Transcript
Speaker: damn Hello and welcome to Digifabricators, the show where we learn how makers and artists use their computer-driven tools for fun, art, and profit.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jeff Stein, aka a weird guy, and with me is my talented but humble co-host, Al Schultz of New York Woodworks. How you doing, Al? I'm doing wonderful, man. How about yourself?
Speaker: Oh, well, you know, some good, some bad. You know, life goes on. yeah Yep, yep. let's Throw in the disclaimer here, and we can start giving some serious ah jaw action going here. We've got a lot to talk about.
Speaker: So, even though we pretend to be experts on the internet, I would like to point out that neither of us have any actual training and are just guys winging it in our shops and learning as we go.
Speaker: All advice provided is based on our personal experience and possibly inaccurate assumptions, and is worth exactly what you pay for it. If listening to this show causes you to take out a loan to buy new and expensive digital tools, you may tell your spouse that it was our fault, but do so at your own risk.
Speaker: So today our guest is Al's new 3D printer. So welcome to the show, Bamboo A1. Have you named it yet? I have not named it yet.
Speaker: is that Is that a thing? I've named every other piece of equipment. I didn't i didn't even think about naming this. Well, i but Honestly, I haven't named mine either. I never came up with anything new and interesting and exciting. I mean, clearly both. i mean, it's a valid question because both of us have named our C&Cs.
Speaker: I mean, because yourre your C&C is Hannibal and mine is Rosie. Yeah, yeah. um named after the uh robot uh from the jetsons exactly yeah i was trying to think uh housekeeper was the word that was is there for a second but yeah she's just a general uh yeah so ah you know and i think i tried to name my laser when i got it but it was dumb and i forgot what i even called it and yeah
Speaker: And i I don't know if I'm just over it or if I just never really came up with a good name for the printer. It is very interesting, like, being over it. Like, it seems like everybody named, like, my lasers are named. The CO2 is Clarice to go with Hannibal, but I never refer to it as that.
Speaker: And then the laser behind me, if you have Intellivision and can see our podcast, um this is Sparky. ah You know, that the fiber laser. But I never refer to them. Hannibal has stuck.
Speaker: But let's yeah that's the only one. Yeah, same with me and Rosie. That's the only one that really stuck. But i will i will say for the listeners, our disclaimer is true. Because I absolutely blame the purchase of this A1 printer on you.
Speaker: And my wife accepted it. Well, that's what works.
Speaker: Well, i'm that's what we're here for. That is what we're here for. yeah Absolutely. so Yeah, you know, I haven't named mine either. um i do you refer to my AMS system as the filament monster.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Now, that is partially because I found i found a model that had... ah big buggy eyes that go on the let's see, I've got the AMS one for the P and X line, not that in the years has got the the four reels that kind of hang out on.
Speaker: spools that just sort of hang out on the side of this bar. You should probably open on the A's. But the I've got the AMS that's an enclosed box that sits on top of the printer.
Speaker: And so the eyes go on the the sides of the lid and then there's like four big bottom teeth that stick up from the front edge and he he's I'll post a picture of it on here at some point but he he's adorable so I refer to him as my filament monster and he's the one that eats all my spools yes filament You should, as a as a brand new person to 3D printing, know they've been out for several years, you should probably maybe explain what an AMS is for our listeners that are like me that didn't know or don't know what one is.
Speaker: um i believe it stands for automatic material switcher but basically it's a it's a it's a four-way splitter yep and the the printer has one print head which is something we can and talk about at some point, because there are printers now that have more than one print head and thus much poop is avoided, but much extra expense and engineering is required to get into that.
Speaker: But the the the AMS is basically a four way splitter where you can feed one color of filament down into the printer.
Speaker: and to the back of the print head. And then that's the color that's going to come out. And then if you want to switch colors, mid print, the printer's capable of doing a it'll pause things. It'll cut the filament. It'll roll it back up onto the spool.
Speaker: So it just barely hangs onto the tip of it. And then it'll grab the next color over and it'll feed that down in and switch to the other color. At which point it needs to spend a couple of minutes, uh, cleaning and pooping to flush out the remainder of the last color. Otherwise you'll get a blend of the two colors coming out for a while.
Speaker: And you can actually shut down the poop function by about 90%. I think if you don't care that it blends your colors, um,
Speaker: Most people care. Most people want the red to stay in the red area, the black to stay in the black area, and the white to stay in the white area, which requires the purging. yeah if If you don't care there's a little bit of flow between the two colors, you can cut back on the amount of the poop.
Speaker: in Bamboo Studio. yeah um I don't know the exact setting to do that because I haven't done it, but I know it is possible to... I don't think you can eliminate the poop option entirely, but I think you can set...
Speaker: things from a number down to a zero, and it will do the absolute minimum that the machine requires to function.
Speaker: And a good point here is that we are both on Bamboo Labs machines. So right we're referencing our 3D printers. There's 1000 of them out there now I'm finding And boy, let me tell you, if you thought Ford, Dodge, and Chevy arguments were crazy, start arguing with somebody about whose printer's better.
Speaker: Yeah. Man, it's all the same ah level of complexity as the vehicles, too, because there's so much going on to it. I mean, there's...
Speaker: there's There's the printers as far as the printer action. I mean, how how fast does it move? How accurate does it work? um Does it have a an AMS color switcher available for it?
Speaker: Does it have multiple print heads, which is even cooler? um i don't know how those machines perform as far as the printing function, but the concept of having four or five print heads and each print head is got a spool that feeds it.
Speaker: So it doesn't switch back and forth with the spools. Each spool stays stuffed into the back of the print head. yeah And then to switch colors the head just right and it actually works like a tool changer on a cnc yeah where it drops where where the the the framework that moves the x and y and z around it like sets the head down just like it would drop
Speaker: the tip of the spindle in a vacuum tool changer where, where it's got the tool already in that bit that's locked in previously, this would be the same as the filament being preloaded in that head. And you just drop off the head with the filament in it and grab the next head. That's got the blue preloaded.
Speaker: you have to give it a quick squirt to prime the tip and get it going. But I mean, that's like ah layer, a tower. um So or when you're off and rolling. So you can do color changes in like 15 seconds instead of like a minute and a half.
Speaker: Right, right. And waste way less than the poop. So so do you think technology technologically we will advance to the point where, say, you have a forehead...
Speaker: printer, now you can have four-color AMS on each head, so now you have a 16-color printer with four heads.
Speaker: I don't know. you know I think having the multipleal logistics, I mean, I'm not going to say it's impossible. I mean, but the, the multiple heads was done for the explicit purpose of avoiding the whole pooping waiting game.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: I don't know if they're going to put an AMS on a multiple head printer. I don't know. That would probably just add the annoyance back in. I will say that I'm not sure about the A1 with the AMS light, but the normal AMS and the AMS to the enclosed ones that bamboo makes. I do know that you can daisy chain these things.
Speaker: Yeah. And I know you can put at least four, together so i i at that point you know that's i know joey steel blade yeah joey steel blade has two linked i think and i don't want to talk out of school but i think he can do eight colors and one that would make sense because each one holds four yeah yeah yeah so i i mean there' a lot going on and i I know a couple other people that play games like that too. I mean, we talked to, uh, Chris from route nine signs and he's got several printers and I think he normally has an AMS for each printer.
Speaker: But then when he wants to do an eight color print, he just steals the AMS from printer two and plugs it, chains it into printer one. And then he's got eight colors over there.
Speaker: So what is the, the, at the head, like right now I have a four, four hoses coming to the top of my printer head. So is there, is there an eight hose adapter I'm assuming for, for if you're going to run two AMSs?
Speaker: I don't know. Or does it split? Is it a Y into a splitter? You know what i mean? I'm not even sure if you can chain multiple AMS lights or how.
Speaker: Yeah. I'm not sure if that's something you can do with the AMS light. Seeing as I don't have an A1 or an AMS light. I'm not sure.
Speaker: yeah well even don't even know that I've seen anybody string multiples together. You might be limited to four. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, I don't know i don't necessarily mean mine, but you have a single point printhead.
Speaker: but yeah I don't have a four-way in the back of my printer or on the top of my printhead. I have one line. I have one PTFE tube that goes to my print head and it comes out the back of the, uh, so you're literally, when you change color, you're literally emptying the tube.
Speaker: it It drags it all the way back up into the a the the four-way splitter is inside the bottom of the AMS unit underneath the four spools.
Speaker: So it's got a grabber at the front of each spool. yeah And then it's got four PTF-tapes. e-tubes that make it an entire like six inches in there and then it gets to a four-way splitter and then there's one line that comes out the back of the ams and it goes around and connects and comes into the back of the printer so when i mine switches it pulls the filament from the print head out of the printer all the way back up ah basically right up to where the right up to where the
Speaker: the the grabber is yeah yeah it backs it all the way up to the grabber and interesting other ones so i've only got and then there's a there's a four-way splitter that you can it's basically a hub that you can mount on the back of the printer and then you can plug the four ams units into it interesting Yeah, mine is is that, only my four-way splitter, instead of being on the back of my AMS, is at the printhead. So when mine does a color change, it goes over, ah it hits a little cutter, and it's literally cutting about an inch and a half of filament.
