Day: June 14, 2012

Did Termites Eat My Print?

I was printing out the x-end-motor for a new Reprap I’m designing yesterday. The bottom was printing beautifully:

I baby sat it for the first 2:15, and went to bed during the remaining 15 minutes of the print.  I woke up the next morning to find this:

At first, I thought my hot end had jammed again, so I cleaned it out.  After wasting the whole morning getting partway through a bunch of prints and wasting a ton of filament, I found the real culprit.  The grub screw that holds the small gear onto my extruder motor shaft had completely unscrewed itself!  The prints would start out OK, and then fail after the motor warmed up, and the heat softened the plastic of the gear, loosening its grip.  Grr! Rather than reprinting the part, I’m going to just fill the gaps with JB Weld.

Raspberry Pi Case

I was not fast enough to get an order in for a Raspberry Pi on launch day.  Fortunately, a kind friend of mine thought of me, and bought an extra one for me.  I received it yesterday, and printed this case:

The case I made is a copy of HansH’s excellent Raspberry Pi case, modified with a slot that added on the top to accomodate access to the GPIO pins.  I uploaded it to Thingiverse:  Raspberry Pi Case with GPIO Access.  Here’s the first sucessful boot of my Raspberry Pi:

It looks so tiny sitting in front of my 52″ plasma.  I was pleasantly surprised to see it boot up at full 1080 resolution.  At first, I thought the HDMI port was bad, because it didn’t work with a cable that I know is good, but it turns out the Pi is just picky about HDMI cables.  I swapped in a different one, and it worked.  Now, I have a lot of reading to do… yet another gadget to play with…