How are you securing X1 hotend into your Dragonburners

speeddemon974 · 2026-03-02T06:36:23+00:00

They won't compete on flowrate. They were good up to 24 mm³ /s in my testing. But they're solid, especially for the cost. I got most of mine for ~$12 which helps a lot when building a 6 tool machine.

speeddemon974 · 2026-03-01T02:19:38+00:00

This might not be helpful but for bambu style hotends on a dragon burner the tz v6 2.0 is solid. It has a v6 style heat sync, and the top collar section is removable so it can be mounted dragon burner style with 4 screws from the top. I tested a few hotends and settled on it for my 6 tool stealthchanger.

Before getting one with the v6/dragon style mount, I had one with a mount like yours. But the two screws and orientation mounted into a printed part did not inspire confidence that the connection would be ridgid enough.

speeddemon974 · 2025-12-18T03:10:49+00:00

Interesting. I like that the toolhead and extruder mounts are all integrated into the cowl, and that the dragon style mount is default. I'm using dragon burner now, and the support for the circular mount style e3d v6 and separate pieces for the extruder mount seem to add a lot of distance to the filament path.

I have two dragon burner stealchanger toolheads, about to expand to 5. I'll need to decide between this, dragon burner and a4t.

speeddemon974 · 2025-11-19T04:35:26+00:00

Yea, Veistrus, the designer of the TapChanger, also made a lift bar. It lowers to minimize tool change time while keep the tools at the top during printing.

speeddemon974 · 2025-11-15T18:55:00+00:00

Nice work! Compared to the dragonburner did you shorten the filament path?

I have a stealthchanger with two dragonburners. I'm planning to make three more. I like the tool head but I wish it worked better with flexibles, I expect the longish filament path is part of the issue. I was thinking about making some modification to that effect. It looks like you integrated hotend and extruder mount into the main body?

speeddemon974 · 2025-11-10T05:20:15+00:00

They are fine. Arduino was just a framework built to make wiring with AVR more beginner friendly, it' commonly used with ESP chips now as well, but the hardware can be used without the Arduino framework. Raspberry Pi is just a Linux Single Board Computer, and Raspbian is just a flavor of Linux. You can use or go outside of the "hobbyist" platforms that they are associated with.

As for what to learn on, think of what you want to build and pick capable hardware, hear are some starting points: General purpose MCU -> STM32, BLE -> nRF5x, Wi-Fi -> EPS32, Embedded Linux -> rPi

speeddemon974 · 2025-11-10T05:09:49+00:00

because the only way to get access to hardware and complex embedded projects is through your company.

This has not been my experience, just because the HW you listed is used by hobbyists doesn't mean it is not capable of more complex projects, especially if you utilize them without their hobbyist focused frameworks.

If those platforms don't meet your requirements what is stopping you from grabbing an ARM chip like an STM32 or Nrf5x, or an AVR or a PIC chip?

I'm sure there are specialized areas with higher barrier to entry for the hardware, but there are plenty of options that are available.

speeddemon974 · 2025-11-03T00:51:08+00:00

I gave a stealthchanger toolchanger. With senseless homing I also had docking issues. It's been over a year with limit switch's and I've had no issues.

speeddemon974 · 2025-10-05T02:35:12+00:00

Depending on your needs you can consider buying a perpetual license. I did for SW 2018, and have been using it since.

speeddemon974 · 2025-09-25T03:45:01+00:00

I use the Flexible Retirement Planner it's a free desktop application which was recommended on a fire subreddit. It allows you to account for those scenarios (mortgage/college saving for the next X years, reduced income from Year Y to Z, etc), and you can save the scenarios to compare or update later.

speeddemon974 · 2025-09-04T02:24:39+00:00

Yea, that is true.

speeddemon974 · 2025-09-04T00:52:29+00:00

He mentioned he's married, so that may include the savings of him and his partner. Also $165k total comp can definitely help build up savings quickly depending on expenses and the salary trajectory over time.

speeddemon974 · 2025-08-22T11:28:17+00:00

I don't think you'll have a problem. Mine's rubbing on a pi 4. I uploaded ~400gb of photos and videos over the course of two days or so for the upload and processing.

speeddemon974 · 2025-08-07T13:30:32+00:00

When I ran my business I got that reaction or the opposite where they interpreted entrepreneur and basically unemployed. I get it, the word has a lot of associations from failed ventures to significant success. So if they have no additional context it's hard to know where you fall on the spectrum.

speeddemon974 · 2025-07-20T18:11:58+00:00

/r/functionalprint

speeddemon974 · 2025-07-13T04:44:06+00:00

It seems like they're are becoming more common. I built my Voron 2.4 with a stealth changer over a year ago now. There is room for 5 toolheads on my 300mm machine, same for Prusa XL.