Speaker: It just pulls it back an inch, so my PTEF tubes stay full of color. Okay. So it's only moving two to three inches. And then the new color shoves the inch of material that was left in there.
Speaker: That's the poop, you know, goes into little poop bucket, which is the first thing I printed, by the way. yeah
Speaker: But so so that's the mechanics of it. So obviously, you know, we've we've quickly covered the bases that there are multiple applications, multiple types enclosed.
Speaker: Yours is an enclosed unit. Mine is an open unit. Now, my unit, I've had people, you know, I've had a couple of print fails. I've had several print fails, but I've had a couple of print fails that people are like, oh, if you're by an air conditioner vent or if there's a fan blowing on it or something like that, there could i could have a cooling...
Speaker: ah And that's another thing ah we should we should say real quick. When you're when we're printing, three d printing, we're melting plastic and it works kind of like spray paint. You want to have a wet edge.
Speaker: So if your filament is cooling off before it can get back around and put another layer on, it's not going to join and you you potentially have a fail, whether that's holding onto the plate itself or the piece in the middle or a color change or whatever.
Speaker: So... My question to you is, like my plate runs at 220 degrees for ah PLA, basic print stuff. Because you're enclosed, are you running lower temperatures or you just have more control in a cabinet?
Speaker: um let's see i don't know um i don't know english temperatures everything runs in metric um and i think the 220 is the hot end think it goes to like 260 if i do pteg that's the that that's the hot end temperature not the bed temperature Oh, I'm sorry. Correct. You're right. you're That's the temperature that it's melting the the the plastic out the tip at.
Speaker: And then the bed temperature keeps the bed warm. So it keeps the part from letting go. And that usually runs, I think, defaults at about 55 Celsius. Okay.
Speaker: five celsius
Speaker: Although, um you can you yeah here's another tip for you for things that don't want to stay on the plate. Sometimes turning the temperature up will help them stick better.
Speaker: My plate is 70 Celsius right now, and I'm printing PTEG. Okay. And the hot end is 243 Celsius. Okay. celsius Okay. Well, that's, that's the PETG thing runs hotter those and it's a stronger material, but yeah, for the PLA, and I think the bed's usually at 55 and the hot end, maybe 220.
Speaker: um But if I've had problems with something sticking to the bed, Sometimes giving it an extra five or 10 degrees heat will help keep it melted onto the bed properly.
Speaker: yeah um Okay. Now see here's here's here's some of the science behind the question you just asked of ah you know whether you should think about enclosing it or...
Speaker: keeping breezes from going by it and because as the, as it prints, it prints where it wants to print, but then as the part cools, it will shrink slightly.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. So if you keep the entire part warm, it'll stay at the size that you want it right now. But as soon as you take the heat away, you can expect the plastic to shrink just, ah you know, whether it's a 10th or 1%, it's just a tiny little bit, it's going to shrink.
Speaker: But if the... it can affect the layer adhesion if the top layer gets too cold before it can lay the next pass on it.
Speaker: But also if there's too much breeze across the bed, the entire part can shrink and that will make it pop off the plate. So, I mean, you can have pieces fall off because of the fact that there was too much breeze on them.
Speaker: Right. And in addition to falling off, there's a problem that I like even less than falling off, which is the fact that you'll get curling.
Speaker: If you get a big flat piece, we're gonna point specifically at Hueforge pictures as something that I have a big, ah you know I have a big love for Hueforge pictures.
Speaker: But if you aren't careful, Hueforge picture, because it's such a wide, thin, flat piece. And I mean, you can take six hours to do a piece that's, you know, and two and a half millimeters thick because it's the size of your bed. And it's got a lot of thin little tiny details that it runs back and forth around. And I think this was four hours right here.
Speaker: but Four hours for 150 150
Speaker: turtle he's adorable yeah that's beautiful i added him to my collection he
Speaker: he's he's He's saved for later use. yeah This might actually end up being in a tattoo. that be cool That would be cool. um Well, ah don't take in the print. Take in the photo that they used to make the print.
Speaker: yeah yeah Because that's always... Hugh Forge has never come out quite as good as the original photograph. But they some people do really well with them. yeah But the because they're really wide and super thin, that if if it starts to cool, the corners can lift up a little bit.
Speaker: This one curled the curled up in the center because it's thinner or thicker in the center. Okay. and So it's actually, if I lay it down, it's probably a quarter of an inch high in the center. So it needs to be adhered to a backing of some sort, but yeah, sorry.
Speaker: I've got a piece here, which you can see, but no one else can. The, ah the corner on this is like ripped up yeah because what, what happened is that the, the corner lifted as it pulled off the bed and then the nozzle just ran into it and just the hot nozzle just shredded the corner off of this hueforge picture.
Speaker: yeahp And that's honestly the best case scenario is it ruins the corner. Um, as it lifts the, the worst case scenario, I believe you have encountered a blob of death.
Speaker: Oh, my God. Yeah. Blew the whole front of the printer head off the plastic case and everything. that oh and that's That's how you get the blob of death is that you've got a print that's laid down. You've got a couple of layers down enough to get, you know, a half a mil or a millimeter thing and then the corner peels up and instead of just running now see with the hue forge if you just run into the corner it's just gonna tear up the corner because it's got such good adhesion over the whole surface area especially since i'm printing it 225 by 225 using glue on a plate
Speaker: it's not going anywhere. So it can just shred the corner. But if you've got a smaller part that curls up and it hits the head, that part can stick to the head.
Speaker: And then it basically it breaks it breaks the part off of the bed and sticks the part to the nozzle. And so now you've got the beginning of your part stuck over the tip of the nozzle and as it drives around with this and keeps squirting more and more and more liquid filament into it it just turns into a big blob and it globs up and it can surround the tip of the printhead which as you know i've had two actually i've had three i was able to survive one of them the other two i had to replace the printhead
Speaker: um I was able to save mine. And it's, it's not because there's anything that can go wrong with the print head. The print head's pretty durable little piece of metal, you know, a stainless steel and it's the wire that gets stuck in the plastic. It's, it's the little tiny wire.
Speaker: There's, there's, there's basically a, a temperature controller. I think it's called a thermistor thermistor. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's basically a little, a digital thermometer that reports back as to what temperature it is.
Speaker: so it knows whether to add heat or maintain heat or let it cool your that's how your pilot light in your furnace works it's got a ah little sensor that says yep it's it's heated yeah well that that's an on off trigger that it the that it triggers at a certain temperature that that's an always when it hits when it when it hits 140 degrees it automatically shuts off but this is a this isn't like a ah flip a switch kind of thing this is a reports back to the computer what the temperature is it's a digital thermometer basically yeah and the wire is itsy bitsy teeny tiny little did
Speaker: 25 gauge wire. looks like hair't know it's it's It's super tiny and getting the blob off the head without pulling that wire off is near impossible.
Speaker: And i have done circuit board level soldering repairs in my past as well as like mod chip installs on consoles that involves soldering the wires onto chips on a PlayStation, for example, and I was unable to get that thermistor wire back together properly. it was, it's, it's just, the good thing is, is the parts are just absolutely fucking cheap.
Speaker: I mean, i was going to say, what's a, what's a printhead rebuild? 50 bucks you can buy the print head itself for like i don't know it's it's like 10 or 12 bucks or something like that i think and you can buy the print head assembly that comes with the thermistor and the boot and the the the head and the wires and the whole and the little tiny fan on it the whole shebang is like 20 bucks 25 yeah It's not a huge deal.
Speaker: And these things are made to last as long as they can, but they're also made to, you know, I mean, they know you that a lot of people are going to put thousands of hours on these things and they want to they're, they're made to swap out the parts fairly easily and inexpensively.
Speaker: So that's fantastic. If, if you screw something up, you just go order another 30 bucks worth of parts and you're back up and running. It's not one of those, I spent $1,600 on this machine and and when it breaks, it's going to cost me another 300 bucks to replace this stuff.
Speaker: There is no, i mean, you'd have to break everything have to spend that kind of money. yeah yeah when when do you want to go to uh from a four millimeter to a two millimeter printhead like what's the benefit or disadvantages of um if you have any experience with them i have one i've barely used it because i haven't found that i need it for most things does it take twice as long it does take
Speaker: well Technically, it takes more than twice as long because not only is the the width of the line thinner, but the height of the line tends to be thinner as well. So and and we're dealing with volume,
Speaker: not area right i mean so if you want to say how long does it take to print layer one of a hueforge picture it's going to be twice as long because the line's going to be half the width right but that is going to affect the layer height that you can set it to as well so that is a multiplier for the time based on we're dealing with volume is the print quality twice as good though The details are definitely much, you can get much, much tighter details.
