Posts

Balco 3D Printer Z Brace Mod

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I read on some forum's that it's highly recommended you add a Z axis brace. You do this to better align the z axis so it's perpendicular to the build plate and also to take the weight off the centre frame. Luckily my Balco printer is based off the popular Wanhao i3 duplicator v2.1 and someone had already created a printable solution. I love how this 3d printer is able to print parts to upgrade itself. Genuis! I followed the guide described here:  http://3dprinterwiki.info/wiki/wanhao-duplicator-i3/duplicator-i3-basic-mods/z-brace/ The 3d files I downloaded from thingiverse are found here:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:921948 The only issue I had was until I get a glass bed I can't manage to print the front Y brace in ABS without it warping. It's an optional part and something I can print later. For now the rest of the required Z brace parts printed successfully in ABS and without supports just using the settings recommended as per the thingiverse post above! Thi...

Teensy LCD Display for MSI Afterburner 3.0

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I recently wanted to display the MSI Afterburner statistics to an Arduino based device, specifically a Teensy 2.0++. I came up with the idea that I'd piggyback off the MSI Afterburner Remote Sever windows application which is nothing more than a web server. Long story short, after a few nights of soldering and coding I managed to create this. Because my graphics cards are already quite powerful (2 x GTX 680 2GBs) I decided not to make an overclock button that would trigger a profile set in MSI Afterburner. For now it's just a simple statistics monitor. The case is made from the packaging that came with my wife's iPod Nano. The stand is actually a cheap soldering iron stand and the LCD display is a positive white on red backlight 16x2 character display. For the teensy I just simply used the Arduino sketch example for LiquidCrystalFast->SerialLCD which just runs a loop and continuously waits for any serial messages and when it receives one displays it to the LCD. In ...

Lenovo Y500 - Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Installation Guide

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Here's a guide I wrote up as I was installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on my Lenovo Y500 laptop. Features WIFI & Bluetooth Ethernet & USB Tethering Sound Backlight Brightness Idle Backlight Dimming Power Button ACPI functionality FN Keys + (Sleep F1, Backlight off F2, TrackPad Off F6, Search F10, Backlit Keys Spacebar) TrackPad and smooth two-finger scrolling Nvidia GT650M Full Hardware Acceleration & No screen-tearing Sleep, Resume and Shutdown Pre-requisites 4GB USB Flash Drive Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ISO Image Spare HDD (SSD is ideal) Generic SATA Laptop HDD Caddy (cheap on eBay) Installation Download Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Using Linux Live USB Creator make a standard bootable USB key from the downloaded ubuntu image. Power down the latptop Install a blank HDD in the Ultrabay HDD Caddy. This can be a typical sata caddy from ebay. Ensure that the HDD in the Ultraybay Caddy is wiped and is not part of any raid se...