Totally fair, on the tip side I’ll totally admit I’ve modified some to fit in my older Weller station I use as a dedicated heatset iron, it has heater cartridge that’s semicircular so the tips run the length of the iron. That said, I mainly do through hole and connector soldering, I’m not doing a lot of precision work, pretty much grabbed it because I was familiar with the iron and knew that it’d be comfortable for me. Think I use my heatset iron the most out of anything tbf, got me thinking about tools to recover inserts, that’d be super nice to have.

Oh for sure, totally appreciate that Weller is pricey, and I’d totally expect good tips on a knockoff to perform well. For me it’s going to come down to preference, wish I could try a bunch of different irons before buying, I at least had experience with wellers so I knew that I found them comfortable to work with and I’m not doing a ton of surface mount or fine stuff so meets my needs.

I’ll suggest Weller irons as a solid alternate as well, pretty much the only irons I’ve used in the last decade or so, mainly because the job I soldered in a lot used Wellers, had some lower end variable ones beat to hell in field bags that still run perfect today (actually my dedicated insert iron). I have a WE1010NA that I use now and it’s a solid tool.

I found Freecad has become fairly intuitive if you already have traditional parametric cad experience, there’s definitely a few quirks but generally super easy to adapt to if you come from solidworks, inventor and the like, trying to convince my dad to give it a try as he’s been getting back into design since retiring and he’s been paying for a solid works license. Personally use ondsel but mainline freecad is totally useable.

Kinda sounds like combine infill layers in prusa/super slicer, that setting will have it do the perimeters as per normal but do infil at 1/2/3 etc layers, so 0.2 layers would get infill every 0.4 at 2, so it’ll print the perimeters and anything that can’t be merged, go to the next layer and do the perimeters and chunky infill, I use it to save time and I haven’t noticed much difference in functionality.

Could have a bot that links to a git wiki, or even just a sidebar with knowledge base stuff would be nice for that.

I’m a data engineer/architect and it’s the same over here, I get asked constantly “how can we stuff AI into this solution?”, never “should we consider using AI here? Is there a value?”, my view, people don’t understand their data and don’t want to put in the effort to understand their data and think that it’ll magically pull actionable insights from their dataswamp, nothing new, that’s been a constant for as long as I recall.

Like I totally understand the draw of new and exciting, but there’s so much you can do with traditional analytics, and in my view you really need to have a good foundation before doing anything else.

I’m also thinking that way wrt to “we need more fast charging for EVs to work”, I recall that plugging into a standard outlet will get you something like 5-8 km an hour, slow charging is totally acceptable for most people’s usages. If you’re in an area where block heaters are the norm you already have outlets at parking spots, if I could commute to work and plug it in, covers most commutes in a 8 hour day, even those of us who rarely go in and live 70k away I’d be getting most of my range back. For the amount I drive, level 1 charging is more than sufficient.

I think a compact with 2-300 k range would suit me just fine, would cover the odd longer trip and I’ll totally grab a rental for anything longer, like I already do it I need to move a fridge.

Totally get you, I swapped my prusa’s hotend for a stealthburner as well, they’re super nice to service, especially with the 2 part PCB, but having the entire assembly mounted from the front is fantastic.

Stealthburner ended up fixing your clog issues entirely?

Fingers crossed. There’s hats you can get to power the pi off of printer’s 24v supply, considering doing it on my klippered mk3s and switch that over to using a SBC instead of the laptop.

If you can swing it, definitely worth printing a spare set for the stealthburner + cw2, just in case you crack anything during assembly.

You’d think right, anecdotally when I was meaaign with undervolting on my desktop, you’d get instability or crashes at the limits without useful errors. Could think maybe the processor isn’t getting enough power and that’s causing instability? Found a klipper thread that about losing connection with the mcu which totally can show up as an EOF error.

How are you powering the pi itself? Wondering if the wakeup draw from your screen is enough to make it unstable, 4 I believe having higher power drawn than the 3 if you’re using the same power supply. Pi isn’t oced either?

