#SundayStew for October 6th, 2024 - All The Stuff That Happened This Week Part B

This is what I meant to do last week. I wanted to talk about all of the progress and setbacks I experienced in the past week. Here is a link to Part A, the recipe. 

First, I had this idea for cute little dice cups. All I needed was lids. The jars are recycled yogurt jars, the glass beads were leftovers from my daughter's fishbowl and the dice are something I had left over from a D&D campaign. 

Well, it seemed pretty simple until it wasn't. I was going to cut the lids from 3 mm thick wood but I accidentally bought a 5 mm sheet of birch project board. 

I did a trial run and it seemed fine. Except I cut a rectangular piece, not circles. I didn't think about what I was asking the laser to do. I used a caliper to measure the interior and exterior dimensions. These are Oui Yorgurt jars. Here are the measurements: 

Interior dimensions: 55.700 mm 
Exterior dimensions: 69.000 mm

Here is the problem of what I attempted to do with the laser. LaserGRBL and Falcon2 attempt to cut by moving back and forth along the X and Y axes. What that means for circles is the laser attempts to blast a series of holes through the target, in the shape of circles. It starts in the bottom corner and blasts a dot-like hole as deep as possible, then moves on to the next dot, and so on.  

This means the laser has to dump 22 watts of power into a pin-prick area and move on. When you are cutting straight lines, the laser moves at a predetermined speed dumping its power into the target. The beam can smoothly slice through wood. 

That is different from firing full power for a brief moment and moving a large distance before repeating. The energy is discontinuous. It took hours of repeated tries to cut circles. Eventually, it worked but I'll never do that again. 

I meant to burn a series of dice images onto the lids. Recently purchased some .svg files on Esty, so I thought this would be easy. 

No. Either I didn't like the images or the license on the image was objectable, most not extending the right to put the image on a physical object or otherwise modifying it. 

I suddenly landed a new project. Make a package of dice images specifically for various projects, from digital products to physical goods. On the left is a sample image. I suspect I will be doing blank dice and numbered dice, both black on white and white on black. These would be .svg files so they are easy to modify. For completeness, I would make a set of .tifs and .xcf files with a transparent background.

And my drive for completeness makes this project "epic scale". I need 6 images of blank dice, 60 images of numbered dice. I can double that for black on white and white on black. I can double that again for the .xcf and .tif files. More if I want to have .png and .jpg. 

Hell. I will probably break this into three different files. The Friends and Family Pack would be 12 .png images priced at PWYW and would be the hardest to modify. The Dev Pack at $7.99 would be blank dice in positive and negative for the user to create stuff from there. That is 12 images in 4-6 file types. The Complete Set of Dice would contain hundreds of files owing to the numbering and would be $24.99. As time permits, I will be completing and loading these to Ko-Fi and DriveThruRPG. 

The licensing would be really friendly for each. If you use them for a blog or digital product, an attribution someplace therein would be required. If you modify the files into something else, say colorize or make them part of a completely different image, then attribution is optional. Placing images on a physical object like a coffee mug, map, or t-shirt requires no attribution. The big hangup is the license does not permit the use of the files to make another clip art package. I don't care if you sell 10,000 books, T-shirts, and coffee mugs using the images, I just don't want someone reselling them in a new clip art package, modified or not.  

In other news, my son spotted a piece of artwork on ESTY that he wanted burned onto a plaque. Ah, another rabbit hole. 

BUT the file has the exact license I want. In fact, the creator asks people to post images of their products made with the image. That is exactly what I want to do with my dice images. 

This is an image of a KC-135 refueler. My son wants it flipped the other way around. The completist in me knows there is only one main door on the left side, so I have to modify this file for accuracy because there isn't a door on the right side. Also the little curved panel under and slightly behind the cockpit is also not visible on the opposite side. 

And that rabbit hole will continue throughout the next few weeks. Tomorrow's post will be about the 6 mechs I got painted. 

Let's get ready to paint some #mecha

 I do love a good Locust sculpt, but I have a few more figures queued up for painting. 

Usually, I do a light color as the base, but you can see I used black on the Mechs in the back rank. I've never tried that before. The Battlemaster and the Commando will be dark green, with red and white details, along with a bit of silver and gunmetal. 

The jars of dice are my next laser project. I'll be cutting some 3 mm thick lids for them. The next generation will have laser-etched glass, but I need to buy a rotating stand for that. 

Back with Frickin' Laser Beams!

I am back. And now I have a laser. 

I purchased the Creality Falcon2 22-watt laser with all of the trimmings. I have used a laser in the past, however, that machine was very next-level and way out of my price point. If you have the means, the Epilog series of lasers are amazing. I do not have the means but I set one up for the Buffalo Science Museum in 2013. 

I have dreamed of having my own machine and the Falcon2 was at my price point. 

Delivery was super quick and set up was "easy". I've had this machine for nearly two weeks and thanks to the Crowdstrike issue nuking every computer at work, I didn't get to unbox the Falcon2 for 12 days after delivery. 

I wanted to do an unboxing video, but I was too excited to film it and unboxing videos are not a habit I want to start. I will say the packing is excellent for both shipping and unboxing. They really thought out the consumer angle of this product. 

Setting up the laser is simple, but I would like to share some tips based on my background experience. These tips will draw on my time at Mattel/Fisher-Price and my experience with the Epilog laser. 

