To Buy or Not To Buy

Image courtesy of "Google"

So, I am quite upset at this exact point in time.  My digitizer on my phone broke(for those non-phone nerds, the digitizer is the part of the phone that registers touch inputs).  So with the broken digitizer my phone basically is the most expensive battery powered pocket watch ever.  It cannot make calls, text, or do anything remotely useful.  Last night I attempted to change my cell service to an old Blackberry (Blackberry can go die in a hole, oh wait they already did, BURN!) But that did not work, so right now it is day 3 with no phone, and I hate it.  How did people live in the olden times? What did they do on the bus? When they were bored? It must have been an awful thing.  I also can't contact anyone, at all my mother nor my friends.  Today, I am will hopefully get the HTC Hero to connect to the network, the Hero is one of the first Android, made in a time a before time.  Ok, they might have been a hyperbole, but it actually is really old.   Anyway the Hero is not a long term solution, so now I am presented with two paths, buy a digitizer for about $60 to repair my screen on the Optimus G.  Or buy a new phone, even though my contract is not yet expired.

 Normally I would just buy a digitizer, but my phone has been having other problems as well, sometimes whenever I type huge blocks of text, it will delete it by pressing the back button with no way to stop it. It's to unpopular a phone, so many companies do not support games on it, and it has random glitches, where it thinks the keyboard does not exist. Not to mention WI-FI needing to be constantly reconnected.  So, at this point I know I want a new phone, but the choice is quite hard, because my contract is not yet expired on Sprint, and once it does my dad is moving us to a new carrier.  So, it needs to be a quadband phone, meaning it can get into any network, CDMA, GSM, LTE, or WCDMA.  Which narrows my options to really only one phone, the Nexus 5.  The Nexus 5 is made by a partner ship between Google and LG(why they don't use Motorola, which they already own is beyond me).  This is really nice because it is subsidized by Google, and is the phone made by Google to show off Android to developers, and consumers.  Also if I got the Nexus 5, I could design a new case for it, which is always fun.

On another 3d printing note, I did not win the contest for the Ultimaker.  However, they were nice enough to ship me my entry to my house for free.  It looks really great, it shows how great the UP is at making things, honestly the layer stacking compared to my Printrbot, make the Printrbot look like shit.  Then again that is expected as the UP is the same size, but three times the cost.

Multidesign Cookie Cutter

Image courtesy of "My MIni Factory"

There is a contest put on by My Mini Factory, to see who can produce the best 3d printable Christmas design.  The key word here is printable.  Most people think a 3d printer can produce anything, they are right and wrong, they are right that they can produce almost anything, they would be wrong in thinking that it can be produced in one part, with no knowledge of 3d printer.  To design for a single extruder 3d printer is quite difficult, your object can have very little overhang or negative space.  I think of them as the computers in the 80's, you can see potential, but it's by no means perfect.

So, anyway here is my entry.  It is a multi-design cookie cutter, basically, what it does it is cut out cookies in different shapes as your roll it along the flattened out cookie dough.  It took me about 3 hours to design.  To make it 3d printable I hat to sectionalize it into 10 different parts, inside of 5 different .STL's.  If I may say so it looks pretty badass, well as badass as a cookie cutter can be...  Any who this beast(yes I just called a cookie cutter a beast, deal with it), weighs around 86 grams, which depending on where you get your filament from, costs between $1 and $4 to make.  It sports 3 different designs, a snowman, a gingerbread man, and a Christmas star.  On their printers's it took roughly 3 and a half hours to full print.
If you would like more pictures, click here and consider making an account and downloading, it would help me win.


Why did I do this?  The grand prize for the item that gets the most downloads, is an Ultimaker.  An Ultimaker is pretty much the best FFF printer around, it is seven times faster than mine has 10 times the build area, and is way more accurate.  Think of my printer as a hoopty car(Im not sure if it is just my family that calls old, broken down cars this, but that is what I mean)  And an Ultimaker is like a nice Suburu.  I really hope I win. I guess in 3 to 4 week I'll know, I'll keep y'all posted on how its going.  I hope you enjoyed this blog post.  As always have a nerdy day.

