MSRaynsford

I keep forgetting to take photographs of the batches of face shields when I cut them. Tonight I made 100 plastic parts for someone else who is providing their own clear screens. These will be boxed and sent out asap. There is a mix of colours as I used up the ends of some sheets I had but all in all there are only 3 sets that will have white/blue parts instead of all blue parts.

The laser cut version of the  surgical mask straps  (or ear savers) was made in a very timely fasion. A few days later I saw this viral post from Charlie Swift , who was collating 3D printed straps for the Leicester General Hospital. He had an ambitious goal of 1000 straps so I offered to chop up a sheet and made him 150 straps in just over an hour to get him close to his goal. Turns out all the straps went down well and the other local hospital, Leicester Royal Infirmary now would like a batch. Given that the laser is so much faster and I just took receipt of more polyproylene sheets I offered to cut all 1000 this time. I made a few tweaks to the design to make it faster for cutting ( svg here ) and I also optimised them onto a half sheet of material ( svg here ) The first step towards optimising a sheet is figuring out the best way to stack the design and then working out roughly how many will fit into a sensible sheet size. I'm using half sheets because ...

I tried another one of the timelapse settings, this time is was the 'printer mode' which should move the print head left and right above the print throughout the duration. There was a minor issue with the print though because it wasn't centred in the middle of the print area. This did however lead me to realise what was 'wrong' with the previous orbit print , during the whole timelapse the print head just wafts around the top of the print because it's not actually printing. In this worst case scenario it means it's not even wafting around above the print. So that's my testing done for now, I'm reverting to the back left corner for now.

This laser cut caliper is made from 1.5mm birch plywood, I'm still using Kitronik because I've found other places have sent me 'external' ply instead of 'internal' ply and Kitronik are consistently high quality. I realise this is actually a very old project but due to dead links I've been meaning to rehost the files for a long time to make sure that the links are active and available. ( svg here )

Ruling out higher resolution for the time being I looked at some of the other octolapse settings. Dad was talking about the 'orbit' setting which moves the print head around in a controlled manor to make it actually look like it's printing, this is different to a normal timelapse where the print head is a bit of a blur at the top. I tried it out and the effect is pretty good but there's something I don't really like that I can't immediately put my finger on.

Now that I figured out how to set the white balance, I thought I could increase the image size to produce some better images, trouble is that bogged down the raspberry pi and stopped simple things like the mDNS working so it's not a great combination. I'm wondering if there is a better solution than the raspberry pi camera but with lock down I'm kind of limited on the things I can actually test with. It might be easier to integrate another processor in there altogether, maybe something like an old phone or an ESP Cam board. In the meantime I have a few more timelapses to process using this camera and alternate settings.

I kept this minecraft based easter egg hidden from the kids for the last two days. I knew they would love it when they saw it. I finally managed to get the white balance sorted on my raspberry pi camera, I still need to tweak the settings, particularly as they're not currently remembered between boots but here is a time lapse in the meantime.