JamesF

Burn the witch!

Never mind that. Too damn expensive James

They're also repeating one of his other series at the moment I think. Human Universe? James

Blimey. That's a hefty print time. I've just started one that shouldn't last five minutes James

I found quite a handy map here: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2021-june-10 You may need to zoom out a bit to find your location first. Here's what it says for (close enough to) me: James

The forecast for here is for the wind to be gusting up to the mid 40s until getting towards Friday lunchtime. My observatory is in the lee of the house and in fact the top of the roll-off roof is below the house ground floor level, but the weather station mounted there is still measuring wind speeds of over 30mph! James

If it's anything like here over on your side of the country, the camera could be in Germany by now... James

I missed this at the time. There has been a problem with recent INDI releases because of a clash between the version of libraw provided by the standard system and the version packaged with INDI. I suspect that might have been what you fell foul of. It's not always a problem because it depends what other packages you may have installed that also use libraw. Even with the latest INDI release I believe it's still a problem for Ubuntu 20.04-based distributions. At least, that's how it looked to me last night when I updated my laptop to test a problem with Point Grey/FLIR cameras and oacapture. As far as I recall it also causes problems with Gimp and Shotwell. I believe that the problem should go away for any distribution based on Ubuntu 21.04, but I've not tried it in anger yet so I can't say for certain. James

The purchase having been prompted by comments about it after his recent death, today Michael Collins's "Carrying the Fire" arrived, in 50th anniversary edition form. I'm very much looking forward to reading it. James

My personal feeling is that if the camera has dead or hot pixels, I'd rather the firmware didn't mess about with the data in ways that I don't necessarily understand, control or am able to reverse. I'll take the raw data please, and if I decide it needs messing about with then I'll be the one to do it the way I want it done. Not everyone may share this opinion :) James

Vernier calipers should do for this I think, if you can measure the diameter of the motor shaft and the diameter of the output gear across two opposing teeth. James

Indeed so. They would be my first port of call for that, but as already mentioned, people who specialise in radio controlled models, or even parts for building robots might be worth a look too. James

That was my assumption. It looks as though it may be possible. Otherwise it's probably easier to go the belt & pulleys route. James

An alternative might be to replace both gears by timing pulleys in a 5:1 ratio with a belt. You'd not get the reversal of the direction of rotation then though, so you'd probably have to use it with the handset in southern hemisphere mode. James

Someone like MotionCo might be able to supply a suitable replacement for the 24-tooth gear, but the tricky bit may actually be working out what to replace it with as there are plenty of gear profiles and spindle diameters to choose from. Assuming you can get the correct spindle diameters it might be easier to replace both gears with a matching pair of the correct ratio. James

A 120MM that I have sitting here on my desk producing images in oacapture right now says it certainly can work on Linux. It may require some faffing around and I don't know if it will work with all applications, but I guess you're going to find that one out :) James

That was one of the reasons I was initially concerned about moving the X and Y axes manually. With my old printer I could move the heads by controlling them via RepetierHost over the USB connection, so I didn't need to worry about it. However, disconnecting the motors and moving the axes manually seems to be the Creality way to do it so that's what I did. I found a photo of their controller board and it looks like a bespoke design, so perhaps when the "disconnect steppers" option is chosen, it genuinely does disconnect them, rather than just powering them down. I have no idea. James

The "end of life" section there makes me wonder... My compost heap can quite comfortably reach 40C when we have sufficient material to feed it, and in fact when I measured it a few weeks back was at 50C. Would PLA break down reasonably quickly under such conditions? And regarding incineration, if burning it does not release any toxins, would it be preferable to save it to put in the wood-burner during the winter (when it would at least be keeping us warm) rather than putting it in the dustbin? James

PLA is made from corn starch if I recall correctly, and is biodegradable if you can get it hot enough. Unfortunately I don't think that's feasible at home. It would be nice if the local recycling centre had a collection bin for PLA waste though. There are people experimenting with recycling waste PLA back into a usable form and I think even a few machines on the market that claim to do so, but I don't think you get back something as good as you started with. At least, that seemed to be the situation last time I looked. Sadly therefore, my waste ends up in the bin. The positive side is that I have far more good prints than waste, and it's not uncommon for me to print parts that prevent something else being thrown out because it is otherwise unrepairable, so I've decided I can live with the consequences of having to put a small proportion of my output into the bin. James

I had to move the block down a little for the Z axis too. That may all change again though, as I decided to replace the springs for bed levelling on my older printer because bed levelling was always a bit vague and there are enough to do this one as well. And I also had three of the black bolts left over :) I've just changed the filament which was a little more awkward than on my old one (which was direct feed rather than Bowden), but that may just be me not being used to it. James

It's 4.8 that's crashing for me. The .deb file is for 4.4.1. I'll have a go with the AppImage. James

Well, I've sworn a bit and said "Damn! That gave me quite a buzz!" once or twice over the last fifty-odd years. I reckon that probably counts. It may run in the family, actually. Apparently my younger bother developed quite a reputation for attempting to poke screwdrivers into thirteen amp sockets as a toddler. James

I tried the snap install, but not the app image. I discovered though that an earlier release is available as a .deb, so I tried that and it seems to work fine. On windows it tells me that v4.9 is available, which isn't the case for Linux, so perhaps if I wait for that the problem will go away anyhow. I'm pleased with the print I've just done. Comparing it to the one from my other printer, the bed adhesion is better and the quality of the surfaces where supports have been removed is better. Part of the latter is down to the different slicing engine I imagine, but also because of the print head fan. I wonder if the slightly textured surface of the Ender3 print bed helps with adhesion over the smooth glass of the old printer. I would also say that the top surface is better finished. There's not a lot in it, but with the Ender3 print I have to feel for unevenness in the top face, whereas it's obvious with the print from the Geeetech Prusa copy. Where the top surface is a small area, such as the top of a vertical peg, the Ender3 finish is clearly much better. I'll have to try to find something that was quite difficult to print well on the Geeetech and see how the Ender3 does. James

Looks like Creality use the Ultimaker slicer, and as it happens there's a copy of the Ultimaker slicer available for Linux which means I could do away with an old Windows laptop that I currently use for slicing. So I downloaded and installed it. And it crashed as soon as I tried to open a file :( James

Having levelled the bed I'm now doing my first "proper" print. The motors are impressively quiet compared with my old one. The fans (particularly the internal one, I think) more than makes up for that though. It won't be staying sitting on my desk beyond the end of this print run :) James