@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

timixretroplays

@timixretroplays@digipres.club

Aussie gamer making new memories from the old. He/him. Writing from Ngunnawal/Ngambri land.

I built a giant Gravis GamePad and am working on USB adapters for old controllers. I beta-tested Secret Agent HD and UnDune2. I once made Toshiba mad at me over copyright. I post mostly #retrogaming, #3dprinting and #arduino stuff here.

Projects:
#Plasbeams
#Thrixels
#CGAPrints
#SerialStinger
#SimpleBreakouts
#SolderingStation
#GravisGamePad

https://justmytoots.com/@timixretroplays@digipres.club

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

I miss the days of spinning hard drives being the norm. It's not nostalgia this time, it's because they were noisy - that sound of rain on a tin roof and a flashing red light was a sign your PC was busy thinking, doing stuff in the background, please wait patiently. Stuff still makes you wait today, but with no feedback of any kind. Has outlook finished loading everything yet? Has teams had its traditional morning crash and reopen yet? Will clicking make things worse? Who can even tell anymore.

timixretroplays, to animals
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Why spend a single cent on complicated cat toys when you can make the most fascinating object in the world by tying a swisspers cotton bud to the end of a shoelace and make it wriggle like a snake? #CatsOfMastodon

Update: She got so excited by it that she demon-growled and sprinted right past it out of the room. I'm calling this invention a success.

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Laser printer ownership continues to be a rewarding and stress-free experience in this, the year of our lord 2024

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@jake4480 someone once explained to me, quite reasonably, that deleting a pending print job is "like trying to delete a locked file", and that doing so is making a lot of assumptions about a thing that a piece of hardware has made a lot of very different assumptions about. So fair enough, this is technically a very strange situation.

That was two decades ago, now. Surely someone could have come up with something better in that time.

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Someone remind me. A thick layer of dust entirely blocking airflow through half of your CPU cooler - good or bad?

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Is there such a thing as a USB-powered screwdriver? I just want something in between a manual screwdriver and a cordless one to quickly buzz screws in and out of stuff at my desk. I don't want yet another battery-powered thing in my life, and "corded screwdrivers" seem to be expensive industrial appliances for putting screws in drywall.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

It looks like the answer is "no" - there's no electric screwdriver that's 100% powered by plugging in a USB cable, they're all either rechargeable or run from AA/AAAs - but given the recognisable brands that are available here in Australia, I think I'm settling on a Bosch Go kit.

The Ryobi is cheaper but doesn't have torque control, the equivalent Makita twists for a pistol grip hold (a point of failure I've seen before), and the Bosch has a push-to-activate feature that intrigues me.

jpm, to random
@jpm@aus.social avatar

Another little blue box of electronics crimes has arrived

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@jpm 0.4mm is pretty close to the smallest increment I'll bother adjusting by to get a 3d print to fit something else. That's the only thing that gives me any sense of scale to what you're attempting and my first thought is "could JLC have supplied the board with U1 pre-installed?"... But I assume what you're doing relies on being able to do that but yourself. Good luck!

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

What email client are people using on desktop these days? Is still the go? My MS Office subscription gives me access to Outlook but it's terrible for personal use (arguably it's terrible for any use, but it's annoying enough that I don't want to use it even though I'm already paying for it).

I was going to make a joke here about going back to Lotus Notes, but it looks like IBM sold it back in 2019, so it wouldn't even feel nostalgic.

Boosts welcome.

timixretroplays, to animals
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

You know those days where it feels like gravity's just a bit too much to deal with?

#CatsOfMastodon #Caturday #Siamese #SiameseCat

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I wonder how well my smartphone would work if I was at the bottom of a lake.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@foone you could approximately test this at an aquarium with an underwater tunnel

timixretroplays, to random
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

you know what I'd really like as a monitor? like, I know they're all basically the same now, but one feature that'd really set it apart for me is having exclusive buttons on the front.

like [VGA][DVI][HDMI1][HDMI2][DP1][DP2][AUTO] [POWER]

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@foone at some point I'm going to properly research EDID and set up command line scripts on my main PC and a little keypad to quickly switch my monitors to different inputs digitally. I hate having to dig around in menus with crappy invisible controls to do it

timixretroplays, to 3DPrinting
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Here's an example of the importance of free, open licensing for #maker stuff. The most popular ice scraper model on Printables didn't have a hole big enough to store on the hooks by our front door, so I downloaded the model, bored a new hole in it, added chamfers to make the modification look consistent with the rest of it, and uploaded a remix. It cost nothing.

Proudly presenting: The Ultimate Ice Scraper With A Bigger Hole In It. https://www.printables.com/model/820425-ultimate-ice-scraper-with-a-bigger-hole-in-it

#3DPrinting @3dprinting @3dprinting

timixretroplays, to 3DPrinting
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

#3DPrinting and other #maker friends who release files under #CreativeCommons, what makes you choose CC-BY-NC (the non-commercial one) over CC-BY or other options (or vice versa)? I'm not here to evangelise one over another, just curious as to people's thought process when picking a license for publishing stuff online.

@3dprinting @3dprinting

masukomi, to random
@masukomi@connectified.com avatar

A while ago I mentioned hunting for a good looking photo box for product photos and finally finding the one pictured below

Well, it turns out it's a complete rip-off of this product: https://amzn.to/3TRTcH5

The creator appears to have just copied the original (scanned?) and made a box with 3 of them. UGH!

