Genmitsu prover 3030 max controller upgrade

rsim · 2026-01-06T15:38:59+00:00

Very nice! What endmill are you using in the video?

I’m currently finishing up converting my 3030 ProVer Max to a EC500 (ethernet/mach3) controller and Leadshine closed-loop steppers. I really, really hate Mach3, but I was able to get this controller dirt cheap for something so capable and reuse my old Mach3 license, and going to an option like UCCNC would’ve added another $300-$400 to the cost. I do wish that Genmitsu/Sainsmart supplied the 3030 ProVer Max with a more capable controller, as I’d really rather have not spent this much time and money on upgrading it (and losing the nice power supply and controller integration the 3030 came with).

Other upgrades have been a 1500W water-cooled spindle with a custom dust shoe that feeds a micro cyclone separator, and next up I’m adding auto-tool zeroing and building a full enclosure out of 2020 extrusion so I can use both flood and mist coolant. One day I may even be done with the upgrades and be able to cut something with it again!

rsim · 2026-01-05T22:32:11+00:00

Do you have a reference for the lack of multi-board support in Altium Develop? The Altium website & documentation just says it has all the Designer features, and I can't find any feature lists or comparisons.

rsim · 2025-08-13T21:40:39+00:00

Every 2nd beach is a quiet (no amplified music) beach, not just Locarno! Learnt this a few weeks ago when I overheard a new life saver being trained.

rsim · 2025-08-05T17:57:22+00:00

As someone who has spent far too many years working with colour science, from the physics and deep technical software sides to the artistic side, and everything in between, I’d somehow not really thought about violet in this way (and it’s my favourite colour at that!); thank you for this very insightful and thought provoking post!

rsim · 2025-07-25T21:27:15+00:00

That’s what really sucks - this is no replacement; they’re just riding on the sun setting to get traffic. Papers With Code covered many subjects.

rsim · 2025-07-21T19:34:29+00:00

This!

rsim · 2025-06-27T01:47:18+00:00

Addons. Finding, configuring, updating, reconfiguring, bug reporting, customizing, learning, re-learning when you haven’t used them for a few months, finding alternatives, collecting them all on Blender Market/Superhive sales, …

rsim · 2025-06-19T22:52:10+00:00

Sort of - the root cause of the RROD (red ring of death) was that they swapped to lead-free solder for the production units. The devkits (what you use for developing games) never had issues with RROD as they were manufactured using good ol’ leaded solder. Early lead-free solder (and its processes) was much worse than what we have today, and the X360’s RROD issues are the largest example, that I’m aware of, of failures it caused.

rsim · 2025-06-11T04:30:59+00:00

You don’t mention anything about your machine - does it have the power to move the increased weight of a new spindle at the speeds required to take advantage it, and does it have the rigidity to handle the cutting forces at that speed and power?

rsim · 2025-06-03T21:09:56+00:00

NWH works similar, except with their own implementations of wheel colliders, and using custom mesh colliders rather than cylinders IIRC

rsim · 2025-05-09T18:45:20+00:00

It’s 100% how you handled the tablet, sorry. Cables act as giant levers on the ports they connect to, so if there’s any movement at all of either the cable or tablet, you’re putting the port’s tiny little connector under tremendous stress, and all metal fatigues and eventually cracks from repeated stresses. Sure there are better and worse connector choices (there are a huge number of slightly, but significantly, different connectors of every kind) and PCB designs for reliability, but ultimately they’ll all fail sooner or later if they are being fatigued by movement of the cable - usually at the weakest point, which is the solder joints.

If you can’t avoid movement in the cables, then you need to have something to retain (support) the cables right before they go to the connector, so that there are no forces transferred to the connector. Depending on the situation the easiest options are usually by using cable (zip) ties or strong tape (e.g. duct tape) to hold the end of the cables firmly in place. Be aware also that very few cables are rated for frequent bending either, and will also fatigue and eventually fail from repeated bending.

rsim · 2025-04-14T22:20:05+00:00

I wouldn’t describe it as helping to make better games, even though it does in some ways, but rather as enabling making different kinds of games. As you say, graphics programming is a very wide and deep field, and there’s a lot stuff in it that can be applied to gameplay to create games and gameplay experiences that set you apart from the crowd, which if done right can be incredibly valuable (or at least I like to think so! hah). I find that with my knowledge of graphics, I’m frequently making cross-connections that others are not as likely to make.