Speaker: Yep. So the the one thing that I've used it on is I've got, I've had a history of making round to it. Yep. And it's, it's just ah anything that's circular with the letters T U I T on it. And the concept is, is that you have a round to it and now you have the ability to get round to it, whatever it is that you put off for later, it's a stupid, motivational kind of, it's sort of a joke.
Speaker: But anyway, it's, it's a thing I've made a bunch of over the years. And I decided to make a round to it on the printer, which is just, you know, it's like, I don't know, a three inch round disc or something like that. And it's got a border around it and it's got the T-U-I-T on the front.
Speaker: But then on the back, I actually wrote the phrase that goes with it and the explanation that says that, This is around to it, and this will give you the ability to get around to all the things that you said that you would get around to later.
Speaker: But now you have a around to it, so now you can go get around to it. yeah And I actually like put that in text on the back of the desk and it just, the, the detail to, to put all those words on the back of a little tiny desk and shrink the text down. And it just didn't really, it was almost legible with the point four. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: but I put a point to nozzle on it and I told it to slight re slice and reprint with that. And you can actually read the text.
Speaker: Nice. You can actually read the text on the back of it now. And, so that is the entire deal is that the, it gives you the ability to do much, much finer detail, the, the smaller, the nozzle.
Speaker: Yeah. The longer it's going to take, but the better detail you're going to be able to get. And the faster. And the other problem is is that I hear a lot of people on the internet complaining about, i can't use...
Speaker: weird kinds of filament, any any filament that has stuff in it, like the the glow filament has stuff in it that glows and the wood PLA has bits of I don't know, fibrous shit, or I don't know what the hell's in it. But um anything weird like that that, and I've even heard some people had some struggles with the silk PLA as well, the shiny stuff.
Speaker: In two and a two millimeter? In the.2, because the nozzle's so goddamn small, it's much more prone to clogging than the larger needle. yeah than the larger nozzle.
Speaker: It's really interesting as we are a digital fabrication podcast, ah but as... as I grow and age and get old and have all these cool toys like the CNC, like a CO2 laser, like a fiber laser, and now a 3D printer, it's really just terminology.
Speaker: Like on a CNC, it's feeds and speeds and bits and how fast you're and how much horsepower you give it, RPMs. On a CO2 laser, it's power of wattage versus speed of travel on on on a fiber laser, it's frequency of of pulse and speed, you know, and now I'm learning in 3D printing, it's how fast you want to move, how thick or thin you want to make your line, and at what temperature you want to lay the material down.
Speaker: It's all basically feeds and speeds, just with different application. yeah yeah You know, the controls are the same X, Y, Z, you know, on all of them almost actually on all of them.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. ah um So it's really interesting like how. Maybe not the fiber, but yeah. Yeah. But well, it's still, it's still layers. It's still depth. It's still going to Z, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. But it's very intuitive. Once you understand, like, in other words, if you're, if you're proficient or understand 3d printing, you'll be able to conceive CNC.
Speaker: If you're a proficient and understand CNC, you'll be able to process 3d printing or laser operation. So all of this digital fabrication kind of is in its own bubble.
Speaker: just with different tools and different applications. They're all very, very similar in function. Yeah. Yeah. They're very, very similar in function. And technically this is a weird one that throws people, but technically all of these devices are technically CNC.
Speaker: Yeah. Left, right, left, down. but see CNC is... itself is Unless you hit the wrong side of Reddit, which watch out for that one.
Speaker: I'm not on Reddit. Well, well, okay. seeing but just CNC has a couple of meanings for our use.
Speaker: The term CNC means computer numerical control. That's the only one I know. Simply means that your computer and your programming controls the movement of the tool.
Speaker: Yeah, my numeric motors for for anybody going out on the Internet and searching for information on C&C, you will occasionally get results that you are not looking for, because in some twisted circles, there is another use for the acronym, which is consent, non consent, which is basically bedroom rape play.
Speaker: oh so Oh, that's a real thing. Yeah, it's a real thing. people are This is a thing that... pet and thats is Ladies and gentlemen, things to avoid. but this is this is that This is a consensual thing where, say, somebody wants to be handcuffed and gagged or something like that.
Speaker: or you know So watch watch out for that when you search for the word CNC because sometimes that shit comes up. It certainly wasn't what I was looking for, but occasionally searches have come up with that. And I've had to learn that that's just something you, you know, yeah something that you get with that term.
Speaker: All right, back to 3D printing. that printing yeah So, I mean, that technically what we refer to as a CNC is a CNC router.
Speaker: Yes, because it's a router connected to the computer control system versus a CNC laser versus a CNC printer. Technically, they are all CNC devices. Yeah.
Speaker: But for the purpose of most people's common lives, we usually call the CNC router a CNC. yeah right And we don't use the word CNC when we talk about the laser or the printer.
Speaker: Although you will occasionally hear people say CNC plasma to differentiate from handheld plasma guns. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. It's like the, like, uh, similar to, you know, every skit steer is a Bobcat, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Every facial tissue is a Kleenex. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. So I, I did have, we were talking about adhesion and and stuff like that, holding parts. And as you know, because we stay in contact with each other, I'm holding up my little, uh, bamboo, bamboo labs, or I'm sorry,
Speaker: Yeah, Bamboo Labs. Bamboo Studios. um A free file called... This is an F-bomb. And it's tall. It's about an inch by inch, but it's like four inches tall. And the file prints... It's three and a half inches tall.
Speaker: The file prints these little bombs sticking up in a group of 12. And what I was getting is I would get to about this color change right here where there was a detail.
Speaker: And... that I guess the time that it took to to do its color change, the plate cooled off enough or didn't maintain. And when this thing starts whipping around, putting these little tiny-ass dots, one of these would pop loose. Well, when one pops loose, now you created a lasso, and I've got 12 of these little half bombs flying all over the place.
Speaker: And this is a 10-hour print, and it just kept breaking and breaking and briefing breaking off. So I put what is called a brim, thank you for the tip uh and so you you were like concerned that it was gonna end this morning this thing i just grabbed them and it just popped right out but this is a perfect and basically what i did is i put a wider base in layman's term i put a wider base on the plate so rather than 12 little pieces stuck down it was actually one piece with 12 parts on it stuck down so they kind of all grouped together and held on for dear life for 10 hours yeah so we've got a tall skinny part basically if you've got anything that's sort of tall but it has very little surface area on the first layer yeah and and there's there's not a whole lot for it to hold down to the plate yeah
Speaker: Yeah. And the printer doesn't know it's through a part off. It just keeps trying to print in midair and you end up with the most beautiful spaghetti. My wife comes in and wakes me up the last two days now while this print has been failing. Every morning she comes and she goes, by the way, you made beautiful spaghetti last night in the liver drum. I'm like, great.
Speaker: Now, that's that's one of the things that I paid an extra five hundred dollars for. One of those things that comes with the X one is that it's got it's got a stronger processor in it than what yours has.
Speaker: Yours has got a low end processor, so it has enough brains to take care of its printing needs. But ah mine has enough ah processing brains to ah use an AI ah circuit to monitor the camera.
Speaker: And I have spaghetti detection. So if it starts leaving springy spaghetti all over the place, my machine will pause, send a notification to my phone, and go, ah we've seen what we think looks like spaghetti.
Speaker: I was looking for this setting. I don't have it You don't have it okay You didn't get that with the cheap one. That's one of those features you only get with the expensive one.
Speaker: Yeah. Show off. because well i Because it it takes ah it takes a lot more processing power for it to watch with the camera and recognize when it's got something weird going on Something doesn't look right. And it it it looks like spaghetti and it matches what the AI model says spaghetti looks like. So mine will actually pause.
Speaker: and say, hey, I think I see spaghetti. What do you think about that? and then And you could tell it to go on or... or and Right. I can look at it and go, no, i see what you're looking at.
Speaker: But what happened is that when it took a poop, instead of the poop properly getting flushed down the chute and out the back like it's supposed to, sometimes you get the dingleberry effect where it doesn't quite...
Speaker: cut off from the bottom of the nozzle so when the nozzle moves away it drags the poop out and drops it on the plate so every once in a while i'll get a printer poop on the plate and the ai detection will go hey i see something that doesn't look like it belongs there and it looks stringy is this spaghetti should i should should i wait should i keep going what should i do sometimes i can just look at the camera and go oh nope that's just a poop on the plate and it doesn't look like it's going to be in the way so i just hit the resume button and say don't worry about it it's okay it's fine
Speaker: do Do most higher end printers have this function or is this a bamboo thing? I don't know. I don't have any of the other ones. And i my information about the other brands is much more limited because I don't hey dr see some of it go by, but not a lot.
Speaker: Drop your opinions and or comments in our Discord, please. That sounds like a good plan. Yeah. So and then the the other thing is that's really cool.
