It will decompose, but only it a hot compost pile.

To some extent, this means large scale composting, but you could theoretically do it at home if you live somewhere with four seasons (specifically fall) and have trees that drop leaves on your property or nearby. Let your grass get a bit taller as the trees start turning and mulch/bag the grass and leaf mixture. Bonus points if you have a ratio of 30 carbon (brown stuff) to 1 nitrogen (green stuff) by weight. “Normal” composting into. This is why big piles of fresh mulch get pretty warm and stream in the middle.

I don’t know what it would take to break down PLA in compost, but suspect it would take more time than a typical home pile if you manage to get it hot. It would probably be benefit from shredding to speed things up, as would the rest of the stuff in a typical compost pile. Amusingly, your PLA is probably ripe for getting whacked with a hammer, or a hammer mill.

IMO there’s little need to buy new in the computer world unless you want to do something silly like have a snapdragon x laptop or have the disposable funds to go the gaming rig route.

My desktop is a retired business workstation, a HP Z420. I bought it for $250, installed a smaller SSD ($100 new) for the OS + apps, upgeaded to the “best” Xenon that fit the socket ($150 used), upgraded to 64 GB RAM ($107 used, yay ECC memory being dirt cheap on the used market), and a 1070TI ($225 used, purchased just before covid).

It’s more than fast enough for my needs still.

This was all about 4-5 years ago, so you could probably do even better with more modern hardware.

That looks like under-extrusion to me.

Here’s the quick “tune your extruder” arc:

1. E-steps. Mark your filament about 125mm from a known reference point, extrude 100mm, measure again. What percentage of 100 did you get to? Adjust your e-steps accordingly and try again. You should never have to mess with this number ever again unless you physically change parts in your extruder. More detailed guide
2. Temperature. Print a temp tower. Choose the temp that looks the best and offers good layer adhesion. Your filament will extrude differently based on your extruder temp
3. Flow rate / extrusion multiplier. This will require more typing from me, but there are a number of ways you can generate test prints for this, so check the linked guide. More detailed EM multiplier guide.

After you get #1, never touch it again unless you change things like your extruder gears. #2/#3 are a good idea whenever you start a new roll of filament, although I personally don’t bother unless I’m trying a new material, brand, or color.

The PWM signal once it starts getting jittery is basically only 0 or 100% and corresponds pretty well to the swings in temperature.

I’ve moved the head hot and cold by hand and haven’t gotten any weird behavior. Normally when I have a wire break there’s a very specific location that will reliably fail. That’s not the case this time.

I wouldn’t think so, the printer never did this previously. I need to put together some g-code to make the print head move around at a pretty high rate, but without actually extruding anything.

My phone is in bedtime mode (black and white) and the painting looks a lot more photorealistic to me. It’s quite the collection of kids, activities, and expressions.

I suspect it’s motion/jiggling around related. I guess I could whip up some g-code to see what happens when the printer is still vs when it’s moving rapidly.

Thanks for the nudge, will follow up.

Agree that the result won’t be a perfect print, but I personally prefer this route over printing the other half, sanding the first half flat to account for a partial layer like you said, and then gluing.

I guess it comes down to what you goal is. 90% of my prints are functional and I don’t really care if they’re a bit ugly at times.

Do you have a pair of calipers that you can use to measure print height? If yes, don’t take it off the bed. Measure the height of the print, delete those layers out of the gcode (it’s just a text document after all), and reset. Note that the gcode and printer setup might require some fiddling to get right, but I’ve resumed prints like this without problems before. They don’t all look perfect at this layer, but they’re certain better than nothing. Once the print loses its hold on the bed, all bets are off.

Hair color changes with age. My mother in law and wife were both blond when they were kids, but their hair slowly turned browner with age. They both highlight their hair to split the difference.

We have two fairly young kids. Their hair is pretty light blond on the top layers, but their bottom layers are quite a bit darker. I suspect the biggest contributing factor beyond genetics is sunlight. Both of them spend a pretty good amount of time outdoors when the weather permits.

