No, but investors tend to treat companies as either growing or dying. If you have a boring and reliable product you’re going to saturate the market at some point, which means that revenue will fall. Arguably there’s still a lot of value in sticking around selling replacements as people break things, but this is nowhere near as lucrative as the growth phase.

Very nice! The behind the scenes timelaps was a bit mind blowing to someone who understands everything you did, but could never accomplish what you accomplished.

You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.

I’m not going to try to dissuade you from getting a 3D scanner, but for functional prints a pair of calipers, some radius gauges, and a profile gauge will you really far. Once you get some reps in with CAD it also won’t take you long to model your designs. CAD is a great skill to learn and as you do this again and again you’ll start modifying your designs to make them easier to print.

Haha, that’s… juicy. Thanks!

For those out of the loop, what happened?

Some of the arm based windows laptops, and even the newer x86 windows laptops, get pretty good battery life these days too. In my personal life, I have both an arm based MacBook and windows laptop. Both get similar battery life. I do wish there was an easy way to get Linux running on the windows laptop though.

At work it’s usually all the corporate… bloat/security stuff that kills windows. I recently made the work switch to a MacBook and the difference is night and day.

In the corpo world, office integration with OneDrive and Teams is pretty nice too.

Very nice! Welcome to the joys of designing and making functional parts. I suggest doing two things:

1. Print, or buy, some radius gauges
2. Make some test parts to understand how your filament and printer behave. For example, materials like ASA will shrink. I’ve also found that outer dimensions are much more true to CAD than inner dimensions, especially for things like smaller diameter holes for threads. Some text prints will help you figure out what input results in a given output

These are the end of year tomatoes that didn’t have a chance to ripen on plant. If OP has a decently long growing season, they probably harvested a few multiples or that. For example, bandywine tomatoes weigh in at 1-2 pounds each and one plant will produce… quite a few tomatoes.

Sauce: I grow tomatos in my garden too

Way back when there was an American filament company that sold… very reasonably priced filament that actually printed well. As they got more popular they couldn’t keep up with demand and it seemed like they started cutting corners. This resulted in their filament not having a consistent diameter as well as the occasional foreign object in the filament (a bit of charred plastic?), which lead to jams for many of us. They ultimately went out of business due to their reputation of struggling to fill orders and inconsistent quality.

If you still have the chunk of filament you cut off and also have some calipers I suggest measuring the end that you were trying to feed into your extruder. You could have had a physical clog, especially if your extruder was clicking.

Late to the party, by quite a big margin, but I have some thoughts having gone the commercial and DIY routes on this with two rounds of raised beds.

First, drip irrigation = great. Soaking the soil slowly is way better than flooding it and having a lot of the water simply roll off. It also keeps water of leaves, which is generally good for your plants.

I found homeowner grade commercial systems effective, but also fiddly and expensive. I was happy with the Rain Bird setup in my first garden after I installed an inline pressure regulator. The pressure regulator was necessary because we have very good water pressure out our spigot, even after 50’ of hose. The Rain Bird system didn’t offer much flexibility year over year. For example, if I planted a sprawling zucchini one year and wanted to put tomatoes or peppers there the next I was cutting hoses and swapping fittings as you can fit multiple tomatoes/peppers in in the space of one zucchini. Draining everything for winter was also fiddly and I would inventively lose a few parts to the freeze/thaw cycle. These systems are not easy to break down and reuse.

My original garden beds wound up getting torn out when we pulled out our pool and I went the DIY route with our second garden setup. Instead of running a hose to my beds, as I had before, I dug a trench and laid PVC pipe underground. Each of my beds has its own ball valve to help balance flow/pressure. On the house side, I PVC glued a hose adapter that I use to tie into a hose bib. I usually have a brass Y valve attached to it, so I can either send water to my garden or the hose.

None of the PVC pipes or fittings downstream of the ball valves have any PVC glue on them, so draining them for winter is super easy. Inside the beds I simply laid the PVC on the ground and drilled 1/8" holes into them every few inches. If you ask your favorite search engine, you can find a number of articles/videos showing variations of this technique. I do have a sprinkler in my raspberry bed, as raspberry canes are weeds and row style irrigation doesn’t work well for them.

Despite using drip irrigation, powdery mildew on squashes and gourds seems unavoidable due to my garden’s location. It’s flanked by trees on its eastern side, which means it doesn’t get direct sun until 10-11 in the morning.

… I hope this wall of text is helpful. Feel free to ask for follow ups.

Fellow Voron builder. I agree that getting reps in on other things made the build a lot easier. I found the mechanical portion of the build very straightforward thanks to things like flat pack furniture and Legos - it’s basically being able to follow well documented spacial instructions. Wiring wasn’t particularly difficult, but I’ve crimped things and built wiring harnesses before. The thing I was the most apprehensive about was getting the pi running and the initial tune, but everything is so well documented even that was pretty straightforward.

The Voron build is absolutely long, but it’s surprisingly approachable and well thought out. I guess that’s why there hasn’t been a revision in a while.

We used a PS3, and now a PS5, for such a use. It’s a great Blu-Ray player. There are also apps for most streaming platforms. It supports both Plex and Jellyfin.

A raspberry PI setup, running VLC with a computer/NAS DLNA serve, might be interesting to try too.

Are you using something to hold your camera, like a tripod, and some kind of jig/fixture to hold the film in place? Ideally you wouldn’t need to touch the camera and the film would be positioned consistently between shots. Without some kind of setup scanning will be very fiddly as you need to be perfectly centered/squared/etc.

Could the camera possibly be moving some between shots? Are you shooting wide open?

As for focus changing with lens rotation, that would indicate something in your lens lacking axial symmetry. An uncentered/decentered element, an element that’s not ground just so, etc.

Seconding the cat suggestion. Our cats love to lie under the grow lights - it’s nice and warm.

I wonder if pre-shooting, or whatever canon calls their implementation of this feature, would help? Granted, a long exposure should catch it too, but unless you’re constantly going to be taking long exposures…

Excellent content as always. It’s always fun when your gear encourages you to get other gear - flashlights, camera lenses…

I got morbidly curious about this thing. AliExpress.us turned up no hits. DuckDuckGo turned up this listing, but it doesn’t look like they ship to the US. It’s also $41.25. Scrolling down to the more to love section revealed what looks to be the same knife, but for $18.47 with US shipping. Closer inspection makes it seem like you get two for that $18.47.

One costs just $6.43.

So, the joys of shopping direct from China. Also why I’m wary of buying direct, lol. What the heck are you really getting? At these prices it doesn’t really matter, but it irritates my “don’t be a wasteful slob” sensibilities.

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Some level of rotational play on lenses is normal, but one wouldn’t normally put enough torque on the lens for it to be an issue. It sounds like the focus ring is a bit stiff? It might loosen up some with time, but I have not ever used any TTArtisan glass.

Simply rotating the lens relative to the body shouldn’t impact focus. Focus is all about the distances between elements relative to the sensor and rotation shouldn’t change that.

If you’re looking for opinions it might be worth popping over to something like Fred Miranda or DP Review if no one else here can chime in. Sadly, the fediverse is somewhat small and those sites have big/active forums.