff I have attached to it, you know, put it under more load than it needed to be, and you know, burned out early.
And when I measure the load on it, I’m only pulling like four to six amps at the most when everything’s heating up. So it’s not like I was even really getting close. I wasn’t pulling the voltage down at all from the power supply.
So I thought I was okay. So this time around, I figured, okay, I’ll get an eight amp power supply for it.
So I bought in I bought two eight amp power supplies that way I can have a backup for you know if I ever ran to this problem again. But it turns out the power supply I got only pushes about two amps before you start getting a pretty severe voltage drop.
So it I got ripped off it ain’t no eight amp power supply, but I was tired of fooling with it. I spent $50 on the darn power supply, and I could not get a hold, I bought it off eBay which was a mistake for this particular thing.
So they wound up replacing giving me back my money, but I still had the power supply. And I didn’t want to buy another one. And this one was working.
The printer, even though it’s 24 volts, the control box only requires like six or seven volts to actually function. I think it might even run off of five, but I think it uses a voltage regulator so it might need over seven.
Either way, the voltage for the whole system can drop down that far, and the control box will still function fine. The stepper motors will still function fine, although you’ll be losing current and they won’t be as powerful.
The, you know, everything else about it will still work. It will just not work as good. And I, I suspect so right before a couple of days ago I noticed the cooling fan in the control box, which had been squilling for a while with bad bearings.
And I’ve already replaced the fan once and when I replaced it, I bought extra fans like I always do. But I, the ones that I got turned out to be kind of garbage. They only last about a year, maybe two years. Excuse me.
Excuse me. So I figured, I’ll go ahead and just change it as they go out and buy better fans next time, instead of, you know, buying more fans and then having these crappy ones laying around.
So this one here finally gave out and stopped making noise altogether. So I figured it was seized and I figured, okay, I’ll change it this weekend. And then it was like that night is when I got the very first thermal runaway.
So what I’m pondering might be happening is the power supply might be overheating and giving out even less than the two amps it normally would. And the printer might actually be having a hard time keeping the head warm.
And that’s causing it to exit the thermal envelope it was in and throw the air. So I haven’t got a chance to yet. But I think I’m going to hook the printer up to a computer so I can log the temperature, because it will print for like an hour before it fails.
So I’m going to hook it up and watch the temperatures. I’ve got a multimeter that can do logging so I’m going to hook the multimeter up to the 24 volt power rail in the power supply and monitor it and see what happens when it actually crashes what exactly is going on.
I love problems like this. It’s like there’s so many variables you got to test for to figure out what exactly is wrong, you know.

Chris

You’re not just going to keep buying new parts until one of them fixes it?

Andy

Well, see, that’s what I’m trying not to do is to just keep on buying stuff so I need to figure out what exactly is is failing.

Frank

that’s the method that works for me though.

Andy

So we’ll see what’s actually happening because it would be nice if Marlin would when it did have that fault if it would write a log file to the SD card real quick of, you know, the last few, you know, polls on the thermistors of the whole thing.
You know, just a dump of data so you can kind of debug a little bit to figure out what exactly was going on when it when it failed, but

Frank

Well, when you

Chris

Speaking of the control board.
Make sure it runs off of either 5 or 6 volts normally because that’s what my printer, the board, the Control Board it’s self can be run off the USB Port.
But only the Control Board.

Andy

Yes, but, but that’s the you the voltage that comes out of the USB is a regulated supply, and that’s what the chip would would rely on, but if it’s connected up to the 24 volt power supply,

Chris

Yeah, you would need a regulator.

Andy

The regulator that would regulate down to five volts requires about seven volts,

Chris

I got you.

Andy

so give or takes one so it will always have a bit of a drop so that’s why you got to have at least like seven volts if you’re running it from the high voltage side, but if you’re just powering the board directly from usb usb is already regulated so they just use that power rod doesn’t go through the main regulator.
So.

Frank

So when you first brought up this issue, I found that you can use a code with Marlin to have it report periodically on temperatures.

Andy

Yeah, that was.

Frank

Did you decide not to go with that?

Andy

No, I totally am going to go with that I haven’t tried I have I haven’t done anything since we spoke yeah I was, I was just going to pull the M was the M 305 or something like that, and get temperatures

Frank

I think it’s 105.

