Do you need a brim?

First let's explain what is a brim when it comes to 3D Printing. A brim is a a number of additional bands printed around the base of an object to help it adhere to the bed better. Items which have a very small footprint, but are quite tall can lose balance and fall over when printing, thereby making the print failure and turn into the dreaded spaghetti monster. I have never experienced that.

The Brim gives additional support and allows it to stick to the bed better.

However you also have to consider how the print bed moves. On printers with movable beds, like the Prusa, the bed moves back and forth on the Y-axis. This can put a lot of stress on the foothold as the weight of the printed object is only applied to the smallest width of the item sitting on the bed.

But there is a very simple way around this limitation. Turn it through 90°. By applying this turn to the model you are now increasing the force holding it to the bed to the length of the object, instead of the width. This decreases the force of movement when the bed moves and allows it to adhere better.

Now this is not always the case. Objects which have a round footprint will obviously have no effect and a brim is a necessity in that instance. However in this particular model the instructions said that you need to have a brim. In this case, it's just not necessary. True the default placing of the object when loaded is not optimal. But as I have already proved, you need to think how things are positioned to be able to get a good result. And here you go. The proof it can be printed with no brim, just the default skirt.

"Subscribe to the Newsletter..."

How many times have you been spammed with popups and notifications asking you to subscribe to a newsletter? Quite frankly I find them insulting and annoying. You're scrolling down reading an article and the next thing you know some great big javascript driven popup is right in your face asking for your email address. I don't care. Any website that does that to me ends up on the ignore list.

What I want is to be able to get the news as and when I want it, and the best way to do that is with RSS. Yes, if you're one of those few who haven't heard about RSS then stop reading right now and go away. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to people who actually care about getting timely information.

Now you can either get a decent News Reader (I use QuiteRSS) or if you need something a little more specialised then you might kludge together something a little more useful. So thats exactly what I did.

I work in the Cyber Security world. Subscribing to newsletters means that I would be at their whim to receive the details. Whereas having something that brings all the news to you is a lot more useful. Even more so if those feeds could all be collated and re-distributed in a website for your colleagues to use as well. So that's exactly what my current Cyber Security Project is all about. (See my Previous Project)

There was once upon a time a piece of software called Planet. It was a news feed aggregator that you could give it specific feeds and it would display everything together. Unfortunately it is no longer in use and hasn't been maintained for a long time. Besides which, I wanted something with a little more flexibility.

Enter "Hack the Planet".

HTP offers a greater level of control and the ability to subscribe to numerous feed services all of which are scanned and collated every 15 minutes. The system will also check against a predefined list of keywords for services which are NOT cyber security related (such as general purpose news feeds, eg. Sky News or BBC News) and decide whether to include them or not. Add to the fact that it can figure out Keywords to allow you to filter all of the news clips to just the specific entries (which has been really useful during the recent PrintNightmare issues).

The name has a number of in-jokes in it. Firstly, well Planet software and all that. It's my tribute to them. Secondly "Hack the Planet" was a key phrase used in the 1995 movie Hackers which featured hacking as a core theme. (Don't get me started on the inaccuracy portrayed in most TV media about hacking, because that really annoys me.) So the theme all fits together. 

It's all written in shell script, because it's easy and works. The XML processing is done by xmlstarlet, the web pages are generated through filepp and Make controls the whole thing. The fancy indented DIVs are done by Augmented UI.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the result. There is nothing overly complex with it, and it provides timely information needed by the in-house team of Cyber Security people, whether they are Threat Assessment, Penetration Testers, or people who are just interested in timely news.

No subscription needed.

Printing bigger than the bed

 So a colleague at work asked me to make an Amazon Fire Wall Mount, except a particular size to suite his machine. Fortunately this design allows for flexibility of the end model through it's use of OpenSCAD to control the sizing of the system. But he also needed it adapted to allow for a cable to run inside the case. No big deal really... except for how big the piece is.

Now the wall plate itself has no problem to be printed. The design will split the model in two and allow it to snap together, but the outer bezel, that's a different matter.

The print bed for the Prusa Mk3S is 250mmx220mm and this design is 264mm. It's not going to fit.

Except... the build volume is 3D. So by tipping the design up at a 30° angle it will fit, albeit with a lot of supports in place. But that's neither here nor there as my colleague has already paid for the filament (a whole roll of black PLA) so the cost is on his head. I get to keep whatever's left over as my fee. So thats what I did.

The end result took over a day to print but came out really well.

Mind you, thats not the only thing I'm printing at the moment. There is currently a KickStarter campaign underway which I am backing. And they've even produce some free designs which seem specifically dedicated to me... (OK, not really but they're good designs). So of course I made one.

3D printing has a lot of possibilities, but you have to remember, it's 3D. After all, Khan didn't think in 3D when up against Kirk, so make sure you think in 3D as well.