Tag Archives: 3d printing

Feb 11

Friday Post: Simplify3D customer service is the best!

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Hey All,

Not much to report on this week.  I was having issues with really bad stringing on my prints from my SeeMeCNC ERIS 3D printer.  On fully enclosed prints, it’s been great, but on anything with overhangs or open spaces, the stringing has been incredibly bad.

I use Simplify3D as my slicer, and it’s been worth every penny.  This past week I get fed up with making the adjustments myself, so I emailed Simplify my settings file, pictures of the issues, and within a day they sent me back a new settings file, for a printer they don’t even officially support, and it’s now working 100% better.

Prints are more dimensionally accurate and I have almost zero stringing!

CURA and Slic3r are really good free open source slicers, but it’s been totally worthwhile to pay for Simplify!

I also bought ANOTHER new 3D Printer, which should arrive in a week or two, and I’m excited to see it in action.  I will be doing a review of it so be on the look out!

The model is a surprise for now.

Sep 11

Updates Updates Updates

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Hey All,

Sorry for the long delay in updates.  Been extremely busy with the campaign and some personal projects.  I needed the break but I’m back.

Good News

The Florida primaries are over, and it is only myself and a Democrat in the race for Florida House District 49.  I am currently polling in the high 30s, which is pretty damn good considering I’m an Independent with about $1000 left running against a politician who has raised over $100,000.

Does money help?  Of course, but the more I talk to people and tell them my platform, and more importantly, what type of person I am, the more support I am getting.  I am so thankful for the wonderful support my friends and family are showing me during this campaign.  It’s been amazing so far.  Can’t wait until the November election 😀

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The PiPlay Advance board is coming together!  We have another iteration we are getting ready to test!  More news on that soon 😀e6e6230260da234de488a393ef5bd7cb_preview_featured

I’ve been playing a TON of Overwatch lately, and in a few of the maps, you can run around some arcade machines.  They look like traditional Japanese Candy Cabs, and I love them.  I really want to make my own real version sometime, BUT, I was able to do the next best thing.  A modder released the model files for the arcade into Source Film Maker, and I was able to export them OBJs, convert them to STLs, and then clean them up in Tinkercad, so I could 3D print them.

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Sad News

In sad news, last month my Grandfather passed away.  I want to thank the other campaigns for offering their condolences and being decent about the whole thing.  It took a toll on my family of course.  Right after he passed, my Grandmother went into the hospital (for what looks like a heart attack), but she is doing better.  It was just a heck of a month.

Today is also 9/11, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention anything about it.  I remember 15 years ago, a senior in high school, watching the events unfold on TV in a class room.  The administrators were going room by room turning off TVs and telling the teachers to go back to their lessons.  I’m glad my teacher turned it back on when they left.

At 17, all I could think about was how my cousins lived in NYC at the time, and hoping they were OK, but not really worried, because they were also kids, what would they be doing close to the towers?  I remember a lot of confusion and worry about what was next.  I remember a lot of ignorant and hateful comments being spoken in the following weeks, and a lot of misinformation from my fellow classmates.  I was just numb.

15 years later, the big thing I take from 9/11 is that we should never respond to these tragic events with reactionary legislation.  The PATRIOT Act is probably one of the worst bills that was pushed through during that time.  In hindsight we see that, but we can’t forget the lesson in case of future events.

Thank you.

-Shea

Jul 04

Happy 4th of July!

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Hey All,

Happy 4th of July!  Go eat some hotdogs, grill some burgers, and watch some fireworks.  That’s my plan for today 🙂

In other news….

Amazon is selling the Monoprice Maker Select 3D Printer at the incredible price of $279 with Prime shipping!  The Maker Select is based on the Prusa i3, and is considered one the very best reprap open source printer.  This price point is killer as well, since it is normally $350.


I couldn’t resist and purchased one (so my Makerbot clone will be up for sale in the near future lol).  I’ll be posting a review of it soon!

Thanks everyone!  Have a great holiday!

-Shea

Jan 09

(Late) Friday Post: and the winner is! Also Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer

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Hey All!

The winner of the Raspberry Pi Zero giveaway is Aaron!  Congratulations!  I will be emailing you later tonight!

Onto other news.  This has been a hell of a week.  Had a small health scare with my grandmother, so we drove 200 miles yesterday to visit her.  We spent the night and drove back home today.  Hence the late post.  Shes doing better, so phew! 😀

This week I implemented a cool video encoding queuing system using Redis and Django.  The module I used is called Django-RQ, and it makes it super simple to convert your functions into queue-able objects using the @Job decorator.

This Tuesday is my birthday! Woo!  I turn 32.  I’m content.  I also start classes that night.  Yay lol.  I bought this as a gift for myself:

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It’s a Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer for $300.  It’s a major upgrade compared to my Micro, but it takes a lot more to get it going.  I’ve had it for two days and I’ve finally got most of the settings dialed in.

When I went to visit my Grandma I took along my Kinect sensor and used Skanect to scan her, so I was able to quickly print out a very low poly version of her as a bust.

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The Skanect free version limits exports to only 5000 polygons.  Once I upgrade I can export at full resolution.

