Hey! I learned something!
Trying to create a model of a Panasonic Insta-something camera. (My wife loves it):
This is what I got (sparse, dense):
Looking from above, there might be some lens distortion – the edges of the room do not appear to be square:
In general, though, I think the problem is that a) the model is too dark, and b) the model is too small.
I decided to switch models for something lighter, and take the pictures closer up.
When given a client who has a lot of work that needs to be done.. and as the work progresses, other ideas form, older ideas lose priority, etc – how does one show progress?
The specific statement that spurred this was “You guys were supposed to be done N time ago”. True, for the scope from N-1, the date agreed to was N. How can I show you how things have changed since then? How can we agree on when things will actually get done?
What I started to do is keep track of work by when it was introduced into the queue. Each month got its own mini-burndown. In the picture above, pay attention to the spaces between the lines, not the lines themselves.
I like that this graph shows:
An additional thing was to somehow show time taken by production issues – unplanned, un-estimated things. Overall, quite slight – less than 10% of the project?
Before I let this post, I need to show it to the client to ensure that I’m not divulging too much information.
As I come in to work now, what did I see
Laid out on the side of the road
A mound full of Teddy Bears winking up at me
Laid out on the side of the road
It turns out this is the work of Korsair Bears on Patrol. It’s a stuffed animal drive; collected by, in this case, United Health Care and Optium. (see their names in the first picture on the sign). They started out at 700, then 4000, and this year it snowballed to 13000+. Today was media day, media was arriving at 11:30, so they were trying to set the bears out to make for a better shot.
But it was really windy. The plastic kept getting blown about. They tried water bottles. I raided my parking lot for larger stones of gravel. Turns out, the solution was to dump more bears down on the plastic, like this boss is doing. They said by the time all the bears get out there, they should have all the plastic filled up. I might swing back out around lunch time to see that.
The lady said that they used to be in the first floor over in our building, but now they’re on the third floor, and its much harder than they first thought to move that many bears. Never fear, the call has gone out to the rest of their company, and they’re getting the manpower together to get the job done. She showed me a picture oh her phone of a fishbowl conference room – the kind with one wall being all glass – stuffed floor to ceiling with bears.
The purpose of the bears: The police officers and firemen keep them in their vehicles. If they encounter a family in a distressing situation, with a child who needs comforting, out comes the bear to provide some luvvin’ in ways only a teddy bear can.
I love people, and I love people doing good things.
We’re back in business!
The last time I had tried to print something, I noticed a bunch of smoke coming out of “C” in the diagram below. And things were dripping too freely. I had the thermister at position “A” below, just how its supposed to be.
Thanks to acquiring a digital thermometer capable of measuring temperatures up to 200C, I was able to read my own temperatures – and sure enough – Fred in this chart. The real temperature in the barrel was much higher than was being read. Why? This makes no sense!
Well, luckily I had watched a video on how to put a print head back together, and it turns out that I had not looped some Kapton tape around the nozzle first, I had put the thermister directly on there, and then covered it up with tape. I tried it the other way: One loop around with tape, then the thermister, and then another layer of tape, yielding sample Barney. (I also put the fiberglass insulation (tattered, but still in one piece) on it like they suggested.
| Sample | Thermister Location | Temp (C) | Reference Thermometer location | Temp (C) |
| Fred | A / Direct | 130 | C | 170 |
| Barney | A / Kapton | 130 | C | 125 |
| Scooby | B | 130 | C | 125 |
Much better! We’re in business.. almost. While printing, the tape gave way and the thermister fell off.
Why, I wonder? My guess is that by having one loop of kapton tape, and kapton tape is a good heat transfer agent, it gets to sample the average heat from all around the nozzle, all around the thermister, rather than just one side of the thermister. Or something like that. Or maybe there’s just a bad spot on nozzle and I was unlucky.
I tried taping it back on 2 more times. No luck. I seem to have done something to the print head, the wires are shorter now, and after much cursing and screaming, I gave up.
