I purchased a new printer earlier this summer (Creality K2+) and it has been working well, though  recently I’ve had some problems with some larger prints. Fortunately, the printer has a web interface called Fluidd. One of the capabilities in Fluidd will display a bed grid showing how even (or not) it is. This is located in the Tuning command listed on the left side of the interface.

The other day I had some time on my hands while I was sitting in the infusion area waiting for my wife’s infusion to complete and got the idea for an electronic Magic 8 Ball. If you didn't have one of these growing up, they are a plastic ball that when you turn it over provides a random answer out of 20.

Meshy has been around for a while, but they just released a new 3D model generator and I am impressed. I was surprised at how easy it was to create a 3D model from a text description or a picture. I wanted to create a headless horseman for the G gauge train in our neighborhood. I asked for "A horse with a headless horsemen for a Halloween model".

I was looking for a project utilizing the various types of machines we have in our maker space. I landed on a pinball like game. This post will describe the various layers involved and show the prototype (that is not sanded or finished). The Overview The game is sized to use 13 mm marbles. It is designed to sit on a table with an angle mounting bracket providing the correct angle and stability.

I have another cruise coming up before Halloween, so I thought I’d make some Halloween themed ducks. I need to get better about providing more contextual information for the people who find the ducks. There are facebook groups focused on cruise ducks. This game is popular and I need to try and see who is picking up the ducks. I think I’ll attach a QR Code that replies to this post.

When I first started cruising, getting away from the phone and the internet were part of the experience. Now, Internet on the cruise is relatively easy and reliable – though I still don’t share information publicly about our travels until I get home. I usually get a couple of free days of internet for free when we are on a cruise (one day for me and one day for my wife).

I went on a Royal Caribbean cruise out of Seattle this past week on the Anthem of the Seas. This was a very nice boat since it has more and larger indoor facilities than the ones the we’ve been on in the Caribbean. Since I have a 3D printer and placing ducks around cruise ships has become a thing, I printed out a few and left them around the ship.

I just saw that the Byte magazine archives were added to archive.org. These magazine archives go to the fall of 1975 when Byte started. I remember I did a project at Purdue back in 1978 for a microprocessor lab where I took 2 A-to-D converters, 2 D-to-A converters, a joystick (for analog thrust and directional input), an oscilloscope (for the display) and the Motorola 68xx computer (I think it was a 6809) and made a lunar lander game.

I hit my 100 contact goal (I actually had 132 unique contacts (one more than last year). I used two digital modes only across 3 bands. Band FT4 FT8 Total 10 meters 45 45 20 meters 32 20 58 40 meters 11 18 29 Total 49 83 132 I didn't operate all that much since I had quite a bit going on over the two days.

Field day is part emergency preparedness exercise, social event and contest. It is also amateur radio’s open house, giving clubs an opportunity to show the public who we are and what we bring to our communities. The club I am part of is setting up at Lake Summerset here in Sun City Hilton Head. They will be operating the afternoon of June 28th.

A while back, I switched my phone provider to Mint. We just got back from a cruise going out of Orlando on Royal Caribbean that went to St. Croix, St. Thomas, San Juan and the Bahamas. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mint voice and data worked in all three of the US territories without issue. The only location that seemed to get overloaded was St.

I had my first large plastic blob form on an overnight job. Once I got the plastic softened with a heat gun, I was able to remove almost all of it. The blob was so aggressive, it pulled the thermistor wires out of the hot end. I purchased a new hot end from Amazon. I also had an exchange with…

Learned quite a bit along the way about the limitations of L brackets… When I built the design, I decided to use L brackets for the corners, since they give support and allow the stand to be taken apart. Unfortunately, L brackets do not provide much rigidity. My stand is screwed together and works fine, but I really wish there was less vibration.

My old approach to having a table in the garage for the 3D printer was totally inadequate. This printer is a beast compared to the K1C , so I am thinking through how to support it. I'm also thinking about a new way to mount my desktop laser. The current design for the 3D printer table looks like: With the red box representing the…

One feature that the Creality CFS has that surprised me was built in support for reading RFID tags. The CFS will know the type, spool size and color of the 3D filament loaded, if the correct tag is attached. The RFID tags have to be MiFare Classic 1k RFID tags. Some of the Creality filaments come with them already attached.

Cardboard spools The Creality CFS is very sensitive to the spools to hold the filament. NEVER use a cardboard spool (at least from the vendor I used). I had a cardboard spool that jammed the filament flow 3 times, before I just threw it away. Some things I tried: Created a cardboard spool adapter (but the CFS tolerance of ‘fat’ spool edges is too tight), so the filament didn’t flow through the path properly.

After having several 3D printers over the years, I finally bit the bullet on a large format printer – K2+ Combo. It worked well out of the box and I created a multi-color coaster for all my family members (for the various schools they attended). I used Paint.NET to separate out the colors and Microsoft 3D builder to create the…

This is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU). It was on this day in 1925 that the IARU was formed in Paris. American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Co-Founder Hiram Percy Maxim was its first president.   Amateur radio operators continue to be on the cutting edge of innovation in electrical engineering and signal research. Modern weak signal modes, digital modulation schemes, and software defined radios show that ham radio is a vibrant and modern hobby, even in this Internet and…

It was easy to understand the spreadsheet for the decision tree when I was the only one working with it (until I started making revisions). Once someone else started changing the spreadsheet it became clear that some node relationship visualization was required. This is where Vibe coding comes into play. I knew that Python had all the libraries needed display a decision tree.

I work in a large maker space that has about 1000 members. Nearly 100 of the members use technology enabled tooling like CNCs, 3D printers and Lasers to manipulate wood. Naturally, not all of them have the same level of computer literacy. To address this gap we were discussing how we might provide a tool to address some of the common issues encountered, when setting up the machine as well as running the job itself.

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi is arguably the most famous mathematical constant, appearing in formulas across science and engineering, from calculating the curve of a river to navigating spacecraft..

I am putting together an advanced slicing class for our maker space. Layer height adjustment is one area that I haven’t found documented very well. Since we have a Creality printer (K1 max) and that is the first printer most people will have exposure to, I wrote up the instructions for that slicer. Other slicers will have similar options but the user interface is implemented differently, but the concepts are the same.

I did the same kind of request as I had done earlier with some of the other AI tools and got a much different and more interesting result from Think Deeper. Some of it was the same but then there were some really solid game development suggestions that I wasn't expecting (more about this at the end): Hey! I took a look at your MicroPython code for the Raspberry Pi Pico SkeeBall game.

Grok is another AI tool that has an X interface that is supposed to be good at coding. I gave it the same problem as the other day and here is what it produced. Here are several improvements that could be made to the provided MicroPython code to enhance its functionality, readability, and efficiency: 1. Use Constants for Pin Numbers and Other Hardcoded Values…

I read an article on Deepseek and its coding capabilities, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I could not believe the level of explanation it went through during its ‘thinking’ process. Gemini 1.5 Here is an example for a project I am working on -- it is a main loop for a desktop Skeeball game I’ve been designing. It has one sensor for the ball return and eight other sensors for scoring.