I've been doing a LOT of 3D printing lately. I had a project for a convention that I didn't do and I've got a lot to print for a friend of mine. I got a little burnt out on the printing thing for a while.
This weekend I finally got the cameras set up for the interim. The whole thing is going to change some time after April when I do upgrades that will take me into the custom modification area. That includes new camera mounts. I'm fine with it and I'm looking forward to it. So for now these will work, at least for monitoring. I can use the timelapse videos to practice my editing and make my images to bracket the videos so they're not so abrupt to start and end.
I also need to put my own watermark on them instead of the printer server logo. But that's a small thing.
One thing I did do was remove a server plugin that would have made for 'better' timelapse videos but at the expense of my prints. The general concept is that this moves the print bed and print head to fixed spots before it takes the picture so the final result is a static image. It's pretty cool. I was looking forward to using it.
Then when I got into setting it up there was a big glaring thing I didn't like. It keeps track of exactly where the printer is - X, Y, and Z. That's fine. But what it doesn't like is when you have different kinds of movement at the same speed. It wants all of them to be different. And then you have to change your settings for creating your files to match. That was the deal killer.
I spend a lot of time getting those settings as close to perfect as I can. The end result is the print. Now a plugin that does nothing but take pictures wants me to adjust my print settings. The settings I've spent hours refining. It might not seem like much to change something by 0.1mm but it is.
For one thing that means everything I've already gotten prepped will have to be redone. That's simple for most of them and difficult for others that I've done work on to print exactly as I want. It's also forcing me to change my printer settings to match this plugin - that's not guaranteed to work, mind you - just so it can take pictures.
I uninstalled the plugin from both servers. I'm going to see if there's really an issue with having the print head moving all over during a timelapse. I'm not nearly the only one who does them this way.
Two things to finish up here.
One - I do plan on uploading these to my YouTube channel and I'll get you the name of it once I have everything settled out there.
Two - If you want to be able to check in on the printers whenever you like and be notified when new prints start, etc. then you can do that through Telegram. Install it, create an account, and send a message to each of the bots associated with my printers.
Note - The request won't go through if the printer is running so if you send a message and there's no response in a reasonable amount of time you may have to send it again. I won't know if you sent it and it bounced.
The Telegram bots are:
@Rastl_bot
@RastlWorld_Other_Bot
Two printers, two bots.
Once you're set up you'll get notifications at times and you can request status updates. These come with pictures. I may ask you if you want notifications at certain points in the print but don't enable those by default.
Fun thing. Telegram commands include /shutup and /dontshutup to turn notifications off and on. So if you sign up for them but they're bothering you for the day you can turn them off. Or send me a Telegram message to remove them completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment