20181123-1914_entry.txt (2685B)
1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2 23-Nov-2018, 19:14 (UTC) 3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4 5 Busy days, busy days ... 6 7 Lots of stuff at work, basically related to kubernetes and fighting 8 ingress configuration. I think is the weakest point on this container 9 orquestration software. 10 11 On the personal side, I think I don't advance so much in my touch 12 typing, althoug it helps quite a bit with the finger pain and I'm maybe 13 a little bit more confortable with it. For sure it's worth to continue 14 with the "experiment". 15 16 On the geek side (the good side !!), I did something I had in my todo 17 list for long time. I have a smal laser engraver (2500mW), the kind one 18 can easily find on ebay or china. The quality of the thing is not the 19 best in some areas, for instance, the system is based on some acrylic 20 plates with ball bearings that "ride" on aluminum extrusions. The 21 problem is that they just put metal against metal and also the 22 tolerances are a little bit loose. Months ago I bought a set of ball 23 bearings with a plastic wheel around them in order to replace them. They 24 are slightly bigger in diameter and my idea was tighten the tolerances 25 and remove the annoying metal to metal contact. 26 27 I succeeded in that, but the rails are now a little bit too tight. So 28 tight in fact that the Y axis (wich drives 2 carriages with one stepper 29 motor) was unable to move the gantry. So CAD/3D printing to the resque. 30 I cloned the acrylic plates with just a bit more distance between the 31 screws that support the bearings, so now it goes smoothly, more quiet 32 and with virtually no play ! 33 34 From that I get a couple more ideas about things I wanted to do ... so 35 the small Cetus3D is pretty busy these days ! 36 37 I may put a couple of photos and write something about the process I 38 follow for this. I'm not an expert on mechanical design (not by a long 39 shot), but it fascinates me. 40 41 Of course I try to use free software as much as possible. I think the 42 only piece that's not free is the slicer, as Tiertime (the company that 43 produces the Cetus3D) is kind of special and don't use Gcode as the 44 rest. 45 46 That's good when you're starting, as the thing just works. You send it a 47 model and you get a part with a pretty good quality. But when you want 48 to do more advanced or peculiar stuff, it falls short. One of my todo 49 list projects involves modifying the printer to work with regular 50 firmware (like marlin for instance) and be able to use gcode and play 51 with the traditional slicers. 52 53 Now I'll have a big beer and read some rss feeds. Geek weekend ahead ! 54 55 ------------------------------------------------------------------------