I'm fine with "inspired by", but this is just theft.

#3DPrinting

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@masukomi that's crap. Will you report it? There's no way whichever CC license they chose isn't a flat out lie as to original ownership. Except I guess the small chance that the one you found was the original, and the Amazon product is the copy...

druidess, to random
@druidess@c.im avatar

Caught @jake4480 and some other girl. 😠 at least she's pretty

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@druidess @jake4480 that cat is extremely comfortable

koz, to 3DPrinting
@koz@chaos.social avatar

Today's fun discoveries:

  1. Qidi's newest printer has mains running directly through its chamber heater fins, even when the heater is off. Proof: https://twitter.com/diyperspective/status/1770543328607477891
  2. Uniformation's 'own slicer' shipped with the GK2 is a bad reskin of Prusa Slicer. This wouldn't be a surprising choice, but the GK2 is a resin printer.

#3DPrinting

@3dprinting

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@koz holy. crap.

"The heating element inside the heating device can not be grounded, the entire shell and wiring and other parts that may come into contact with the insulation protection we have done, in general, there is no access to the heating element part."

In general, it shouldn't kill you. Their official response to having live mains voltage physically accessible inside their printer.

In general, I won't be letting Qidi-designed hardware anywhere near anyone I love.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

@koz as someone who was initially extremely impressed by the handful of test prints I got out of my kickstarter CR6-SE before it put ten volts on its USB port and let the smoke out of my main PC at the time, I will absolutely walk away from hardware over safety concerns even if it's otherwise generally excellent. (That CR6 is still boxed up in my garage, waiting to be parted out - I don't dare even give it away whole.)

I'm desperately hoping nobody's Bambu ever burns their house down.

timixretroplays, to 3DPrinting
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Introducing the second iteration of my project. I wasn't happy with the results of emulating aluminium extrusion as-is, so this is an entirely new construction system designed from the ground up for , heat-set inserts, and metric everything. Finished structures get M3-bolted together for strength, but prototyping is done with bits of 4mm doweling for speed - it took just minutes to pull apart the little cube and rebuild it into the bigger box!

@3dprinting @3dprinting

A photo of a small section of the parts, disassembled, to show how they slot together.
A photo of a large (roughly 20 by 20 by 30cm frame) built from 3D printed parts.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

The beam cube is now at 40x40x40cm. Four more beams for height and some perspex, and this could be an enclosure for a Bambu Lab P1P!

It's quite wobbly, because the only thing holding it together are tiny wooden dowels, but again, there will be brackets in every corner to hold the finished version together.

The different colours are basically different versions of the model, with blue being the latest. Next step is to bracket this box up, then decide if it needs any further revisions at all.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

V1 of the corner brackets is now installed! As smaller parts, they're much faster to iterate through prototypes.

Here's where that odd offset pattern comes in - every part has rotational symmetry and stability.

There is practically no flex in the corners - 100% of the weakness is in the lengths of the beams, and they will become stronger as-is once they are also actually screwed together (the individual beams are still just loosely slotted into each other).

Also, #CatTax!

A close-up photo of four of the cube's beams, showing pairs of threaded inserts at each end - this is how the brackets are attached to each beam.
A photo of a small Siamese cat sitting inside the partially disassembled cube. She looks unamused.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

I'm so proud of this project so far. It's not nearly as rigid as aluminium extrusions, and it was never going to be - I wouldn't try building a 3D printer or a CNC machine with these beams - but if you wanted to build a box around one of those things, maybe add some perspex and some LEDs to it, this'll do that.

It's also 1/10th as annoying to build with than actual extrusions, at well under half the price. Watch this space for STEP/STL files soon!

#3DPrinting @3dprinting @3dprinting

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Okay, I crunched some rough numbers. Maybe it's not "well under half the price", all things considered, but it's certainly cheaper! None of this takes into account additional tools, postage, time, labour, shopping around, or the fact you might already have a drawer full of one or another part listed - but if you wanted a cube-shaped frame that was 40x40x40cm inside, I think my system here is a solid option for doing it for less.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

Experienced the first rapid unscheduled delinearisation in my beams project today. This took A) way more force than I would have expected, and B) way more force than I should've even tried putting through the beam in the first place. These things are strong!

It also reveals that the tolerances I've decided on for these models will vary slightly from filament to filament. These ones are too tight a fit to slip together by hand, but it turns out a $10 rubber mallet will do that job just fine.

A photo of a rubber mallet sitting on a set of four 80cm long beams, which were slotted together from shorter 3D printed parts and locked together using the mallet.

timixretroplays,
@timixretroplays@digipres.club avatar

90- and 180-degree hinges for my #3DPrinting beams project. These glorious shiny parts are a bit of a #maker game-changer when you discover they exist and are variously known as Chicago screws, book screws, screw posts and sex bolts. If you're wearing a leather belt, it's probably held together with a couple of shorter ones.

20mm Chicago screws do exist, but I've chosen these 15mm ones for this project to keep the totality of the hinge parts within the 20mm width of the beams themselves.

A photo of two 3D printed joins, one is two beams joined in a straight line, the other is two beams at 90 degrees.
A photo of the same joined prints, with the hinged sections folded flat.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • provamag3
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •