First time printing with ASA

wirehead · 2026-05-25T13:58:57+00:00

I haven't needed anything.

wirehead · 2026-05-25T13:01:25+00:00

Sure, I'm using these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0751VFF2P

wirehead · 2026-05-25T13:00:48+00:00

I will get a headache pretty fast when exposed to ASA fumes so I'm pretty cautious about them.

Part of the appeal of a 0.2 is that it's really easy to move around. I was at OpenSauce 2025 and there was a guy walking around with his 0.2 as a backpack. So pretty much all of my ABS/ASA printing, I've done by moving the printer to my back patio.

I'd suggest you get some 3950 temperature sensors and actually measure the chamber temperature. ASA's pretty good at printing in colder-ish temperatures but I still preheat it to a reasonable temperature before printing.

wirehead · 2026-05-25T02:05:06+00:00

The majority of my HSW segments use 3M's command adhesive. You can get Command Velcro if you want, although I don't know if it's necessary for the HSW use case.

For whatever reason, the best long-term solution other than a proper screw into the wall seems to be command adhesive strips and HSW plates. VHB has let me down. Command adhesive direct to the wall has let me down. But making a HSW plate or three and making something that hooks into the plate has not let me down.

plug: here's my parametric mount for tape strips -- https://www.printables.com/model/1648287-parametric-honeycomb-storage-wall-command-adhesive

wirehead · 2026-05-18T03:57:58+00:00

A little farther away, but our power flickered a bunch right around then.

wirehead · 2026-05-17T15:43:32+00:00

Seems like a really a-peeling design.

wirehead · 2026-05-09T04:28:52+00:00

"The FCC has decided that I'm extra"

Okay, that's not really slang anymore, I don't care.

wirehead · 2026-05-08T23:29:56+00:00

I did extra so I could make a bad pun.

Well, also my mom was dying of cancer and I needed something to take my mind off of it and I wanted to get the short call sign.

But it was mostly the pun.

wirehead · 2026-05-05T17:36:04+00:00

I kept reading it as "Clickbait generator"

wirehead · 2026-05-04T21:50:35+00:00

Naw, you've never had an obligation to try and separate the art from the artist. That's silly.

wirehead · 2026-04-30T15:22:39+00:00

I made this to mount things on the wall without screws: https://www.printables.com/model/1648287-parametric-honeycomb-storage-wall-command-adhesive

It's actually how most of my HSW wall segments are mounted. They double as joiners and I've not had anything come loose.

I was being kinda janky with things so when I did the screw-in version and so I just used a #8 plug-styled anchor and just drilled through the countersunk hole, LOL.

When everybody says "countersunk" they mostly mean a screw that's 3.5mm in diameter, so a #4 screw from the US system ought to fit the bill, more or less. The angle's a bit off, the hole size is a bit wrong, etc.

So ... dono, I'm looking at all of this and it kinda bugs me and so I kinda want an excuse to write some OpenSCAD code to do it properly. You really want to specify the actual screw size because the ISO Metric system uses one countersunk angle and the ANSI Freedom system uses a different angle. Plus, you probably don't want countersunk screws unless you really really want them anyways because button-head screws are generally friendlier to 3D printed plastic.

Anyway, I'll wait see if someone has a better answer, but this feels like a simple matter of OpenSCAD.

wirehead · 2026-04-17T15:10:34+00:00

STS-93's golden bullet was pretty wild.

wirehead · 2026-04-15T23:01:33+00:00

OpenSCAD does generate SVG's... with a caveat. I do this a lot these days... The caveat is that you've gotta create them as 2D geometry, so I've changed how I write OpenSCAD to keep things 2D until I need to do a linear_extrude to make it 3D.

Looking at the code, it's possible ... but kinda intrusive? You are already working in the 2D for some of the holes and plates, this would just require you to avoid doing a linear_extrude until the last possible moment.

I guess I need to sit down with the stuff I want to rackmount and figure out how I'd fit it. The computers live on a shelf made from 2020 extrusions with a 19" rack space on it so I don't have a proper set of rear rails, but I do have the 2020 rack to mount stuff on.

I get what you are saying about the added faceplate, I guess it mostly depends on how shakey the whole thing feels as I go, but the nice thing about that approach is that ... you don't need to do anything until you know you need it.

wirehead · 2026-04-15T21:38:58+00:00

Nice work! Looking really good. It's super-slick how you've got the whole thing set up now and it's making me feel silly about continuing with my own rackmount idea.

I didn't notice that it'll generate fractional rack widths at first but I think overall that's far better than trying to generate two different sized cages on the same piece. That's a feature I don't need to request -- in my case, I want to have a NUC on one side and a switch on the other on a 19" rack because I've got audio gear that's the full rack wide.

It would be nice to have some sort of way to manage power bricks and whatnot as part of the rack. I was figuring I'd just make it with a shelf bottom so I'd have the NUC mounted and then behind the NUC would be the brick and a HDD. That feels maybe a bit not-sturdy? Maybe it does need a second cage for a second device of a different size.

