You could well be right, and I don't doubt for a second that you know your stuff. What I've heard more often on the low powered diodes is that it just prevents the smoke from blocking the laser's wattage, which is already in short supply, and keeps it from fouling the optics.
Frankly, so far the whole thing only works about as well as the big-ass oscillating fan I had blasting at the laser and workpiece, but it's much nicer to live with, especially now that winter is here.
Yup. If they leave some minimal process/app that keeps the headsets working with Steam VR, then nothing of value will be lost. It was an underwhelming tech demo and major annoyance.
Good info. I'll need to make sure I keep an eye on it. Safety wise, I have a decent fire extinguisher nearby, a camera pointed at the laser, and never leave it unattended for more than a few minutes. Haven't had any flareups in a while, but I know it can happen if the motors stop and the laser doesn't. As for damaging the module, not that I want to, but there might be worse things in the world than needing to replace the 5-watt laser.
I'm mostly joking about the interface. FreeCAD is the obvious solution for someone who wants no-restrictions on usable 3D CAD software. It's one of the most impressive FLOSS projects out there, bar none. It's awesome.
It's also deeply committed to parametric principles, and I think the code to go the "final mile" to make an intuitive interface that doesn't violate that paradigm is one of the more jealously guarded parts of the commercial packages. I've successfully made a few parts in FreeCAD, but it's always felt like pulling teeth, turning my hobby into work.
I'm just an oddly tech-leaning English major with fairly simple needs, so the direct modelers and the hybrids where maybe the individual 2D sketches are parametric but the 3D model definitely is not, they still work for me.
I got it here. It’s still showing as on sale for me. Oddly, only the top “3D Pro” version was on sale.
If you can’t get the sale, don’t buy it. At 20eur , it’s an interesting experiment. At full price, just get Alibre Atom if you want something with a perpetual license.
They blow air super close to the laser to get rid of smoke and leave you with better cuts, at least slightly, and in some cases significantly. If you have an enclosure, you’d also have a smoke/fume extractor similar to what you might use to print ABS.
Most of the Air Assist nozzles for the Comgrow Z1 are specifically for the 10w focal length, not my little 5w, so I stole some concepts but designed my own. Press fit some magnets and hooked it up to an Aquarium air pump.
Printed on my Voxelab Aquila in PLA. Designed in my 20-Euro copy of BeckerCAD 14 3D Pro (aka Caddy++ Basic, which they at least attempt to sell for 800 EUR), because I'm a cheap weirdo who wants a clear commercial-use license to maybe sell something someday, but FreeCAD hates joy.
I gotta say though, as niche as BeckerCAD is, the vendor (who seems to have bought the bankrupt husk of a German company that made a 2D CAD package in the 90s) was very quick to send me an (unevenly translated) English manual and sent my question about crashes straight to the Caddy++ Support dude, whose first idea fixed my problem. Not bad for 22 bucks.
With the mini wheats, there are also a few different styles, mostly in how finely shredded the fibers (or whatever) are, how they're compressed, what the size is, and the thickness of the frosting. Like, the Post is barely the same cereal as the Kellogg's, and the store brands play around with the ratios too. It's really a matter of preference.
So registration marks were an excellent idea. After measuring the peak-to peak distance of the "dish" on the DSA keycaps, I set a 0.1mm dot on two corners and simply didn't ink those corners. I'm still eyeballing the laser's framing operation, but it's going well enough that I ran a couple of batches of 9 keycaps with alignment no worse than when I was doing one at a time. I think a second set could be even better, with a proper jig for registration and maybe having most legends towards a corner, as centered legends need to be consistent and accurate. Corner legends just need to be consistent.
Comgrow Z1 with the 5w module. I've powered through 4mm plywood with enough passes, but it has a lot of materials it would prefer only to etch. TBF, it has handled everything it was marketed to do.
Sorry, that's the Plate and Case Builder put together by a Geekhack user nicknamed swill. You pop in the raw data from Keyboard Layout Editor and tweak some parameters, and out pops a set of vector files suitable for Laser Cutting, 3D-printing (after extruding in CAD), etc. You can make the switch plate, plus enough other files to build a sandwich-style case.
My last two boards are built around aluminum plates I sent out to Xometry, but this one is completely home-manufactured using a pretty low-end laser. It can get through 3mm hardboard or plywood and can engrave a ton of stuff, but it has trouble cutting many other materials, and even 4mm plywood.
Maybe you could start with small dots on four corner keycaps in one go to calibrate/not risk bad prints on a full keycap set.
Huh. Yeah, it would need to be something like that, and that as a preliminary burn could work! With the one at a time, it's invariably going to be slow and end up inconsistent, BUT on the plus side, an error in alignment or sizing only kills one keycap and there's no risk of compounding error: being 1mm off is bad, but usable, while being one DEGREE off on a batch job could get much worse, and quickly. I specifically took a break from keycaps today to think on it, since I think every single one the rest of the way will be a one-off setup.
I may refresh my memory on how many spare keycaps I have and try doing a batch of 3-5 to see if it will work well or if there's some other way to screw it up that I haven't considered yet. My capslock glyph was going to be nicer and more on-theme that that giant oval, but early on I thought that simply placing the cap against a known 90-degree angle would be fine, but vibrations or something happened on Caps Lock and it came out a blurry mess. At least the "cover-up tattoo" has clean edges.
If batching out the keys does work well, that could make the remaining keycaps (and future batches) much more practical. For this board, the entire set of keycaps was less than $20, but everything else was cheap too, so I'm trying to make the "prototype" work with what I've already bought, LOL.
That update seriously reinvigorated my enthusiasm for KBin as a platform. It's really nice to see a story I find interesting, regardless of magazine/community, then see where folks are actually discussing it.
wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social Posts 22Comments 514Joined 2 yr. ago 
The main thing is that being in wine country, a few years after "Bliss" was taken they planted vineyards.