Speaker: And I don't know if the other software does this or if this is just a bamboo feature, but I have the ability to skip an object. And you're printing the other ones.
Speaker: So if you've got 12 F-bombs printing and they're about half done and you look over and happen to be watching just as it knocks one of them over.
Speaker: And you can run over and grab the pause button before it drags that thing around and knocks the rest of them over like bowling pins. And you've stopped the, you stopped the machine and so saved disaster. But one part has been knocked off and there's a skip button in the software.
Speaker: I can do it on my touchscreen because I have a touchscreen, but I mean, the, uh, I have that too. I saw it on the touch screen. Oh, you do? Okay. yeah I wasn't sure how much screen they give the other printers.
Speaker: Pretty small, but it'll do it'll do it. But there's a there is a skip option where you you push the skip option and it'll bring up ah a very simple image of the I believe it just shows first layer, first layer view of what's on there.
Speaker: And then you can click on a certain object and say, skip this object.
Speaker: yeah the yeah So you can skip an object and say the one that knocked over, just stop printing. pun Yeah, that's amazing. That's a cool function.
Speaker: And then hit resume and it will keep printing the other 11 of them. And hopefully none of those will fall off, but at least you'll end up with some of them instead of having to stop the job six hours in and start over. You might be able to salvage some of the pieces, assuming that it's a multiple object print.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Also, um and I'm sorry to interrupt you. This is all good information, but there's so much information. Again, in the Discord, post some questions. If you want to know what a person who knows nothing about 3D printers thinks about it or a person who uses 3D printers, please ask these questions there so we have something to talk about.
Speaker: I want to ask you... your opinion or your thoughts on a couple of other 3D, I don't want to call them ethical questions, but like, um like model usage and or selling models.
Speaker: And also um shoot, I forgot what I was talking about. The Hueforge, Hueforge, you've been talking a lot about like really cool things you're doing with Hueforge. Explain some of that to us. Cause we're kind of running out of time. We could probably do three or four shows on,
Speaker: introduction to 3D printing. Well, uh, so address one of those. Let me start with, uh, what, what we'll refer to as licensing there you go for models here.
Speaker: There, there's a lot to unpack here and then I'll, uh, I'll throw in some bits on what I've been working on, which involves Hueforge. Um, licensing that there, there's a decent amount to unpack, but,
Speaker: Basically, any time that you upload, say that you model something with your CAD software that you make for your printer, you can upload that to any number of websites.
Speaker: um There is you know obviously Maker World. And just it sounds like you might have been confused on this. You're talking about things that you found in Bamboo Handy.
Speaker: Yes. Bamboo Handy and Bamboo Studio, the desktop software, both have back-end access to the Maker World website.
Speaker: Okay. They are all the same site. They're all the same place. What you're seeing on the Handy is a mobile tap into the Maker World website. A light ah light version.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. and So the same models that you see on the handy are the same ones that you see on the maker world website. ah
Speaker: But, you know, I mean, it's they're basically the same thing. um But say you upload something to the maker world or to thingiverse or any one of the other websites out there.
Speaker: When you upload your model, you can choose what license to apply to it. And then people are basically on the honor system or threat of lawsuit to follow that license.
Speaker: But you have to look when you find a model, you have to look at that model's license to see what you're allowed to do with that. Now, assuming. Okay.
Speaker: Everything on Maker World website is free of charge for download and for personal use. So that is implied by the fact that you can click the download button without giving them money.
Speaker: It's automatically implied that you can do whatever you want for it for your own personal use. If you want to print one of those and stick it on your wall, you want to put it on your desk, you want to print one and gift it to your mom.
Speaker: nobody gives a shit. That's all good to go. The things that the license will really allow or disallow oh One of which is the the big one is commercial use.
Speaker: That is the big monster in the corner of the room is, am I allowed to print this and sell those prints for money? And the license may say, yes, you are allowed to print that for commercial use.
Speaker: If you look at my F-bomb model on the Maker World website that you got from Handy, if you go look at it, There is licensing information on there, and I have allowed people to do absolutely anything they want with that damned model because I don't care.
Speaker: um If you want to print those out and sell those in a store or sell those on Etsy, it's allowed because the license says so. And I chose the one that would allow you to do that.
Speaker: this commercial license is acceptable. The other option is ah attribution which is basically giving people credit so if if you download the model and you do things with it that post it other places attribution says that you may or may not uh have to uh put a link back to my original model to, you know, give me credit for this is the model that I'm selling, but I got the model from this place right here because this guy created it.
Speaker: You might be required to give credit to the original modeler for it. And then the third little piece is ah called Remix.
Speaker: So if you were to download a model and then you want to like make changes to it, you want to add another piece on to it. You want to to cut some pieces off. You want to make it squat. You want to make it wide. You want to change things.
Speaker: And then you want to upload that as a new model, because now it's not just a thing. It's a thing that does something else. Mm-hmm. I just printed a stitch, Stitch, the little monster dude.
Speaker: I found somebody's stitch model. I shrunk the thing all the way down to about, you know, two inches tall. And then I added geometry onto the back of it so that it's a doorstop.
Speaker: Yep. Now that would be considered a remix because now it's a stitch doorstop, but I didn't model the stitch. I, I, I used someone else's model.
Speaker: I'm not going to say stole. I used someone else's model and I modified and added on my own geometry. And now that's a remix. It's a stitch doorstop. Now, I can put that in my daughter's room because she loves Stitch because that's personal use.
Speaker: If I want to re-upload a Stitch doorstop, then I have to go check the Stitch model that I started with to see if it allows remixes.
Speaker: If it allows remixes, I can upload a Stitch doorstop as my remix, which links back to the original model of the Stitch that I used in it.
Speaker: But if it doesn't allow remixes, then you can't repost that and reshare that as your alteration. Right, right. i was i was having a a I was confused between remixing and original somebody's original and creating.
Speaker: like I was like, you didn't make the F-bomb. But now I understand, no, you made this F-bomb. And if I modify this F-bomb, I'm modifying your model. Right. that Thank you for clarifying that.
Speaker: If you sit down with your CAD software and you model one that resembles mine, that is... You were inspired by my art to make your own art that is similar. That is artistic inspiration. That is not remix.
Speaker: If you download the CAD that I made and cut pieces on off of it add pieces onto it, twist it, turn it, tweak it, make it do something else.
Speaker: But my original CAD is still involved in that. That is a remix of my model. Yeah, that's fair. Versus a reincarnation that was inspired by my model.
Speaker: Yeah. Which if you remake it, it's your model now. You can license it and do whatever the hell you want with it. Yeah. OK, so I guess one of the bigger problems is that the licensing is kind of on an honor system to some extent. I mean, because I mean, once you've downloaded it for personal use,
Speaker: It's kind of hard to say what somebody is going to actually do with it. Right. I mean, you can upload your stuff and you can say you can print this, you can enjoy it, you can give one to your daughter, but you can't go selling these things around town and on the Internet.
Speaker: And there's not a whole lot to stop somebody from actually doing it. Unless they come to the store you're selling them at or something. Right. Now, I mean, yeah technically it's it's it's it's not illegal.
Speaker: it's But it is suable. I mean, there's there's a line there between... the reaction you can have to something illegal means that the police will come for you and the DA will press charges.
Speaker: Uh, licensing is not something the police will come for, but you can't, the the creator could sue you. If say you've got, and say some, you get some dragons from somebody, you you download some dragons from somebody for free, and then you like print a bunch of them and you start putting them on Etsy.
Speaker: the The first thing you're going to do is you're going to get a cease and desist and, the Etsy is probably going to get a takedown request. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So as as the creator of the model, you can go tell Etsy that these are not authorized for sale. This is my model. I own this. And this is illegal use of it. And please take it down.
Speaker: And you can sometimes get things pulled off and and You can also get things pulled off of other websites to where it's posted, where if you've got like a and no remix, no reshare means that you cannot down. You can't you can't just upload this to another website.
Speaker: if If the license says that you're not allowed to remix or reshare and you download it from Thingiverse and you're like, this is a fantastic model. I think it should just be added to the Maker World site just so people over there can enjoy it.
Speaker: Well, you're not allowed to do that if it says you're not allowed to do that. So that this sort of has a another point I touched on with you before the show, which is things that are posted don't always stay where they're posted.
Speaker: right all Right. I mean, this is something I've observed on the internet over all the last, you know, 25 years is that I learned a long time ago that if you bookmark a site because you think it's cool, it may not be there tomorrow or next week.
Speaker: Had it happen. Yeah. And it happens all the time. And this happens just as well with models. And ah because somebody may post a model on Maker World, but they may not own that model and they may not have the permission to post that model.
Speaker: Why would they do that? Well, because Maker World gives you ah store credit. for posting things that are popular.
Speaker: So if I post an F bomb, they give me a couple of points. And what do you, what do you do with those points? I'm sorry. Explain those points. You can turn those points in for store credit on bamboo labs.
