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Cake day: Feb 15, 2024

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I have no idea if this is a clever bypass around expensive commercial offerings, a clever waste of time that barely improves over doing it by hand, or somewhere in between, but it sure looks like a nice design and print.


I suppose if a given machine can work in LAN or sneakernet mode, then it’s not THAT bad, but I was referring more to their heavy reliance on Cloud, closed source (possibly in violation of other projects’ licensing), and proprietary parts. If any 3D printer maker is going to start hiding features behind a paywall someday, it’s them.


I was thinking the Neptune 4 plus looked pretty good. If I can get my print capacity to 300mm in X and Y, options for my other hobbies (keyboard building in particular) open up. Then, I’ve never really tried TPU, so direct drive also seems nice.


Recommendations other than Bambu and Prusa?
I currently run a Voxelab Aquila I got for $120 three years ago. It largely replaced a Monoprice Mini, and the Aquila's done some surprisingly good work for me, but I may look for something new to put on the ol' birthday list. I would like a flat bed and some modern QoL improvements built in (he said, side-eyeing the BLTouch clone he never installed), but I'm still looking to play in the shallow-end, price-wise, and anyway Bambu just has "future enshittification" written all over it. I don't do anything time-sensitive, and I'm not afraid to put the whole thing together, so who are the current leaders in the value space? Recent machines from Creality?
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“If it works for the humans, it’ll work for me!”



I’m sure he would say think you by cheeping sweetly, then hissing like an asthmatic snake.



I actually kind of like that Apple has become a boring and iterative company for the most part. I just use the same glass and metal rectangle until a few months after my upgrade eligibility on my work plan (because I always forget when it is), then I get whichever glass and metal rectangle is cheap now. I routinely forget which iPhone I use, and my life is no worse because of it.

Okay, I just looked it up. It’s a 13, and I did remember, but I was not at all confident.


This one is not really filling up my outrage meter. Amortize it over the first year before you finally admit you don’t want to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to your ad-hoc coatrack, and it’s 8 bucks a month, and you’re already paying $45 or whatever for the whole shebang, including what have to be some pretty expensive live classes from Instructor/Influencers who have a certain amount of leverage. At least there’s a real service involved, and likely the new bikes subsidize some of it. They should admit that’s what it is, but… meh.


Sort of tells you everything you need to know about the target market that all the images on the game listings are box art and the physical carts (unless you scroll way down). Anybody who cares more about gameplay will just emulate the things with some sort of nice controller or handheld. This is for collectors (god bless 'em).


You’re thinking of the 5200, which had the keypad and analog sticks that didn’t auto-center.

The 7800 controllers were roughly the same form factor, but were digital and only had two buttons, but given the weird history and struggling Atari, many games didn’t even use the second. I think the last models shipped in Europe may have even had a gamepad like the one this new thing comes with.

EDIT: Here it is. I guess the d-Pads were standard in Europe.


The basic concept seems to be floating out there, and I’ve bought many empty RP2040 boards from AE without issue, but if you’re determined to do this, maybe disconnect from any networks, back up your PC, and start with an expendable cartridge. :-)

I don’t THINK a Pi Pico clone could send enough voltage back up into a board to fry a cart, but it’s your risk. 98% chance everything is fine, but you’re spending money on what should have a 100% chance of being fine.

Or, accept the almost-inevitable and just grab ROMs of your carts. If you really want to experiment, maybe build the dumper itself as a DIY project. Buying someone else’s device to create files somebody already ripped twenty years ago doesn’t quite pull the right nostalgia or hobbyist levers for me, but we have to go where our nerdery takes us, and from that perspective, I understand.


I run all of my DIY keyboard builds (here’s the latest) off of Pi Picos or clones with USB-C.


Do you find you are able to emulate much that can make use of the analog sticks? The RG Arc-S and -D have similar internals and a nice screen, but they seem to have been consigned to the discount pile for lack of analog sticks (and maybe being late to the game for RK3566 models). As a Genesis kid, I always liked the Sega controllers of that era.


Thanks! That class of device is probably where I’m leaning, having now poked around some other sites as well. Honestly, those issues are about what I’d expect from this pricepoint/feature combination, but they don’t seem like dealbreakers and sounds like it’s a usable SBC in a gaming friendly package, which is about what I’m after.


That was one of the posts that piqued my interest. Also think the Anbernic ones look decent.