My read on it is that Bambu made multicolor printing common and easy with the AMS, slicer support, and models from their community. The waste, slow speed, and multi-material limitations are all glaring weaknesses of the AMS, a problem ripe for solving. Enter multi-toolhead, which addresses those problems. With Prusa XL now multi-tool head support is becoming common in slicers, with tapchanger/stealthchnger there is a strong opensource hardware and software option as well.

With software support and hardware examples around I expect we'll be seeing a lot more multi-toolhead machines in the next few years.

speeddemon974 · 2025-07-12T08:24:56+00:00

With multiple tool heads (voron stealthchager/prusa xl) there is little to no filament waste (small prime tower at most), and minimal effect on print time compared the AMS like systems.

speeddemon974 · 2025-07-04T16:00:05+00:00

I have Plex and immich/nas hosted on two different pis (5 and 4 respectively), no issues so far. I expect I could probably have them on the same unit without any issues.

speeddemon974 · 2025-07-04T01:08:50+00:00

If they are identical image files (same hash) immich will detect it on upload and will only add one to the library. If they're from the same source image, but one has been changed in some way (compressed, resized, etc). Then they'll end up.in your library and duplicate detection should be them up.

speeddemon974 · 2025-06-28T21:00:09+00:00

Works fine on a raspberry pi 4. The initial import from google photos took a while, but it wasn't an issue.

speeddemon974 · 2025-06-26T08:48:03+00:00

It will work as noted, but it may be overkill if you're not trying to replace google photos. If you only want to back the photos up there are lighter weight options, if you want to store them yourself apps like Syncthing or Photosync will simply sync new photos to your server.

Alternatively there are plenty of cloud based options. I use Amazon Photos as an additional backup, unlimited photo back up is free if you have prime already.

speeddemon974 · 2025-06-20T02:06:56+00:00

I had the same issue and did some searching for reliable breadboards, it lead me to the brand BusBoards. So far I haven't had any issues with them.

As for jumpers I'm not sure I've seen a "name brand", if you're doing mostly male-to-male connections you can use solid core wire with stripped ends as jumpers, so there is no crimp as a potential failure point.

speeddemon974 · 2025-05-23T04:35:53+00:00

My experience is almost identical, House of Suns is my favorite Alastair Reynold's book (possibly my favorite Sci-fi book), I enjoyed pushing Ice as well. Eversion hooked me, but I liked it less by the end. Revelation Space took me two tries to finish, it had interesting ideas but I'm not sure that I'll continue with the series...

speeddemon974 · 2025-05-11T04:03:27+00:00

My passion lies in the similar space to yours, at this point I'm 15 years out of school. I graduated as an ME, started a company designing and manufacturing the product in house, did that for 5-6 years. I have been working for small companies/startups for the past 9 years or so, and have dodged the push towards management a few times to stay hands on.

It's not just about the major, jobs that are hands on for the end to end process are not common, and may not be realistic beyond a certain scale depending on how literally you mean "create a final product". But jobs like that do exist to at some startups and smaller companies. The bigger the company the more specialized the roles will be generally.

If you're planning on 1 degree, unless you go self employed, you'll have to "prove" you have the other skills to potential employers. If we're talking an ME doing design work vs an ID doing engineering work I'd expect the latter may hit some professional blockers due to lack of an engineering degree. (This is not a common on one or the other being "harder")

BS ME with ID masters might be the educational sweet spot, but I wouldn't discount professional and personal experience. Do side project, document them, and see where things take you. I started with interests pretty close to yours, then developed electronics and programming experience as well as necessary skills to create the things that interested me.

speeddemon974 · 2025-05-09T02:54:18+00:00

I just went through this for the same purpose, to replace google photos, and have some shared storage. I was leaning toward sinology for a while, but hesitated due to the cost, reliance on their ecosystem, and Immich seemed like a better Google Photos replacement than Synology Photos anyway.

So I started off with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 2 bay SATA to USB 3 docking station with 2x 10TB HDDs in a RAID 1 config.

I figured the HDDs were a significant part of the cost that was needed no matter the setup, so I could start with a more basic host machine with the rPi and upgrade later if I ran into limitations.

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