Andy

105 and just pull them as fast as I can reasonably speaking you know,

Andy

because one thing I am afraid of is if, if it is a broken thermistor wire, and it just happens to disconnect, if the printer catches that error before it logs the temperature to me, then I might not even see a problem.
I’ll just see it shut down, so I want to try to pull quickly, so that I might be able to see a bad value that the printers responding to, but the printer might respond faster than I would get the data from it.
So, if I do run it and everything’s looking fine on both the voltage and the temperature, and it still faults out. I’ll try again, but I’ll use my multimeter logging to check the thermistor directly.

Frank

Gotcha.

Andy

And that way I could see the data beyond the crash and see.

Chris

Yeah, like, like if, if, if the thermistor wires are crack cracking and giving you issues after everything heats up for a little bit.
I know that like inductor coils and things like that happen on happens on cars quite a bit where you’ll get an intermittent short and it turns out like there’s a crack wire and a coil or something like that.
There’s this nice little can of stuff called.

Frank

Fix It oil?

Chris

I can’t remember what it’s called.
But basically it’s freeze spray in the can to help you track thermal intermittent.

Andy

Okay.
Oh, that’s cool.
Well.

Frank

It creates a fog of fix it bubbles that just fix the thing for you.

Chris

Yeah, Freeze It. It’s called Freeze It.

Andy

Yeah…

Kevin

I used to use that at Walmart to freeze the gum in the carpet to break it up.

Andy

Oh, that’s a good idea.
Oh, mental log that’s a great idea to get something like that out of carpet.

Chris

I actually learned about it as a mechanic, even though I worked at Walmart first, but I used it a lot as a mechanic to track down.
Well, it works fine when it’s hot, but then when it gets cold, it doesn’t work and vice versa.
It gets hot and then it stops working.

Andy

That’s good. Yeah, that’s a good idea.
I think if it does show signs that the thermistor is bad, like if I put the multimeter up to it and do get a spike of odd values or something like that.
I’ll just replace the thermistor. You know, they’re not very expensive, but I don’t know how much of it I would like to replace. You might got a point there.
So we’ve got to replace the entire wire all the way down to the control board to make sure I get whatever break it might have that would actually be kind of hard.
I’ve got all the wires, including my coolant lines crammed into one.

Chris

Conduit.

Andy

Yeah, the conduit stuff. I’ve got one of these half inch conduits running everything, even the coolant lines up to the head. So I don’t want to have to pull the wire out of there if I don’t have to.
So I might just change out the thermistor altogether up to the wire harness. And if I keep on having problems, then I’ll change the wire and the wire harness.

Chris

If it’s got a, if it’s got a connector right there and it’s a separate thing all the way, all the way down, I would expect that it’s probably the, the, the wires and in the head.

Andy

Yeah, I would think so too, because I mean the wires running up to the head are multi strand, but the thermistor itself is only one thin hair like wire.
Two, I guess. Yeah, so they’re very, very small and easy to break.
So that’s my plan right now is to fix that. I’m interested. It’s going to be a fun problem.
I do think I want to look at getting a better power supply for my printer, even if it’s not the problem, because it used to heat up so much faster.
The bed, the heater I got is 110 volt heater on it. So it heats up the same speed no matter what, and it’s nice and fast.
But my printer head, it takes a good maybe two minutes to get up to temperature, which is quite a long time.
And that’s all like it used to be really fast with the old power supplies is this new power supply I got crammed in there is it sucks, not the best.
That and it’s huge, I could barely get it inside the case. So it would be nice to see if I can find something smaller that’s like 10 amps or something.

Chris

Oh, smaller. He’s, I was about to say, you know what, you said you bought like two of those things. Why don’t you just duct tape them together and.

Andy

There you go, double the amperage.

Chris

Yeah, duct tape them together, double the effort, double the power.

Frank

I can never remember. Does that need to be in series or parallel, Andy?

Andy

You’d put them in parallel.

Frank

There we go.

Andy

Yeah, because you would want to keep the 24 volts and I might get four amps total out of the darn thing.

Chris

You put them in series and you’re doubling the voltage.

Frank

Gotcha.

Andy

So that’s me and where I’m sitting with my printer right at the moment she’s currently broken.
I’ve got a lot going on this weekend. Hopefully I’ll have some time tomorrow to be able to run some tests and identify what is actually causing the problem and hopefully be either back up soon after that or possibly by next weekend if I got to order something.

Chris

My printer’s working. So if you need anything run, just send me the file.

Andy

Okay, thanks.

