Recent

Low Volume Production With 3D Printing and Open Source

1/13/2019

I bought a Prusa i3 MK3 3D printer to do some prototyping and low volume production. After doing some rapid prototyping, I came up with a product for organizing dewalt batteries. The polished dual iteration is pictured below.

The product was designed using parametric models in FreeCAD, stress calcs and costing with python, sliced with Slic3r PE, ran with Printrun or Octoprint all on a Debian desktop. Production went smooth until the printer became increasingly erratic on the first layer. Overall, 3D printing could be a viable production method if you can get hobby pricing AND reliability. Reliability still needs work.

A full report on the design can be found in my mechanical portfolio.

Visualizing OSM Edits

I decided to visualize my contributions to OSM over the last few months to see what impact I had on the map.

After a short search, I found that "last touched" edits could be downloaded from the overpass API. This includes all features that haven't been modified after I created/modified them. Using the Leaflet js library to render the edit data with mapbox streets tiles you end up with a fairly crowded map of points and ways.

So if you've been using OSMAND to navigate in the exotic locales of Lynnwood or Bremerton you've probably run into some of my work.

1/13/2019 Update: Added marker cluster plugin to decrease loading time

Lib.Reviews Return To Path

First patch merged for Lib.Reviews! This patch is an ease of use feature for users. When you follow a link to a review on lib.reviews and decide to sign in or register from that page, you will now be redirected back to the review you first visited.

This feature will be very nice to have as lib.reviews grows and users become more likely to enter the site from a review link.

Lib.Reviews Signup Language

Second patch merged for Lib.Reviews! This patch ia a hidden ease of use feature for non-english users. Users can post links with a signupLanguage query to advertise lib.reviews in any supported language. Say all your friends speak esperanto, you would send them lib.reviews/register?signupLanguage=eo so the website will show up in esperanto without having to search for language drop down.

This should help new users feel like the website is for them instead of an english website that happens to have an interface in their language.