Daniel GraceI haven't written anything here in a while, but that's not because I haven't been working on this at all. I've just been working more slowly than I wanted to, and no single day feels like I wanted to write an update. But cumulatively it might be enough now, and I can also go over what the delays have been and what the future looks like. First, a spoiler list.
- My 10-year old daughter is now my "boss."
- There is (probably) a commercial product coming out of this.
- I am making a reflow oven. It should be done shortly.
- I am designing some custom boards. The RP2040 board is the next to be sent off/tested.
- I am going to build a Voron 0.1 as part of the commercial stuff.
- I am considering more projects on here.
10 Year Old Boss
I have been trying to teach my 10 year old daughter responsibility. At the same time, I am bad about starting 20 projects and finishing none of them. So I've started a thing where every Friday, I give my daughter a list of my deadlines for the week, and list of things I want to eventually work on but aren't deadlined. She's enjoying holding me to task, and it's probably good for me, too. They aren't all work-or-project related. The first one was cleaning my work area. I call her my boss to make it more fun for her, and because it amuses me, too.
Commercial Product
I don't know if I've said this before, but this project actually started in part because I'm itching to create a commercial product. I ran my own business many years ago, have been in the corporate world again for a while, and am looking to dip my toes back into being a business. My wife and I technically co-own a business (it's my old company name, she's using it to do consulting), but I wasn't doing anything in the business.
3d printing being one of my hobbies, I immediately went about trying to solve a problem that is being inadequately solved in 3d printers. There's a lot, honestly. The biggest trick is finding a good balance of price and quality. I do not want to put out a shoddy product, but 3d printer people seem to be very price-conscious. And the pandemic isn't really helping that.
I am not ready yet to 100% lock in what parts will be commercial, even though I have an idea at this point.
Reflow Oven
I am making a reflow oven. Getting basic functionality is on my list for this week, so my daughter will yell at me if I don't. It has been taking a decent amount of time, but isn't special or unique enough for me to want to spin up a project page for it.
Custom Boards
I really want to make custom control boards for my 3d printer. Doing so requires working with no-lead SMD components and SMD components with pitches < 0.5mm. It's a hassle, hence the reflow oven. I should be sending off one of the most important prototype boards to be manufactured this week if I follow my schedule. I have already purchased the hard-to-find components to insulate myself from the chip shortage in the short term. This is what I expect this log to be mostly about in the short term.
Voron 0.1
While I still want a fully-custom 3d printer, and this project isn't dead, there are three reasons to build a not-designed-by-me printer. In no particular order: The only printer I have right now is an Ender 3 v2 which I am tired of fixing. I can take design ideas from the other printers more easily if I am more intimately familiar with them (cad drawings are nice, but don't give you everything). And the commercial product will likely mostly be used by people upgrading their own printers, and I would be served well by designing for that purpose.
More Projects
One of the people I follow the closest on here has a lot of projects. I follow a number of them, and I honestly don't even notice when/if one of the projects doesn't get that many updates because they are always updating some project. I am considering doing something similar so I don't go silent when my interest is on something else. I haven't committed to that yet, and I don't even know where to draw the lines exactly. But I thought I'd mention it here to see if anyone had strong feelings about that. Especially if kevinA, the person I'm referring to, wants to chime in with how they like the running of it behind the scenes.
Discussions
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> 10 Year Old Boss
Finally. Someone out there giving 10 year olds the responsibility I always knew we had at that age. Being an adult when you're a kid is so much cooler than being an adult when you're actually an adult.
> Commercial Project
3D printer *consumer/prosumer* people tend to be price consious. Industrial (and some consumer/prosumer) people just want a tool that works "Truly Convinient"-ly. The most recent thing I read that makes me think this are the comments in this article: https://www.theverge.com/23012424/anker-first-3d-printer-ankermake-m5-price-specs-launch
> Reflow Oven
I feel like that is project-able. How else are people following someones pick-and-place robot project supposed to finish their boards? Also, think of other projects found on places like YouTube; it could be a cool table they just made. What about all the calculator apps on the App Store?
> More Projects
Leading from my reflow oven comment, I did a week+ of research into other projects on the site to get an idea on what people made projects about, how far they got, how many logs they made, etc. Finishing that, my number 1 conclusion was no project or project log is too small. This is part of the reason why I made a custom "no image yet" image for my projects. One of the projects that inspired my small project thinking is the one where they're trying to compile Cura from source code.
There's a reason why Hackaday has options for things like "shelved project", "researching project" and "completed project", and I'd assume it's because hackers in general still want to see what was accomplished, and there's always the option to change project types in the future. And the future is who I write for. It's more likely that someone's going to stumble on my projects 2 years down the line, and so I post a minimum viable log and update anything afterwards since it's unlikely that someone's going to see it less than an hour after its posted.
Also, I try and make the barrier to writing a log as low as possible. Quite a few of mine have titles which are just square bracket tags and are otherwise unnamed. If it's a 1-liner, I think that's still fine. I can get something I was thinking about out of my mind (as if Hackaday.io is a second brain, like Obsidian), the project doesn't look like it's indefinitely frozen, and people following the project are probably like "aight I only had to read for 5 seconds and now I'm up to date" instead of sitting there, like me, going "man... it's been a while since I last heard of that one project... has it gone the way of the rest? (read: has it died?) And it was a cool project too..."
Additionally, there have been a few occasions when I was only planning on 1 or 2 sentences and, at the end of writing it, I think "Huh; that's actually a fully featured project log. There was actually more to say than I originally thought."
Another way to think about it are micro articles instead of "project". Writing logs just so that if someone asks, you can say "I wrote more information here" or if You In The Future wants to know why something in the project is being done that way, almost like "project comments".
Also, 🎉🥳 wooo I got my first shoutout!
> Voron
That sounds like a good idea. Looking at AliExpress, Vorons are probably the second largest upgrade aftermarket after the Ender's. They also have the ability to print fast. (It's more like overclocking though. At least now I have an idea on what kind of effort must go into the 2x speed increases for engineers working on the next PCIe standard.)
[other comments]
Huh... this comment took almost an hour to write. 😅
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