Frank

Well, I was just thinking that all that really means is you’re going to have to spend more time with your other printer, Andy.

Andy

Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
I do use it from time to time I just got to admit SLA printing as neat as it is it does take so much longer of a time to be able to set up and and you know, clean up after it’s done.

Kevin

That is true.

Andy

So that works.

Chris

Yeah, a lot of post.

Andy

Yeah, so that’s me.

Chris

Yeah, you can’t print on Sundays. No post on Sundays.

Kevin

Well, you can print on Sundays and then do the post on Monday.

Chris

Ah
Good point.

Frank

W… I’m confused. What does the power on self test have to do with any of this?

Andy

Terrible.

Frank

Chris.

Chris

Nerd.

Frank

Yeah, shocker.
Chris, did you do anything this week?

Chris

With my printer, not really. I’m just, I’m so happy it works that I’m not using it.

Frank

That sounds about right. The printer that is never run never breaks down.

Kevin

That’s true.
Yep.

Chris

No, I’ve been spending the whole week tracking down, trying to track track down some person wire intermittence.
So, you know, I got my car fixed, right? New engine.
And some of the electronics aren’t working like the, the shift interlock is the, the solenoid is not working and the power locks are not working.
And that means I can’t, I can’t use the button to lock all my doors after doing manually and my hatch

Frank

Oh, no.

Chris

won’t open at all because it’s completely electric pat… latch so…

Frank

The electrical latch I can see being a problem, but you have to lock all the doors manually.

Chris

Manually, I know it’s been years. It’s been at least a decade.
So,

Frank

I haven’t had to lock all my doors physically for years.

Chris

you know, like, all the way up until, like I said, about about a decade ago when I could afford cars that just all came with power locks.
But yeah, so I’m still, I’ve been trying. I think it’s a wiring problem and I just can’t seem to track it down. I went through all the grounds on the car.
And cleaned them up really, really good.
I went through all my fuses went through all the, the power wire, power, power wires to the fuse box and all that, all that.

Frank

Did you slaughter a goat to the gods.

Chris

Well, yeah.
I’m about there.

Frank

Okay, sacrifice to the gods and beg for progress.

Chris

Yep. So apparently I must have damaged a wire or something somewhere on the car body when I was replacing the engine.
Because this shouldn’t have anything to do with any of the wires on the engine, except for the ground to the, from the engine to the body, which I did double check and replace and added to, you know.

Frank

You remember that person we worked with a while ago, the leprechaun that shall not be named had a BMW and those things had like 12 ground wires and they all had to be connected for it to run.
Are you sure there aren’t more ground wires on your car that need to be connected?

Chris

Um, there was an, there was an extra one on the new engine and I hooked it up anyway.
So, yeah.

Frank

Okay, so you’re more grounded than you were before. Okay.

Chris

yep.
So Yeah.
So I’ve been, I’ve been poking with poking with that with most of my free time this week.

Frank

Stupid scientific procedure thing. Try disconnecting that extra ground. See what happens.

Chris

Well, I hooked it up after it didn’t work in the first place. I was like, extra grand why throw extra wires on if I don’t need to.

Frank

Gotcha. Okay, so you already experimented with both.

Chris

Yep.

Frank

That’s fair. Okay.

Chris

No change. Yeah.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

So, um, yeah.
Um, and, and that and then now the, now we’re getting to the wife’s car. I cannot get this harmonic balancer off. So I went and got me a bigger uggadugga, which is a impact wrench.
That’s the sound they make is uggadugga.

Frank

Oh, because you, how many breaker bars did you break before?

Chris

I broke two breaker bars and before I was frustrated enough. So it’s a Honda and they, they have this special tool with a 50 millimeter hex and a little offset offset, um, a place for you to stick your just a half inch drive breaker bar.
Right?

Andy

Okay.

Chris

And so you do that and you rest that breaker bar against something solid, i.e. the, the, the ground, right.
And, and then you, it’s got a hole in the middle, but for you to get to the crankshaft pully bolt.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

And so you do that with a little bit of an extension and to, to get past the wheel. Well, and I put a, I got a breaker bar and like a 10 foot pipe crank down on a busted a breaker bar.
And I was like, okay, well, maybe, you know, that was kind of a cheaper breaker bar, which is why I was using it in the first place.

Frank

And probably older, you beat the crap out of your tools, all kinds of stuff, right?