Quick Edit: I run my v2.4 on a lepotato with oodles of usb attachments (camera, multiple mcus, wifi and a screen. Replacing the mcu connections with a usb-canbus bridge when the heatwave ends) but with it connected directly to a meanwell 5v5a PSU into the gpio header, have never had communication issues to the octopus pro I use. Skr mini on the other printer is connected to a laptop host so it definitely has enough power, did have some odd issues with the skr mini and having an accelerometer connected to the spi header on boot and separately the 24v supply becoming loose that I fixed by crimping ferules onto the supply wires when I added a molex connector to make taking the printer out of its enclosure easier.

Yeah that’s how I did the mockup, I use superslicer on one printer and prusaslicer on the other so was hoping I could do something that’d be able to port between them easily.

On that thought, superslicer being based on prusa slicer, wonder if I could just import the project like I’ve done with filament profiles. Thanks!

Yeah I used inkscape for the image dxf, good thought on the text. I’ll try it in freecad again, had it die on me a few times so I started looking into alternates, thanks!

I’ll give that a try, thanks, figured it’d be something straightforward!

I have a large chunk of my colleagues who have little to no experience using CLI tools, and totally have found the last part to be true. In fairness, documentation is all over the place quality wise (I generally find Microsoft’s useful but I’ve totally had issues in the past with undocumented or vaguely documented features/dependencies). People will google their issues, and increasingly I’ve found it doesnt point you at the documentation directly, instead stack overflow or medium pages.

I feel like there’s definitely some conceptual… Stuff for lack of a better word that’s an issue, I’ve seen a number of people focus on the execution instead of trying to understand what’s the issue and define it logically, when pressed they struggle to explain.

If you want a SBC, a lepotato works really well, supposed to be more performant than a 3B. I used as an alternate to a raspberry pi for a klipper setup, running armbian on it now.

There are updated versions of it as well if you need more performance, but they’re cheaper than an equivalent pi and importantly, purchasable which was an issue when I was putting together that printer.

Generally lubricate every few hundred hours, however you really should consider condition based lubrication over time based, over lubrication is actually a really common failure mode for rotary bearings and would not be surprised if the same is true for linear bearings. 50km intervals sounds like an order of magnitude too frequently based on what I recall from Thompson, yeah the bearing type, loading, cleanliness etc all play a part, but their examples are in the hundred of km range, not tens.

Are you ensuring that you’re actually getting grease into the bearing as well? The MGNxxX bearings are usually sealed, you need to get past them to actually lubricate as you want to expel the degraded grease. Myself, I do some white lithium via syringe and then machine oil on the rails, and even that’s probably excessive. Moving the bearings by hand along their length of travel will give you a feel for them as well, there’s a lot more you could do but I’ll be totally honest that it’s probably not worth doing, consequence of failure is basically nothing in the hobby space (no risk of injury, low costs, no impacts to business, basically if a bearing goes you’re out what like $50? and an hour)

A lot of industry does use grey water or untreated water for cooling as it’s substantially cheaper to filter it and add chemicals to it yourself. What’s even cheaper is to have a cooling tower and reuse your water, in the volumes it’s used at industrial scales it’s really expensive to just dump down the drain (which you also get charged for), when I worked as a maintenance engineer I recall saving something like 1m cad minimum a year by changing the fill level in our cooling tower as it would drop to a level where it’d trigger city water backups to top up the levels to avoid running dry, and that was a single processing line.

I can’t find much literature about it, did find this safe handling procedures from UNSW Sydney if interested. I’d say if you’re concerned, don’t use it. The fibres themselves to me are a concern when out of the polymer, so take precautions when sanding or cutting, glove up and wear a mask + eye protection, probably should consider wet sanding too to reduce airborn dust. Print in an enclosure with ventilation, same precautions you’d take for abs and nylon, you don’t want to be around that when it’s printing. As I said though, if you do have any concerns, don’t use it, there are matte finished filaments if thats the look you’re going for.

What was CNC kitchen’s concerns? As above, personally I’d be concerned while disturbing the plastic through printing, cutting, sanding etc, just handling it wouldn’t be on the top of my list unless the plastic has degraded or been damaged in some way, pretty much how I’d treat anything with fine fibres or particles in it.

At the end of it, I’m just some guy on the internet, if you have concerns, don’t risk it. If you do decide to use it, treat it with respect like you would anything with fine particles or fibres.