Making Stuff Blog

Ender 3v2 from July to October 1 hour ago
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…

My particular implementation of the Rubbermaid 21 Cup and Sterilite 20 qt dryboxes 2 months ago
I started out without a drybox or dehydrator with my printer. I got one roll of PLA and one roll of PETG and I figured that I'd use my time on the PLA roll to determine what I was going to do with the PETG roll. About two weeks in, I'd used maybe half of the spool of PET so I decided that it was…

My Ender 3v2's failed motherboard, the repair work, and the new BLTouch 3 months ago
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…

First few non-calibration prints, mostly not printer mods even 4 months ago
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…

Ended up buying an Ender 4 months ago
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…

AP22815/AP22615/et al USB-friendly load switches from Diodes Inc. 8 months ago
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…

Trying out Ponoko and the FreeCAD Laser Cut Interlocking workbench 1 year ago
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…

Gate driver test: PWM switching a half-amp at 80 kHz PWM with a MOSFET 1 year ago
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…

A vaguely finished ESPHome node for my geekroom 1 year ago
Some five months ago , I wrote about how I got started with ESPHome with an ESP8266 and a temperature/humidity sensor on a breadboard. I figured that I'd build it over time. I'd realize that there would be something that would be really nice to add, and so I'd find some parts to do it, or try out…

Making an ATMega32U4 Arduino clone board from scratch 1 year ago
So far, the Ardunio environment seems to be the easiest way for me to get real and practical things done with hardware, most of which has to do with there being a decent open-source library for most of the things that I could write but don't want to. I've never actually purchased a real Arduino…