Chris

Yep. And when I broke the new one, I was, I was a bit miffed.
So, so then I was like, okay, the only way I’m getting anywhere with this is by buying a probably a one inch impact wrench.
Because the one I use is a half inch drive.
And has about 800 foot pounds of torque. This one’s supposed to have 1500. I’m like, that should do it.

Frank

Yeah, that’s

Chris

It’ll only do it if I have enough volume. I am currently using a four gallon air compressor, not enough volume to kick this thing into gear.
So I’m, I need to fix the 120 volts to my garage so I can run my 80 gallon or a hundred and some odd gallon air compressor.

Andy

Can you can you utilize its tank by hooking your smaller one up to the bigger one to charge it and then use the air from the bigger one.

Chris

What?

Frank

Increase your volume, dude.

Chris

I haven’t even, I haven’t even thought about that. Yeah, that’s, yeah, okay.

Andy

It’s all about the tank and the connections I guess, isn’t it? Not necessarily where it’s getting air from you just might not be able to keep up with it, you know, as much as you’d like.

Chris

Yeah, well,
right. So, so like ages ago, when ages ago, it’s been 14 years, not quite 14 years ago.
I bought the house.

Frank

Back before the dawn of time.

Chris

The garage had no power to it. It had a single working gauge wire run from the attic over to the attic in or rafters in the garage to run the garage door opener and that was it.
And so I ran some conduit underground next to this, this cement, the edge of the cement so that I could have our in the garage, but electrical panel boxes are kind of expensive.

Andy

Yeah, and if I remember it, you got one of the old ones too, don’t you?

Chris

So the first one.
Yeah, yeah, so the first one, the first iteration I had was 120 volt only with two breakers. And it was like a $50 box.
Right. And so that works great for like, maybe half a dozen outlets, right. And some lights, not a problem.
But now I want to run 220 to it. Well, I was gifted a box from my ex, I’m like he was he was a journeyman carpenter did a lot of cement work and whatever else anyway he he gave me a box from an old job.
The three phase box.
It’s not easy to get a proper 120 off of a three phase box, at least not the way I had my wires run. Anyway, I, but I got my house electrical updated since then.
I have an extra separate breaker on the back of my house, just for my garage that will do the 220 volts.
I just have to run, pull the wires out from my, or my house box panel and hook them up to that. And then I got, I have an extra house box panel from my dad’s house that will do give me the 220 and all the power I can want.

Andy

Okay.

Chris

So I just have to do that. And I’ll have the proper 220 to run my big compressor

Andy

Good.
Well, you might want 220 in there at some point either or anyway.

Chris

I’m running 220 in there anyway. I want to get a better welder and stuff like that too but I haven’t needed a better welder so I’m not I’ve been on the fence about that.

Andy

I’m kind of on the same boat with you on that one there. Like I used to do a lot of different kinds of metalwork and I started out with, you know, I’m one of those people that shouldn’t own a welder.
I got a Harbor Freight flux core welder. I got two of them.
I’ve gotten a couple other things since then, you know, so I got a spot and a stick, but they’re all 110 based in there, so they’re not the best, but I don’t weld professionally and I so rarely use them anymore.
It’s like, I don’t, I just be wasting money at that point, I think.

Chris

I got my 110 arc welder and I, the 110 flux core Harbor freight guy, and they’ve been good to me. I’ve done everything I’ve needed. So, even stuff that I didn’t know that I wanted to do too so.

Andy

Yeah, that’s good.

Chris

Yep. So, that’s where I’m at is I need more power.

Frank

Hey, Kevin, did you do anything this week?

Kevin

I did lots of things this week.
But not much of anything with the 3D printer.
I am currently printing a couple of minifigures.
One of them is one that my son James built in Titancraft for his Zombicide Chronicles character.
and the other one is one that I built in Titancraft for the upcoming game of Household that my boys and I are going to be joining in on.

Chris

So it’s like dragons playing humans or…

Kevin

So, Household is a campaign setting that takes place in a house.
and the characters are all what the game calls Littlings.
So, my character is a fairy detective by the name of Ivangor Dezvoyovich

Frank

I’m not even going to try to spell that.

Chris

you left gold in your pockets in the wash mine now.

Kevin

I can spell it out for you in the chat.
That’s fine.
But, I built this thing in Titancraft, now the thing is that the weapons in this system are all mostly adapted household things.
So this guy has his, his two weapons are his Pistol and what is called a Walking Toothpick

Andy

Okay.