Speaker: You can buy a fucking printer. You can buy filament. You can buy. Yeah. you Is it like Marlboro Miles in the eighty s Yeah, but it's exactly like Marlboro Miles in the 80s.
Speaker: And I had someone who had a couple of Marlboro hats, a couple of other gear. I had the cold weather sleeping bag. Nice.
Speaker: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was super warm, man. Wow. Side track, side track. Side track. Anyway, yeah, it is like that. where if and And if the more people that download my model, that gets me more points.
Speaker: And there's a there's a boost button on it. Yeah, I see it. Yeah. Basically, Maker World will give you as a user boosts. You'll get a couple of boosts. You can use like a couple of boosts a week. So if you see a model that you really think is good and you really like it and you want to help reward that creator without actually spending any fucking money out of your own pocket, you can push the boost button, which is just it's like I get a couple of free votes every week to give somebody a high five for a really good model.
Speaker: And the more boosts your model receives, the more points you get. Once you get up to about 500 points, I think it gives you, i think you can get like a, what is it? A $40 gift card for the bamboo store.
Speaker: No shit. Okay. Yeah. I'll have to look and see what the numbers. I don't remember what the numbers are, but i think it's somewhere like 500 points. And I think it's a $40 gift card nice for bamboo. I mean, and you can, you can do a couple of things with it, but I mean, that's the popular choice is to put it in bamboo gift cards.
Speaker: How do you know where your points are? Let me see. Are you food limited time? You might have to be on the actual website. I don't know if the app will do that.
Speaker: but I have 55 points on the, on the, yeah. There's a little coin button up in the corner of the website. I currently have 251 points right and, see. It costs four hundred and ninety points get to up forty dollars gift card for the bamboo store So you can buy filament, you can buy accessories, whether, cause I mean, the the bamboo store has got a bunch of weird shit.
Speaker: They've got like things to add onto your models. Like, yeah you know, axles and wheels and tubes and lights and circuits and shit like that. The magnets and all that. You can buy all of that shit or you can buy, there's also some stuff that,
Speaker: there's There's some stuff on the front page that has ah what is it like labs or something like that? i Yeah, there's a maker lab thing where where you can like feed it a picture and it'll like do shit with the picture. And so it's like you can feed it ah and an image and turn it into a model.
Speaker: But sometimes those things use points. So you can spend your earned points towards those so you don't have to pay for points.
Speaker: If you've contributed, you earn points and you don't have to buy those points to spend on the MakerLab stuff either. Nice. I haven't done a whole lot of that, but it is what it is.
Speaker: But so and you were saying earlier that when you see something you like, you hit the little plus button and there's put it in a collection. It's yeah like add the collection.
Speaker: Okay. Well, that is a great way to, that is you're bookmarking it. You're just marking that product as something, that item is something that you want to have in your collection and your bookmarks and you can go back to it later.
Speaker: You can go back to it later if it's still there. I was going to say you you kind of made a good point and I'm assuming I downloaded a model that I really wanted and I went back like three days later to print it and it was gone.
Speaker: And I'm assuming it was a mixed, it was probably a remixed model that didn't have permission to remix and they took it down before I got to it.
Speaker: Or it was a model that was on Thingiverse with a no share and someone downloaded it and uploaded it to Maker World so they could earn points on your work.
Speaker: And if the original person finds that they'll send a takedown request and make your world will take it down and it's gone. So, uh, my, my habit, I do use the collections, although,
Speaker: It's of limited use because i don't guarantee they're going to be there when I come back later. What I do use the collections for is I'll sit on the couch and browse through the database on handy looking for interesting things and I'll bookmark them.
Speaker: Then later when I get back to my computer, I will open the Maker World website I will go to my collections and click on the collection.
Speaker: And then I will go through and download those things into my laptop. So I collect on local hard drive. I don't collect on the web because i don't guarantee the web's going to be there later. And if I like this model, I mean, I don't know why these things disappear. I don't know if it's because they weren't supposed to be there. They weren't allowed. Sometimes people change their minds.
Speaker: People, you know, sometimes people say.
Speaker: I keep this model on my Patreon, but I'm going to put it out as a sample to tease people. And if you get there this week, you can download it.
Speaker: But then he's going to take that model back down later because he wants people to pay for it. So, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons these models come down. who's Which is why I have a I see it, I like it, I download it mentality.
Speaker: Because I know my hard drive is going to be there tomorrow when I come back to it. Well, I mean, yeah the hardware, anything's possible, but I mean, and it's, it's fairly good likelihood that my computer will still be working and that model will be on my hard drive later versus will it be on bamboo site?
Speaker: I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker: So. Okay, I think we've pretty much covered that. um Now, we'll do a little bit on the Hueforge as to what I've been working on.
Speaker: um i And it's been pretty quiet. I haven't done a whole lot publicly. This has been sort of kind of going on quietly in the background here. But I'm pretty sure most people are familiar with Hueforge at this point.
Speaker: It's a fantastic software where you feed it an image and i I'm really trying to wrap my brain around how to make the software work. I have, I've got one test print that's vaguely what I wanted it to be.
Speaker: ah but You're talking about designing your own? think it yeah for designing your own pictures, the software is great. And you can feed it an image and there's some controls that allow it to... it it like pulls the colors out and turns it into like a height map.
Speaker: So basically, the the the lighter colors turn into taller areas of a flat picture. Yeah, kind of like what the fiber does yeah with that. Use grayscale. There's 256 layers.
Speaker: Right. Except this is more complicated because it actually uses f freaking colors. And actual layers. so And actual layers, too. Exactly. So you you you tweak some stuff to adjust the way it creates a height map, and then you assign different heights on the map to different colors.
Speaker: And it knows how well your colors will bleed through. It understands that if you've got a millimeter of black and then you put a 0.2 millimeter layer of white over the top of it, it doesn't look white.
Speaker: because You're still going to be able to see the black through it because it's such a thin layer and you'll get like. a dark gray and you add another layer on it and then you get a light gray and you add another layer on it and suddenly now it's starting to look pretty much white yeah and it understands that and you play with the sliders until you do it's kind of almost color blending it's it's fucking magic and it's
Speaker: It's almost, it's really difficult to understand. It's not super easy or intuitive and I'm ah fighting with it, but I'm getting there.
Speaker: But I love the pictures. I've printed out like 50 of the damn things that someone else has made. um I print tons of these things for the last six months. They're great. My walls are covered with these damn little things.
Speaker: And The only major drawback, well, I mean, there's a few drawbacks as far as to how many damned colors you can use. and There are cheats for how many colors you can use. I've printed, i believe, seven color Hueforge with my four spool AMS.
Speaker: And the reason you can get away with this is because it prints all of the black, switches once, then it prints all of the blue and it switches once and then it prints all of the red and then say it switches and prints all of the yellow.
Speaker: But if you've got a HueForge that's got five colors, basically what you do is during the print dialog page where it assigns what colors to what colors you say, I want it to use the black spool in spool one of my AMS to print the black from the picture.
Speaker: then you've obviously you assign the blue spool to the blue color and the red spool to the red color and the yellow spool to the yellow color. But then you've got a white.
Speaker: and you assign it to you assign the fifth color to the first spool. You tell it that you want it to print the white using the black color.
Speaker: And then sometime after the black has finished printing, but before it finishes the yellow, you just walk over and you yoink the freaking black spool out and you feed the white in.
Speaker: And then it'll print that as... the fifth color because you did a switchy change that it doesn't know about. So you can do more than that. So but that is kind of a stiff limitation as to how many colors you can feed it. But as long as you're there to keep yanking the spools and replacing them, you can get around that limitation.
Speaker: The limitation that's been a pretty hard one to get around up until now has been a size, though. because you can only print the picture as big as your plate.
Speaker: you know And with the the the the bamboo system, with the plates, you've got, I think it's 255 by 255, but I'm not sure about the A's and the P's, but the X has got some exclusion areas that you can't print on without doing some weird shit to disable some things.
Speaker: the The the filament cutter is actually in the front left corner of my printer. So instead of having like a mechanical cutter that when you're done with a color, it cuts the end of the filament behind the head and then retract it back in instead of having a like a motorized part that performs that cut.
Speaker: It pulls the printer over to the very front left corner and jams it sideways, and it hits a little pokey thing on the side of the box.
Speaker: That's what mine It pushes the cutter in. Yeah. Mine's on the end of the gantry, though. It can do it anywhere. Okay. It's just on the right side of the gantry. goes like... On my plate, I actually have a little tiny corner of the front left corner of the plate that I can't print on because it'll cut the filament if it tries to go into that corner to print it.
Speaker: So um I believe my physical limitations left to right on the X axis, I think I can do like 238. two hundred and thirty eight without running off the edge or into the exclusion zone.
