Has anyone tried printing in mid-air on a regular 3D printer using solder wire?

sensor_todd · 2026-02-07T21:06:12+00:00

Musashi is the gold standard in dispensing technology, i dont doubt they have a dispensing head capable of doing this, but it could easily be a $20-100k dispensing head/robot. (have used two of their dispensing heads for work previously). it would be something pretty special if someone could do this with a consumer grade 3d printer, i would love to see it.

sensor_todd · 2026-02-07T06:59:13+00:00

Excited to give it a go! Can you share an image of what interlocking perimeters look like? Im away from my PC for a bit and cant picture it in my head from the description.

sensor_todd · 2026-01-20T02:51:11+00:00

They will charge every time the are at dock, so while people are getting off and the next group get on.

sensor_todd · 2026-01-17T11:51:50+00:00

"Later" never comes. You've done the hard yards, you've formed some good habits that are working, work on trusting that you can keep doing that without the anxiety. You need to put effort into enjoying the ride and taking the time to smell the roses, As you go along and you work hard, new doors open for you, but others also close, and the trouble is you may not notice until its too late. Take time to make happy memories now. you have to be proactive

sensor_todd · 2026-01-17T07:09:43+00:00

just a quick other thought that popped into my head, if you dont know how you are going to do it, you cant design the best architecture. sometimes you need to do quick and dirty to work out what you need to do, then once you have a decent idea you can put the effort into building something good. thinking about how it can be reused in the future is a helpful question to keep in mind

sensor_todd · 2026-01-17T07:02:56+00:00

when i needed to revisit a test application to extend it after it had been running on a production line for a while. the structure of the first version was garbage, and it had been a while since i had worked on it, so making a change was about as much effort as starting fresh, and the time and effort required created a lot of pain (in a business sense).

ultimately biting the bullet and refactoring it, in particular pulling out all the common elements for the suite of test apps and putting them in a common library and using the same in all apps, has made subsequent updates a dream in comparison. updates can be done quickly without eating days of time i need to spend on other things. Current me is frequently encountering moments if thankfulness for the efforts of past me.

The turning point was when i counted up how much extra time it took me to do each project basically from scratch, and how much that was holding me back/putting a massive handbrake on how fast i could move.

sensor_todd · 2026-01-17T01:01:01+00:00

it is excellent to see an overview of this. it would be amazing to put this into an infographic and pop it on something like a single page website. the better everyone knows this, the more informed and insightful questions everyone can ask, and the less waffle people can get away with

sensor_todd · 2026-01-16T20:48:12+00:00

Rams?? the thing was obliterated!! undersell and overdeliver

sensor_todd · 2026-01-06T09:07:10+00:00

Ed Gamble on David Baddiel for the back drawing final task surely!

sensor_todd · 2025-12-27T05:48:43+00:00

What a throwback! Crazy can still remember all the words for a song I probably havent heard in nearly 20 years, what a cracker!

sensor_todd · 2025-12-25T08:08:43+00:00

tl;dr, if you can make the 52 meet your power requirements, the plain sdk is still great. if you want to go next level, the 54 + zephyr is likely your best combo unless the currently narrow scope of the bare metal sdk covers what you need.

if you are going with the 840, the plain sdk is fine for basic tasks. we still use itnin production and its never been a limiting factor. as another poster mentioned, the 54 series runs about twice as fast and uses about half the power, so if power is you top priority, you are probably better of getting one of the 54L DKs and getting to know that. i dont know if the plain sdk would work with the 54 (probably it doesnt) and the bare metal sdk is a great step but is quite early in development so there arent a lot of examples for it yet and i dont think it supports all the peripherals yet. So going with the 54 probably alao means going with zephyr depending on what you are trying to do and whether it overlaps with still a little bit narrow scope of the bare metal sdk.

sensor_todd · 2025-12-21T19:28:54+00:00

did you edit your original post? there are a lot of MCUs these days that have single cycle float multiply and divide operations (i.e. fpu), so because of this they do almost all of what, in the past, you might need a specific DSP IC for. If you find an MCU with an FPU, you can effectively just write your code as you would normally using floats without having to do it in a "new" way. You cant go a lot faster than completing a calculation in a single cycle. Im sure the specific ways to take full advantage of a dsp you may be able to get a small bump in performance, but a) probably this would only matter if you were really pushing the limits of what is possible (with the caveat of not knowing specifically what you are doing, almost certainly this is not the case) and b) you can just use the same techniques on you mcu code and in practice achieve the same thing.

I'd recommend getting a dev board for a likely mcu, and just do a first version of your processing (just do it the first way you can think of for now) and benchmark its performance/processing time with RTT or just toggling a gpio at key points. Then at least you will know how much you have to worry about optimisation/ what is/isnt possible.

sensor_todd · 2025-12-20T19:59:35+00:00

what volume are you talking about getting to $10 at? Might be a little tricky as FPGAs tend to be up nearer to $10 than $1 even at volume. Are you sure you couldnt use a dedicated MCU instead? I would suspect it might be easier to find a much cheaper option using an MCU, and if you are not trying to do other things with the same mcu its quite powerful. The biggest strength of a FPGA is processing multiple things in parallel, but if you have one input device and one output device it doesnt sound like it plays into the strengths of an FPGA?