Kevin

it’s a…
They found a toothpick and then fashioned it into a cane, but it still has the pointy end.
so what I did in Titancraft is I made the guy a cane and I sharpened it to a point.

Andy

Okay. That’s a good idea.

Frank

Sounds right to me.

Chris

Making shi… He’s making shivs in blender.

Frank

You almost made me had to censor you there, Chris.

Chris

Oh, you’re thinking the other S word… should huh.

Frank

That too. That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Kevin

For the Visual Listeners, you can see here

Andy

Oh yeah.

Kevin

how that cane is now narrowing down to a sharpened point.

Andy

It even looks like it’s been sharpened.

Chris

Oh, those, those fairy wings are so awesome. Look at that.

Kevin

I mean.
I did mod…
there’s only one set of fairy wings available in Titancraft.
so I did the best I could. I modified them as much as I could.
but these ragged ends here are not actually supposed to be ragged.
the character himself has uh… his wings are similar in shape and color to wasp wings.

Andy

Okay.

Kevin

so, I mean, I think I did fairly good because in Titancraft the fairy wings look more like ragged butterfly wings.

Andy

Okay.

Kevin

but I modified them in Titancraft, and I think I did fairly well.

Frank

No, I think it looks good.

Chris

Yeah, they definitely give that look of he’s somewhere between a steampunk Old West and a 20s detective.

Frank

I’ll be honest, as you were describing the setting and the tools and all that, the first thing that came to mind was steampunk.
So, yeah, I think that’s cool.

Kevin

And then to make the fairy…
Actually what I started in Titancraft with was a Male elf, and then replaced the male elf’s head with a female elf’s head to make it look just a little more effeminate than your standard elf would be, because it’s a fairy.

Frank

Yeah, but those are already pretty, what’s the non gender, they already look pretty pretty…

Kevin

Androgynous?

Frank

Yeah, androgynous.
Something to do with living for thousands of years.

Kevin

Right.
But it’s a fairy, it’s not an elf.
I didn’t want it to look just like an elf with wings.

Frank

Oh, that’s fair.
That’s fair, I guess.

Kevin

So I’m currently printing Ivangor and Jack and Jack is James’ um… Zombicide Chronicles character.
And then, Last Night, my boys and I went over to our Community Choir director’s house to play Magic the Gathering with him.

Andy

Oh, that’s fun.

Kevin

He wanted, he only wanted to do Commander battles so right now I am looking on Thingiverse at Command Zone trays because when we were getting ready to leave Kyle said we definitely need to do this again.
and the Director, Dan, said yeah, I think we do. That would be good.
So, um, I’m thinking we probably should have some of these trays to just kind of help out.
Keep things organized.

Frank

Chris called me a nerd, but I haven’t played magic the gathering in 25 years 30

Chris

It is. It has changed so much in that time also.

Kevin

It really has. Oh my gosh!
So years ago I almost 8,000 cards, and I didn’t have anybody to play with.
and there were so many changes and I needed the money, so I sold them all for a couple hundred dollars.
and then a few months ago my nephews were over and they introduced my kids to Magic, and they were like all in on it.
and it made me regret selling all those cards, all those years ago.

Chris

I have the same regrets.
And of course, mine was my mom was going through one of those Christian things where, you know, anything she anything new she doesn’t understand must be evil. So she said

Frank

On there’s a pentagram on the back

Chris

she says you’re getting you’re getting rid of those, or I’m getting rid of them for you.

Frank

Potentially a pentagram on the back

Kevin

Well, and I got about 4,000 cards from you Chris.
if not 5,000 so…

Chris

So, you know, rather than, rather than have them end up in a burn pile, I says, Okay, this is like an overnight decision I’m not going to be able to just hop somewhere and sell these here Kevin take these.

Andy

Well, I hate to do this to you guys, but I got some stuff I need to do so I’m going to have to take off.

Frank

All right, sign off.

Andy

You guys have a nice one. What do I always say, always use hair spray.
We’ll see you guys later.

Frank

Take it easy, dude.

Chris

You can take a version of yourself or you can support yourself better.

Andy

There you go.

Frank

Take it easy, man.
Well, this week was actually kind of busy for me.
Surprisingly, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to get out.
I’ve got a pseudo community support thing that I want to do for the park where that’s right underneath where I live that everybody takes their dogs out but only a small portion of the people actually take care of their dogs apparently.
So, I got a spade, and then I decided I needed to print off some tools and just put them on a broomstick to help me, you know, pick up trash and that sort of thing and so I’m working on that… still.

