This is incredibly cool, but I feel like it skims over a pretty important hurdle as well. It says that a good chunk of cost is saved by 3d printing the lenses which can be expensive, but I can also hazard a guess that the kind of printer that’s capable of producing lens-quality printed plastic isn’t anywhere close to the realm of “budget friendly” as the whole printer itself.
That’s not coming from a place of pessimism, either though. The prospects of being able to do something like this are incredibly cool—but it’s a bit misleading in its pitch.
This is super cool! I would love to learn more about diving into hardware hacking like this, but I feel like the learning curve is basically a hockey stick. Do you have any advice or recommendations for someone like me?
You start with interfacing with well-known, well-documented hardware devices (say anything from Adafruit or Sparkfun), then move to interfacing with rare devices with badly translated manuals and broken example code (many cheap sensors), and then to reverse engineering.
It helps if you use non-trivial hardware: while plugging STEMMA/Qwiic cables make for simple and reliable hardware, having a nest of wires on protoboard will teach you to how to trace connections and use multimeter/oscilloscope.
Also for reverse engineering, some devices are much easier than others. For example serial ports on various embedded linux devices are probably simplest - you might not be able to do anything useful, but boot logs are often very easy to discover, you don't even need oscillosope/logic analyzer.
The next step is simple one-way links, like most infrared remote controls or cheap radio transmitters (in OOK mode) - easy to capture, and fun (if tedious) to decode. There is a danger that device you pick will turn out unexpectedly complex, so don't be discouraged if you have to give up on one device and pick a different one.
The biggest piece of advice I have is to not give up too easily. The writeup makes things seem a lot easier than they actually are. While working on this project I had many moments where I almost gave up. Pushing past such roadblocks can get you to great insights.
For learning how to do such things? Well, a general computer science or electrical engineering background is a great start already. Ideally you learn a bit about embedded systems and how electricity works on circuit boards. A great resource for this is Big Clive on Youtube [1] who reverse engineers many circuits on his channel.
Tinkering around with hardware at a lower level will also reward you with a lot of knowledge. For example just working with an ESP32 and some off-the-shelf sensors will help you get a feeling for how these things work. See if you can communicate with other systems as well this way. Try to do as much as possible using jumper wires and breadboards rather than premade cables, so you get to know how it works. Also get a multimeter (one that beeps) and get comfortable using it. If you're unsure which multimeter to get, Big Clive has a pretty good video about that.
One thing I recommend getting is a logic analyzer. You don't need to go for an expensive Saleae (you can find pretty cheap clones on your regular Chinese webshops for example). Then just use it to investigate things that you already have access to. Attach it to a UART port where you know data is sent over and see if you can obtain that using the logic analyzer.
Then you can probably step over to investigating things you don't know. Just figure out with a multimeter what the voltages are and see if maybe data is sent over the line.
Not only does Bambu sell parts, but there’s a pretty healthy market of third party parts as well. Saying these printers are irreparable is plain false.
I rarely print multi material in the same print just because of the filament wastage, but damned if the AMS isn’t worth it for not having to mess around rethreading the filament for filament changes. I know that’s a luxury “nice to have”, but after years of fighting with an Ender 3 Titan extruder and the filament curling just enough to not make it through the PTFE coupling, the AMS is such a time saver. Pop in a roll, push it in an inch, then forget about it and pick it from a list when I print. Done. Love it.
I got my P1P pretty hesitant about the closed ecosystem, but having to never really think about my printer and whether a print is worth the time it’s going to take, which prevented me from printing a bunch of times on the Ender 3, I’m sold at this point.
I wish Prusa the best of luck with their new printer, and I’m sure it’s a solid piece of kit. I think they’ll do alright. Just like I feel as though Bambu have really changed the market in the last couple of years, they’re building in the footsteps of the paths carved by Prusa.
I absolutely love this, but I hate websites like this so much, especially on mobile. I’m haphazardly scrolling hitting breakpoints trying to get to content that either lags well behind my gestures to animate a device spinning around, or zips past everything I wanted to actually read. If you want to show a video, please just show a video.
It's funny, you can basically play back the first animation in dev tools by just scrolling through all the media requests. Each frame of the animation is a separate PNG.
I guess it looks nice when cached, but i am just scrolling empty page and when I stop, after a second I get random picture. An epitome of atrocious design
Bike shedding is bike shedding because the color we paint the bike shed at the nuclear power plant doesn't matter. If people can't use your scroll-jacked website to even learn about your product, that matters.
Does anyone have more examples of articles written in this perspective? Regardless of my experience level I love diving through “ELI(a mediocre engineer)” type explanations as I either learn another piece that wasn’t completely clear, or gives me another set of examples to help explain it to other people. Either way they’re generally very helpful.
This article is largely feels like a 3 to 4 Cloudflare blog/articles summarisation. If you want more of this stuff, check CF's learning centre: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/
That’s the thing! Even if the city had plans of their own, I’d be willing to bet if this guy came in with any sort of backing beyond “well I’ve got my own ideas!” in the way of actual (architectural/engineering) drawings, (time/financial) budgets, etc, he’d have a lot better luck.
Also—like other people have said, if the city are assholes, that sucks, but he’s still going to be fighting a steeper uphill battle on his plans and investments without them behind him—suck it up and learn to work with them or it’s going to be that much harder to not only get started on his current plans, but also his longer term plans of revitalization.
Maybe a great piece of software can be built as a single person working alone, fighting the odds and pissing people off, but I can’t see that approach working for building a town full of people.
