So, one thing I did note is that a lot of the PETG vendors these days have been ratcheting up the speed that their normal non-rapid PETG filaments are printable at as well.
For example, Prusament PETG is good up to 200 mm/s and Elegoo’s Pro PETG is good up to 270 mm/s.
You can always mock some stuff up and try it out in PrusaSlicer to see how long it thinks it’ll take?
Wall thickness potentially depends on the size of the object? I guess 2mm would the the starting point, fill one with soil, see how sturdy it feels. Complexity for 3D printing is “free”, kinda. A lot of the best container designs incorporate ribs to strengthen them without using up too much material. Given that the joins are the weak part, you’d potentially want that a lot thicker.
You also want to look at “vase mode”. Some of the fastest printing objects you can get on a 3D printer are where you design around the constraints of vase mode and then you can use a fat nozzle with thick layers to print really fast.
You can always print plumbing instead of using PVC pipes? I’ve definitely seen self-watering pots such that they just have a pipe incorporated into the design such that it just sticks up along the corner. So, worse case, each module has a watering port. If you want to get fancy, you could make a manifold such that a single pipe sticks up in the middle and fills 4 reservoirs, although the fancier the plumbing the more likely you are to have one of them get dried out faster unless your filling routine tops them off.
Yeah, see if you know Python, then OpenSCAD is not a hard jump? One of the reasons why I really like OpenSCAD is that libraries like BOSL2 have parametric joiners and snaps and stuff. And you could totally write modifiers for FreeCAD or Blender to do it, sure, but it’s a lot less trouble to get it done with OpenSCAD. This way your end-result would let you input the size of the bed and it would figure out how many sections it needs, etc.
Lesee… 120x40x40cm is a lot of plastic to print, even with a single printer running all day all night.
What I’d suggest is that you make the wooden outside for the 120x40x40cm shelf and make 20cm x 20cm x 40cm units. At which point you can make bigger multi-part modules. It might actually make sense to keep the cups separate because you could adjust the holes and stuff based on the plant’s needs. Whereas the reservoir section is going to be happiest as a single tub. But the important part is that if you are a few modules short, just add a spacer for this season. And it gives you more time to experiment on the tub and allows you to swap that out mid-season.
This is pretty darn ambitious for a starter project. I say this as someone who is trying to get some fancy new 3D printable tomato cages going before the plants get tall and dangerous and I’ve been doing this for a while.
So you really probably want to de-complicate this, either by only making planters that are sized for the printer or finding a existing planter that’s the right size but not self-watering and designing just the self-watering part. You’ll probably learn a lot about the right way to do one this year and then next year you can attack the next generation of the planters.
The problem with printing in pieces is that you are going to have to make sure that the joints are strong enough for the weight of the soil. This is why using a ready-made outer container might help. In the same way, what you really want is something finger-ish or jigsaw-ish so that the pieces align themselves more easily and interlock.
You will probably want a fatter nozzle, otherwise this is going to take forever to print.
PETG seems to have worked fairly well for me for outdoor stuff? Coating or paint or whatnot is handy. You might want to look at the epoxy family? If you can print on the balcony, you might consider ASA which is totally fine for outdoor use with no paint.
FreeCAD is a bit of a learning curve? The thing that FreeCAD would make easier is a parametric model, where you say that you want a 400 x 400 x 300 planter. Except that if you are really serious about making large self-watering planters that are parametric, you are going to end up wanting to write code to make it all happen, which either means the Python in FreeCAD, the Python in Blender, or maybe just use OpenSCAD.
One avenue, which is also too big of an ask for this season, is making a multi-part model to cast the large pieces in concrete.
Another avenue would be to just design around the outside being wood and the 3D printed parts being brackets and jigs and connectors and the self-watering bits.
My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.
“lucky” assignment.
It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.
There really aren’t any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.
I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.
Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they’d gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they’d have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can’t even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.
And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn’t have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle’s cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.
There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we’ve got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.
Then again, here’s this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything’s fine and the bulk doesn’t matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo… yeah.
The more I think about it, it’d ruin the magic of the story if “Max” got outed. If “Max” goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but … even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I can’t find it on IMDB.
My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.
We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There’s nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don’t have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.
Given things lately, I think it’s healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right “tech subculture” cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.
I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There’s, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind … but at the same time, there’s a lot of the science fiction canon where I’d probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.
And, likewise, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don’t have.
“Tell me about your favorite science fiction book” is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that’s, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It’s checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.
On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.
If you want to make a better interview, I’d suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.
If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren’t serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren’t a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they’d not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.
The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.
If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.
Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.
Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.
Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.
IoT devices are, to be quite honest, a shitshow. Where your Sovol counts as such.
Either the device needs to call upstream to get updates or it’s going to ship with a security bug that can be exploited. Or, in may cases, it’ll have an unpatched security vulnerability and it’ll call upstream to get updates.
It costs money to keep the necessary cloud infrastructure in place, both in terms of hosting costs as well as devops time. Either they will eventually need to brick the device, leave it unpatched forever, charge you some maintenance fee, go bankrupt, or fund the whole thing by selling your data.
It’s not hard to write a bot that would scan for signs of a Sovol printer, try the default SSH password, and do nefarious things. And people are generally really bad about the default SSH password regardless.
There’s not really a good answer here for IoT devices. There’s not even a really great answer for home brew IoT devices with the thing where Home Assistant’s reverse-tunnel service had a nasty vulnerability that let you remote HA instances.