Chris

It’s funny because actually when I first got, when I first got my dog, we, they sell those in the pet store.

Frank

Yeah, but not all of the tools that I have in mind, like a kind of a rake, I guess, a mix between a rake and a hoe, so that I can push it on to the spade, but I’m also going to make it interchangeable.
So I can put a trash spike on it. And it’s just, you know, going to be a supported nail that I can screw on and off at the end, and pick up

Chris

Oh, yeah.

Frank

pick up trash while I’m out trolling over the park.
See if I can help with that a little bit.

Chris

You’re you’re out here making shows too, I guess.

Frank

I guess.
I also ended up finally buying a flu brush
kind of, for my heater vent or my clothes dryer vent, because

Chris

So, are you talking about the, you’re talking about the, not the, not a flu, but the actual vent.

Frank

Yeah, well, because where I am the the heater is in the center of our building. And so there’s quite a bit of vent that goes out to the side where most houses I’ve been in or seen it goes.
You have a little bit of ducting that goes from the dryer to straight out the window or whatever.

Chris

Yeah, right or to an outside wall.

Frank

Right. So, and that’s problematic, even in houses, if that doesn’t get cleaned out regularly, but it’s especially in a condo, you know, there’s an extra, I don’t know, 30 40 feet of ducting to collect all that dust and lint and potentially burn down the condo.
If it gets too warm. So I’ve been wanting to do it for a while. I finally got the brush to do it. And I had seen a video of someone cleaning out their own duct, and they had this cap that they put on it so they could hook up their vacuum to it.
And I just decided, why should I buy something like that when I can print it off, right.

Chris

Brilliant!

Frank

So I designed it around my own shop vac and the size of the rods for my brush and spent all week test fitting interference parts and all that and finally got a good part and got in there and cleaned out my vent.
And it worked wonderfully. Andy voiced some concerns about the vacuum pulling air through the hole where the rod goes through. And I didn’t really couldn’t tell if there was any issues with it. So that was about the biggest concern.
And I got, I don’t know how one should measure lint pulled out of a duct, but uncompressed, it’s probably, I don’t know, or five cubic inches of just loose dust. It wasn’t a ton.
Like I actually expected more after five years of not being maintained for that distance. But it was enough. I’m glad that it got done. So…

Chris

Now the question becomes how many of your neighbors are doing the same.

Frank

My neighbor upstairs did it.
Almost a year ago, he woke us up at 7am running a brush down the duct. But that’s the only, as far as I know, for certain others must have done it though. So there’s that.

Chris

Cool.

Frank

But that’s everything I’ve done.

Chris

Wow. Yeah, I saw you posted the pics of that. And that was that was pretty dang cool. So that with with the advent of town homes and condos really, you know, I’ve noticed a lot more of them being built.
And do you think that’s something, another thing you want to post on Thingiverse or whatever so that, you know, more people have access to it.

Frank

I could that that is one thing I did post my my tape measure spooler up on Thingiverse any of our 40 listeners wants to check it out.
I’ll share a link.

Chris

I showed it, I showed it to the wife because she goes, she looks at me and she goes, Oh, that’d be great. But she she she’s like,
it’s really good for people that use the, the, the mats and rollers to cut out bigger, bigger patterns and things.
But she doesn’t do that she just fixes stuff here and there on the sewing machine and that’s about it. And half the time it’s me using the sewing machine to fix things and so she’s like, so it looks really cool, but it’s more than what I would ever use.
So she’s just keeping the one I already printed her, but I thought that was pretty cool.

Frank

Yeah, I mean, I’ll put it up. I don’t have any idea for the standard vacuum fit fittings.
But actually, with my tape measure, I put up the fusion 360 file too I can always do that with this, and it can be adjusted as needed.
Got everything parameterized so they can adjust the vacuum fitting and the rod fitting as they need to. So yeah, I’ll put that up too.

Chris

Yeah, because, yeah, because like the household vacuum fittings are with pretty standard within a range.
But they’re slightly bigger than I have for my mini shop vac and quite a bit smaller than my five gallon shop vac so

Frank

Yeah, my my my shop vac is, I think it’s a five gallon, but it’s a it’s got a bigger hose fit fixtures and all that than what I’m accustomed to even on a shop vac.
So it’ll definitely need some customization if somebody’s not using the Ridgid five gallon shop vac.

