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I feel like a lot has happened this year, so I’m sure I’m going to miss out on a number of cool things, but lets give it a try and see if I can get most of it.

I began building a Voron 2.4 3D printer. Two of them in fact. One for myself, and one for my wife. She’s been taking up all the time on my printer and that’s been making it hard for me to fit in some of the stuff I want to print. So, we’re buying it bit by bit, and as of writing I’m stalled until some other projects close out and free up my time and money.

I killed my Qidi Tech I. This was my only filament printer at the time. While trying to figure out why my prints would suddenly begin failing and then give me tons of trouble getting level again, I broke the wiring on one of my thermisters and didn’t have a replacement. After some more intense observation and measuring and wating, I was able to figure out that the matte PLA filament my wife loves was eating up our nozzle. Because the hole on the nozzle was getting larger with every print, it would end up with an under-extrusion situation where it was trying to feed 0.4 amounts of filament to a 0.6 hole and the glob wouldn’t get enough nozzle pressure to push it to the plate and get it to hold.

So, how did this lead to me breaking the printer?

Well, the Qidi Tech I is a dual head 3D printer so when the thermistor wire broke, I swapped over to the other head and kept printing. When I finally figured out the problem I ordered some abrasion resistant nozzles. While I was doing that, I decided to replace the thermistor and get back up to full capability. I had to remove the power lines to the board (24v) to replace the wiring for the thermistor. I checked and double checked the polarity on the board, and made sure to wire the red lead to positive and black to negative. As an American, this made sense. But I guess in China, where Qidi is located, the wiring goes the other way around. So the power from the relay was wired the Chinese way, and the board was wired the American way.

When got everything else wired and plugged in I was ready to get printing again. I had Voron parts to finish! When I flipped the switch to power up, the display lit for a second, there was a small little sound inside the printer, and then nothing. I switched the power off, tipped the printer on it’s side so I could open the bottom and see if anything obvious happened. When I flipped the power again, smoke began rising from an IC and then it looked to be glowing red. I turned the power off again and looked closer and saw that probably 1cm or so of the PCB lead near that chip had burnt. For me, that was it. A dead board.

To make the rest of the story short, I bought another board and promptly shorted that one with a screwdriver. Finally I got a real upgrade, a Bigtreetech Octopus v1.1, a set of TMC2209 stepper drivers, a bltouch, a filament runout sensor, and some new, lower profile, limit switches to give myself just the tiniest bit of extra print space. I couldn’t just put marlin on the board because that would be too normal. So I spent a day re-wiring the whole 3D printer and then 3 days configuring Klipper, which included me wiping the whole Raspberri Pi disk to start over 4 times.

Everything was working, I did a number of calibration prints and things were looking good. Except the lighting. I thought the lighting was crap. So I got some RGB LED strip lights and wired them up around the top of the printer. But, while wiring up the LED lights to the control board I accidentally plugged something back in that shorted the 24v rail to the 5v rail. This fried the board and a number of components. I got another Octopus because my wife didn’t like me being mopey. Once I got it back in and wired up, it was a long game of guess the fried component. I fried another BL Touch playing this game but got to the place I am now, everything seems to be going okay, but the BL Touch won’t register the touch, so the printhead crashes into the plate. And then I got pulled away onto another project and haven’t been able to make progress on it.

I built an OpenBuilds CNC machine for my wife. I actually didn’t have much problem with it. But building the table to put it on kind of sucked. I had to buy a new 3d printer to print the corner joints, and the only filament I had was some dark green PETG. So the table is strong, but has a ton of flex. But she’s been cutting almost non-stop since July, so it’s not really a concern yet, though I do want to get some CF infused Nylon to reprint the pieces.

When Augest was almost over, I began working on some of our new Halloween decorations. We usually like to buy one decoration a year, and build the rest ourselves. Well, I began by building some realist size hay bales for a new section we were starting in our side yard. I also built a scarecrow. But the one decoration we bought required some kind of protection to be outside, so I spent all the rest of the time leading up to Halloween building a shack for him.

And as soon as Halloween was packed up, my wife set me on all things Gcode, manufacturing her gifts, 3D printing on both the new 3D printer, and the resin printer, as well as setting up and running her jobs on the CNC machine. But I’m just biding my time until I get my chance to build a gift for her. I am building an electric guitar from scratch. I have learned a lot about guitars and building guitars.

Well, that was a lot longer than I had planned on it being, but I think we’re mostly caught up now. I wonder what my next obsession will be.

You ever have one of those things where you know you have to do it, and you mean to do it, and you plan to do it, but when it comes time to do it you just don’t do it? That has been posting here for the past here. I’ve planned on writting a post catching up with everything but when I get some time to write a post I feel like it’s too much to post and end up doing something else. But now I’m forcing myself to do it.

