3D printing for prototyping: part 3

Success!

The trick to having this part not get stuck to the bottom of the resin bath on the AnyCubic was to print it sideways! Not sure I really needed the island on it but it made me feel better.

Lychee Slicer doing the job

The printed part is functional - kind of. It fits the plastic injected moulded parts, a long way from perfect but certainly good enough to get changes to the CAD roughed out before handing it off to somebody who knows what they are doing. For this part, I ended up washing and drying it a lot more carefully before placing it in UV light to harden the resin up.

On the left is the injected moulded part, in the centre is the last failed print, on the right is the working print

What needs to change

There are 2 o-rings in the current design, one which was placed there originally but doesn't always work, and the other one suggested by a local engineering firm which does work, but the housing isn't really designed to take it. The o-ring needs to be rebated slightly into the housing to make it work correctly and the other part flexes too much which means I could simply make it thicker (I think). The changes will require new injection moulds to be made so I will have to pass it on to a professional to get it finalised, but most of it can be done in-house. It finally feels something like progress.

Popular posts from this blog

Tailscale ate my network (and I love it)

Image
No matter where you go, there you are If you're like me, you travel occasionally. Access to your office from home, or from an airport lounge, or from a hotel room is paramount to being productive for most of us now. While I had a fairly simple Tailscale setup that got me into my test machines in the office, what I really wanted was to integrate my AWS production VPC into that system. It's surprisingly simple. Tailscale AWS instructions What do you want to do that for? In the "before tailscale" times, if I needed to test against the production AWS resources or connect dBeaver for database maintenance, I would edit the security group to add my IP address, do my testing, edit the security group to remove myself. This is as error prone as it sounds. I quite often forgot to remove my IP address from the allowed addresses, a major potential security risk when you are travelling. Tailscale has an extremely nifty way to get around it: if you run up a small ec2 ins
Read more

That magical word: Workstation

Image
Or how I came to own a HP 8760w 17" laptop I am reading a lot of retro-computing articles lately, I grew up in the 8 bit era and I have strong nostalgia for it. It does help to be realistic though, for all the love that things like the Amiga get, they were a dead end in terms of computing. What really ate the world was the boring old IBM-PC: flickery, interlaced multi-sync monitors, beige boxes and productivity software. There was another, relatively brief path the industry could have gone down though. The Workstation was king In retrospect, it might be a bit tough to put a circle around what constituted a workstation . Is a PERQ a workstation? Probably. Xerox Alto and Star? Definitely. Symbolics Lisp machines? Not sure. Probably? The real success stories came out of Apollo , Sun, HP,IBM,NeXT,DEC and Silicon Graphics. For a time it was a hot market, especially in what was known then as technical computing: research, manufacturing, CAD, graphics, simulations. If
Read more

Time machine: Solaris 2.6 on QEMU

Image
You can never go home A big chunk of my professional career in the 1990s was spent with a Sparcstation on my desk. Before that the 68000 Sun2 and Sun3 floated past my sticky fingers but the Sparc machines quickly superseded those. I don't remember too much about which ones: pretty sure there was at least one IPX, one Sparcstation 5, a Sparcstation 10 and then the last one was most likely an Ultra 1 or maybe even an Ultra 5. It was a long time ago. Every now and again I think about how productive those machines were and do a little Ebay digging on how much one would be worth to have around. Except I don't have the room for more machines and the idea of trying to revive 25 year old hardware from that era is well beyond my electronic capabilities. Never fear, QEMU is here. Following these excellent instructions from Adafruit , you too can install Solaris 2.6 and have your very own emulated machine. Note that there is one instruction in there I am not sure you need. A
Read more