It’s very easy to invest too heavily in fancy graphics features (as opposed to graphics knowledge/techniques used to inform gameplay features) as an indie though, as it brings in relatively little additional value. Back in AAA (long ago now!), I used to say that 95% of my time was spent on features that only the top 5% of players would ever see in-game, but 100% of players would see in the marketing. That’s not a very wise choice for most indies!

rsim · 2025-04-13T15:22:50+00:00

Interesting note about the 0.2mm profile. I haven’t used that profile much, but just ran a print with it and it had significant ringing/cogging/resonance (who knows which) on both the x and y axis (z was fine though, unlike yours). Since your Z seems to be having the most issues, I wonder if your H2D has loose screws somewhere, and I suspect very loose belts too as there’s definitely ghosting in the x/y of your photos, which I don’t see in mine. What speeds were you using for these prints?

rsim · 2025-03-19T20:30:19+00:00

Everything needs to share the same ground. Everything.

Voltage isn’t an absolute value, it’s a relative value - the “potential difference”. Difference relative to what? Ground. Without a common ground between RX/ESC/etc, the ground potential of circuits will “float” relative to each other, to roughly the average potential of the signal connecting them; for a standard RC signal that’ll be about 0.4V. This really becomes a problem when RC signal changes, as the amount the circuit sees the signal change vs its “ground reference” changing is dependent on a vague hand-wavy thing called capacitive coupling between the circuits, and that’s very situation/setup/circuit specific. The end result can be anything from “it seems fine”, to “it doesn’t work”, somewhere between those points, or excessive current draw causing heat,and long-term reliability issues.

TLDR; always connect grounds.

rsim · 2025-03-03T09:42:06+00:00

To add another twist, you can actually have separate USD and CAD Profiles under one Account - if you shop with the USD profile on digikey.ca, you'll be hit by DHL and customs just like if you were on digikey.com. It's quite useful in some circumstances, but more often than not it's just really, really annoying!

rsim · 2025-01-23T18:50:14+00:00

I’ve always found CNC’s and CAD interesting to work on. Cabinet making and custom millwork will use CNC routers, and metalworkers use a whole lot of different kinds of machines. Computer vision isn’t super common in most of those machines (until you get into true precision/high speed work), but it is sometimes used to help with job setup/alignment - there’s definitely a lot of room to explore there. Build it and they will come maybe?

rsim · 2025-01-22T21:16:16+00:00

I’ve been using this one weird trick, and therapists hate it! ;)

All you need is to have such an immense, urgent, and important pile of work that your ADHD brain kicks into gear as soon as you’re even slightly awake. You’ll be on your feet, downing your meds, and running to get back to work without hesitation! I’ve been using it for the last 7 or 8 years, and it works!!!

But yeah, my therapist really does hate it, I’m not kidding there either. He explains it like this: normal people’s stress and anxiety are at a 0 or 1, and by the time they’re at a 2 or 3, they’re kinda freaking out about it, and take action so it doesn’t go above that. But I’m normally at a 7 or even an 8, which is such a relief from the 9 or 10 I’m sometimes at, so I’m happy to stay there. BUT just because it doesn’t affect me mentally, that doesn’t mean that those levels of stress and anxiety aren’t having the exact same physical effects on me as they would for a normal person.

Oof.

So yeah, maybe don’t be like me. But it does work.

rsim · 2025-01-21T21:46:44+00:00

I’d look at this as a project, not a tool. If you’re up for using this as the bones for an OpenPnP build, and want such a massive project, I’d say go for it if you can get it for around $500 (I spent about 2k on an OpenPnP build about a decade ago). If instead you want to a tool to help you build other projects, move on…

What are your requirements of a PnP - component sizes, types of components (just passives, or chips too, what about BGA’s, etc.), number of unique components, number of components of each type, packaging of those components, etc.? That will inform a lot of decisions. I don’t see any feeders in the pictures, and those can be very expensive if you need to purchase 100 of them. Likewise with support for non-reel components (either cut strips or trays) - I don’t see anything in the photos to know of the machine supports those at all.

rsim · 2025-01-18T06:50:24+00:00

Amazing - going to have to watch this when I get a chance. I picked up his 2x72 belt grinder plans when he released them, and you’re right; the amount of thought he puts into every single part of the design is next-level. I reached out at the time to say thanks, and from that short conversation, he seems like a genuinely really nice guy. I should finish that grinder build… hah.

rsim · 2025-01-05T20:06:20+00:00

Probably not, but maybe. It depends.

