Doing the Reprap #12 — First extrusion

Last Friday, while Pilvari Pirtolas had his opening here at gallery Titanik, I was sitting in an adjacent room and fiddled with my machine. I had managed to get the extruder to heat up and the thermistor to register in Pronterface — a previous day of troubleshooting revealed that I’d connected the hotend to the wrong two pins of the Gen7 board — and now it was heating up with no problem and only a slightly worrying amount of smoke. Once it was mounted on the Accesible Wade’s extruder I was good to go for extrusion test.

I got some visitors from the opening next door, and it was fun to see some people react with curiosity and others with disinterest to the machine. To the uninitiated it looks mostly like a heap of metal and plastic, so the awesome disruptive power isn’t always readily apparent, so I got to practice my pedagogical skills on young and old, tipsy and wasted alike. Once I realized that all motors had the wrong polarity in relation to the Teacup firmware, I pressed “reverse” instead of “extrude” and lo! there was extrusion and much exaltation all around!

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Partial moon over Gothenburg

Continuing our experiments with GIF animations, I’m surprised by how crap the gif support is in Photoshop. And on Mac, there aren’t any alternatives for files larger than 100×100 px or so. Also, export for web seems to gunk up the cache; Files no larger than five megabytes crash the app, and each rendering takes a minute or two. Are there any good alternatives? Something as flexible as PS but faster (or, y’know, actually working) and maybe with a few more dithering options would be awesome. GIF is the most ubiquitous format for Internet animations, and it’s just too darn fun to play with not to use.