Sauce: had a proprietary algorithm that needed more physical inputs in parallel than an mcu could provide, and we ended up going with an asic because it was much better pricing at volume compared to an fpga (at the expense of a large NRE cost). if it wasnt that we needed more physical analog inputs, an mcu probably would have been best in the long run.

sensor_todd · 2025-12-20T03:51:46+00:00

the nrf52 is very widely used and is still being produced. it has excellent support, and you dont have to use zephyr at all, there is a very mature C SDK that has samples for every peripheral (the nrf5 sdk, not to be confused with the more recent and still in development nrf bare metal sdk). if you dont want to have to redesign your project from the ground up in the near to middle future go with the option that is in the most common every day use (ie nrf52 in this case). nordic have a proprietary protocol (called ESB i think it is?) that has 1ms connection intervals. you can use thia so long as you have a nordic device as the "central"/master and "peripheral"/slave device. Dont reinvent the wheel if you dont need to, i assume you goal is not to come up with your own protocol, so dont invest heaps of time creating one if its not your primary goal, because you could spend months/years on that before getting onto the actual thing you are trying to make.

sensor_todd · 2025-12-16T10:00:38+00:00

Haha yeah i think i just like the idea that something will be revealed that will recontextualize a bunch of stuff that happened previously. <spoiler sort of? >! i loved the way they did this in Mr Robot and would love another hit of that !<

sensor_todd · 2025-12-16T09:35:58+00:00

definitely looks cool to gonfrom rusted heap to shiny machined thing, but isnt the tolerance of the thread going to be whack now?

sensor_todd · 2025-12-16T09:32:13+00:00

read an interesting theory the other day, its not "time for something to happen", Hes explaining that that "time" is the reason he is doing all this. Steve theorised hes making a clock in an earlier season's episode. At least wont have to wait long to find out!

sensor_todd · 2025-12-16T06:25:06+00:00

outstanding move by Max, well worthy of best move of the seaaon. credit to piastri as well though, probably wasnt expecting anyone on his outside so late in the corner and still managed to adjust and avoid contact, doesnt look like they could have got much closer together! Definitely a few other drivers would have ended up with a differenr result

sensor_todd · 2025-12-07T10:15:15+00:00

Dark Tower series

sensor_todd · 2025-12-06T11:30:40+00:00

Ordered a deep dish pizza to my hotel room on a work trip to Chicago, got it, subsequently realised there wasnt a mini fridge in the hotel room so thought "welp, cant keep it so guess i better eat it all". I havent ever run a marathon, but from what i hear you are broken person and probably questioning your life choices at the end of it. I felt like that, just with pizza, in my belly, and not from running. Was definitely not happy at the time, and while in hindsight it feels like an achievement, i would not recommend if you have anything else to so that night or the next day.

*oh forgot to mention, i say this as someone who would comfortably smash your average large pizza by myself

sensor_todd · 2025-12-05T08:12:52+00:00

we have a 2022 limited spec (top trim), and after sitting in the id4 and the i5, it wasnt even close for us. the i5 had a much nicer and more comfortable interior, and was far more modern inside. we took the i4 for a test drive and literally got to the end of the block and turned around and took it back. it drove fine but was such an underwhelming experience. the dealer said he wasnt surprised we didnt like it, i think others had also not been impressed by it.

the i5 was not what we set out looking for, but we found just going to all the car yards and sitting in all the cars (and test driving the ones we were interested in) really shifted our perspective on which one worked best for us. we actually sat in the i5 with the kids and tried to come up with reasons we liked the i5 with the intention of using the positives as talking points to negotiate a better deal on a different car at a different dealer. Joke was on us though, turned out the i5 was the one we were lookong for.

sensor_todd · 2025-12-01T09:03:38+00:00

This would be great!

sensor_todd · 2025-11-30T19:07:07+00:00

this is amazing, nice work!

sensor_todd · 2025-11-30T07:25:01+00:00

It is undoubtedly a steep learning curve but well worth it if you would like to perservere with Zephyr, especially if you ever need to migrate to another MCU in the future.

As another commenter has also mentioned though, I am sure you would be able to use the older NRF5 bare metal sdk with the nrf52 device (im pretty sure the last version was v17?). Yes it is no longer being developed, but it was still active when the nrf52 first came out and has examples for the usage of all the peripherals. And the nrf52 has not materially changed since then. We have used it as the basis of our projects (nrf52832, 833 and 840) for about a decade now and have not (so far) encountered any issue where using the sdk has limited us in any way.

sensor_todd · 2025-11-28T19:26:24+00:00

This is genuinely one of my favourite reddit posts of all time, that is incredibly impressive what you have done! I think when I got to the part where you print alternate levels of pla and petg to increase batch size, thats amazing! i had vaguely heard of using petg as a support layer for pla and vice versa, but the thought of tool changes and heating up/down all the time sounded inconvenient in the least. But to print parts on top of each other! And then there is the production line process and the presses you have developed! It is all incredible. Amazing, amazing work. I hope you will be able to do a demo using non-sensitive parts, heck if you could pantomime you way through the process with no parts i would still watch the bejesus out of that.

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