First, the Falcon2 has 60% of the power of the Epilog 35-watt system. This means the Falcon2 has less power needs and fewer protective systems. The Epilog is in a massive metal and glass box with specific venting methods set right into the frame. 

The Falcon2 only needs a tent with a fan to separate you from the laser. Additionally, the Falcon2 requires protective glasses despite having a plastic window on the tent AND a shield around the laser. Seriously, you only have two eyes so 3 layers of protection is good. 

Let's start with two issues I had with the tent. The tent sits on a plastic frame. The frame parts appear to be 3d printed plastic. It does require a bit of care assembling. Me and my hulk hands snapped one of the support tubes. 

This was laziness on my part. I could have used a little care or a dot of soap. 

The second issue I had was with the fan assembly for the tent. It comes with a fan shield.

PUT IT ON! 

Fans are devices with spinning blades. Despite everything Star Wars has taught me, they usually have covers. This prevents items like Jedi from jumping through them to destroy your Imperial Plans. 

It is a little-known fact that if you stick your fingers into a tiny fan to see if it is sucking or blowing, the blades always SUCK! 

In addition to the Falcon2 laser, I also purchased a very nice set of bandaids. If I had put the shield on the fan from the start, I could have saved a couple of bucks on bandaids.

Live and learn. 

Now we are to the third issue I had with this product. On my first try, the laser didn't work. It wouldn't even move. This indicates a firmware update is necessary. The process is pretty well documented, you simply load the file on to the provided SD card and stick the card in the SD card slot. This updates the main driver motors. 

Next, you load the laser head file on to the SD card and plug that into the laser head unit using the provided SD to USB-C connectors. It's odd, but it works. 

Having completed the update, the laser head moved and the air assist worked. But the laser would not fire. This one flummoxed me. I reached out to support to get help.  

They were ridiculously fast. I emailed at 9:45 pm and they responded by 5:00 am the next day. I was taken aback by the speed and the comprehensive support. They had me disassemble the laser head and check the internal connectors. This would have been daunting, but for the fact they provided all of the tools necessary to perform this check. They provided tools! 

Sadly, this was not my problem. 

Let's back up a bit and go to the same problem I always have... me. Remember how excited I was to assemble the product? I disassembled the whole thing and started over. This was not that hard. 

Before I go any further, I would like to explain the symptoms as they presented. 

Symptom One: the laser head and arm wouldn't move until I updated the firmware. Also, all of the lights blinked oddly. This was the red herring. After the update, the head and arm would move correctly including home and frame, and all of the lights gave correct/ready indicators including the laser, but the laser would not fire. 

On reassembly, I noticed something was off. There connector box on top of the arm for the laser head. When I pushed the connector in, it felt squishy. It also has a locking tab that would not lock. I couldn't see anything wrong until I used my camera.

In my haste, I bent a pin. It wasn't all that hard to push the pin back into place. I first tried the provided tweezers. That didn't work, they were a smidge too big. 

The next tool I reached for was an X-acto blade. It seemed like it would work, but I had just slashed my finger open on the fan so I put that down. What did do the trick was a clay sculpting tool. It has no sharp edges. 

I pushed the connector in and got the same squish. I thought I was being ham-handed again. Considering I already broke one part and stuck my finger into a spinning fan, this was highly probable.  

I fixed the pin again and took a better look at the problem. 

There are three cable management clips on the arm and the third leaves barely room to push the connector into the plug. Remember I mentioned they sent tools with the laser? 

One was an Allen wrench, the right size to remove the cable management clips. With that one clip removed, the connector was easy to fit, click and all. 

The last step was to put the clip back. I gave myself a lot of slack by homing the laser head and pulling the lines out of the way. The clip went back home and I had good cable management again. 

My Mattel/Fisher-Price training tells me they could have put this in the instructions but this isn't the typical consumer product. It's not like you are expecting a child to survive first contact with the beam.  

Since I was in troubleshooting mode, I simplified testing by loading one of the sample images to the SD card and disconnecting the laser from my computer. One problem at a time, right? 

I was immediately rewarded with the air assist powering up, the laser head homing and framing, and a brilliant blast of light. 

Within a few minutes, I had my first engraving. 

The image to the left shows the final product, not the process. You need to have all of that safety gear in place to use the laser. 

Like so: 

And so: 

And, also so: 

Ok. The smoke and CO detector was not actually provided with the device and is more of a nod to the fire that burned my house down once before. 

While you can read that as humor, it isn't. With the tent and fan in place and one window open, you can run this thing in your home without terrible odor problems. Even if your home includes 3 survivors of a fire who are sensitive to burning smells. So long as you have good ventilation. I would also like to point out the laser doesn't trigger a smoke detector 10 feet away in the same room. 

I suspect when I goof, it will trigger the detector, but I'll have to try harder to do that. Also, the product does have a built-in fire detector, so I'll have to try real hard. 

I polled four people on the smell and got some surprising reactions. 

Me, the guy who was not at home for the fire: It smelled alarming bad, like I was going to send my family into PTSD mode. 

Nathan, the kid who was outside but present for the fire: "The laser smells like smoke."

Catherine, the girl who got out last: "It smells like incense."

Kitty, my wife, ran back into the fire to save the cat and collapsed from smoke inhalation: "I can't smell anything." 

So, it does clearly smell funny but not that bad. 

I'd like to close with a final image, an improperly run speed vs power test. 

I cannot wait to get the hang of this and start making products.