Handheld Linux Retrogaming recommendation? [solved-ish]
I figure it will be a good thing to throw onto a wish list for whatever holiday is coming next. In a perfect world, it would run a Linux-based OS, be moddable, have decent ergonomics for an adult, and kinda just generally not suck. Is a hundred bucks a reasonable price point? One hundred fifty? I grew up in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras but never completely stopped gaming, so I'd be interested in emulating somewhat newer stuff too. I normally just plug in a controller and find a desktop emulator, but portable could be fun, especially if it had potential for general SBC computing. Edit: I think I have a better idea what I'm looking for now. The Anbernic devices seem to more or less match up with what I am looking for, so I'll start there with a more informed search. Thanks! Happy to get more suggestions and tips, though.
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Aussies are great. They’re like border collies, but slightly more chill.


I just watched it for the first time and… I thought that while the handwringing is excessive, the subtext that all these other emblems of human creativity have to be destroyed to become part of the iPad is unsettling, moreso because the visuals are so decadent in their detail. It makes it feel much more like replacing than supplementing. It’s probably worse that I think it was also unintentional. Big miss for me.


Excellent, reader cases always seem to cost way more than they should, espeically with how fragile they are.

Although, you should know you’re supposed to move over to another room to pretend your workspace is cleaner than workspaces ever are, LOL. Then, what are we rocking for the keyboard?



First, a little plug for !cad@lemmy.world because more traffic is welcome. The pinned post there is a fairly comprehensive list of viable 3D mechanical CAD suites. I’m a rank amateur with actual designing, but if you want someone to drone on at length about their business models and licensing terms, I’m your guy. (short version: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool, and fuck you.”)

Now then… I also came from TinkerCAD, and I actually think the grouping and alignment tools lifted from vector art programs are super intuitive, and they almost provide a sort of design history if you use them right, but there are so many things that can’t be done quickly in TinkerCAD, and Autodesk also nerfs it for reasons that are commercially sensible but not technically necessary.

Almost all parametric tools , and also most “grown up” (for lack of a better term) direct modeling tools can do the Boolean addition and subtraction that is at the heart of TinkerCAD’s “solids’n’holes” paradigm, often in a couple of different ways. For instance, to make your orange part there, I’d draw a 2D silhouette of the vertical view, then extrude (or “pad” or “pull”) to the height. Then I’d draw on that top surface, possibly with a reference plane set up first to avoid having the model too far up its own ass (i.e. the toponaming issue), making the shape that needs to be extracted. Then you can cut or extrude down into your solid. Most tools will know what you mean, but some might make you do use a distionct tool or manually do the boolean “difference”. You can then do the same with your hex grid, setting up a new sketch for that. Later, if (for instance) you wanted to have 12 holes or bigger holes, you’d just edit the one sketch. Your red part would be similar, but doing the back of it would involve extruding out from the new sketch. The power of sketch and extrude is, apart from the ease of implementing a parametric history, doing several things at one that would each have to be a manual hole in TinkerCAD.

Finally, there’s the simple matter of fillets and chamfers, which TinkerCAD doesn’t support as an independent function. Manually adding them gets tiresome real quick and is the “killer feature” that made me realize I needed to move on. Other tools like loft sealed the deal. TinkerCAD is capable of some really interesting parts, but not efficiently.


Per the edit to the main post and in the interest of full disclosure, I had a filament break about 1/3 through, but that’s okay because the partial PLA print was nowhere near strong enough along the layer lines. There are plenty of decent 3D printed keyboards out there that just need some assembly and post-processing, so if this one doesn’t work within the constraints I’ve set, there’s not much point to it.

Learned some stuff for future designs, though, so we’re all good. 😊


Possibly, and now that you mention it I might round off the two at the front, but the sides are chamfered, and the main angle towards the front is quite shallow. This is also a very shallow “case”, like your average gamer mech board circa 2016. Reasonably, you shouldn’t really be touching it at all.


**EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I had a filament break about 1/3 through, but that's okay because the partial PLA print was nowhere near strong enough along the layer lines. There are plenty of decent 3D printed keyboards out there that just need some assembly and post-processing, so if this one doesn't work within the constraints I've set, there's not much point to it. Learned some stuff for future designs, though, so we're all good. ** 😊 cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14515597 > It has to go vertical and diagonal, but it fits on my stock-sized Ender 3 clone, even with a brim. Key layout, dimensions, placement of chamfers and the [angles on the underside](https://i.imgur.com/2ubvyZl.png) were all designed with this goal in mind. 30-hour print, if Cura is to be trusted. Going to start with a partial print to make sure the layer lines can handle the stress of the keyswitches being friction fit. > > Z-banding is an aesthetic choice, right? *...right*?
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Still, even after all this frustration, after spending hours standing in front of restaurants tapping my chest and whispering questions that go unanswered, I find I want what Humane is selling even more than I expected. A one-tap way to say, “Text Anna and tell her I’ll be home in a half-hour,” or “Remember to call Mike tomorrow afternoon,” or “Take a picture of this and add it to my shopping list” would be amazing. I hadn’t realized how much of my phone usage consists of these one-step things, all of which would be easier and faster without the friction and distraction of my phone.

