51–60 of 104 posts
The low-cost part is as good as the high-cost part ... except in all of these ways that it's not, that I will outline here. Oh, and I basically just eyeballed them, instead of measuring them. Oh, when pieces were missing due to failure to print, I just kind of assume that they would have printed okay with some tweaks.
What!? Amusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are tools out there that address your specific complaint re: software repeatability. A combination of Ansible/Emacs/Git dot files can yield a consistent environment across machines. Howard Abrams has some great material on how he does this with Emacs (howardism.org).
Why stop at your editor? Automate your entire workstation so every last config is identical across computers: https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook
And sometimes the steps take hours worth of bandwidth when sneaker-net would suffice.
3D printing, especially hobbyist machines, is still in its infancy and produces disappointing results. A large flat piece warps. The resolution is coarse. It takes too long to produce even a simple piece. The machine needs constant monitoring. It's at the equivalent of the DOS stage of personal computing. I wrote code to produce STL files. These files are accepted by hobbyist printers. I sent it to a professional sho…
You probably knew this one, but still: http://runningahackerspace.tumblr.com/post/113272014704/sure...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are tools out there that address your specific complaint re: software repeatability. A combination of Ansible/Emacs/Git dot files can yield a consistent environment across machines. Howard Abrams has some great material on how he does this with Emacs (howardism.org).
Why stop at your editor? Automate your entire workstation so every last config is identical across computers: https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook
What happens if your build script breaks? You have to work around it then troubleshoot the problem. Already there goes your time savings.
I keep my dotfiles in a repo, that seems to be at the appropriate level of abstraction. Easy to set up, easy to add to, I can understand everything its doing, if it breaks I can localize the problem and fix it exactly where it's happening.
Trying to expand the scope to include arbitrary package management? I don't think the tooling is there yet, that will make this sort of thing very painful. The dotfile convention has been brewing for decades.
Trying this will inevitably force you to make compromises, and compromises defeat the whole point. The work it does is fundamentally equivalent to a package manager, and existing package managers haven't managed to get it done yet.
If every Mac developer can be convinced to use a package manager, and every package manager can be scripted, (looking at you, Mac App Store) and every app with a modular architecture also either plugs into an existing system or implements its own package manager, then this becomes viable. But you still need a modular and easy-to-manage way to manage app configuration too. If you can get them all to use dotfiles, awesome. But they don't now.
Right now, invariably you're reduced to a pile of hacky workarounds. Any automation will have been done at the wrong level and will break constantly.
The last time I needed to set one of these up, I started to write down a checklist of things to do. I gave up after I realized that I was just pulling the checklist from memory, it already exists and writing it down wasn't going to do much good.
I have never seen a 3D printer, although I have seen a model (of a house plan) made with a 3D printer. You folks who live near civilization and 'make' communities are so lucky! :) Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? I imagine a machine that prints the model slightly oversize, milling and then perhaps finally warming the surface to polish it, all as it goes... I would love to have access to a h…
> Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? No, and there likely never will be. Why would you wait for hours to then still have to mill down your final product when all the advantages of 3D printing are then lost and all the advantages of milling are lost? The advantages of 3D printing are that as an additive process it will work in many environments where a subtractive process would not, the advant…
I enjoyed this article, but perhaps not for the reasons the author hoped. This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive ma…
Welcome to the wonderful world of quality control :) Making something is easy, making something with a high repeat accuracy and very low fail percentage is super hard. I learned this the hard way myself with an IO expander for the Atari ST that I designed. I needed it to drive the lathe/mill controller, the ST simply had too little IO capacity so with a bunch of decoders and latches I was able to drive a much larger…
I enjoyed this article, but perhaps not for the reasons the author hoped. This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive ma…
Welcome to the wonderful world of quality control :) Making something is easy, making something with a high repeat accuracy and very low fail percentage is super hard. I learned this the hard way myself with an IO expander for the Atari ST that I designed. I needed it to drive the lathe/mill controller, the ST simply had too little IO capacity so with a bunch of decoders and latches I was able to drive a much larger…
If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. Reliability, support, accuracy, all lacking with hobby printers.
If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not. It's far from a perfect analogy, but with servers Google demonstrated really well that the cost of high-end 'professional' equipment can be a waste of money where cheap, commodity kit can be used at scale instead. It's not completely unreasonable to think that a farm of cheap 3D printers could be used in…
For hadoop a comodity box is a dual xenon white box with 192G of ram plus infiniband networking kit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference here is reliability. Commodity kit is generally reliable, just slower; whereas cheap 3d printers are more likely to fail a print/produce junk.
In which case, the junk can be tossed and tried again.
There is a solution to that, when your labor and capital costs are huge but the cheap printer is 1/10th the cost of the fancy printer... simply install and use 3, 4, maybe 5 cheap printers, keep the best print, and pocket the savings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference here is reliability. Commodity kit is generally reliable, just slower; whereas cheap 3d printers are more likely to fail a print/produce junk.
In which case, the junk can be tossed and tried again.
Not sure where the break-even point is, but the cost of a failed print is pretty high in terms of sunk time for most prints. On an industrial scale, a machine that prints correctly 99% of the time might be a better investment than two that print say 75% of the time.