Weekend update Oct 13

by Ross · October 19, 2013

So now that the push to finish slicing in Octoprint is over several other projects have piqued my interest and I’m excited to be working on them. The biggest of these is the Universal Filament Identification System, or UFIS. We had our first general Meeting about a week ago and so far things are starting to pick up. I’ve also joined the E-nable community on Google Plus to try and either print or maybe help write some code for these printable prosthetic devices that are starting to emerge (see RoboHand and the open hand project). 3D printing would help simply because these devices have to be so incredibly customized and the body (especially of growing children) is constantly changing. I’ve also been talking with the firmware guys on the Smoothieboard about trying to get a web control panel as part of that. We’ll see how things go.

This weekend I worked on making a parametric 3D model of Thomas’s Filament diameter case so that the community can start messing around with the right distances between the sensor and the filament. Should also help people make them fit their hardware easier. I also spent time on the automatic bed leveling models as I’m still trying to get that working. Coding wise I began diving into QR code decoding and how we would be able to do that in Cura and in Slic3r. I’m leaning towards writing a general module that takes a QR image and generates the Slic3r or Cura profile from it rather than trying to integrate it with those two right now. I’ve also been looking at adding in QR code recognition to Octoprint as we might be able to do it through Octoprint as well.

Slicerhub is also getting the dust knocked off this weekend as my next big project over the next two months or so. Still can’t decide on what to do for Halloween this year so I may skip doing anything special. Too many more important things to work on that require what I have of my meager hacking budget. Have to pick up some dev boards for the smoothie stuff I want to do and also some AVR programming related gear. Hardware is so interesting but it is also expensive for a hobby. This weekend I also fixed my headset. The original design put all the stress on the actual USB connection and it finally broke the USB plug. So I took a cheap cable and made a little extension while also fixing a short on the board. Had a great weekend!