Making Stuff Blog

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Replacing my Ender 3 v2's build surface with G10
tl;dr: G10 is pretty neat stuff, although Angus is wrong and you can't score-and-snap the thick stuff. I knew, starting out, that I wanted to print PETG on my Ender 3v2. But that led me down the notion of printing nylon and other interesting materials. It turns out that a lot of what I want to do…

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Ender 3v2 with a Bondtech DDX and a Slice Mosquito.
After a bit of an incident with some black PETG and the hard discovery that some PETG formulations will work with a PTFE-tube hotend but not others, I resorted to a printer upgrade. I figured it would be a relatively fast upgrade but it turned out that my printer was either fully out of commission…

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Ender 3v2 from July to October
tl;dr: Auto-leveling is great, Silky PLA is great and PETG is annoying, vase mode and fat nozzles are great, and prints are mostly turning out right without pain and suffering. So far, I got a printer, managed to actually print things other than calibration pieces and printer mods, and then the…

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My Ender 3v2's failed motherboard, the repair work, and the new BLTouch
Just outside of the Amazon return window but before the actual warranty went out, my printer's motherboard failed, which triggered some maintenance and upgrades. Walking away from the printer and a Spaghetti Detective After getting the printer, I've been printing like mad. A lot of other people's…

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First few non-calibration prints, mostly not printer mods even
The joke is that what do you do with a 3D printer other than print your next printer mod. Or calibration prints. Either way, the entire purpose behind buying a 3D printer was because I'd be a lot more free with printing organizers and stuff, especially rando models on sites like Prusaprinters or…

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Ended up buying an Ender
The part that most people hear when they hear the phrase "3D Printer" is the "3D" part. What you really need to hear is the "Printer" part. As in "I just purchased a printer and, instead of a solid-state unmoving device like my LCD screen, now it has to go through a mechanical process to produce…

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AP22815/AP22615/et al USB-friendly load switches from Diodes Inc.
tl;dr: These are two load switches in a series of similar SOT-23-5/SOT-23-6 load switches that make it really easy to get power safely from a USB port. One of the important rules about getting power to a device from USB is that you need to make sure that your USB device doesn't try to back-power the…

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Trying out Ponoko and the FreeCAD Laser Cut Interlocking workbench
tl;dr: The Laser Cut Interlocking workbench is the first tool I've found that feels like it might make the process of designing three dimensional structures to be laser cut easier. And Ponoko is kinda neat once you get past the $14 per-order charge Why is laser cutting cool? I should probably…

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Gate driver test: PWM switching a half-amp at 80 kHz PWM with a MOSFET
tl;dr: At 80 kHz where the MOSFET switches 0.5A at 5V, a gate driver makes a small but measurable difference in switching speed. It makes a clear difference in heat generated as you switch increasing amounts of power. It's better to do PWM at a high frequency. Ideally, you want the frequency to be…