I try to keep my writing somewhere in the middle. Easy examples include intent, which is sometimes more important than the explanation itself, as well as outlining alternative ideas/approaches and why they weren’t used.

I greatly appreciate insight into the thought process of others and try to pay it forward.

little kids

If the kids are truly little this would be an OK move from the US. However, schools in Puerto Rico teach in Spanish which would be a struggle for kids who are not fluent.

If there’s a sudden boom in prison construction in the next few years I’ll reconsider of course

You work in what now 🤨

Sarcasm aside, I am genuinely curious why you would leave this here. Is your work related to something with prisons?

Find people who care about what they’re working on and they’ll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won’t be around if they don’t succeed. I’m sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive “startups” that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:

• Fisker
• Faraday future
• Detroit Electric
• Elio Motors

(I’m sure many others)

I hope you get a decent answer. When we last visited 10 years ago a similar idea passed our minds.

I did some poking around at the time out of curiosity. From what I recall, a decent amount of manufacturing moved there in the 70s to claim made in America, take advantage of cheaper labor, and take advantage of some tax incentives. The incentives were phased out and manufacturing started leaving. Wikipedia .

I am not sure what their economy is like these days, but as with all moves a chunk of it is going to come down to the work you can/want to do and the jobs available, but with remote work living somewhere like Puerto Rico does seem appealing.

I suspect you’re going to have the usual island pain points (hurricanes, expensive imports, limited economy, a large swath of the economy tied to tourism) and benefits (consistent weather year round, natural beauty which PR has a ton of, beaches, interesting culture).

Again, I really hope someone with first hand experience chimes in - even if the moved in the other direction from the island to the mainland.

Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.

This can be true of most hobbies, lol. Amusingly, three others of yours fall into that pattern.

Electronics? If only I had a bigger power supply, higher speed/more channel scope, hot air station, logic analyzer, etc. Guitars? I have friends and coworkers who play. No one only owns one guitar, pedal, amp combo. Gardening? I have quite the setup in my basement to get seeds going, but I live in zone 6 and need to compensate some for the short growing season. Cooking can also be it’s own equipment rabbit hole.

Beyond that: Cameras? Choosing which brand of body to use, sensor size, lens collection, tripods/flash/accessories. If you play a tabletop game do you really play a tabletop game or are you looking for an excuse to make and paint minis? 3D printers can be just as much about messing with the printer as actually printing things.

I think it’s important to recognize the pattern so you can consciously decide if you want to fall into it or avoid it. For some people, the collecting around the hobby is even better than doing the hobby.

Ha, this is true as does amortizing things like the coffee maker that needs replacing every 5 years, white vinegar for monthly descaling, the Stanley thermos I bought 4 years ago to bring coffee to work, etc.

Let’s say that it takes 15 minutes to brew the pot of coffee at 1,500 watts. That’s 0.375 watt hours. At $0.20/kwh that’s $0.075/pot. Yay for dumping it into a thermos once it’s brewed.

All in, even if you added an extra $0.50/day brewing at home is still way cheaper.

Stay away from espresso and super “high end” artisan beans and you can have a very solid coffee hobby for not a whole lot of $$. We do a mix of drip, French press, and cold brew. The cost per cup is basically the same for each and the equipment was not very expensive.

You got me curious, so I did the math for us.

I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.

• Small (12 oz): 4x @ $2.65/pop = $10.60/day
• Medium (16 oz): 3x @ $2.95/pop = $8.85/day
• Large (20 oz): 2x @ $3.25/pop = $6.50/day. This is obviously the cheapest choice, but will result in a cold bottom half of the cup due to drinking my coffee slowly vs pounding it

My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don’t know what we paid for them the last time around.

So… since my wife also drinks coffee let’s say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.

The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.

Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you’ll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.

Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you’ll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.

Factories will win this hands down, especially when you’re building large/complex items. It looks like the distinction might be “single building” vs “complex or buildings”, but VW’s Wolfsburg plant is 70 million square feet. The largest plant I’ve been to isn’t on that list, but it’s still over a half mile wide - all under a single roof.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/g2904/7-of-the-worlds-largest-manufacturing-plants/