Hello Spring!!

So here we are, a week after the clocks ‘sprang forward’ and an hour was stolen from me.

As I’ve gotten older, the clock change has been consistently kicking my ass year after year and I don’t know why.

I presume its effectively jetlag. And I presume it’s because I start work early and I’m not used to being up that early anymore.

Starting work at 7:30, the clocks go forward and all of a sudden you’re starting work at 6:30. Takes a little while for your body to get used to the change, all of a sudden its still light at 7pm, nobody knows what’s going on. I mean I’m 42, I should be used to be this shit by now.

Last Sunday I spent all day messing around with the webcam on the Raspberry Pi attached to the printer. Originally it was coming through a route53 record through my router, through an Nginx reverse proxy and to the camera through octoprint. That worked alright, but more than a couple of people watching and it used to suffer a bit - I don’t think this was upstream bandwidth so much as compute capacity or throughput on the Pi itself.

So I figured it was probably a good idea to look at Kinesis. I got that working but couldn’t find a decent way to have this livestreaming on the site without some sort of auth, which I didn’t want. So I looked into a few other AWS services, then Twitch, then YouTube. I couldn’t get a lag free streaming experience that I was happy with.

Finally decided to just buy the supported version of OctoAnywhere and use that instead. So you’ll see that there’s a nice new interface on the main page showing the name of the thing I’m printing, how long its been going and how long it has left.

The cool thing about this is that I can have Kayleigh clear the build plate if I’m away and I can start something else off remotely. Which is great if I’m away and trying to print something like a Gaming Table.

StageTop kickstarter page

Speaking of which, the gaming table print is coming along wonderfully. Here’s a photo of the frame so far.

The frame, locks and tile locks are mostly done. I’ve got another 10 frames to print (for it to be a 5x5 table) and maybe 30 tile locks and I think maybe 20 more frame locks (over and above the 4 that are being printed with each frame).

Rails are going to take a little while, then its the play surface itself. I don’t think I’m going to have enough filament to do an all one colour play surface, I definitely don’t want it to be just grey like the frames. The rails are going to be black, probably sparkly black underside with squishy TPU tops. It’ll take a while for the tops to print, and I’ve never printed TPU before so that in itself could be very interesting. We’ll see.

I estimate probably another 2 weeks before the table is ready to play on. I’m going 5x5 so that I can easily play something like Nemesis on it, and it’ll sit quite happily on the 90x90 camping table (and kitchen table) that we have with a nice little overhang.

Extremely impressed with the quality of STLs and support from Gut Shot games. This is an amazing project and the fact that I’m just able to start printing this stuff out and put it together with ease is testament to the hard work and design of both them and their testers (and members of the community who have also been hard at work testing everything).

I’ve always wanted a gaming table, but until we buy a house, spending up to £5000 on a solid wood, custom built gaming table with a decent place to put it isn’t really feasible. But to be honest, when I tot up the price of the printer, the filament and electricity….. actually, lets not - :D

Really glad they brought out some short legs for this, it means it’ll be nicely sized for games nights sitting at either table and I’m hopeful that the TPU squish will be nice to lean on. Even if its not good for actually leaning on, we’ll see….. I have high hopes for this thing.

Really enjoying printing it and really enjoying this printer too. Love it.