Not sure I'm at the regret stage, but the 3D printer has been sitting mostly unused, and I'm not sure that'll change. There have been a few things that were good to print, but mostly used to print fidget toys for the kids and their mates.
I’m actually surprised I didn’t hit this problem. My 3D printer has been wildly useful.
I seriously thought it would be another fad hobby that I drop immediately. But now I’ve gone as far as learning 3D modeling which I never really expected to do. I actually have more projects going on than I have printing capacity for sometimes.
I wish I had perfect advice for getting the most out of it.
Maybe this one will help: remember that even cheap plastic products are often more expensive than printing your own. That $10-20 doodad from the store is still more expensive than a LOT of filament. I’ll list out some stuff I’ve printed:
- Planter pots
- Knock box (for espresso)
- portfilter stand for tamping (espresso)
- espresso machine mod kit enclosure
- A loom for a friend who weaves
- “neon” LED signs with custom words (designed by me based on YouTube tutorial)
- Same concept but used to make might up address numbers for the house
- A triangle-shaped piece to guide the extending kitchen sink sprayer hose so it stops getting caught on stuff under the cabinets
- A replacement clip for a Packit reusable container
- Designing your own wall or under-desk mount for any custom size object is trivial
- Tea bag organizer
- Bookmarks
- Name tags/3D labels (you can pause prints and change filament colors at a specific layer even without an automated material system)
- Bag clips
- Toothpick dispenser
- Toothpaste squeezer dispenser thing to keep the tube neat
- storage organizers, including a whole pegboard system hanging up all my tools and junk
- Contact lens storage boxes
- Replacement latches for plastic bins
I haven’t printed them yet but I’m very interested in some of the cool mini-racks, mini NAS systems, and small form factor PC cases you can print from scratch rather than buying them. For example there’s a design on makerworld where you grab a cheap mini PC, an nvme to SATA adapter, and an AliExpress SATA 3.5” backplane, and boom, you’ve built a consumer NAS alternative for a fraction of the price.
Hopefully some of these ideas inspire you to get more use out of your machine!
I’d use it all the time but the workflow is obnoxious. Download a model, manually run the slicing software. Load it onto a usb. Plug it into the printer.
If I could click print from my phone I’d be running it constantly.
Like many others here, I was excited to hear pebble return, and have a Time 2 on preorder, but will be cancelling it if I don't hear a positive outcome from this.
Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.
Killing ZFS on Linux would basically make Linux unsuitable for lots of usecases. What would you use instead? Btrfs, which keeps having stupid data corruption issues? Bcachefs, which is not yet stable and now it's being struck out of the kernel? LVM2+thin provisioning, which will happily eat your data if your data overlap? I hope some industrial players will force the kernel to drop this nonsense.
Heck no native filesystem besides btrfs has compression, I'm saving HUNDREDS of GB with zstd compression on my machines with basically zero overhead
Wait, there's a setting for this? I've lived in Australia for over 16 years now but everything is still in miles instead of Kms and I have never been able to find a setting to change it (although it sounds like even if I did find itz it would be mostly useless).
Ive lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense.
In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles".
I got the app wrong, it was Uber. I have my phone set to English (UK) and change the measurement system to metric. Uber doesn't respect that though, so it keeps using miles.
Ah, thank you, this was it. I had the language set to English (UK), but changed the distance setting to KM. I got the app wrong, it was Uber, and Uber doesn't respect the override, so it always uses miles. Changing it to English (Australia) and Uber switches KM.
With the number of interstellar objects being detected only going up, it would be amazing if we could get some probes to hitch a ride on them. Imagine something lasting as long as Voyager 1 but travelling 3.5x the speed as it leaves the solar system.
Visiting one with a probe would surely be amazing in it's own right...but hitching a ride would mean matching velocities with them. And if you can do that...you're already in the same orbit, so the comet doesn't really help.
There's disposable FPV drones that launch with 50km spools of kevlar cable. Seems like smart people could work out a way to "hitch" a probe on a comet without fully matching velocities first.
i mean aren't we talking like km/s of speed difference? idk of any kind of material even 50km long that could absorb that kind of stretch/sheering like that...
Question: I know that our planetary probes often use planetary gravity to boost their speeds. That only works for prograde speeds, right? Because you're subtracting a miniscule amount of orbital speed from the planet and adding it to your spacecraft's speed. You couldn't whip around a planet and somehow use that to give you retrograde speeds, could you? (Presumably an airless planet, like Mercury.) Or what about using a large moon during the retrograde (relative to the planet's motion around the sun) part of its orbit?
Problem is another. To got additional speed from other body, you need to move very close to it and in perigee use some powerful acceleration to increase rotation speed fast, so could not use slow acceleration engines, like ion engines.