The Perfect 3d Printer for Consumers

An example of a Delta printer.  Image courtesy of "SolidSmack"

Here is my idea of a perfect 3d printer, targeted at consumers:

It would need to be fast, while remaining cheap.  So, i would ditch the traditional Mendel style 3d printer, and go with the far less popular delta style of 3d printer.  The delta is much faster because instead of moving the whole print tray, or the whole extruder in a linear motion, it sort of swings the extruder around to create an object making it much faster.  It should be able to printer at 200 mm/s maximum.  This allows you to create most objects in less than an hour.  

The print area should be at least 6x6x6 inches.  This is where Deltas are slightly flawed.  Instead of being a square like a Mendel, it has a circle build tray.  So to get a square object that is 6x6 like a Tardis, you would actually need about 8x8. This is not to big of a problem though, it just equates to a larger overall footprint. The whole printer would have a foot print of roughly 14 inch diameter, and 30 inches tall(the way the Z axis is designed, it has a lot of wasted space while the X and Y axis are quite efficient.  

It needs dual extruder. Not for colors, but for support material.  One of the biggest drawbacks of most 3d printers is that they can’t make everything.  If I told someone to design something to print on my printer, it would likely be unprintable.  This is because my printer like most other sub $3000 dollar printers, have a single extruder, so if anything has overhang it can’t print it well, or even at all.  Dual extruder let you print anything because you can put water soluble support material in the second extruder. 

It needs to cost $300, that is the most consumers can probably afford.  I believe that each printer could cost as little as $350 to make. This leave the only way to make a profit, is through material sales. I think that material should cost $40 for .75kilos. It only costs around 3 bucks to make it.  Take into account that most people use about .75 kilos a month, there could be a very healthy profit with the first year (around $400).

It needs to be launched by a big company, such as Google.  This is because a large company is needed to launch a project like this and show all of the world what it is capable of through advertising.  It would also be the first printer to be launched by a large company, this would help instill trust, that it can deliver as promised.  The printer also needs wifi, so you can print while not being physically attached to the printer.

Public School : The Hidden Communist

courtesy of "Revenuecanada666" 

Ok, so you probably read that title and are thinking "Wow, is this kid secretly a conspiracy theorist?"  Well, the answer to that is no.  I (like many other nerds) just over examine things, take mental notes, and I  derive things from those notes.  This week I have derived very close similarities between communism and public school They include: all teachers get paid the same, there is only one place to buy things from, which is the government.

My first point is that all teachers are paid the same no matter how good of a job they do.  For instance, I had a teacher last year that said she hated us all, and taught us anything.  Yet this year I have a teacher that we play fun games in her class, and we learn a ton. They taught the same subject and made the same amount.  This I believe should not occur, the teacher that is truly an awful human being(I do not mean to be excessively harsh here, and I am not because this teach was that bad, she's gone now though) should make much less than the great one.  Making the same amount, no matter how good of a job you do is one of the fundamental principles of Communism.

Another principle of communism is that everything is owned and operated by the government and thus the people.  The only place you can buy food, snack, and other things in the school, is from the school.  The best example of this is school lunch.  Everyday, more than half of the students buy lunch from the school, and everyday it is the same nasty slop as the day before (except for the day of the chicken fried steak, that stuff is the shit).  Yet we continue to buy it, as many of us have no time to pack a lunch, and there is no where else to buy a lunch in the cafeteria.  Say for instance we had a few restaurant in the cafeteria that were not connected financially to the school.  The place with the best product and cheapest prices would get the most customers, forcing each other to continue to lower the price, and increase the quality, all in pursuit of the children's money.  But alas, in public school we do it the communist way, with only one place to buy your food: the government.

I hoped you enjoyed my little rant about school, but do not take it the wrong way. I love school and we are very fortunate to have it for free.  Alas, nothing in the universe is perfect especially the little microcosm know as school.