The new part triggering the microswitch. Success!

Since day one of using Crystal Palace, my Reprapguru Prusa i3 V2 clone, I've been planning to fix the poor design of the y-axis stop switch. The Reprapguru design is annoying but marginally usable with careful adjustment and frequent human intervention, but after making a small bumper part on the 3D printer and screwing it to the bearing housing (all of forty minutes of effort) the problem is solved and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Not bad for a full year of irritation and procrastination!

Read more here.

Perfect for a picnic!

Although I haven't blogged about any cocktail since last July, I haven't abandoned the lab; in fact, I'm finally ready for a first: publishing an original! I've been playing with this one for months but as it's obviously a summer drink, I'm releasing it only now, when you need it the most. Herbal, bright, cold, and not so boozy you wouldn't want a few before five o'clock, Sunshine Through the Tall Grass is just right for hot weather, long days, and meals outside. Here's what you do:

• 1 1/2 oz. gin. I used The Botanist for this, but I'm not too particular.
• 1/2 oz. Chartreuse
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice, fresh squeezed
• 2–3 oz. ginger beer; I recommend Fever Tree.
• Tarragon and lemon wheel to garnish

Fill a rocks glass with crushed ice. Place a generous bunch of tarragon leaves on the palm of one hand and slap it hard with the other. Then plant this bunch in the ice, artfully, along one side of the glass. Add gin, Chartreuse and lemon juice to a cocktail shaker full of ice cubes. Shake vigorously and strain into the glass. Top off with something like 2 to 3 oz. of ginger beer, depending on the size of your glass, how full of ice you had it, and how sweet you want this drink to be. Place a lemon wheel on the rim behind the tarragon for a sunset-through-the-grass effect.

Go ahead and try this while the weather's warm. I'd love to hear about your results and about any variations you try!

At some point since my original post in February an update to Chrome broke the layout of the EV100 logo overlay you (should!) see on the upper-left corner of this page. Before fixing it I noticed that nothing was visible there except on the contact page, and that was because that page is short enough to not require scrolling on my display. The bug wasn't present on firefox, IE, or mobile Chrome on my Android.

A little investigation revealed that the element itself was correctly positioned but that the background image wasn't visible. Removing the fixed positioning of the background (but not the element) proved to be the solution. I replaced this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat fixed top right;

With this:

background: url(/images/ev100logobanner.png) no-repeat;

I don't exactly understand what changed in Chrome and why this fixed it, or indeed, why I had it that way in the first place. Any explanations are welcome!

Plastic dust from the spinning nut on one of the couplers.

I recently fixed another problem with my 3D printer: damage to the z-axis caused by unsecured wires getting in the way of the z-axis limit switch. This caused the nuts to turn entirely out of their housing as the printer reached zero mechanically but couldn't trigger the limit switch to turn the motors off. Read more about the fix here. This is another reason I need to get back to the task of making cable chains and other wire management features to make this printer a little cleaner and better contained.

I recently designed something to fit inside the Pelican model 1550, one of their excellent “Protector” line of rugged, watertight cases. Although Pelican helpfully provides exact 3D models of the inside of their cases, I needed the outside geometry as well for documentation purposes. Using their models as a starting point, I built the rest of the geometry from measurements. I didn't need it to be nearly as detailed as this, but I wanted to release it on Grabcad, and I wanted that release to be as useful as possible to others. As a result this became a bit of a labor of love; I haven't gone into my time-tracking app to find out how many hours I have into this mostly because I think I'll be dismayed by the answer!