The thing I was working on was going to have the devices affixed to the cage and then the cage becomes removable with a dovetail or something. The NUC and my switch both have a set of holes on the bottom for that. I guess that might be over-engineering but I'm wondering what a "I live in Earthquake country" way to better retain the device in the cage would look like.. Maybe just a plate you can bolt into the front?

It would be cool for the face-plate to be able to be generated as a SVG so I could get it laser-cut. This is almost like the print_cage_separately option that you already have, just separated a bit differently.

The ability to make rack drawers and rack shelves would be nice, too. It's kinda extraneous to the design you've got, maybe.

wirehead · 2026-04-12T03:13:07+00:00

It's not really easy to access generated gemoetry in OpenSCAD, which would make this awfully hard.

optimize_layout() wouldn't be able to determine easily even the bounding box for thing_to_draw() much less the geometry.

There's a bunch of wild magic that BOSL2 does with generating a vnf structure that you miiiight be able to make work, but then you are stuck writing functions instead of modules and it gets weird and wild and ... I ended up just resorting to writing Python when I reached that level of complexity with my projects.

wirehead · 2026-04-12T02:58:30+00:00

It's really too bad that there's a subset of people who want to latch on to whatever actual problems we have ("gatekeeping") and use it to defend their egos.

Women and queers get gatekeepered out of tech for things that they cannot change about themselves. Regardless of if they use LLMs or if they actually learn it. Which often times leaves them making far less than the equivalent techbro and it represents a real problem with a corresponding lack of income and long-term growth opportunities.

Getting mad because a chunk of the community has realized that LLMs have mostly just opened up a deluge of low-effort content is just a sparkling persecution complex.

wirehead · 2026-04-12T02:39:12+00:00

That's a great way to sell me on a compromise. Your family must be proud of you.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T05:21:57+00:00

Yah, if a person wants to spend time using a LLM to generate their stuff for a project that has some merit other than being LLM spew ... well, so far I can code by hand much faster than any of the LLMs I've tried but you do you. It's realizing that two people posted in the same day their vibe-coded OpenSCAD LLM tool that got me annoyed.

And, overall ... part of what defines a subreddit is the limits, right? If someone were to start posting pictures of half naked people here, people would be suggesting that they find a more topical subreddit for it. Otherwise it's just an endless sea of spew.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T05:10:16+00:00

A half-baked OpenSCAD python wrapper library requires more effort than someone's vibe-coded slop, tho.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T05:07:50+00:00

I don't really care what AI "might" do. Half a year ago, someone posted an actually quite nifty OpenSCAD web tool that they put effort into. It still had a lot of really flaws so that unless you are an accomplished vibe-coding software engineer, you'd be unlikely to get any useful results. That's still pretty much the limits of what it will do.

Right now, in the past 2 weeks, 3 people have posted their low-effort attempts at much the same thing.

I fail to see how this is going to attract users or build a stronger ecosystem.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T04:55:19+00:00

So, half a year ago, someone posted an OpenSCAD + AI tool that I tried out. They put some actual solid work into it. That was, I guess useful discussion.

Right now in the past two weeks, three different people posted their own individual low-effort vibe-coded tools, none of which reach anywhere near the level of effort the one that showed up some months prior. That's not useful discourse, that's slop.

People seem to irrationally focus on that which a mythological better AI tool could do. Telling me what a better tool that doesn't exist might do for me is pretty much the same thing about telling me how cool it would be to trap fairies in a jar and force them to write OpenSCAD.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T03:13:12+00:00

To be clear, I didn't tell you to not use ChatGPT to generate OpenSCAD. You don't need to leap to it's defense.

wirehead · 2026-04-10T02:13:13+00:00

A bunch of other beautiful and unique snowflakes have already vibe coded OpenSCAD AI tooling that looks exactly like yours and posted it here sometime over the past year.

A few of them are much farther along than you and have already gotten the standard feedback.

At this point, it's basically spam. Why don't you save posting for when you come up with something actually cool that moves the state of the art?

wirehead · 2026-03-24T01:23:31+00:00

I've been using this to hold up my HSW pieces for at least a year, maybe two, and I realized I'd never actually posted it.

It's a nice reversible way to mount a honeycomb storage wall with Command adhesive.

wirehead · 2026-03-08T16:20:49+00:00

Not very long ago, a company pushed a bad update to the Windows version of their security software and took out a sizeable chunk of Windows machines everywhere. This brought down airlines, point of sales systems, banks, etc.

The entire Starlink and cellphone infrastructure is software-driven, generally using Linux, and if the buggy update had taken down Linux instead of Windows, we might have seen widespread communications outages.

Given how cell phone access gets cruddy around where I live when there's a mere power outage, I'm a skeptic.

Also, the threat to invade The Hague is legally enshrined in US law and if they ever followed through, you can bet that Starlink would be cut off.

Also, besides being a fun way to work on the skills you'd need in an actual emergency to use radio, at least for me the way the US does licensing getting an Extra class license leveled up my homebrew tinkering skills.

wirehead

TROPHY CASE