Chris

Or a lot of duct tape.

Frank

Duct tape will do it too.

Kevin

Yeah. It’s the Handyman’s secret weapon.

Chris

I joke.

Frank

If it don’t stick and it is supposed to use duct tape, right?

Kevin

Yup.
Speaking of parameterization.
Reminded me of something I did this week with programming at work.
A while back I had written a Shiny app in R to evaluate reference ranges of assays to see if they were still valid for our patient population.
and my manager, last week, brought it up and said I should do that again just as a routine check.
So I did that with Sodium, and saw that there was no need to make any changes to our reference range based on my evaluation.
But I didn’t have any way to comment that and save it onto the PDF
so I thought I aught to build something in there that will make that happen.
So I took like five minutes to write the code to add the widget to the Shiny app, and then define the parameter and have it build it so that it would export that parameter to the R markdown file that would actually generate the PDF.
and then I hit Generate PDF on the Shiny app and it threw an error saying we’re not using this argument.
which is the new parameter that I just built.

Chris

Didn’t see that coming.

Kevin

and I was like why? Why not? Why not?
So I spent two hours trying to troubleshoot it and redefining it, and changing values and stuff.
And then finally after two hours I discovered what the problem was.

Frank

Semicolon.

Kevin

No. Not a semicolon. A perenthesis.

Chris

Curly Q.
Oh, yeah.

Kevin

One single Close Perenthesis in the wrong spot.

Frank

Yeah, that’ll do it too.

Chris

That that knowing look from Frank’s face was just

Frank

It’s always something stupid. It’s it’s never, I don’t want to say never it’s rarely something like super complex. It’s usually something like a misplaced semicolon or parentheses or or…
in a lisdexic spelling of the the parameter at some point.
And it all looks good. Your brain reads it right. It’s just it’s wrong.

Kevin

Right! and that part of the two hours was looking at the spelling of where I define the parameter, and looking at the widget where the parameter would look for the value, and looking at hwere I assigned the value to the parameter, and then looking in the R markdown for whre it calls the parameter.
and it’s all spelled the same.
and the error I did was that when I was defining the parameters you’re supposed to do that in a List, and the list is supposed to be contained within open and closed parentheses, and I added the new parameter on the outside of the list.

Frank

Yeah, that would be a problem.
Kind of sounds like C you declare your you can you don’t have to you declare your functions and C before you actually do anything with them and that sounds like C to me.
But yeah.

Kevin

Yeah, but the Parameter definition happens toward the end of the Shiny Out Code where you’ve already assigned values to the various functions and variables and stuff.
And then you get to the bottom, and say These are the Parameters, and you define the Parameters.
and You are like So the parameter named sad and… equals the Variable A. for example. and you have to already have defined A before you can say that’s what the Parameter will be when you export it to the R markdown file.

Frank

Global parameters are always fun.
Well, we got anything else to share.
I feel like this is we went a little bit quick.

Chris

So we’re running by the hour.

Kevin

I mean. Time restrictions will make the time go less…

Frank

Maybe we should have Andy go first more often just to get him out of the way.
No, I shouldn’t say that. I’ll talk crap to his face, but I don’t want to talk behind his back. That’s rude.

Chris

Realistically though
I love getting the full story from Andy every week. He’s always got something new.

Frank

Oh, yeah.
His rendition… No.

Chris

Also to teach us.
I can’t tell you how many different, how many different things Andy’s done where I’ve taken a little bit of that and gone, yoink.

Frank

His narratives. That’s what it is. His narratives are interesting. Anybody who’s not your biggest fan there, Chris is probably his. So

Chris

Hit it, Frank.

Frank

All right, we’d like to thank everyone for listening to the very end.

Chris

The very very end.

Frank

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 we’re easy to share.
If you have feedback, you can find us in our Facebook group, Amateur3DPod.
You can email us at Franklin, Kevin, Andy or Chris @amateur3dpod.com or you can email us collectively at panelists @amateur3dpod.com.
Breath, breath, breath.
Kevin Buckner wrote the music for this episode. Open AI’s Whisper completed the heavy lifting for the transcripts, which you can find 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.

Kevin

Keep your FEP tight.

Chris

Modifications.

Kevin

Okay.

Frank

I guess it’s just going to be that week.