#weeklyreview 03/24

On Monday it was the birthday for one of our kids. As that kid absolutely isn’t into gifts we had to come up with something else. As a surprise my wife came to Berlin and payed us a visit and we had fancy donuts and a cheese fondue for dinner. That was great fun.

Got myself a Nintendo Switch for a few weeks. Just to try whether it might entertain me and the kids for a while. And it’s surprisingly good so far. I like the fact that you can play on the go or on the big screen in multi-player mode. Also their controller concept is pretty versatile. In two month I’m checking whether I’ll keep it or not.

Got an Xbox 360 with Kinect collecting dust here since years. The concept was great. But then again we didn’t really made use of it.

I finally managed to get Klipper working on my 3D printer. Klipper is an alternative firmware to control the printer. The original firmware for my Creality Ender 3 V2 is based on the popular Marlin Firmware. That sits directly on the controller board (MCU) of the printer and controls all the hardware component and executes the printing of G-Code files.

Klipper in contrast is modular. Only a very basic firmware is flashed onto the controller board of the printer and acts as counterpart to the more complex Klipper Host process that sits on a computer. In my case a RaspberryPi 4. The computer hosting the Klipper host process is usually more powerful than the MCU of the printer and can perform more stuff to make for a smooth print. The Raspberry Pi is connected via USB-Serial to the printer to connect Klipper host process and Klipper firmware.

The downside is, that one has to configure Klipper properly for the printer. There are readymade profiles for popular printers available that should give a good start. But I have modified my Ender quite a bit and thus had to do a whole lot of calibrations for the Dual Z-Axes, the direct drive Extruder, Filament sensor, CR-Touch probe etc.

This process was what ticked me off last time I tried. I just couldn’t get a reliable print out with Klipper. And I didn’t had issues with my Marlin Firmware to begin with. So back then, I switched back to Marlin. This time I wanted to get it working to be able to support a friend who just recently got a used Ender 3 V2 with Klipper firmware.

Eventually I got it all running and even installed “Klipper Advanced Mesh & Purging” (KAMPS) and configured Input Shaping thanks to some helpful articles. KAMPS will analyse the G-Code files and then do the bed calibration with the probe just on the area of the bed where the model will be printed. This gives much more accurate information because it just probes the small printing area with the same amount of probe points. Makes for a better 1st layer.

Input Shaping is voodoo where you measure the printers vibrations during movements and calculate resonance frequencies and the best way to compensate these vibrations during print. I had to solder a sensor and cable to connect the motion sensor to the raspberry pi and then conduct the measuring (fortunately that only needs to be done on hardware changes on the printer).

Finally I was able to produce some acceptable prints that I promised to a friend.

On Saturday we did a day trip to Binz. First time since 2017 that my wife had been there. It was great. The weather was OK and we had good lunch in the famous “Strandhalle” and took a walk on the beach. It wasn’t too crowded as its really off-season at the moment and the weather wasn’t inviting for a long walk.

The lake had ice last weekend already. But it was just 5cm and a friend took the effort to make a hole so we could at least dip in.

#weeklyreview 11/23

Obviously didn’t manage to get the weekly review done before Sunday. Weekend was rather busy as the weather finally felt spring-like and we got a lot stuff done on the property and in the garden.

We put in a tree to hopefully give us some shade in the summer (not this year, but maybe next year already)

replanted the tomatoes seedlings and also cleaned up the property. Since we had borrowed a large trailer over the weekend I was able to bring a lot of old stuff and trash to the local recycling yard. It’s amazing that you can just got there and get easily rid of most of your stuff that doesn’t belong or fit into the normal trash bins. Its free as its included in our yearly waste treatment fee. I’m always tempted to rummage trough the large scrap containers and get out useful stuff (like old electronics).

Hosting

This week I’ve installed my own instance of Overleaf – a web based LaTeX editor for collaboration. Not that I’m in need of LaTeX document system at the moment… but it’s always nice to play around with such stuff.

Mastodon updated to v4.1.1

Installed a Jenkins-Cron-Job to repopulate replies to my mastodon instance as suggested by Matt.

3D Printing

Got quite a bit of 3D printing done. Leveled my printbed properly and I’m still amazed how smooth prints come out with the right filament and settings on this rather cheap printer. Uploading the timelapse videos to my PeerTube Instance in their own channel.

I switched to a newer version of OctoPi and it was just really smooth. Simply download a backup bundle on the old instance and feed that to the setup wizard on the new instance. Thats it. Everything was just there again. No need to change our touch a single thing. I could just go on-printing.

Gina Häußge (aka @foosel@chaos.social ) is really doing a fantastic job with this piece of software.

Sport

Oh boy was I lazy this week. Almost no sport at all. Running partner still sick, office gym showers closed and me too lazy.

I hope at least the physical activity on the weekend and hauling that bulky package count a little bit.

And of course we went swimming despite some rain.

beast of burden

Today I was tasked with shipping a rather large and bulky package. How hard can this be? Short answer: very hard (if you don’t want to spent hundreds of EUR on it)

The object to be shipped is a rather stiff case. I thought I was well prepared with bubble wrap and some wrapping film. Oh boy was I wrong.

Took me about one hours to carefully pack the thing, wrap it first in bubble wrap and then in a couple of layers of wrapping film (like the one you might use in the kitchen to keep bowls of food fresh).

Went to the website of DHL (the shipping company of choice for this project) to check on the price and figured that the packaging material will have to be paper or cardboard to avoid the bulky load surplus charges.

Fortunately I still had some packaging paper large enough. Another round of wrapping and taping. Finally I put the monster into a large IKEA bag and trotted off to the nearest post office. Thats about 800m from here. Hauling this bulky thing which comes in at 15 kg is not as easy as one might imagine. The bag straps cut into my fingers and my arms are about 10cm longer now.

In the post office I learned another requirement for stuff you want to ship at lowest possible cost: it has to be box shaped so it can be stacked.

My package had one side with a hump and thus would again count as bulk load with a hefty surplus charge. As I’m frugal … I hauled the whole thing back home to organize a cardboard box large enough to contain the package and small enough to not exceed the shipping boundaries again.

In addition I 3D printed myself a bag strap holder to ease the cutting of the straps a bit. That came out rather nice and make a huge difference when carrying such heavy loads.

To be continued …