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Showing posts from November, 2020

Planned Obsolescence

Came across this Reddit topic about planned obsolescence of consumer products. I am sure we are all acutely aware of how we are forced to upgrade our gadgets every few years, whether it is your phone, tablet or laptop. The batteries are intentionally made not replaceable, and the hardware are deliberately made not repairable. Even if you luck out on the hardware, the software moves so quickly that very soon, you will find that your old operating system no longer run the latest version of your favorite software. So you say, so what, I will just make do with the old version. But soon enough, the backend protocol will change so your old software is no longer able to connect. Time to upgrade.  But I found that in every day consumer products, stuff are deliberately made crappy so that you will have to upgrade once past the warranty period. Frequently it is not the entire product that is crappy, just a tiny part of it so once the weakest link fails, most people won't find it worth their...

ESP-07 flashing issue on PlatformIO and solution

Recently, I decided to port the ESPClock project to PlatformIO , and kept encountering an intermittent error during flashing:  A fatal error occurred: Timed out waiting for packet header Took me a long time to research the issue and making no headway,  until I stumbled upon this rare gem . The file I needed to modify is:   C:\Users\<Username>\.platformio\packages\tool-esptoolpy\esptool.py I changed the values to:  DEFAULT_TIMEOUT = 100  START_FLASH_TIMEOUT = 40  CHIP_ERASE_TIMEOUT = 240  MD5_TIMEOUT_PER_MB = 8  ERASE_REGION_TIMEOUT_PER_MB = 60  DEFAULT_SERIAL_WRITE_TIMEOUT = 20 Originally, DEFAULT_TIMEOUT was set to 10. That made flashing the code reliable, but flashing the filesystem was still problematic. After increasing the value all the way to 100, I never encountered the error again. ESPCLOCK1  /  ESPCLOCK2  /  ESPCLOCK3  /  ESPCLOCK4

Drivinator Direct Drive Mod for Ender 3

I recently tried printing and installing the Drivinator , which is a direct drive mod for the Creality Ender 3. It makes use of all existing parts, so there is nothing extra to purchase (the stepper motor wire needs to be lengthened, which is easy done by a little splicing; an even easier route is to purchase an extension cable online). It is also compatible with the FreeABL bed levelling mod. Besides FreeABL, this is easily the best mod I have installed for the Ender 3, well worth the 1 hour or so I spent on the job. This was the YouTube video which helped me install the mod: Where before the extruder would sometimes skip and grind under the Bowden tube setup, the extrusion after the upgrade is just smooth as butter. The extra weight on the print head also doesn't seem to affect print quality or speed. With the enhanced extrusion, I was now able to crank up the print speed. But at higher print speeds, I discovered sharp corners were showing signs of over extrusion, so I needed to...