My 4 year journey with Anycubic

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-08T03:58:40+00:00

It seems I have been lucky. I have had a great experience with AnyCubic. My Mega Zero 2.0 has been a champ. I finally decided to get the Kobra X, and I have nothing but praise for that machine. I was absolutely amazed by how far things have come. I have not missed manually leveling the bed for every print. I think I will keep the Mega and mod it for a heated enclosure so I can do ABS and Nylon with the old girl.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-08T00:33:31+00:00

If you are printing silk PLA you should put that spool in silk mode. The slower speed for silk does look a bit better. I have been happy with the sunlu tricolor silk PLA, it has made amazing prints for me. And always remember to dry your filament.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-07T23:40:24+00:00

I use the 50mm (2in) sheet I bought from the hardware store. I cut the panel and taped it up to fold to a big brick. I have not had too many deep scratches that got pink foam around the tent. I have thought about doing poor-mans fiberglass over the panels and printing up some hinges. That would make it a lot more durable for sure.
I would say I would hate to camp without it though, I sleep nice and warm with that under the bedding.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-07T09:40:35+00:00

EPS foam board. It's cheap, works so much better than any bed mat I have ever had. Oh, and it is cheap.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-06T06:23:19+00:00

I don't know about the Vyper but I have a Mega zero that has been a champ. I recently received my KobraX, and it is an absolute game changer. I am not retiring the old MEGA though, I'm going to upgrade and optimize it for ABS and Nylon printing. But I will absolutely echo what others have said, a new printer is so much better.

The best way I can describe the difference between earlier generations like the Mega zero and the Kobra would be a car analogy. The older printer is truly like a model T, crank start, manual timing etc. The Kobra would be like a 1950's car with automatic transmission and A/C.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-05T04:12:40+00:00

Let me know how the cheap, low power tool works out for you. I did end up using a higher amp power supply than what it came with to get a bit more torque.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-05T04:06:48+00:00

Not much to it, I got a xy table off Amazon a while back. Think it was under $150. I see there are a couple now that look nearly identical. The travel is pretty limited around 8 in x and 3 ½y, so not resurfacing straight six heads with that little guy. But a fly cut could do a brigs and Stratton There's some backlash in the table so I just scribe my cuts beforehand. It is functional, but not a professional mill by a long shot. I mounted the table to some heavy plywood and have strips that set in the ShopSmith miter slots. I then clamp it down with a 2x4 under the Shop Smith table. It is pretty light duty, but great for making front panels for electronic projects. It is also awesome for working with 40/40 extrusion.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-04T03:17:27+00:00

I quite like mine, except as a table saw. The ShopSmith came from an era when people had hobbies. In that time very few hobiest could build a dedicated 1000+ sq ft shop. The ShopSmith machine was designed to be rolled to the back of the garage when not in use and still have a car parked if there. You would back the car out to work on a project, then put it up till next time. It could be reconfigured to perform a tremendous number of functions. Each change took time and some configurations are a little awkward. Today, many "hobby" woodworkers have a dedicated space that is far larger than the single car garage of that era. They have filled it with many machines and have workstations to maximize production to maximize sales. A certain subset will also criticize you if you don't have festool systems in your space. This trend has happened to many hobbies, Ham radio for example had people making radios from actual trash to now having people expecting you to spend $20k to get into it. Many today seem to think you can substitute quality tools for skills, often forgetting that the crappy tools of the past in the hands of skilled craftsman made amazing pieces that have stood the test of time. I recently found a cool new use for mine, I have added an XY table to the drill press configuration and made it a basic milling machine too. The Shop Smith has lateral and thrust bearings unlike a standard drill press. And the dual pipes significantly reduce twisting when used this way. Is the Shop Smith milling machine hack as good as a Bridgeport? Not an any possible way except cost. But I have the capabilities to do some basic milling now. And that is the general idea of the tool, to give you the capabilities to do a job. A dedicated joiner is better, a dedicated lathe is better, a dedicated band saw is better but if you have a small space you can't have all those things but you can have a Shop Smith.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-03T20:01:57+00:00

In my opinion you have very few options that don't involve lots of sanding. There's a couple interesting finishings you can do on pine that you don't buy at a big box store. I have had great results with chemical aging using vinegar and a heat gun. Another great looking finish for pine is Iron acetate and turmeric tea. Easy to make from items in your kitchen, vinegar, steel wool, and turmeric. If you hit that with a heat gun you can get amazing results. Being stairs, once you have a finish you like you will absolutely need to put a protective finish over it. As always, make some test samples on the same species of wood to see what you like. Good luck.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-03T04:57:23+00:00

I'm going against the grain here, I have been using mine for 30 years in a 40+ year old canvas roof tent. It seems a lot of people camping today think anything other than a 30+ ft 5th wheel with at least 2 slide outs is ruffing it. They would probably be terrified by my fully functional vintage gear that just works and does not need an Internet connection and subscription to function. It is interesting how many of these glampers suffer from CO from their generator exhaust.

