A summer off, community firmware cont.

The last thing I posted was in May last year, time for an update of what I was up to last 6 months!

The Summer of less printing

Also in summer 2021 I was still working from home. I have my home office in the attic. Both development of the Community Firmware and my paid day job at EY I do from this space.

Usually in the summer it gets quite hot here because the sun is shining on the (brick) roof, all day long. To make matters worst, all heat from the living room and other rooms also rises through the stairwell to the attic. I have no air conditioning unit here - except for a fairly inefficient mobile air conditioner.

To keep this space habitable, I try to avoid most activities that produce heat. This includes gaming and, of course, 3d printing. Though I have an PEI or similar surface on all my 3D printers, I like to keep a 60C bed temperature for PLA. And I don’t only print PLA of course (also TPU, ABS, PETG).

Even then, it easily gets 28C-30C here. Enough reason to pause 3D printing for a while

Promotion

Other than that, also a lot of mental energy was poured into my work, and I was also promoted to the title of Manager. I’m thankful for this opportunity, but it did make that I didn’t have a lot of energy to put into other efforts.

Catch up with gaming

After acquiring a GTX3090 for a reasonable price (second hand, when it was still possible!) I had some gaming to catch up with. Due to the developments of the community firmware, I practically hadn’t gamed for quite a while.

I took some time to catch up with Cyberpunk 2077 (having also waited for the most critical bugs to be resolved), and also replay the ever awesome Deus Ex series of games.

Internal Creality testing

I was also contact by Creality to do some internal testing for beta units of their printers. I have done this for the CR-10 Smart, of which I made several articles already. I have by now dismantled the CR-10 Smart, as my beta unit had quite some trouble with keeping a proper leveled bed.

I also tested the Creality Ender Pro 2. I still have this unit, and very much like it. It is a simple printer, and not much can go wrong. The only thing I don’t like is that the source code of the firmware isn’t released yet. There are some things I would like to customize.

Vyper & the Community Firmware

Over time, the Community Firmware has received contributions for support for new printers:

• Sovol SV001
• Creality CR-200b (also requires custom horizontal touch screen firmware)

Myself, I have an Anycubic Vyper now in addition to the CR-6 I already had. This Vyper has an DWIN touch screen, just like the CR-6. That calls for an port of the Community Firmware! The Vyper is a better CR-6, featuring a proper dual gear extruder, E3D Volcano-like hot-end, auto-leveling Z-axis, and quite accurate strain gauge leveling. The only downside is the default stock firmware.

Porting the Community Firmware is what I will be focused on the next few months.