Aaand… IPv6 is great. But unfortunately the way things are now means that giving everything on your network a publicly routable IPv6 address is a very bad idea.
Klipper provides a lot of protections but all of that hinges on the microcontroller, so presumably an attacker can upload a substitute firmware using the update mechanism that would go full send on the heaters, which has the potential to actually melt some things.
The problem is that if you want Klipper, you need a full Linux. This is not actually a problem for the Klipper devs, mind you, because they wrote a cool tool for people comfortable modding their printers and only BTT and Obico sponsor Klipper. This was a lot less of a problem when we were talking about Marlin printers. Except that if people weren’t using Klipper, it’s just too damn easy to write a two-piece controller software in the same fashion of Klipper and get the expediency of writing code in Linux instead of in an os-less microcontroller.
tl;dr: there is no safe way to buy a printer with klipper on it, it just looks like it works right now.
FYI: Text sometimes work when calls don’t. Text use much less bandwidth.
Sure… but… not all municipalities let you text 911. And with the way modern phones are being implemented with VoIP+LTE and iMessage/RCS and some of the very exciting failure modes of modern networking… I’m having a very real concern that even if my municipality lets me text 911 (I don’t remember offhand but I think mine does) that if I actually needed to dial 911 under relatively prosaic emergencies like a silly little power outage, I might be out of luck.
I’m not convinced on the cell phone thing. Every time there’s even a minor thing around where I am, like a dinky little power outage, everybody grabs their cellphone and my service goes to crap, so much so that when I’ve tried to work through a power outage with my phone, I’ve worked out of my wife’s car after having driven somewhere that does have power.
Also, a standard ham radio uses a lot less power than the entire chain of phone plus network equipment. So, sure, there’s cell tower trucks with generators but a ham rig needs a dinky little solar panel.
I guess it depends on your aspirations and where you live?
A radio that can hit the bands longer than the 10 meter band is pricey. Which is why Ham has traditionally been the sort of hobby that a distinguished older white gentleman does, not a thing for regular people.
On the other hand, a cheap VHF/UHF handheld radio can be really quite cheap (Baofeng radios being an example). You will only be able to talk to the local area but most areas have a repeater in convenient geographic locations (mountaintops, ideally) that will listen on one frequency and then transmit at higher power on another frequency so that you can reach a wider area. So in my area for the EmComm use-case, there’s a whole organized VHF/UHF system of volunteers.
Oh yeah, and you can also screw around with putting custom firmware on WiFi devices or Meshtastic in Ham mode.
I dono… I’d like to think that there’s useful things especially these days to be done with Ham radio and that it’s not just a thing that is just for distinguished older white gentlemen, but it’s kinda hamstrung (LOL, pun) by the present-day audience that’s preventing people from seeing what it could be.
Funny you ask because I literally just got my ham license because of this.
Radio works without infrastructure. Okay there’s some ham stuff that is internet-connected et al but overall you are just spewing radio waves into the ether with a variety of simple encodings and someone else can pick them up. So powering a few radios off of a dinky solar panel and battery combo is no biggie, whereas powering cell towers, routing infrastructure, et al is a bunch of generators that need to be fueled and whatnot.
Like… you can hit the 20-meter-and-longer wavelengths with a radio and a random bit of wire and some ingenuity and get your signal all over the place. And the maximum power you are ever allowed is 1500 watts and most folks can make do with far less power than that.
Also, amateur radio has fun stuff to do other than mere EmComm needs. Part of why Twitter used to be handy in a pinch for lesser-disasters in days past was that it could be used for EmComm needs but also had other fun stuff to be done with it. Things that are “just” for EmComm infrastructure tend to get forgotten about and abandoned and rot away to nothingness.
A lot of areas in the US have ARES/RACES orgs to provide an already organized group of people… but some of the fun games that hams play like POTA/SOTA, Field Days, et al also serve to make it fun to have a portable setup.
The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?
So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.
I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.
Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?
Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.
My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.
I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.
I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.
…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.
Not really, although that was clearly a popular impression created by the 1980s Right Stuff movie.
Both the US and USSR had the A4/V-2 rocket and both the US Redstone and USSR R-11/SS-1 “Scud” were grown-up and bug-fixed versions thereof.
The US kept the Operation Paperclip folks going throughout the program, leading to Von Braun’s team designing the Saturn V rocket, even though the Redstone Arsenal / Marshall Space Flight Center folks didn’t design some of the other rockets.
The USSR kept their Germans under a tight leash and every time they designed a rocket, they’d have the Soviet team design the same thing, they’d compare, and then after a few years, they sent back their Germans to live in obscurity because the Soviet team had gotten good enough.
Thus big rockets ended up being a German ex-Nazi party member, Von Braun and his Saturn V vs a Ukranian, Korolev and his N-1.
Thus, an astonishing number of rockets are based off of the A-4 design, many of them with the Scud as the middle step. And neither America nor Russia gets to really take credit for their chief designer, where obviously both men were mostly acting to provide structure to the giant armies of engineers who did the actual work (but doing it well, the USSR program really screwed things up after Korolev passed away). But there was a bunch of really neat bits of rocket science that the USSR did in the 70s-80s that was well above where the US was specifically because while Korolev was Von Braun’s generation, most of the newly taught Soviet scientists were not. Where, again, the real problem was that Korolev didn’t have any good successor leaders and the USSR was in a state of stagflation.
And you can say many things about the USSR space program, but they were significantly less “nazi” than the US program.