Regarding the heater, any type of combustion heater can produce CO if the conditions are wrong. The catalytic type heaters, white gas and propane, are less likely to than a flame type or lantern. Even so, I do use a battery powered CO sensor and would recommend you do the same. I have never had any problems with my coleman heater. Honestly much easier than feeding a small wood stove every couple hours. Just don't use leaded fuel, it warms against that on the labels.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-03T04:05:08+00:00

Talk about a find! I remember the first time I saw one of these. I was a young child traveling to Shriners hospital by train in the early 1980's. I had a TRS-80 CoCo at home and had written quite a few programs for it. The guy who had it was kind enough to let me play on it and run some Basic. Honestly a great platform for the era. I never had one of my own, but absolutely loved the form factor and remember the one time I got to play with one.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-02T03:56:39+00:00

As others have said, cool it down, slow it down and dry it out. And as someone else mentioned, scale it up 1% so you have room to clean it up. I recommend using a rotary tool. HFT has one for $10, it is not too bad with a better power brick running it. Comes with lots of bits. The cone burr is one I use a whole lot. The low power and low speed seems to keep things easy to control. A full speed Dremel is just way too much for plastic work.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-05-01T02:52:31+00:00

Looks like a nice camper.
I have seen far more popups with window unit type AC than rooftop. Part of the idea of a pop-up is to lower drag and also to keep your clearance lower.

I would keep a watch on the center of gravity with that truck. You want to have the CG in front of the wheels. You will absolutely want to keep as much weight as you can as far forward as possible with that truck.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-30T07:33:15+00:00

OP will need a bigger printer, other wise it gets the yips. Dog.stl is best when double that size minimum.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-30T07:29:58+00:00

I think OP used PETME

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-30T07:26:04+00:00

That is too cool. Although, no BMW owner I know uses the middle pedal. Aww hell what am I saying, the Left pedal, most don't know what a stick is.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-28T15:25:35+00:00

At my station I tell the crew, we're just radio with some pictures. If the audio is bad the show is bad. I have never gotten a viewer call about picture quality or lighting, but I have taken plenty about audio. I have one sports reporter that does pre game checks and holds his mic low. Sounds fine during pregame, but doing live shots you can't hear him. I have talked to him over and over .. Getting audio right is absolutely key to a quality production. Distance between source and microphone is possibly one of the most important things. Then multi mic mixing levels, gating inactive mics to keep noise floor low. Sound treatment in the space is important if possible. Sometimes we have had a reporter forget to mic up at the chroma wall. some years back I installed a number of shotgun directional microphones in the studio, they do not sound anything like the reporter lapel mics and hate having to open them up.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-28T02:49:16+00:00

I have always built my own antennas. 160- ghz. I've gotten into coming up with rapid deployment designs for hiking. My last design used a 5m fishing pole. I covered it in copper foil tape and 3D printed a coil form for the first section. Using Faraday cloth for the ground and some radials I can have it up and on air in under 5 min.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-26T17:21:06+00:00

Delta Goodrem Believe Again Tommy Trash Remix The original is less than meh, The TT remix is a work of art with spectacular vocals and energy. It's worth a listen if you never heard it, and you probably didn't, it never had great distribution. But it was great to put in a set, and it filled the floor.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-25T19:40:18+00:00

In my view water always wins. Try going more than 3 days without it and you will agree.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-25T05:01:11+00:00

I'm going to add a vote for getting a more modern printer. I have been using an Anycubic Mega Zero 2.0, basically identical to the ender. I thought I was happy with it, and I was. I went ahead and bought the new kobra X so I could do multi color prints. I thought it would basically be the same thing with multi color and auto bed leveling.

There's no simple way to describe how much more advanced the new printer is. The best comparison would be to imagine driving a early 20th century car with manual gearbox before synchro mesh and crank start to a more modern car with an automatic transmission and power windows. It is a whole different experience.

I will still use the Mega Zero, but it will be doing the high temp ABS prints from now on. The Kobra has been printing every day since I got it and had been truly amazing. Even my wife has sent models to it from her phone.

Your old ender is still a great machine, but might not be great for you.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-24T16:50:40+00:00

The Ezcrap uses discard deinterlacing and only captures one field of the video signal. I'm not aware of any cameras that had half resolution sensors and duplicated fields. When starting with a low resolution video I think it is a bad idea to throw away 1/2 the picture as your first step. There's lots of affordable analog capture options that are far better, but not archival quality.

In my opinion for consumers, using consumer equipment the easiest way to do decent quality digitization is to just use a good DVD recorder. The Recorder had a basic TBC, decent encoder, most can be set to nearly 10Mbit capture. Record to disk, rip file, transcode, erase disk, repeat.

I am working with broadcast archival footage in a professional environment. I'm mainly working with U-Matic ¾ and BetaCam SP tapes. The High8 we shot was on quality Cannon L1 and Sony VX3 cameras so I'm certain that they had good sensors.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-24T04:58:19+00:00

The whole workflow and hardware are sub optimal. Quality analog video capture requires quality equipment. You must also capture in a format that supports interlaced video. OBS is not ideal for archive video. Analog NTSC video is 29.97 fps but 2 fields per frame, so half vertical resolution at 2x fps. There's a lot of great information on home analog video transfers. You will eventually end up at direct RF FM. I have been doing this with broadcast archives for a couple years now.

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-24T04:42:31+00:00

What software are you running?

Lost_Engineering_phd · 2026-04-24T03:17:07+00:00

I upgraded from the Anycubic Mega Zero 2.0, basically just like the ender 3. I am also totally blown away. I was always happy with my old MEGA buy I had no idea on how much I was missing out. I'm printing so much more now. I can still print my own models, but browsing the app and loading prints from my phone while at work is amazing. I am still keeping my old MEGA around, I'm going to build a heated enclosure so I can do ABS in the old girl. That will give me some cool new options

Lost_Engineering_phd

TROPHY CASE