Speaker: So I've figured out that in a hue forge works best with a frame, you know, because it's just a flat piece of plastic. It doesn't stick on the wall by itself. I mean, you can tape it to something if you want and you can put it in an actual frame if you want, but I mean, printing a frame for it seems to be par for the course.
Speaker: And that takes a little bit of extra space. So, I'm comfortable printing a Hueforge up to 225 by 225 and still have a little bit of ah room around the edge to make a frame for it.
Speaker: Because the frame obviously has to be bigger than the picture. It has to go around it, you know? Right. So if I do a 225, I can still print a frame and fit it on there in less than the 238.
Speaker: thirty eight And, you know, that works out pretty well. But I mean... That's a nine to 10 inch picture. mean, it's, it's i guess probably pretty close to nine, nine and a half inch picture.
Speaker: And that's really cool. And especially, I mean, if you prop it up on your desk, that is a cool little piece of artwork on your wall.
Speaker: It's kind of small. It's kind of I mean, I've got, you know, 15 of them running down one wall and it's starting to look kind of, trashy You know, I mean, the pictures are awesome, but the fact that it's got 15 little tiny pieces of art that are each individual and that's as big as they get is kind of and and not not not as impressive.
Speaker: um So I've been trying to work on a fix for that. And ah the beautiful thing about Hueforges is that they are infinitely scalable.
Speaker: Once you've created the Hueforge, you can expand or contract them ah to any size you want, although I generally recommend keeping X and Y at the same percentage. Otherwise you'll get, you know, some stretching.
Speaker: Distortion. Yeah. Obviously. Um, the important thing is that you never ah adjust the Z. on the model because it's a height map and the colors are programmed to change at certain heights.
Speaker: So therefore you really can't adjust the Z. You'd leave your damn Z alone. But I mean, you downloaded a turtle that's 150 by 150 say one and half. If you click on that and say scale, you adjust the and if you click on that and say scale you can adjust the x and the why to all the way down to 50 by 50, or you can scale it all the way up to 225 by 225 and just leave the Z. And and there's a there's a connect these and there's a disconnect these. and So, I mean, you can just go in and say, I want these to be 200 by 200 because that's the size of the frame that I like to print.
Speaker: And you can just go in and you can leave the the bars connected and say 200 and it'll go 200, 200. two hundred two hundred And then the Z jump to 150% as well.
Speaker: And then you hit the uncheck and put the Z back to 100%. Just don't fuck with your Zs. yeah They'll screw up the height map and then your colors are off and everything's just, yeah, it's just a mess.
Speaker: So in addition to being able to scale it up to 225 to fit the plate, Bamboo studio ah Studio also has a bunch of other options. Like you can cut the model on a plane.
Speaker: You can click on an item and then one of the tools up at the top is actually a cut button. So if you click on an object and then click the cut button, it brings up a ah thing where it gives you a cut plane and you can move, rotate, twist, turn the rope and move around the cut plane to be exactly where you want. And then you push the button and it will divide the model into two parts.
Speaker: It's a lot more cooler, more complex than what I'm doing here because it's got options to put like if you're cutting a 3D model and you can like cut off the head.
Speaker: and then put pins in it so that the pieces snug back together and line up with alignment pins when you're done. Unnecessary for my use here, but I figured out that you can scale a Hueforge up to, double that. Say you, instead of 225 by 225, say scale to 450 by 450.
Speaker: instead of two twenty five by two twenty five say you scale it to four fifty by four fifty by 100%, then you've got enough material, and then you can use the cut tool to cut it in half left and right, and then cut it in half top and bottom.
Speaker: And you've got four quarters, each of which is exactly 225 225.
Speaker: Up at the top, there's an add plate button and you can add plates. So you show four plates on your screen and you've got four pieces of Hueforge now.
Speaker: Each one is a full size plate print.
Speaker: So yeah, cool app, isn't it? I'm looking at it right now. I'm like, I'm going to blow this turtle up. This is going to be four. Yeah, exactly. and And not four little ones. You make them four big ones.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Now, that's the easy part. The hard part is, is that there's not a real good availability on frames to hold the four pieces together on the wall so it looks good. You can hang the four pieces on the wall next to each other.
Speaker: But I mean, you're going to have ah a decent gap between the pieces. And there's a couple of frames out there. I found a frame. Somebody split a Star Wars picture left and right into two pieces, and they made a frame for it where each frame has got like five or six mil border around the edge.
Speaker: And then they ran a... ah It's like a dovetail ran up the edge through the edge. So you slide the two pieces onto each other, and it took a fucking mallet and 10 minutes to freaking carefully pound that damn thing together.
Speaker: Even after trying to sand the edges down a little bit, it was really rough getting it together. And once you get it on the wall, the things like... It's got at least 10 mil of black bar up the middle between the left and the right parts of the picture, which is just mildly annoying.
Speaker: So what I've been doing is I've modeled a frame. It's like a modular frame system. There's three parts of the frame for the three different areas that need to be covered.
Speaker: And there's a corner and every rectangular you need to print four corners for it. And if you want to print your turtle in four pieces, you would just take the corner piece, print four of those, and they snap together.
Speaker: is into one cohesive unit and then you can slap the pieces of hueforge into it and they pop right in and the benefit to this is that they all snap together into a cohesive unit and the fact that i've got it down so there's a 0.8 millimeter line between the four pieces of print and if you're not even happy with a 0.8 millimeter black line I'm, you can use translucent.
Speaker: um I'm planning on printing one with a translucent PETG for my frame. So you're barely going to see that there's any line between the pieces of picture at all.
Speaker: And then if you want to go bigger than a four by four, and I did print a four by four of a flaming dragon and that worked out. Actually, no, it was a it's a flaming Godzilla.
Speaker: It's a Godzilla that was pretty cool. And the next one I did was a dragon. And that one is three pieces across and two pieces tall.
Speaker: So I modeled a second piece, which is I call a mid edge. So for the three across, the piece in the center on the top and on the bottom are a different model.
Speaker: So to print that one that's got three across and two down, I printed the four corners and then I printed two of the mid edge, one for the top and one for the bottom.
Speaker: You just rotate them and snap them all together and it and it works. And then... did Did I just... Did I just... ah experience the inception of Hughfinity?
Speaker: Yes. Hughfinity is actually a good term for it. I like that too. It's it's not the name I'm going with, but I really like that. i like that. and because Or Gridforge. With the addition of my third piece,
Speaker: It is infinitely scalable. And the third piece is a center block that has no outside edges and will connect to. Four of like a three by three. So, right, right.
Speaker: So if you want three across and three down, you now need a center block. Like a Rubik's cube. that's like That is the centerpiece that the other ones connect to.
Speaker: It doesn't actually, it it never has to connect to a corner because it can only connect. It only has to connect to a mid edge on the sides and on the top. But with that, there's no theres there is absolutely no reason that you can't scale this up so that you do five across and five down.
Speaker: It's going to take you weeks to print 25 Hueforge pictures and 25 frames, but you can fucking do it to make a big piece of artwork.
Speaker: Right now I'm working on my third piece and it is a fan fantastic picture of a tiger and I'm printing it three across and five down.
Speaker: So it's going to be 15 pieces that are 225 by 225 with 0.8 millimeter lines between them. And they're all snapped together and it's just going to go up on the wall. and It's going to be a big ass poster sized piece of art.
Speaker: I think it said $26 worth of PLA for the Tiger. And I think another $12 worth twelve dollars worth of
Speaker: frames and it's going to take me, you know, well, it said, see the Tigers. Once I blew up the tiger, It was a a shit. I don't remember.
Speaker: It's fucking huge. But yeah, I think it said two and a half days of print time. It was so yeah, 48 plus 12. It was about yeah, about 60 hours of print time to do the hue forges.
Speaker: And then the I'm tweaking the model right now before I release it for public because I want to make it just just just a very fraction of a millimeter thicker because I'm having a problem with the holes on the connectors.
Speaker: that It's kind of floppy once you put it together and then you're trying to get it up to the wall. It kind of flops around on you a little bit. It's perfectly stable on the wall, but I want to tweak it a little bit. But we're between an hour and 10 and an hour and 30 on the frame pieces.
Speaker: and just Just for the listener, sorry to interrupt. I just did the math while you were explaining. This is 26 and half by 44 inch. piece of art yeah yeah yeah and then this and then this also ties back into the licensing conversation that i'm glad we had first yeah because one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to try to create original Hue Forge art that I own rights to.
Speaker: And then maybe I'll try to print poster sized pictures on Etsy. where I sell people, ah you know, a three by four or a two by three sized poster.
Speaker: And then they get the six pieces of frame and the six pieces of Hue Forge and the instructions on how to snap them together, put it on the wall and put the pictures in it. um I could sell that as a physical object once I have figured out how to do the original artwork in Hue Forge.
Speaker: So do the edges of the hue forges themselves have to have some kind of a treatment to fit into these frames? No. that I could just pop this into one of your frames right now. You can. Yeah. I sent you my, I sent you my single picture frame size for one 50 by one 50. If you print out the one I sent you, you can just pop it in.
