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Tinker Tuesday for May 13, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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FDM's a great learning experience for software-side people that aren't great at self-driven efforts to learn about physical-side work -- everything from chemistry to mechanical tuning to maintenance scheduling to belt or stepper drive behaviors matter.

For actual usability, it's a mix. A lot of what's available out there are aesthetic toys at best and, frankly, more often cheap useless crap. If you've got a good use case, there are things that they excel at, but many times even they can turn into a temptation rather than an actual benefit (oh boy, a 3d-printed corner bracket!... why didn't I just get a metal one from Home Depot?). Still, for rapid(ish) prototyping, for specialty shapes, and for weird art projects.

Resin printers are more set-and-forget, since outside of support placement and cleaning there's not much to tweak with them. Better for figurines, though there are some chemistry-adjacent stuff where they have unique advantages.