Idea of gravity-assist acceleration, mechanically is just rotation of pair tightly tied bodies (and cut tie in right moment, so one body got acceleration and other got deceleration), but as it is impractical to tie for example to Moon with rope, used gravity force.
What also interesting, gravity-assist could use not only orbital speed of large body, but also got some acceleration from rotation of large body, as for gravitation, large planet is not just one material point, but system of few smaller (sub)bodies, and closer (sub)bodies give more acceleration than others.
I’m not an expert on orbital mechanics, I just want to provide some data points.
The voyager craft, which not only had very good acceleration early on (the best we could do, really), combined with exceptional gravity slingshots and a lot of time - and are by all accounts some of the fastest man made objects ever - are going 15.4 km/s and 17 km/s relative to the sun.
3I/ATLAS is going so much faster than these objects they might as well be stationary.
Even ignoring the limited amount of time we have to intercept, catching up to 3I/ATLAS would be incredibly difficult to do. Perhaps impossible with our current technology*. Like catching up to a semi-truck going full speed on a highway with a bicycle. After it’s already passed us and is a couple miles down the road.
*barring theoretical (and kind of insane and dangerous) tech like Orion drives.
When you achieve speed in space, after acceleration, the speed won’t change forever unless you encounter some other force, like a celestial body gravity to change it. So if you achieve interestelar comet’s speed, you can shutdown the rocket and just travel at that speed for eternity like the comet does.
Even better: you can forget the comet, accelerate, keep accelerating until there is no more power or even a working motor while also extending a big sail to let solar wind accelerate you a little more.
No it wouldn't because once you've matched speed with it, you stop accelerating and therefore need no more fuel. The comet isn't doing anything except following gravity.
The comet probably doesn't have a great amount of fuel. Even if it's all ice, how are you going to split the water? Only if you have a fusion reactor that can do H-H fusion, or you can scrape enough dueterium out of it, can you use that. You will find no tritium as it has a short half life, and He-3 (probably) won't have been implanted by solar wind in interstellar space, so if you need that, you have to bring it or breed it somehow.
It does have a great amount of mass, so you could rendezvous, construct a mass driver or ion drive and start taking it apart and using chunks of it as extra reaction mass. That would allow you to essentially get a free reaction mass "refill". You will still need a lot (a lot) of power, and solar will be near zero.
At first I thought, "no silly, it has to gain matching speed first, what's the point". Then it occurred to me - if we can make something which can survive the impact, we "just" have to place it in the path of the comet and it will be swept with it.
The whole thing would be like something like shooting a bullet at a moving target, but it's an idea.
That hypothetical probe will not look anything like any other space probe before it, but more like an artillery shell. (They can survive pretty damning Gs and still run that little embedded computer, so it's not a completely insane idea, I guess.)
We would also have to detect the interstaller object plenty in advance, so the probe can be launched "comfortably" in a trajectory which will intercept at exactly where the "object" is going to be.
Some quick prompting seems to say a G force of somewhere between 16-160 billion Gs, for a CPU-equivalent object getting hit by a solid object moving at 3I's escape velocity. Compared to a "typical" artillery shell of 10-15 thousand Gs. Not sure you're manufacturing anything that could survive 6-7 orders of magnitude more Gs than an artillery shell.
Of course the G-load would lessen based on how much you sped up to match its speed beforehand, but still, I think you'd need to be pretty much sped up to near the same speed as it before you could remotely possibly survive the impact.
Wow, I clearly didn't think this through. That's brutal.
That leads to another idea - if something more substantial was placed in its path - the resulting debris and gas cloud from the impact could reveal something about the contents of the object.
Or, if it's an alien probe, it would force their hand. :-D We could see some exotic manuevering.
A "solid object". But it's not clear how solid a comet is (or more to the point, this or any interstellar comet). If it were a fuzzball of snow, maybe 20 km across, you could in theory decelerate through it more slowly, maybe using a very large parachute initially, then discarding that for successively smaller parachutes as you approach denser and denser parts of the comet. The EPOXI mission to the Hartley 2 comet was reportedly hit nine times by "snowflakes" coming off the comet, but not damaged (https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/spacecraft-sees-...).
My dryer doesn't have a delay function accessable via the front panel, it's been "app gated", and the only way the app can talk to it is via WiFi, so if I ever need to set a delay, I have to use the app. All IoT devices are on their own VLAN though, and where possible firewalled off too. I can easily imagine more features being locked behind the app for future models.
Just and FYI, whilst they are supporting it, they only provide source. If you want the images you need to be a paying customer, or build them yourself.
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