Speaker: Okay. Um, you know You know, you've had a cabinet with like a sliding glass door, right? Yeah. When you put the sliding glass door in, you push it all the way up and then tip the bottom in and then drop it down and it stays in place.
Speaker: The frame I sent you works like that, except except the piece of glass would not go in because it's about a millimeter shorter gap than the Hue Forge.
Speaker: So you have to flex it just a little bit to push it over the edge and pop it in there. Yep. the The new frame that I'm working on that works for the bigger pieces and the the locks together, it's got little tiny bumps that stick out on each side, and you just give it a little tap, and it just pops it past that nub, and it stays behind the nubs, and it doesn't fall out.
Speaker: Nice. Now, once I have that perfected and ready to go, i can post that on MakerWorld, and I can put it up for free to make your own posters for whatever you want. Here's the instructions on how to do it.
Speaker: But if you want to sell full-size Hueforge posters on Etsy or in your store or wherever you want, there'll be an option that for say $5 a month, Patreon, or technically Maker World has a membership service built into it now that they've added so that you can sign up with Maker World to give me $5 a month, or you can sign up with Patreon to give me $5 a month, either one of which will give you the commercial rights to print out this frame system and sell them online.
Speaker: as much as you want. and And this is totally eliminating what I consider the biggest bottleneck to Hueforge, which is the size of the art you can put on the wall.
Speaker: This is going to smash that down, and hopefully I'll get some people that are going to jump on my Patreon and give me five bucks a month to use this. Because that's a cool system, you know? Yeah, it's a very cool system. I'm i'm going to print this probably later today to see how the single works.
Speaker: But I've already got ideas to do, like like, this is a turtle. I want to do, like, an octopus and a piece of coral and maybe a lighthouse and put four panes in one frame kind of thing. Right.
Speaker: now Now, you could print those as separate individual frames and then just... hang them near each other as a cluster, or you could make a system that like connects the snap, like connects the frames together at a distance.
Speaker: But I mean, mine is specifically made for if you enlarge one picture, they push them together so close that there's not a huge line but between the pieces. And it looks like one big cohesive print.
Speaker: And I, I worked as much, well as i could to get that that that dividing line down and um 0.8 millimeters is about as thin as i can get that divider piece that'll still hold the little nubbles that'll hold it in place and still have the connectors and everything not come apart so well that's what working on that is an amazing process and i like i like the I like the iterations as you go through things like yeah creating, creating a new thing. It's a very interesting process. Yeah. It's fun. That's fun. Oh, and the name, the name, years your, your Hugh Finity was amazing. And I would absolutely be using that name if I had not already made a decision on using huge forge, huge forge. Yes. Okay. Okay. age five
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Just by adding a G. Yeah. yeah I've made it bigger and yeah I like the way it works. Yeah. Yeah. No, that works. That works i too. I'm going to go with huge forge, but if I didn't already have my heart set on huge forge, Hugh finity would be great.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. We have the, we have this guy. We actually, i think he's passed away now. If you're local to upstate or Florida, um, There is a car dealer, ah Billy Fusillo, and he owns, owned, probably 30 different car dealerships from New York, in New York State and in Florida.
Speaker: And um his sons may run it now, I don't know. But anyway, his whole kitch catch, catch. ah He was like the original nineteen seventy s kind of greasy car salesman kind of person who made it made it big. I'm not saying he was a bad person. I'm just saying he presented that way. And he every one of his commercials ended with, you know, we're selling these deals, blowout deals. you know ah It's huge.
Speaker: That was like his catch. So when you said huge for it, I'm like, oh my God, Billy. It's huge. exactly it's huge but I am three d overloaded right now.
Speaker: And I'm starting to get hungry. So i think, uh, do you got, uh, something, uh, for a thing of the week we can throw in quick.
Speaker: I do. I don't know what the guy's name is. Damn it. So I don't. ah Okay. Well, if you want to look, I can talk. and Okay. Go ahead. Okay. I have something that's a different take on, well, different than I usually come up with a product or a service or something more digital. But I have i have a saying, i have a phrase that is I find ah to be motivational. And as far as I know, it's my original.
Speaker: I, at some point on Instagram, saw somebody make something really cool and I made a comment under his post. And i commented and I said that the path to greatness is always made, not followed.
Speaker: And he's like, dude, you should make a shirt out of that. And I didn't make a shirt. I did see and see a sign for my wall in the shop that says that because I find it to be very inspirational.
Speaker: I love the fact that it it's kind of get the play on words with the term made because we're in the maker community. So the term made is always good. But it really means a lot to me because when you think about what does it take to stand out and be popular and be cool and be, you know, a great artist in any angle or from whatever angle you view your life at?
Speaker: What does it take to do that? And, What it i mean, obviously, as you learn art, you need to practice by copying other people's art and doing the things that people have already done.
Speaker: So you learn how to do art. But then when you if you actually ever want to stand up and be your own artist that's noticed, you have to you have to leave the path of what everyone has done before you.
Speaker: And you have to find your own direction and set off in your own place. You have to go do your own thing. You have to find your own way to be original. So by following other people, you can be good.
Speaker: but you will never be better than the people that you're following because you're following them. You're always going to be in their footsteps and you'll never have, you have to go,
Speaker: You either have to go past them or you have to turn left or right on your own individual path to actually become something of your own. So that's one of the things that I keep in mind as an artist that if I ever want to be really cool and different and better than what everybody else is doing, I have to find my own way to do it.
Speaker: And I mean, that was the thought process that involved me in figuring out how to CNC carve a wooden block from four different sides.
Speaker: Whereas everybody else in the world is carving things front and back, taking, figuring out how to do the work holding and the cam to carve things from four different sides. you can get all the way around and have it flow smoothly with no lines on the edges.
Speaker: that was That was finding my own path and doing my own thing and stepping out. you know And that was that was me trying to live that the path to greatness is made and not followed.
Speaker: You follow someone else's path, you'll never be more than they were. right and You have to make your own path to actually be something cool on your own.
Speaker: And that is my theory on how to be a good artist. I put it on my wall, you know?
Speaker: i think that's a good thing to live by when you want to be an individual. I mean, that's a, that's really good. I'm going to piggyback on that. I mean, just being a i
Speaker: ah I've always had a problem calling myself an artist. Everybody refers to me as an artist, not just in my current job, but like I was an art major in school and then I was always creative, you know, throughout. And and even if it was just doodling on ah on a piece of paper, you know, or something like that.
Speaker: But it's okay to admire people and their skills and abilities, but you make a very good point. If you just chase them, that's all you're ever going to do is chase them.
Speaker: If you want to be an individual, you have to have your own mind, your own thoughts, your own skill set, your own drive. you know ah There's nothing wrong with And I admire people like that. Like I admire you because you don't, it's, and it's not because you don't care what other people think it's you're not influenced. If you've got a th thought and a direction, you're going to suss that out on your own.
Speaker: Thanks for some the advice or the pointer or whatever, you know, but you're going to, you've got to figure it out. And once you've got it, then you've got it and you move on to the next thing. And I'll toss in, i had another thing of the week, if you want to call it that, but I'm going to toss in my friend Alex from 66 Customs, New Jersey, is his Instagram.
Speaker: He's a body man. And if you think about a body man, person who restores cars, you know, professionally, um it's like, oh yeah, some body hammers and some Bondo and a paint gun. Anybody can do that.
Speaker: This guy is using three d printers for detail work in hundred year old pieces of art, you know, cars and stuff like that.
Speaker: You know, like he did a, he did a G a classic GMC logo on a 3D printer and then covered it in leather and made it a, a, a ah three d part of a vehicle, you know, or uses it, you know, he and he does it, he's hand hammering on sandbags and tin very much like, ah and I think he would be honored to be included, but very much like a Jesse James type, you know, with the hammer presses and forge work. And, you know, it's not, he's not buying body panels and making them fit with a zip saw on Bondo. He's literally building new headlight buckets and,
Speaker: like, and it takes weeks to, to get fender correct, you know, and it's not just a bolt on piece. And he, and he uses all these skills. And at first I followed him because I'm doing a body, body project with a dune buggy. And I'm like, Oh, I want to be just like Alex. And then to your point, well, I'm just going to chase him my whole life.
Speaker: If I don't, learn from him and then apply it in my own life. Right. There's, there's absolutely nothing wrong with chasing people. Sure.
Speaker: And he's a perfect perfect example of that because he has been like, he did a, ah I don't know what model it was, but like he did a Tesla yeah completely customized it, lowered it, fender flared it, it like took everything about a Tesla that is not Tesla and did it.
Speaker: cool And that car ended up at SEMA. So yeah, he took all the skills that you start out with, that anybody starts out with as a body man, and he has perfected and exploded those skills into his own work, and into his own art.
