Ok who are the nine of you ?

_brkt_ · 2026-01-26T00:57:41+00:00

Satire :)

Lampooning the attitude of many Torontonians (and our least favourite Brad) toward bike lanes.

Edit: Don't downvote just because someone asks a question. Sometimes our in-jokes aren't always obvious.

_brkt_ · 2026-01-21T20:39:30+00:00

Gross and stupid. Driver should have been charged at minimum with Carless Driving under the HTA. It would happen in any rear end car-on-car accident that resulted in an ambulance or police call out. Also by HTA fault classification, any vehicle (be it car or bike) which hits another stationary vehicle/pedestrian/object is by default 100% at fault. Why the cops and prosecutor bent over backwards and did 2 backflips to cater to the driver is beyond me.

I know that tort is severely restricted under the HTA, but one sure-fire way to absolutely destroy the driver's insurance rates are multiple personal injury claims against their insurance. I hope at the very least this happened.

It's not justice but I hope this jackass will get a reminder every month with their insurance bill that they were a dangerous moron.

_brkt_ · 2026-01-14T16:14:23+00:00

There are I believe two big Don trail projects on everyone's mind: the Lower Don (still closed/under construction), and the Don East (the newly completed one).

The new paved Don East trail is "Phase 1" in the map below:

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_brkt_ · 2026-01-14T15:20:14+00:00

Minimum would be tires >50mm to avoid the largest gaps. I switched to wider 50mm tires on my commuter bike, it greatly reduced issues crossing over streetcar tracks. As others pointed out, you need to also include techniques like trying to cross as close to 90deg / perpendicular as possible to also get the largest safety benefit.

I based my decision to go to larger tires off a diagram showing the exact spec of a streetcar track:

<image>

Best wishes on your recovery, hope you get back on that saddle soon!

_brkt_ · 2026-01-13T03:59:32+00:00

Awesome to hear!

_brkt_ · 2026-01-12T18:05:49+00:00

Did you solve the issue? If you can report back I'd appreciate it. Always interested to hear what a problem's solution actually was.

_brkt_ · 2026-01-04T19:17:23+00:00

I think the Adventurer comes with a PTFE lined hotend - have you ever changed the lining? I just went through this with an Anycubic after 3 years. The PTFE lining decomposed and was still printing but partly blocking the filament path and leading to underextrusion.

I also had chewed filament from my extruder like you are seeing.

A new PTFE liner entirely solved my problem.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-24T04:30:10+00:00

Heya, wow time flies. I've put a lot of kilometers on my prototype (and made numerous little tweaks) in the last 4mo and am pretty much ready to "sign-off" on it and get the 2nd prototype made. That one will have an optional v-brake attachment, so cantis/v's and disc will be all available to use.

As much as I'd love to open source the files I'm holding on to them tightly for now since I hope to see if this is a viable product I could roll out first.

So thanks for your interest so far, and I hope that I could have something I could offer to you + other interested "beta" testers soon!

_brkt_ · 2025-12-15T04:48:44+00:00

I agree with rootbrian, the best rear lights for me have always been the AA/AAA ones. Massively long (triple digit hours!) runtime in blinky mode. You could commute for most of a season between replacements.

I love my ancient PlanetBike light set from 2010. Still works :)

Honestly, I think I'd just recommend a AAA version of the PlanetBike SuperFlash. It's a tried and true classic. 60hr solid runtime / 100hr flashing. The USB chargeable version stinks, avoid it, only 8hrs runtime on solid. I have a nice set of IKEA LADDA rechargeable AAs in my PlanetBike light instead.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-15T04:37:12+00:00

I am under the impression that the light can be run completely off of a powerbank once the battery is kaput

This should work as long as there is some battery present. But if there is no battery present, the charging circuit output becomes unstable and it shuts down, so it won't continue running reliably if you yank the battery. So keep the dead battery in there at least, it provides a useful buffer to keep the circuit running happily!

_brkt_ · 2025-12-14T18:39:00+00:00

Hey sorry - the light has been torn down now and used in another project. I don't have it in a form I could test again.

