Status Update: October

So, the 100 days to offload hasn’t worked out too well. I have a lot I want to say on this blog (not sure if anyone’s reading) but it takes a long time to sit down and write it. I’ll try to pick things up again, or maybe just continue posting now and then. So what am I up to these days? Having graduated high school, I am now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, planning to double major in computer engineering and computer science.

Bed Leveling: A Methodical Approach

Introduction At least for me, the single biggest frustration in hobbyist 3D printing has been the bed and first layer. Leveling, offsets, temperatures, mesh, adhesion, bed materials - it can be quite a lot to get around. And I think this is made worse by all the hacky and conflicting documentation/tutorials on the web, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and even when they work, don’t really explain why. In this article, I want to talk about what I’ve learned in the past 4 years in regards to this.

Gimbals

Introduction For the past two years, I’ve wanted to make a fully open source brushless gimbal controller. Essentially, this is a circuit board and software that can drive a 2 or 3 axis brushless camera gimbal to perform stabilization, motion, tracking, etc. I’m not happy with existing solutions like the STorM32 - closed source firmware, somewhat buggy/hard to use. Most other open source gimbal projects are a decade old and abandoned, and run on horrendously old hardware.