Speaker: i've I've followed him enough now that I could see a car and go, oh, Alex worked on that car. Right. because Because it's his personality. Yeah, it's that artistic touch. Yeah, e-bikes. You can recognize an artist's touch when it's, you know, they've got a look. They've got a look. You can recognize it.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I know that body line. Alex put it there, you know. Now, for some reason, I would like to see ah like a ah one of the small Teslas with like ah hydraulics and a low rider.
Speaker: you know this Go look at 66 Customs. It's a lowered one. Can you bounce a Tesla without breaking the batteries? you can do I don't know. i don't know either. Another car that he did that looks amazing is he did the, and I hate with a passion, just the looks, not the concept, but the E-Stang, the E-Mustang.
Speaker: Okay. He took one, and from concept to completion, it's a complete rally car. Awesome. Like Baja 1000, lights, flares, off-road tires, lift kits, push bars, all on an EV.
Speaker: It's amazing. That's It's an absolutely amazing project. project yeah That is cool. All right. Well, I think we've overstepped our lunch break here. Yeah, this is a long one. Well, you know, there was a lot of fun stuff to talk about that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think we should do two or three more. There's so much in 3D printing that we've we've spent like a couple of full episodes talking about 3D printing. And this one, we just filled in a bunch of stuff that we hadn't really covered up to this point.
Speaker: yeah Hey, everybody, please go to our pat not Patreon. our What's that thing? The comment place? The Discord? The Discord! Please go to Digifabricators Discord and ask well ask any question. We'll answer anything if it's legal.
Speaker: um Neither one of us were on Epstein's Island. um Nope. Never even seen it. Not a child, not as an adult. none yet and Not in the last 56 years. But that seems to be in the news, unfortunately.
Speaker: But yeah, go to our, I want to say Patreon again, damn it, Discord, and ask us questions, especially if it's subject related to what we've been talking about. We want to hear what you think. We want to hear what you, if we say something you'd think is wrong,
Speaker: Feel free to start an argument. Oh, absolutely. we we we We state right up in the beginning that we are absolutely have every right to be wrong. And it's entirely possible that I have spoken something at some point. In the last 10 minutes. Because I'm absolutely not an expert in, you know, say model licensing, for example. yeah I mean, I've done some. Oh, yeah. it Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, you know, right before I wrap it up, I will say one other thing. It'd be advice to you and some other people about if you want to print things to sell and you don't want to run afoul of the licensing issues for either legal reasons or...
Speaker: Moral reasons, because, you know, it's kind of a shitty thing to do to take somebody's crap and sell it without permission. Right. um There are filters on these websites.
Speaker: If you go to Maker World and you go to the search page, you can actually tweak the search results to give you all of a certain type of license.
Speaker: Right. oh nice If you want to search for things that are commercially allowed, if you want to find products that you can sell legally with no money whatsoever, you can filter search results on Maker World and Thingiverse and most of the other places, I'm guessing, have some of that stuff.
Speaker: But you can actually filter your results by license type. but That's a very good protection. good because you can I bet you a lot of people, I i actually did it. i like One of the first things I printed, I put out on Facebook and said, hey, if you want one, let me know. Or if you want to buy one, let me know.
Speaker: And two people, strangers, saw it, emailed me or messaged me and said, hey, this is a licensed thing. You can't really do that. So I unintentionally almost did it. I took it down immediately. But ah that's a very good point. That's good. I'm glad you brought up that. That should be a thing of the week, you know, for sure. That is a ah good tip that if you're looking to do things the right way, if you're looking to not, I mean, because I mean, if you're going to print some stuff and take it to a flea market or a garage sale or something like that, ah part of it says, well, who the hell's going to know?
Speaker: You know, but I mean, it's it's still kind of a shitty thing to do morally, even if you can get away with it. But if you want to make sure that you're not being that quote, that guy, its you know, taking stuff and selling it, the the one but but you want to be somebody that figures out how to monetize your computer and how to print stuff that you can sell.
Speaker: You can filter the website to say, give me things that have this specific license type and that specific license type allows commercial selling.
Speaker: And therefore, everything in the search results, download it, print it, put it in your store, put it on Etsy, do whatever you want, make your money with it. You can do that because you can filter by license type.
Speaker: So that's my last good tip. I wanted to make sure I had that thought earlier and I lost it and I'm glad I found it before we closed out. Yeah. And if you're going to print something and sell a hundred of them at five or 10 bucks a piece,
Speaker: won't you throw the creator 10 bucks for a licensing fee? you almost exactly And then everybody moves up. Sometimes, sometimes, I mean, it depends on where you're at and what the people do, but people can do what they want. i mean, it's their license. They can do what they want. They can set it up. Sometimes you buy an item.
Speaker: If, if there's a, somebody made this really cool dragon, maybe you have to pay them 50 bucks and they'll give you the model and you can do anything you want with it for the purpose.
Speaker: perpetuity for life you own the rights to that model you can print it for 10 years if you feel like it and make your money back out of it a lot of people are on a subscription model where you're either on uh a patreon or like a mate uh the the maker world has a membership a subscribe a paid membership that you can do right on maker world and it handles the payments and the, the permissions and everything. But if you give them $5 a month, you have access that you have been granted the rights to sell this commercially.
Speaker: And lots of people have Patreon. And they've got 70 models that they've made. And if you give them $10 a month, you get the rights to sell any of their models as long as you keep it. But that's not an in perpetuity. That's as long as you maintain your subscription.
Speaker: Right. You're subscribing to the maker. You're subscribing to the maker's. commercial license is what you're doing. And then for $5 a month, you can get this model for $10 a month. You get every model they've ever made and you can print as many of them and sell them as you want. As long as you keep your membership.
Speaker: So smart. That's good too. Yeah. So, yeah and I'm hoping to get in on the sell the licensing to model part because that is residual.
Speaker: Non work money. mean You've done the work up front and you're going to receive residual. This is like in the maker community when you make when you design some woodworking project and you sell the plans to it.
Speaker: And like every month, a handful of people will buy the plans because they want to make your thing. This is where you do all the work up front. And then it's a residual income that you just keeps coming in later for you.
Speaker: And that's the same thing with the licensing. Once you've got a model that people like, they want to pay for it. Then that's money that just keeps coming in for work. You don't have to keep doing. Anyway, I'm hungry. It's lunchtime.
Speaker: I think we're going to call that a day. I'd like to thank our guest, BambooA1Printer, for coming on the show today. He'll be back. He will be back.
Speaker: Whatever his name is, he will be back. If you want to follow him on Instagram, watch Al's stuff and see him print things with it. but So everybody that enjoyed the show should...
Speaker: I guess watch Al to see what he prints next and maybe watch me to see what I'm printing next. So need to thank Al for taking the time to hang out and thank the listeners for tuning in.
Speaker: And I have a huge thank you to all our current patrons for their support. So as always, many thanks to Adam from VKR Customs, Ed Swanson of Ed's Clocks and More, and Eric from Overall Makerworks.
Speaker: And we have a new patron member. We have Jess Nelson. Our previous guest decided to sign up for our Patreon.
Speaker: And I'd love to say some nice things about her. But, I mean, we already spent an hour and 45 minutes saying nice things about her. You should go listen to that show. That's right. And make sure that you're following Jess because she does amazing things.
Speaker: She's the only person I know that's got a CNC sewing machine. Yeah. Yeah. And that is 3d 3d Prince clothes. Yeah. Yeah. And 3d Prince on c cloth and, all kinds of other fun stuff. She's amazing person.
Speaker: So welcome to the patron group, Jess. Yeah. like you So if you'd like to help support the show, you can share it with your friends. You can leave reviews anywhere you find a review, or you can join our Patreon, which is at patreon.com slash digifabricators.
Speaker: And our Patreon is currently capped at $1 membership because Episodes are coming whenever they're coming.
Speaker: um If this fall comes back around and your time schedule starts to open back up more and we officially commit back to a bi-weekly, we will probably bump it back to five buck option.
Speaker: But at the moment, we're at a dollar a piece just to help cover the cost of the hosting for this. So, of course, as we mentioned earlier, there is a Discord server open to all listeners.
Speaker: And our patrons also get access to patron-only channel in a Discord server. And they get to hear about who our next guest is before the public knows the episode comes out.
Speaker: Direct links to the Discord server and the Patreon page are in the Digifabricators Instagram bio, which you should also be following on Instagram at digi-fabricators.
Speaker: I think we know a couple of people we want to talk to, but when we have time, um I know you've got at least one, and I've got somebody I want to contact.
Speaker: when we have time, but if you know anybody that does really cool stuff with their digital tools, please let us know about them is we would like to have some more suggestions on people to talk to.
Speaker: so thank you everyone. I can be found most places as a weird guy and Al can be found under New York woodworks, which was N Y wood works with an x So thank you to everyone, and we will catch you on our next episode, whenever it may be.
Speaker: Everybody being well.
Speaker: Sweet. Nailed it.
