This is part one of a set of calibration test prints to fine-tune your 3d printer to print accurate 3d components to a level where the components will fit each other without post-processing.

Most 3d printers overshoot their wall widths while printing, making components just slightly too big to really fit each other.

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Threads and Batteries: Another nice evening, with a full garage! Some highlights: Steph had his power-assist glove finished, and demoed it. His sensors on the fingers are just bare wires and the Arduino senses the capacitance/resistance. Nice solution, and a really neat project! He then worked on getting a radio link …

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Skateboards and barcodes and CNC: That was a nice meetup! We had lots of people doing interesting stuff and sharing knowledge. Lowku and Chris worked further on their barcode recognition setup. Getting the Python dependencies and cv2 installed took a while, after which they started detecting barcodes of everything in …

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Wings and chairs and maps and cables: I decided towards the end of last year that the organising of the meetup was going on in too many disparate places: I advertised it on ZaTech Slack, Facebook, Twitter and we even had a Whatsapp group. I wanted to consolidate all of that. This is the first meetup organised through …

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The last meetup of the year was quiet: Only Bouwer arrived, so we experimented on his project. Bouwer needed a circuit to buzz when pressure is applied to a sensor mounted on a stick, basically. He had some Velostat, which is a good choice in this case for building the sensor. The idea is to build a circuit with an …

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We had a very full garage this week! Lots of people, interesting projects, even though we had loadshedding from 8pm to 9pm. I did a few labels on my masking tape labeller, after having found a way to make it run consistently without first having to recompile the Arduino code. Steph cut out the wings for his pico stick …

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Yes, these are just dry reports of what happened, but they provide a kind of archive of the goings-on at the Thursday evenings and gives me a way to track attendance and what’s happening. I found a pic of the rendering of the vase, so here it is: Last week: Steph got some 2mm Depron from a local hobby shop, and …

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Last week: I finally figured out a good rendering setting for my random-scorped vase so that it takes less than forever to produce a rendered stl file. I started heating up the printer, but then got busy discussing things. Steph got a few mini drone boards from a friend. He wasn’t sure what condition they were …

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The past 5 months I’ve held regular Thursday evening meetups in my garage. Some notes about things and trends I’ve noticed. Consistency counts My way of announcing this does not reach everyone interested, but since I’ve been doing this consistently every Thursday evening, people pitch up. I’ve …

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Knock sensors, ATTINY85, Satellite antennas, huge 3D printers and some drawing machine stuff. Last week First, a quick report on last week: Steph did the Arduino knock sensor tutorial, but it looked like his piezo element was not working. We tried a few of mine, but most were actually buzzers, which don’t work in …

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