It Came From the Workshop

Latest Posts

  • Why 3D Print at an Angle?

    A recent post of mine published on Hackaday talks about the HomeRacker project, a framework for designing and printing to rack-mount anything you’d like.

    I’d like to go into a bit more detail for one aspect I couldn’t really cram into the original post: the way HomeRacker parts are designed for 3D printing, and particularly the way they are printed at an angle, like what you see below (a screenshot from the HomeRacker project video.)

    There are several advantages to printing in this way.

    Most people print a box shape flat on the bed. But there are a number of advantages to printing like what you see here:

    1. No need for supports. Printing at a 45 degree angle is something just about any printer can handle. It’s a modest degree of overhang. As you can see, no supports are needed.
    2. No supports means a smaller footprint and less material. This also means more parts fit on the bed, and parts print faster. Why faster? Less material is being used, so the printer has less to do. And no supports means there is minimal post-processing for the operator to do.
    3. It makes a stronger part. Printing at an angle that is not in the same plane as a box-like part generally means a stronger part.
    4. Printing at an angle has less of a 3D printed “look”. For one thing, the part won’t have the texture of the print bed on one side with layer lines straight up from that. As a result the part will have a more uniform appearance and finish, with the layer lines not being orthogonal to the part’s geometry. (This is even more true if combined with something like ‘fuzzy skin’)

    So consider printing your next box-ish shape (like an enclosure) at an angle. You might be surprised at what’s possible.

  • Local AI tools are getting ever better

    Local AI tools are getting ever better

    Sometimes I like to make a post (like this one) fleshing out something I wrote elsewhere with a little extra detail that didn’t fit into the original, for whatever reason.

    I recently wrote a post for Hackaday.com featuring a voice-controlled, locally-installed AI agent on a Raspberry Pi 5.

    It’s a great showcase for how much better these tools (both hardware and software) are getting. What’s available to hobbyists is so far beyond what it was ten (or even five) years ago.

    Only a couple of years ago roughly a 3 billion parameter LLM model would be considered the minimum for coherent talk, this model uses a 1.3 Billion Qwen model. That’s not even getting into the support for other functions. The “AI in a Box” project I covered is a good example of what this scene was like two years ago.

    I’d like to briefly mention that the term “agent” (when it comes to AI systems) is currently one of those terms whose meaning depends on who is speaking.

    The definition of agent seems to settling on “calling tools in a loop [to accomplish a particular task]”.

    The other meaning of agent is roughly “an AI system that can use a browser (for example) and click on stuff as if it were a person”.

    I cannot resist saying that I am personally more a fan of the latter definition (when an entity is takes action based on your instructions – for example using a browser as if it were you – it is literally acting as your agent) but the definition seems to be settling on the former.

    So just be mindful that you can run into both definitions at this time, depending on who you are speaking to.

  • Moving

    I finally got fed up enough to move my site off Google’s Blogger interface. It went from free, to a few bucks a month, and relentlessly up, up, up… Turns out that’s what I needed to flip the switch.