Instead, I put the thermister in at location “B” – inside the fiberglass insulation, which held it snugly in place – and yielded sample Scooby. We still seemed to be in business. And here it is, printing:
The URL to the above camera is https://www.dropcam.com/p/sunnywiz, although there is no guarantee that it will be pointed at a geeky subject at the time this post posts.
(Those things in the picture, btw, are thingamabobs (technical term) that Jason needs in his Arcade machine build)
Yay! so now that its back to working again, what now? Hmmm..
For future time historians, the list of all posts on the clog: http://geekygulati.com/tag/3d-printing+clog/
Jason did a great job on the nozzle, but after I had it up and printing (nicely), i noticed a trail of smoke coming from the PEEK barrel. (Why the heck is it named that?)
I think I have the barrel too far up into the PEEK thingy, and the heat is heading up there and melting things.
Also, with the thermister dialed in for 140, the plastic was dripping freely … i suspect that things are MUCH hotter than they are registering at the moment.
I might need a secondary source to determine real temperature. I wonder if my IR gun can get close enough for an accurate reading.
@jstill is the Man.
Here’s what he did to unclog the nozzle.
I think for good measure, I’m going to pick up some guitar strings and run floss it as well. Then put it on and test. This time, definitely tighter on the barrel .. I think it was loose, when I removed it, there was filament where filament ought not be.
Excited.
Here be a picture of Dan with his head in his hand.
This was done using a video of his head, broken out to frames.. etc etc .. and then an exacto-knife, and glue. The head was rendered with 200 faces, and then further simplified (delete a bunch of complicated faces, fill holes).
Closeup:
I wish there was a way I could print this on plastic that would shrink about 5%, so that I could put a texture around a 3D print of the same thing.
Note: Say the title of this post in the same way as you would “She Blinded Me With Science”
The customer has a screen, which is used for data entry. The source of the entry is various pieces of papers with scribbles on them. On observing the person doing the data entry, what I saw was:
Ouch. We could do better.
I think its pretty cool, I don’t know yet if the user(s) will adopt it, but this is what we came up with.
This is well and good, except, this is what happened in testing:
I spent many hours trying to figure this one out. Its complicated, I still don’t know the full answer, but it has to do with a DockedWindow, a control suite, a Busy indicator, a Ribbon suite, sub-ribbons, and document panels, and when the modal popup went away, focus did not return to the correct window.
Bottom Line: all my attempts to set focus were ignored. Seriously. I even bound a hotkey at the Shell level (the whole application) “F10” to fire code that should set the focus back to the correct window.. and.. nothing.
This problem also extended to any window. Any window, when it first came up, did not have focus, so any hotkeys bound inside that window, would not fire. Till it was clicked in. Then it was okay.
I could still capture hotkeys via the Shell, so this is what I did:
I used the same code to also wire some other hotkeys for some other screens.
I hope to (soon) visit my client’s office in person, and sit down with the folks who would use this “enhancement”, and show them what I had thought. As someone once told me, I have to be careful how many strings I have attached to this: I have to be okay with them taking my awesome idea and putting it in the trash. No strings attached. So I’m blogging about its coolness now, in case its a flop, because right now, I think its pretty cool.
I’ve been putting this off for a bit.
Numbers courtesy of www.fatsecret.com, using their app “Calorie Counter” in the app store, as viewed on their desktop web site.
It looks like I gain weight at a pretty set rate if I don’t watch my eating habits.
Good news: It looks like I can loose it pretty fast, too. Lets see if that’s still real.
Well, we tried. And its better. But it ain’t fixed.
Here’s the first bits of print that came out of it. You can see the dark stuff that was either the old filament or burnt:
However, the stream of filament coming out the end keeps varying. Sometimes its good, and then other times it fizzles out:
Conclusion: There’s something still clogging the bottom thing. More work needs to be done.