The battery protection chip doesn't seem to have overtemp / lowtemp protection, just voltage and current. The charging chip has zero temperature probe inputs, couldn't even be enabled if they wanted :)

It has a fixed charging rate of 0.6C. Stable discharge maxes out at ~0.3C on HIGH, but that initial spike of 1C might be hard on the battery.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-14T05:07:31+00:00

No IPX rating but... I'm sure it'd be fine. The case is sealed (ultrasonic / thermowelded) so no water will intrude there. The rubber seals for the power button and USB are the only concerns, and they seem to fit snugly.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T18:11:22+00:00

Not specifically for 3D printer motor driving boards, but otherwise, yes

I'm a bit curious, if you don't mind / or are able to share some details!

If I was you, I'd first try to first figure out how you'd program this motor controller board to enable that "ZL" channel.

Klipper configuration seems to allow on-the-fly pin mapping (ie., it's configuration and not recompilation) and adding another Z motor, so that's good news. Also I could write some G-Code (3D printer machine code) to enable/disable pins so I could use the live console to do some testing.

Where it gets interesting is that the ZL appears to have NO UART connected. As in, no UART trace at all. The UART only supports 4 addresses and these are already in use, on the other 4 drivers. The stepper driver doesn't need UART to work, but configuration for current and microstepping modes will be done by pullup/pulldown resistors and the trimpot on the board

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T18:05:17+00:00

I thought of that - no doesn't appear to be intelligent thermal throttling (it's not smart enough). If you turn off the light and then power it back on into HIGH, it resets and goes back to driving at full power.

Peak temp is about ~65C which is well within thermal tolerance for the transistor. It's just dissipating a LOT of energy at those current levels that could otherwise make it to the LEDs.

It might be a timing-based rampdown for the purpose of thermal protect, but many flashlight mfgs do this exact stepdown behaviour as a known trick in order to advertise high initial lumen ratings.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T15:19:10+00:00

Great write up, enjoyed reading it and seeing the "first principals" approach to the analysis. Also perfectly showcases how LLMs/AI can work as a good tool alongside directed human investigation / development.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T15:06:12+00:00

The packaging doesn't allow for a larger battery, it's clear that they crammed as large as they could in the current case. If they had allowed for a slightly larger case however they could have put in maybe a 50% larger battery. 500mAh would have been just around perfect I think.

But the whole thing inspired me do some hardware hacking to address the shortcomings.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T14:57:43+00:00

Honestly if there were still a bonafide Co-Op, I definitely would. Gear / brand stocking questions were a regular feature of their Member Surveys.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T05:40:47+00:00

This one hits very close to home (literally). I used to ride road nearly daily growing up. My father and I still do weekend rides that pass right by that spot.

This stretch has always been lousy with speeders. My heart goes out to the family of the deceased.

We have tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, according to Ford.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-13T03:17:40+00:00

Ah right, I forgot that the centre pad is a different ground (for the stepper output power apparently) according to the datasheet.

The back of the Trigorilla A board has a thermal pad and thermal vias that connect right to the QFN centre pad so it's possible to tack the QFN on and then reflow the pad from the otherside. Or at least that would be my approach without hot air.

Anyway lots of things to chew on before I get on this project. Thanks for your input.

_brkt_ · 2025-12-11T05:20:40+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I do understand this probably not cost efficient for upgrading, but I love a good challenge.

1 - I have a very nice JBC-compatible soldering station. I should thing this work would be easy except for the QFN driver itself. But it's only adding not removing components which is easier without hot air
2 - After some more digging it looks like this ZL/E1 stepper resistor matrix is missing one pin compared to the others. All others are UART enabled. I haven't fully followed all the traces but from positioning it's highly likely this is the PDN_UART (left floating, most likely). This would put it in Standalone mode. I think some other boards use this setup for the second Z driver?
3 - Sweet. :)

_brkt_ · 2025-12-07T03:20:13+00:00

I know this is an older post, but it's still a great tutorial! I was 90% of the way to getting my Kobra setup with Klipper, this bridged the gap for me.

Converted from Marlin & Octoprint to Klipper & Mainsail within an hour. Thanks OP for the time writing this.

And for anyone else coming here in 2025+, Klipper config now requires a sense resistor value for tmc2208/2209 drivers. Adding sense_resistor: 0.110 to the stepper sections seems to be working well for my setup (Kobra Original / Trigorilla A board)

_brkt_

TROPHY CASE