A Dice Tower Gift, Part 2
By T. H. Wright
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Halting Production
The Dice Tower has been completed for some time. After printing this Dice Tower1 off, I had plans to make several posts regarding the print, but it took me a month to take the still photos of the print and during that time, I chose to upgrade a portion of my Original Prusa i3 Mk2, specifically the RAMBo Mini’s case hung on the back.
My extruder’s cable came out from the rear side of the case at the top, and it dragged in the front left of the build plate—near the LCD screen on the side where the RAMBo Mini is held. I wanted to be cautious with the cables connected to the board, so I removed them and then sought to attach the new printed case. (The model was this Housing for RAMBo Mini2, which moved the extruder’s cable to the top of the RAMBo Mini but was designed for the Original Prusa i3 MK1.)
Unfortunately, that case was too small! I didn’t want to reattach the cables to attempt the print again, only to have to remove them again when testing the print size; I turned to the contingent of 3D printers at my work and had my friend W. to print off the case for me again. I gave him my adjusted measurements, he printed the design, and brought it into work once finished. I tried the reprint but once more it was askew in size. I gave him a new set of adjustments and he printed it a second time for me. This one fit, but was still somewhat imperfect (as are most prints).
I attached the RAMBo to the case and the case to the frame and tested out the motion of the axes; unfortunately, the build plate’s cable snagged on a zip tie on the back of the printer. I thought I had run the upgrade’s course when I found that Prusa had actually released a new version of the RAMBo Mini case for the MK2. I asked W. to print this model off for me and it worked semi-flawlessly: everything fit, but I had broken off a couple of the finer pieces and the screw hole which kept the case shut was too large. I fastened a zip tie through the case’s grates, and it held the case and all its wires shut and clean.
I planned to print the case off a second time with PETG, as W. had used PLA, but the zip tie fastened case works! W. owed me $5, but I told him for the hassle he saved me, his time, and the filament spent I’d discharge the debt. He was glad to help out, especially for the opportunity to save a few dollars while exercising his 3D printer. I was nervous, given the possibility of damaging the wires or the adapters from attaching and detaching them too many times—I think it was well worth the trade.
Yet in all that process, the camera mount 3 I had printed and attached to my Y-axis carriage broke (the print didn’t come out accurate) and I needed some other camera mount to produce future videos. I found a stand4 on Thingiverse and an additional print 5 to elevate the camera’s height as a suitable replacement.
Everything’s Printed, Why So Long for a Video?
As I had mentioned earlier, I planned to do a single post per print job. After setting up YouTube for Redemption Studio, that seemed tedious and unnecessary. Ultimately, I printed a single composite model separated into five pieces (and thought that to spread it out wouldn’t be exciting). On top of that, while borrowing the free music available in YouTube is a blessing, I figured it would be challenging to compile the videos into a single montage with my own music.
A Small, Open-Source Detour
I love Linux. I’ve been tinkering with it since January 2015 and had only been briefly exposed to it before that. I received a Raspberry Pi B+ for Christmas that year as a gift from my father-in-law, who loves Linux for its security. Avidly against Mac at the time and questioning of Linux for its lack of video game support, I opted to dual boot Linux Mint on my laptop’s second HDD to appease his suggestions that I look into it. Up until then, computing had two purposes for me: video games and writing. But I had an idea: what if I ran my own game server?
That desire culminated in running a Minecraft Server. Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi B+ didn’t have the power necessary for a Minecraft server; it wasn’t too long thereafter that the Raspberry Pi 2 was released, and I dove on it. I was on a budget, but the server functioned fine for building and co-op (not so much for fighting monsters and exploring given its limited CPU and RAM). For pennies a month in electricity and a cheap initial investment, it was perfect, plus my friends didn’t mind its shortcomings. Monkeying with that Raspberry Pi led to the purchase of several other Raspberry Pis, and after six months, I applied for a job working with Linux servers and was hired; not bad for six months of hobby work! Since then, I have immersed myself into many parts of Linux on both the workstation and the server side of the operating system.
Something I have come to appreciate is open-source software. While the notion of it all being free (which it isn’t) is great, understanding exactly what the code of software I utilize is doing has been the greatest benefit. Given the frequency of news stories detailing some-such compromise or malicious attack and situations I deal with at work involving attacks on servers over the past several years has only made me appreciate its security. As a consequence, I have become suspicious of proprietary source code—those who don’t tell me what their code is doing—for better or for worse. I don’t want to discourage proprietary code, rather, I encourage transparency through open-source. All of this has expanded my use of computers to realms I never bothered to explore. The power that Linux puts into my hands for everyday computing has been phenomenal and I don’t look back on Windows at all. (It probably helps that I haven’t had time for gaming lately and knowing that the Vulkan API has been released may mean Linux will one day be a truly viable gaming system.)
Where Was I Going?
Now that I’ve walked with you around the barn, suffice to say, within the past week I discovered the Linux Multi Media Studio (LMMS) open-source software. As a man of a million hobbies, adding music composition to the list seemed only proper. I played the clarinet for four years and had dreamed of writing music during my band class at public school, but now it seemed far more feasible. I began tinkering away with the software but had trouble getting the Fedora version of LMMS to load with the VeSTige extension necessary for loading the VST files it uses for additional instruments. I turned to a VM of KXStudio, touted as the sound artists distro, and managed to get the extension to load. Sadly the VST files errored out on being loaded and I still haven’t managed to resolve that issue, which leaves us right where we started: having to use free music from YouTube. But not all was in vain! Even with these setbacks, I could still create a more electronic/techno/8-bit-esque song and I plan to do so when I can find the time.
The Final Prints
With all the work done on my printer, I created an rsync script to sync my Slic3r-Prusa Edition models to my OctoPi, but forgot to exclude the metadata files which stored the print times from the rsync (thus losing the metadata files), and have since forgotten how long each print took to complete. Nonetheless and long overdue, the time lapses of the second floor, third floor, left stairs, and right stairs are below. All in all, they printed over the course of around twenty hours apiece. These were printed at a 100μm (0.1mm) layer height as the first in PLA with a brim and without support. I will provide the scripts I created with the assistance of the Internet and my father-in-law at https://files.redemption.studio/scripts. The scripts work as a frontend for FFMPEG and were used to create the video below.