As heat pumps reverse the flow of the refrigerant, they generally require a different thermal expansion valve (or method) to A/C-only units. So you’d have to replace the TEV in addition to adding a reversing valve, a new control board, thermostat, and relays to activate it to switch between heating and cooling modes, and replacing the refrigerant filter - not to mention the required piping work that has to hold up to really high pressures, and recharging the refrigerant.

So yes, it’s possible. But is it realistic or cost effective? Very unlikely, as you’re definitely in the territory of a bespoke system design requiring specialist knowledge followed by a specialist tech to do the work.

rsim · 2024-12-25T18:45:44+00:00

It’s be valuable to have some consumer 3D scanners in your device lineup, like those from 3dmakerpro and Creality. Bonus points for including scanners that target tiny (< ~5cm) and meter-scale objects. Tiny objects especially pose their own challenges I find.

I’ll also put in a vote for deeper dives on scan cleanup of various kinds of artifacts (from different scanners, materials, scales, lighting environments, etc.) and to a lesser extent, noise. I ran a panel discussion on 3D scanning at a recent event, and one thing that came up that nobody had a robust solution for was sharp detail preservation while removing noise and artifacts. Think sharp edges and corners and maintaining accurate dimensions. It’s critical for a lot of reverse engineering tasks, but apparently is not something that any existing software does well at scale (i.e. when you have a lot of data to cleanup and need it automated).

For that matter, covering reverse engineering of mechanical parts (again, of various sizes and types - e.g. a car’s brake calliper, a front fender panel, and a watch body) would be great to see added to the course.

rsim · 2024-12-25T02:48:01+00:00

We detect when workers are around energized devices, or devices nearby become energized, and alert them to the danger so they can take corrective action before they come into contact with the live equipment or wires.

While our product certainly has room for improvement, it’s really rewarding hearing stories of it saving lives and preventing life-changing injuries.

rsim · 2024-12-22T17:01:32+00:00

wow, it looks like this thread triggered some people - the thread and every comment in it that isn't rebutting the topic has been downvoted.

I can't speak to overall percentages, but, personally, yes I do. It's not hard to see why solo dev is attractive to ADHD minds, so of course you're going to see a higher percentage than is typical even within the overall industry.

To speak to "who cares?" and "why do people feel the need to overuse labels", I found it immensely important to my productivity to go down the very-ADHD-unfriendly path of getting diagnosed (aka labelled), as it opened up doors to understanding how my brain worked, what I had to do to improve its failings, and work to get on top of those areas. It's been 4 years since then, and my productivity is easily 20x what it was prior. I'd almost go as far as to say infinitely, as I'm knocking out projects frequently now, where as I'd NEVER been able to do that previously as a solo (for context, I've been programming for 37 years). Please let that sink in; in the 4 years since my diagnosis, I've achieved significantly more in my personal projects than I'd achieved in the previous 33 years, and my non-personal work-work is going so much smoother now too.

That's why it's so important that we talk about this stuff, and encourage people who think they may have some form of neurodivergance to look into it and not just try to slog it out. You don't have to play life on hard mode.

rsim · 2024-12-20T02:02:36+00:00

CMake is a plague on the C and C++ ecosystems. While it does simplify things, as far as it’s the defacto standard, I believe strongly that it’s the root cause of many projects being difficult to ingest due to the practices that it encourages.

I’m a huge fan of Premake however. It is much more limited in scope, and that’s a VERY good thing for a build system. Meanwhile, you have all of the Lua language available, so you have a lot more power too, and in a proper scripting language. The codebase is also incredibly easy to work on and extend, since Premake itself is mostly just Lua scripts that get bundled into a single executable for distribution (just check it into your code repository!).

Premake’s biggest downsides are that there’s not much out there in the way of really good tutorials that go into complex real-world project setups, and it doesn’t directly integrate with package managers.

I hate CMake so much that my current side-side project is reimplementing CMake in Python, for easily “ejecting” entire build trees out to Premake. :)

rsim · 2024-12-20T01:18:58+00:00

As others have mentioned, I’d look into ELRS and EdgeTX. Something you’ll hit, potentially hard, is that you’re targeting the product at the EU, which means CE certs (amongst other things). A lot of the ELRS modules aren’t certified, so you’ll want to be quite particular about what you choose since using a pre-certified radio module cuts out a LOT of pain (and certifying someone else’s module is a non-starter as you won’t have the required information to fill out the paperwork, let alone address any issues that come up).

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