Update 1 – I’ve got my electronics workbench to a state where I feel comfortable working on stuff. I have a soldering and reflow station, a nice overhead light, a work holder, a controllable power supply and a lot of little screwdrivers and pliers. I’ve fixed a couple of computers and even a Game Cube (the nintendo console) at the workbench so far and I have a couple of projects I’m working on for fun. One of those is a universal remote for my house. I have ceiling fans in every room that are controlled with RF remotes and I want to control them from anywhere in the house, along with the IR controls for my TVs and Apple TVs. Another project is a programmable light controller for my wife’s shadow boxes. I still have a queue of projects to fix for family too, so I have plenty of use for this hobby.

Update 2 – Using my electronics workbench I’ve finally fixed my 3d printer and have gotten back into that. My wife has given me a queue of things to print that’s probably going to take me a year and hundreds of dollars in fillament to finish, and between those I’m working with FreeCAD to design my own parts for various needs around the house. Nothing big, just a tray for some electronics projects, some spacers for a computer stand and things like that. But I guess learning to design parts in CAD software is another skill that I can further develop.

I’ve also cleaned up and recalibrated my resin printer. Prints still seem to be failing after a few layers of supports, and that’s frustrating, but I’ve been reading and it looks like maybe if I lay out my prints a little better that problem could be resolved. It sure would be nice to have this printer back up and running so that I can print high resolution models. But right now it’s a lot of stink and a lot of mess for a lot of frustration.

Update 3 – I’m back into book making. I decided to make books as some gifts for Christmas and it reminded me of how much I love doing it. My mom asked me what I mean when I say I make books. I cut and fold the paper. I sew it together and build a spine before attaching end papers. I cut a material for the cover (mostly leather remnants but I’ve been looking at expanding to cloths). Then I cut some backing board, which usually ends up being chipboard but I’ve also used thin wood boards too, before gluing the cover to. I turn in the cover and then attach it to the book end pages, super (a cloth part of the spine that sticks out far enough to glue to the backing boards) and spine. So I tell my mom that when I say I make books, I mean I make books. And I love doing it. I have decided though that I need a few tools. I’ve been doing this with just a stack of books, a hammer, and a razor. I have begun building some of those tools with my clumsy excuse for woodworking.

Update 4 – I’m building a CNC mill from my first 3d printer. My first 3d printer was a delta printer. That’s the kind with 3 arms and no horizontal moving parts. It uses a bunch of triginometric transformations to determine where to move the arms to push a center piece to a point that you want to print. But of course with my little tweaks here and “upgrades” there it became mostly unusable. I’ve harvested some parts for other projects but still have the 3 motors and control board and various other pully parts. So I’ve decided to build myself a 3 (or is it 4?) axis cnc mill for cutting aluminum parts out for projects that need something stronger than a plastic 3d print. For now I’m working with only parts I have in the house, of which I have a lot because I take apart any electronic or mechanical thing my wife wants to throw away. I can also 3d print many of the parts I need and don’t have until the mill is working and I can mill replacements from aluminum. The only parts I know I’ll need to buy for sure is a motor for the spindle and the milling bits. I also have to figure out how to get the RAMPS board to handle CNC GRBL code instead of 3d printer G code (which is a repurposed and non-standardized GCODE).

Update 5 – I’ve taken up jewelery making. Well I guess for now it’s only lapidary work. I started with a 2 lb rock tumbler and then moved on to hand grinding stones with sandpaper while those tumble. Oh god that takes for ever. I’ve made a teardrop shaped cabichon from pink opal and a 4 sided die from some gray stone that I’ve not identified yet. My wife bought me a wire wrapping kit and I’ve been drawing up my own designs and trying those out. Just last night I finally got the okay from my wife to get a cabachon cutting machine and I’m excited for that to get here. I’ve found a couple of places online where I can get some cool rough rock for cheep and can’t wait to get some of those made into jewelery. Maybe this summer I’ll even get a hat and go out finding rocks locally. That’s a challenge because I break out in hives with too much sun, on top of burning within half an hour. Still, with some spf 9million and a wide hat and long sleeved clothes I should be good. We have some really cool places to find minerals here.

Misc – My wife still plans on doing her etsy store this summer, and I’m planning on using some of my hobbies to help her populate it. So my job is to build up some inventory of books and jewelery. Once my skills get more refined I may open my own shop, but right now I have no interest in that.

I’ve promised my wife to focus on these hobbies: writing, jewelery making, book making, and tinkering to support other tasks. That means no more working on my car, no more music production stuff, no more film making stuff, and no more flittering to new hobbies… for now. Let’s see if I can make that stick.

I’ve also promised to take my narcolepsy treatments seriously. That means taking my meds in the morning and really trying to sleep at night. How hard this is is really underestimated by anyone who doesn’t have to deal with it. But I’m going to give it my best.

Oh, I mentioned writing above. I actually managed to bang out about half a book over NaNoWriMo. It’s a decent start. I’m not happy with it yet, but once I finish and begin re-writing and editing the real magic happens.

Well, I feel like that’s a pretty decent update. I’m going to post more frequently, though I can’t promise daily or weekly.