I think it's starting to sound cliche to say that I've been very busy in my day job lately, which is why I have been posting regularly. But, I'm gonna say it anyway. Over the past couple of months I've been able to re-build how my department works. As a result, projects are getting completed quicker and the team is getting happier as they see see their efforts bear fruit. I think we're on a great track for 2021. I've been experimenting with creating a schedule for my free time. I have so many interests and things I need to complete that, if I don't organize and strucutre, the time will get wasted. For me, the approach to this will be identifying the things I need to do (projects), scheduling them, and then fitting in things I want to do around that. I'll post more on this as I get...
Category: 3D Printing
Preparing for 2021
I've decided to focus on deep cleaning, organizing, and purging inventory in the studio. I'm halting all of my own projects until this is complete, with the hopes I can resume everything again on Jan 1st. To that end, about a month ago I started planning out drawer organizers using foam core boards held together with hot glue. Yesterday, I was able to complete two of them. Combination of foam boards and custom 3-D printed holders (left side). There are still two more drawers in that credenza, and eight drawers in my main desk pedestals that need to be done. I hope to be able to do two drawers per week. I also took the time to completely empty off my desk (computer monitors, charging stations, etc.) and dusted and wiped everything down. I rearranged and relocated a lot of things on the desktop to a point where I could...
Studio Organizing
Cleaning up and organizing the studio has been a high priority this weekend. It's started with some smaller projects like going through the literally cleaning, week's mail, going over finances, and ripping movies. It's now progressed into making forward movement on some small projects and looking at the space here and organizing. I heard Adam Savage recently reiterate a saying has: "drawers are where things go to die." And I would agree. But he reminded me that there's a particularly interesting way to organize drawers to prevent that, which is to build an insert with custom dividers out of foam-core. With that in mind, I started looking at all the drawers in the studio and now have it on the docket to properly organize, and subsequently clean out, the drawers. This will include organizing some items, such as spare external and internal hard drives, into caddies, which I currently have...
Upgrades
A few days ago, I attempted to upgrade my Ender 3 3D printer from the stock motherboard from Creality to a new revision of the board. The original one doesn't have a bootloader or the ability to easily flash the firmware, but a newer rev does. So back in October of 2019 I picked up a v1.1.5 board (mine was v1.1.4) and finally installed it this past weekend. After installing it, I realized the printer's Z-axis was "broken", in that the carriage with the nozzle/extruder would go up but not come down. I did a bunch of troubleshooting and thought it was the new board. So, I ordered another board, but this time, decided to upgrade to a 32-bit processor and move from the Arduino-based platform from Creality. So, I got a BigTree Tech SKR Mini E3 v2.0. That arrived last night and I installed it, and the Z axis...
Flower Planter
The planter is finished. This past weekend, I spent a grand total of about 5 hours in the garage cutting, sanding, and assembling. Here's what it started like: The front yard flower planter, in raw-board form. And it evolved into this: It's about 8' 7" long, 12" wide, and 12" tall. Oh, and I think I forgot to show what the drill bit holders look like hanging on the peg board in the garage, so here's a picture of that.
