W4: 3D printing week
I've finally had the time to get my hands on my new 3D printer! Armed with OpenSCAD, Cura and my growing codebase of custom scripts, I am finally ready to start working on some serious stuff.
I've had a custom OpenSCAD gear library since December, featuring very fast-rendering gears of all kinds. I just couldn't get bevel gears right... This week I finally managed to. I printed those double helical bevel gears and they couldn't mesh better! Right now I'm trying to get some printable bearings; after some trial-and-error I've decided for a herringbone cycloid gear bearing.
Last week I polished my 3D-printable electronics/fluidics scripts. This week I've been able to actually test and debug them against the real thing; plus I've kept on adding new features.
I've sent an update to the PrinterOS Discord, informing them of this progress and what I intend to do next: embed electronics into the print (well, “printable electronic circuits” should imply this, but anyway...). I have some tricks up my sleeve for that, but unfortunately it's just too stupid of a method to tell anyone before checking it actually works :) And no, it's not conductive filament, that's basically like a nicely shaped resistor.
Regarding other projects, I've added a unit test to a Minetest pull request I made a while ago. Not much actually, but tests are important, right?
I've learned a lot about bolts from a couple of textbooks lent by a friend. There are other interesting engineering subjects written about in there so I may as well give them a good read too. In particular, now I can actually buy bolts in my local hardware store, using some more specific terminology than “bolts, star-shaped hole, small”.