A group of us are all headed to Costa Rica the first part of 2021. Like Feb/March. We’re still picking out specific dates.
Its less that we’re traveling together. More that we’re all traveling to the same place during the same 1-2 week window.
If your interested in the details, reply to this post, and I’ll get ya invited to the planning document.
A little backstory…
I’m pretty sure it was in 2018 that godoloju got me an Anet A8 3D printer for my birthday/Xmas. Nice guy huh! It took roughly 8 hours to get it put together and printing my first print. V1.0.
At the time, these were kinda known to start fires. The connection on the bed would sometimes short, and on an even more rare occasion, throw a spark. But it was a thing.
Not wanting to burn down my house, I quickly did some research into different solutions and went about getting them installed. I printed cable chains, belt adjusters, and frame reinforcements. I bought mosfets, a higher quality power supply, and a plug/switch combo.. Just to make it a bit more, well.. more. (the volt meter is just for shits and giggles) I once estimated it at roughly 200 hours worth of work, and pushing 1000 hours if you include all of the print time.
Then, there was the VR incident of 2019.
I had set my VR up before getting the printer. The printer ended up in the ‘play zone’ for the VR. Then, I was letting a particularly long friend experience VR for the first time. While violently throwing a robots head at another robot, my friend managed to hook and throw my 3D printer across the room.
The acrylic frame exploded.
I couldn’t look at it for a while.
About 6 months ago, I set about adding the metal frame, or the AM8 conversion. Same printer, but extruded aluminum frame. I used as many parts from the V1.0 as possible, but I did replace the thread rods and the X guide rods.
The original bearings from the Anet A8 kit had been wearing grooves into the guide rods. After a bit of research, many we’re recommending these plastic ‘sliders’ (not sure what else to call them). I’ll update this sometime in the future and give some type of review of them. But after 50ish hours with them installed, they seem to be working great.
Manual leveling is just tedious enough that it was pissing me off. It seemed to fluctuate some between every print. I do remember at one point I went like 8 prints without needing to re-do the leveling. So, one of the other goals at this point was to get auto bed leveling working. I had purchased a capacitive and inductive sensors, and had planned on using the capacitive as it was supposed to work with glass. However, I was finding information on several different ways that it needed to be connected. One of which required a daughter board. I ended going with the inductive because it’s setup was basically plug and play.
Well… there isn’t a ton of configuration you have to do for the sensor itself. You do have to enable and configure auto bed leveling in the firmware and get the sensor mounted in just the right spot. There are guide out there suggesting a ‘correct way’ of getting your hotend and sensor aligned properly. I started this way, but ended up making a type of jig. Allowing me to put the tip of the hotend in the correct place, and then set the jig under the sensor, and then tightening it up. I’ve used this method twice now, with success.
Site went down a couple of days ago. Since I had to get it up, I figured I’d update it. OS update, package update, wp update, and theme update. Fully responsive, and mobile friendly. Fresh new free cert for SSL.
There were 6k+ spam comments, so I installed something to deal with those.
The syntax highlighter couldn’t be saved. I found another one, so far I like it better.
If any of you can tell me what style is controlling the white around the ‘sessions’ on the graph (bottom right), I’d appreciate it.
Is it too much to ask during the goddamn work day for 2 separate sessions of 80 uninterrupted minutes each of quality dump time?
Pam
Some fun stuff in here. Get it here.
This was the day we needed to catch our flight, sort of. Our flight was 15 mins after midnight, so technically it was the next day, but there was no need for hotel rooms. We were all packed up and on the van headed to the airport around noon. The ladies all gathered to say good bye, and we took a picture with Grams, she had maybe 15 of these hanging on the in the center area. The plan was to get to the airport, ditch our bags, and visit somewhere near the airport.
During breakfast, Godoloju was still not feeling great and said something to Grams about it. She left for about 10 mins and came back with a couple of different medications, one was their version of aspirin, and the other was I think either a powder or a paste that she mixed into a liquid. It was a dark color by the time I arrived on scene my guess is either coffee or water. Godoloju spent a minute or so arguing with her about it, not really wanting to take something unknown, but she wasn’t having it, and he ended up drinking it. My only thought was ‘lets hope that wasn’t a laxative’.
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Everyone was up and eating breakfast by 8:30 am, with the ride to the boat at 9. There was apparently some miscommunication with Grams about the breakfast and a few of the things ordered never showed up. Godoloju had a rough night and spent much of it in the bathroom, with TheGopher trying to sleep in the room attached. TheGopher caught a pretty large spider in his room that crawled into a cup allowing him to take it outside and let it go. We googled it a bit and think its a Huntsman Spider, but are not really sure.
Before we headed out, someone asked if they had a laundry service and Grams said that they did. She told us to grab the hampers out of our rooms, to throw our laundry in them, and set them outside our doors. We all did, they probably had 6 or more loads to do.
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We had to check out and meet our ride to the AirBnB by noon, so most of us met at our hotel for breakfast around 10 am and we’re on the road by 12:15 pm. Its nearly a 3 hour ride from Patong to Krabi, and we had a nice air conditioned van for this trip. It was raining for much of the trip, but looking back, I wish we could have figured out how to do this ride on scooters. Not sure one way scooters are a thing though. We stopped once for a smoke and a pee break but the trip there was pretty uneventful, other than just looking out the windows, lots to see.
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Alternate Title: Hill of the Monkey’s – The Molestation of Bubbles
It was raining, hard. We were finishing up breakfast at like 7:30 a when the email canceling our fishing charter came in. This was the plan until around 6pm for the day, so now what.
My room hadn’t been cleaned since we got there so we headed to Godoloju’s room to try to figure out what we were going to do for the day. After several smokes and a couple of beers later, we decided on going to see Monkey Hill. We found a Tuk-Tuk pretty quickly and we’re on our way. It was a 40 minute drive and it was a pretty uneventful ride.
Hill of the monkey’s
As the driver slowed to a stop, we could see a small parking area and a lot of stray dogs. Stray dogs are a thing in Thailand, idkwtf. The road continued up the mountain, but there was a little gate and a security guard directing our driver to park. We we jumped out and everyone was done using the facilities the driver or the security guard directed us up the hill. There was a small cement bridge that was maybe 60 feet across that went over a ravine with a trickle of water in it.