But the AI Pin doesn’t work. I don’t know how else to say it.

Upshot: intriguing category, half-baked device. Even worse when considering the cost.

This group of devices feels like it should absolutely start out as a slight tweak of watch hardware and the rest of the R&D should be improving the phone’s AI assistant capabilities. Until it’s ready to replace the phone, it won’t, so build toward a future where people will accept it once it’s technically feasible.


This only serves to make me think you’re smarter than Elon Musk.


Probably couldn’t figure out a way to make the ‘2’ serve as a ‘Z’ in a 1337, sophomoric sex pun, so… that’s the end of that project.


Absolutely! It sounds really interesting, and even if I don’t use OpenSCAD type stuff myself, many do and it would be super cool to see how the development progresses.


I’m no professional, but it does seem that many of the ways to design around TNI, e.g. defining reference planes for sketches that are associated with geometry via shared variables rather than a face earlier in the tree, are ripe for automation and/or are very sensible to obfuscate under a layer of abstraction. TNI doesn’t strike me as inherent to the way designing a solid object needs to be, but rather that it’s difficult or impossible to avoid based on the code that actually makes a 3D solids kernel work. To my mind, it seems like awareness of its persistence is sufficient if you have a mature set of workarounds and heuristics that make the software act predictably. I suppose it does promote lock-in and precludes a truly complete and portable file format though; the solution is clearly for one of the big 3-4 industrial suites to open-source itself!

As for that github table, I’m all ears about expanding it or correcting anything that might be wrong with it. The “real” one on wikipedia is rather daunting and necessarily for a broader audience.


I created a generic CAD community. Join and contribute!
!cad@lemmy.world I'm gonna need help, y'all. I'm a single-part amateur hack with a penchant for anything cheap. I don't know enough to make it what you'll want it to be, but I am very interested in the broader industry and also its impact on maker hobbies. You want Solidworks advice? To gripe simultaneously about enshittification and the limitations of free tools? Need to dive into Lasering or Machining or CNC'ing stuff and don't feel like the 3D printing community is *quite* the right place? Come on over. I will keep posting stuff that I find interesting, and I will mod as long as doing so doesn't make me hate life, but if nothing else the name is now parked with an active user.
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Either it will be become an important key (“Windows/Super”) or it won’t (Context menu). Microsoft is being eye-rollingly cringey with the specific keyboard requirement, but I assume there are probably about a million more concerning things about “AI PCs” than the keyboard button.

Also, mech keyboards for the win. Nobody is forcing keyboard nerds to do shit with their keycaps. 😂


Headline is a bit clickbaity. The article is too, but the headline is worse. This factory is the only one processing the local quartz deposits, which are the purest known in the world (at least to hear the article say it), to the degree that they do, and the resulting quartz is necessary to make crucibles for chip fabrication, among other things. The mining and/or industrial processes needed to replace either would be extremely expensive and take several years to ramp up, but the result would be “only” a price spike, new product delays, and a general logistics clusterfuck, not the end of the industry. Some of the article’s commenters suggest that it’s partially due to the ready availability and relatively low price of quartz from the factory that several other slightly less desirable facilities and mines shut down or scaled back. So, it’s all a bit breathless, but it does look like a significant, perhaps troubling, industrial bottleneck.


No worries, LOL. I did have a couple of zits, and the paint pen is not the ideal source for color, but I have used it before with good success after a coat of rattlecan lacquer. Kiddo and I have also had the “this is a prototype that lasts as long as it lasts” discussion. She knows daddy’s deal by now, and is happy that she didn’t have to wait for a commercial product. 🤣


That is a very gentle way to comment on the part, LOL. Thank you. I have sanded and used filler on parts before, and generally for the result I’m after it’s not worth the time and mess. This one is less than 40mm on a side, and was a quick 0.2 mm print in white PLA. The defects are less visible from a normal viewing distance, and the intended audience of one is pleased.


Fifteen minutes in CAD (used Solid Edge CE for this one), fifteen more on the printer, and we have Liko’s hair clip ready to hot glue onto a little barrette. Drying paint and clear coat will take longer than the rest of it.
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I have a 2022. It’s not terrible, but there’s definitely a subscription for remote start and a few other connected type features. Nothing related to actual driving once you’re in the car though.



So, I have no idea if it’s any good, but PTC just released an OnShape AR app for AVP.

As an aside, have wanted to like OnShape, but I just can’t get past the sloppy Terms of Use for the free version that appear to bar you from commercializing your designs (expected… several other vendors do this), but they allow anyone who downloads your public designs to commercialize them. That, and the fact that they charge three times as much for their subscription as Fusion does.