• Introduction

    Posted on September 8, 2022

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    For my brother’s 21st birthday, I wanted to combine his love of Ratchet & Clank and adding coloured lights to his room to make a custom lightbox for his wall. [Read More]

  • Designing the cover

    Posted on September 9, 2022

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    The first task in my mind was to get the front image of the lightbox designed. From what I have read, the best way to get a clean image for 3D printing is to create a SVG formatted file that I can import into it Tinkercad to generate a STL... [Read More]
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  • Jekyll

    Posted on September 11, 2022

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    While this was lower on my priority list, I had some spare time so decided to set up Jekyll for the static site generation for this repo. This will make it very easy to create daily posts on my progress. It integrates very nicely with GitHub Pages too so I... [Read More]
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  • Shiny new website!

    Posted on September 13, 2022

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    I spent WAY too much time today working on this website. I tend to do this. Going down rabbit holes of things that interest me rather than working on the highest priority task 😅. [Read More]
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  • Soldering

    Posted on September 14, 2022

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    My goal for today is to solder the header pins to the Raspberry Pi Pico. I was not sure if this was even necessary, because the Pico has castellations on in for surface mounting. [Read More]
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  • Measurements

    Posted on September 17, 2022

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    Oh man there were a lot of numbers to think about today… Subconciously, I knew that it would be very hard to figure out how big everything should be. There are also things in the project such as spacing between LEDS and the size of the bolts I have that... [Read More]
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  • Octoprint

    Posted on September 18, 2022

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    I spent a little time today getting Octoprint installed and running on an old Raspberry Pi model B I had lying around. Octoprint will let me monitor the printing process remotely and create timelapses of any prints I make. I would like to include a timelapse of printing this project... [Read More]
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  • Building the Ender 3

    Posted on September 20, 2022

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    I have been both looking forward to and dreading this day for a long time. I bought the Creality Ender 3 3D printer about 6 months ago but have still not built it. Life got busy and I was convinced something would go wrong, so I lost the motivation I... [Read More]
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  • First print

    Posted on September 21, 2022

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    I am not counting the bed levelling print from yesterday 😉. The first “proper” thing I wanted to print is something to test how well my printer is printing. This is known as a benchmark or torture test print and the most common is Benchy: [Read More]
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  • Printing the cover

    Posted on September 24, 2022

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    ​I kicked the cover print off just after 7 am this morning. I got the slicing sorted in Cura first and then loaded the GCode into Octoprint. I was happy with the first layer and print adhesion: [Read More]
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  • Spray painting

    Posted on September 27, 2022

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    I was happy with the spray paint test I did the other day but obviously when it comes to doing the real thing, the pressure is on! [Read More]

  • The end

    Posted on September 30, 2022

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    Well, there you have it. After 20 hours making this website, 20 hours printing and countless more hours thinking, designing and making, I have reached the end of the project. It’s been a whirlwind trying to get this ready 😅. [Read More]