Have a good week / weekend all.

Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.

-Shea

Aug 01

Friday Post: Forgetting to set DNS

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Hey All,

So for the past month I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the issue where PiPlay says Could not check for updates.  I KNEW it was because of my server move but I couldn’t figure it out.  I couldn’t reproduce it on my end.  I really thought that it was because the requests module coudln’t do redirects.  Tonight I was dealing with a PiPlay issue with a cool teacher in Canada who is making games with her students, and we were troubleshooting a bad wifi card.  We got everything working, and then the can’t connect to piplay server message came up, and I was going to admit defeat, but I then saw it was going to WWW.pimame.org.  I had set up www on piplay.org, but I had never setup the WWW redirect on the old domain.  I feel dumb.  One DNS change and a 5 minute propagation and everything is working now.

On a side note, I designed this warp pipe planter in OpenSCAD, and printed it out today.  I drove out to a local nursery and picked up some venus fly traps, and voila!  One Super Mario Bros. “Piranha Plant” in my own home 😀

11807716_10104381579905592_3981371305566672176_oYou can download the STL file at thingiverse, and it will be up on my Etsy as well.

 

Jul 17

Friday Post: More 3D Printing

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!  Brain fried from a week of getting some new software at work prepped and ready to be moved to production.  Scary doing a push because some 60,000 faculty and students might run into an issue.  We test as well as we can, but theres always that one case that you miss.  So nerve wracking.

For the past two weeks my coworkers and I have been printing out tons of things on the Micro 3D Printer. After the first week, everything started to shift horribly to the left on each new layer.  Nothing would print right.  A vocal minority was also having this issue on the forums.  Micro3D has a huge support backlog, so communication was very sparse, BUT they DID keep us in the loop on how they were fixing the issue.  Two new software releases in 2 weeks and it seems to be working fine again.  I am extremely happy with the prints now.

Eevee (with support structure)

IMG_8146 copy IMG_5376 copy

Winnie the Pooh bear (with support structure cleaned off)IMG_5372 copy

Don’t mind the weirdness with the Eevee, that’s the support structure that pulls off.  I’m mailing it to a friend so I’m leaving it intact.  It’s like 3D printed bubble wrap, I can’t deny her the joy of ripping it off 😀  You can see a couple remnants of the support structure on the pooh bear as well.  I need to clean it up a bit more before I send it to my Mom.  She will love it.

My conclusion: It’s a $300 3D printer,You get what you pay for.  I am extremely happy with it.  It was broken, now it’s fixed to Micro3D’s credit.   I am hoping the shifting issue is now in the past and that it was just a software bug.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Jul 03

Friday Post: 3D Printing and Raspberry Pi live streaming

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Hey All,

Happy Friday and happy 4th of July weekend!

On Monday I recieved a 3D Printer from the company M3D.  It is the blue Micro 3D printer.  If you use the coupon code “refurb” you can get one for $300 dollars (plus about $12 shipping).

microBlueSo far I’ve printed out a bunch of things, ranging from Bulbasaurs, and Ford Fiesta ST scale models, to characters from Dota and keychains.  So far it has been an awesome little printer.  Now, it’s slow, a little loud, and only has a print size of 6x6x6, but that hasn’t been an issue yet.

I’m using a Raspberry Pi with the camera module to livestream my printer.


Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

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Livestreaming from USTREAM on the Raspberry Pi

Here is a quick guide to livestreaming on the Raspberry Pi with USTREAM and an RPI Camera Module

References from: https://ustream.zendesk.com/entries/63723444-Raspberry-Pi-Streaming-video-to-Ustream and http://www.oz9aec.net/index.php/dvb/490-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-live-hdtv-transmitter

  • Install Raspbian to your Raspberry Pi SD Card
  • Install the Raspberry Pi Camera Module
  • Using Raspi-Config activate the camera module
    • sudo raspi-config
    • Enable Camera
  • You are going to need a version of ffmpeg installed.  The version from apt-get will not work.
    • You can download a working binary here: http://files.oz9aec.net/datv/490-rpi-hdtv/ffmpeg
      • wget http://files.oz9aec.net/datv/490-rpi-hdtv/ffmpeg
      • chmod +x ffmpeg
    • Or you can download and compile the ffmpeg sources via git
      • git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg
      • cd ffmpeg
      • ./configure
      • make
      • sudo make install
  • Set up a ustream script:
    • nano ustream
    •  #!/bin/bash
RTMP_URL=<rtmpurl>
STREAM_KEY=<streamkey>
while :
do
    raspivid -n -vf -hf -t 0 -w 960 -h 540 -fps 25 -b 500000 -o - | ./ffmpeg -i - -vcodec copy -an -metadata title="Streaming from raspberry pi camera" -f flv $RTMP_URL/$STREAM_KEY
    sleep 2
done
    • Change RTMP_URL and STREAM_KEY to match the keys you get from your USTREAM Channel settings page.
    • If you compiled and installed your own version of ffmpeg, remove the ./ffmpeg and replace it with just ffmpeg in the code above.
    • chmod +x ustream
    • ./ustream
  • With any luck, you will now be streaming to your USTREAM channel.