Hurrah! new filament!

Following on from my 3D printing firmware escapades, the printer is still working (quite nicely) and it hasn’t burnt the house down (bonus) though I am still a little wary of leaving it on overnight.

I’m pretty much at the end of my filament run, with my failed giant Ahsoka bust and the various other bits and pieces I’d printed, I Was down to my last half roll of 3DQF aqua PLA. I’ve found the 3DQF filaments to be really, really good and they print at a slightly higher temperature which seems to suit my CR-20 Pro nicely.

I started printing some Dinogenics board game organisers from Thingiverse. They take about 8 hours to print and there’s around 20 different pieces to print. I’ve printed some of them but now I’m dangerously close to running out fo filament. I didn’t want to just buy any old filament and I kept missing the 3DQF restocks - they seem to follow the lunar cycles and release filaments at a strange time of the day and whenever I think ‘oh, I need to check for filament’, it’s always sold out. Obviously I need to get some more of the same colour because having board game inserts that are half one colour and half another colour would not be the best thing in the world, unless I did different coloured player trays, that could work.

The 3DQF website is here. I’ve tried a few different filaments now and am quite happy with the recyclable spools they use and the filament seems really really good. It comes out really nicely and once you’ve printed a temperature tower it tends to do exactly what you want it to do as long as you stick to that temperature.

I’ve also started to use PrusaSlicer. I’m sure it’s printing slower than it used to when using Cura. Maybe I’ll get a chance to properly look at the settings when the new filament arrives. When you’re down to your last few grams of filament, there’s no real point to messing around with anything settings wise because you know full well that as soon as you get it somewhere near perfect, you’ll run out of filament and won’t be able to print anything anyway. Then things will sit and settle and you’ll just need to recalibrate it again.

Once we hit May 17th and we can have people around to the house again, it’ll be lovely to actually play some of the board games I have. I’ve acquired a few more through lockdown and with my wife not really being interested in them and my eldest preferring Minecraft, the opportunity to plan has been somewhere stunted.

The last time I played any proper games in person was at Airecon in 2020 just before lockdown hit. I can’t wait for that part of normality to come back once more.

I was off work last week, this week has been a bit of a blur so far, lots and lots of things on the go and home has been pretty hectic too.

It’s Thursday again tomorrow (why is it always Thursday?)

Plans for this weekend (if the filament turns up) involve tweaking a couple of settings in the firmware and reflashing with some additional options enabled that I missed the first time around, doing some more work on Terraform and maybe a little on K8s and spending some time preparing my roadmap for passing my professional level AWS certification before my associate one expires in September. I should probably spend some time playing Fortnite with the kids too, and should probably remember that I have a wife. Just not enough hours in the day for everything at the moment.