• 3 Posts
  • 428 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • That sounds about right. QA is expensive and time consuming, so it’s left up to the customer. This applies to every single part in the supply chain.

    If you want a set of mitsumi linear rails for real precision applications, it’s going to cost just as much or more than that printer.

    This is not a “buyer beware” rant, but the buyer should know they aren’t paying for consistency or precision. I am basically saying that for these printers to work reliably and with proper precision, you need to tear them down yourself and inspect each bolt.

    I buy cheap Chinese stuff all the time, but my process is to tear the product down and find where costs were cut and look for any serious dangers.

    Svol is well known enough that you should be able to get replacement bits for free. Or not. It’s a crap shoot, TBH.




  • It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.




  • Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

    I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

    However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

    Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

    OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

    What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

    My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.


  • Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

    It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

    I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.



  • I just let it run without the resin vat and the RERF default print (with the characters) does actually trigger different exposures.

    But yeah, the filename is super important as it triggers a test mode where the plate is exposed at 8 different spots at 8 different times per layer.

    I’ll need to create my own test file and test it with and without the characters. It’s something I can test, but was hoping someone knew off the top of their head. (I was in the middle of my first ever resin print when I banged out this post, actually.)





  • Quick addendum: Cheap digital hygrometers from Amazon can be off by as much as 10% or more and are kinda pointless, poorly designed and a waste of batteries.

    Simply using some color changing desiccant will save you a few bucks. (It’s something I use here in Colorado for my jars of… “entertainment products”… that is legal here, in addition to my filaments.)

    There is desiccant available that is formulated to hold specific humidity levels but filament is better served by pure silica gel.



  • I started to design one myself but realized it was a bad idea. For starters, and effective design wouldn’t use much plastic: Bamboo or other kinds of material used for the tubes already stack together really well and it is much easier to stack them in a box glued together or use thin wire to bind them. Any additional design components translates to waste, IMHO.

    And like you said, the plastic is bad to keep outside. If it wasn’t for the moisture, direct sunlight would deform most common materials.