Experts say that is not possible.

I feel better knowing that Chinese military partners get to feel the joy as well. (Curbs can be a bitch sometimes…)

I was teaching people how to download porn years before that kid showed up. That should have made me at least a cardinal or something and I ain’t even catholic.

I don’t buy it in this particular case, but “directed energy” can do some funky things: https://youtu.be/J-SH18dtBlY?si=40dOJbu4O9ZWWCsZ

(No, it’s not a conspiracy theory video or any of that crap. Benn Jordan is a musician that likes all kinds of funky sound things.)

you’ll be doing the QA and will in fact be working on the parts / product to get it to where you need it to be.

Absolutely. Unless a person wants to spend thousands of dollars on push button solutions that cover every imaginable use case, customization is the way to go.

For solid machines, the customer should already have an idea about what parts need to be modified. If a machine was advertised to mill a widget at +/-20% tolerance, cool. If you want to spend $500 more on a custom pully to get withing 5%, awesome. Precision is expensive and customization is niche.

For cheap machines, everything is generally ravaged by bean counters at every level of design and manufacturing. As long as people understand this and can make repairs, that is sometimes OK.

While I feel OPs pain of finding a 2¢ part that was 0.3mm off center, I can only just shrug it off. A pseudo-premium 5¢ part or building a jig for a worker to test each gear would have been quite expensive and it would probably tack on $2-$5 to the end product price. ($2-$5 actually matters on sites like Amazon or Temu and could potentially cost thousands in lost sales due to product placement.)

Why not? Those CPUs got perfect scores on Red Star OS.

That sounds about right. QA is expensive and time consuming, so it’s left up to the customer. This applies to every single part in the supply chain.

If you want a set of mitsumi linear rails for real precision applications, it’s going to cost just as much or more than that printer.

This is not a “buyer beware” rant, but the buyer should know they aren’t paying for consistency or precision. I am basically saying that for these printers to work reliably and with proper precision, you need to tear them down yourself and inspect each bolt.

I buy cheap Chinese stuff all the time, but my process is to tear the product down and find where costs were cut and look for any serious dangers.

Svol is well known enough that you should be able to get replacement bits for free. Or not. It’s a crap shoot, TBH.

It’s easier to target a specific area or person, regardless of the provider and legalities can be ignored. Its best feature is that it’s portable and likely hard to detect because it doesn’t need to be turned on all the time. The second best feature is that training people to use it is probably really easy.

If backdoors exist or not, the setup and use would be significantly more complex. More people would be aware, there is more risk in getting caught, there will always be system logs somewhere, etc.

I wouldn’t even consider most psychedelics bad and I even consider mushrooms instrumental to my alcoholism recovery over the last few years. (There are caveats, and I’ll explain.)

The issue is some people simply cannot handle psychedelics and bad trips can do more harm than good. If someone is in a risky spot or around shitty people, that can amplify bad experiences 100x. I have had several bad trips, and it’s easy to understand why full-blown psychosis is sometimes a thing.

Heavy dosages with inexperienced users that already have issues is a recipe for disaster. Period. Having seen reality completely dissolve a few times myself, it could be a seriously traumatic experience for some people.

However, when used and dosed properly in healthy environment around people who truly care about your well-being, the benefits outweigh the risks in many cases. A person can quite literally rewire their brain and start to heal from depression, anxiety, PTSD or other types of mental health issues. I ain’t gonna lie: I thought this was absolute bullshit until I started to actively work to sort out my own issues.

The best part is that psychedelics are mostly self-regulating and a tolerance is formed lightning fast. If you are crazy enough to want to trip several days in a row, it can get super inefficient, super quick.

For the first few months of alcohol sobriety, I was going on some universe hopping adventures, having multiple breakthrough experiences and having a grand ol’ time. Then, it just slowed down. I don’t know how to say it accurately, but I found what I was looking for and was able to resolve some deep inner conflict.

I still trip on occasion, but at fractions of my previous dosages. I don’t need those deep experiences any more and I can continue my recovery at the speed of reality.

Psychedelics aren’t inherently dangerous, but they are extremely powerful and demands serious respect. Alcohol is just straight-up dangerous. There are people in my life still that are still killing themselves slowly with the stuff and it sucks to watch.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

(I am just going into the basics, so ignore gross errors.)

It just fakes a cell tower. Because of the nature of how modern radios work, a phone will likely connect to the strongest signal it detects. The stingray acts as a “man in the middle” and relays the phone signal to an actual tower as if it was the original phone making the call. As it relays the call, the operator can listen in.

It’s akin to answering a call, making a call on another phone and then holding the two phones together.

(MITM attacks on HTTPS connections are similar, but there are some nuances with how the connection is decrypted and the re-encrypted.)

I just let it run without the resin vat and the RERF default print (with the characters) does actually trigger different exposures.

But yeah, the filename is super important as it triggers a test mode where the plate is exposed at 8 different spots at 8 different times per layer.

I’ll need to create my own test file and test it with and without the characters. It’s something I can test, but was hoping someone knew off the top of their head. (I was in the middle of my first ever resin print when I banged out this post, actually.)

Quick addendum: Cheap digital hygrometers from Amazon can be off by as much as 10% or more and are kinda pointless, poorly designed and a waste of batteries.

Simply using some color changing desiccant will save you a few bucks. (It’s something I use here in Colorado for my jars of… “entertainment products”… that is legal here, in addition to my filaments.)

There is desiccant available that is formulated to hold specific humidity levels but filament is better served by pure silica gel.

To be fair, some of their contests are not thought out very well and usually don’t have enough constraints defined. (It’s kinda pissed me off before too.)

I started to design one myself but realized it was a bad idea. For starters, and effective design wouldn’t use much plastic: Bamboo or other kinds of material used for the tubes already stack together really well and it is much easier to stack them in a box glued together or use thin wire to bind them. Any additional design components translates to waste, IMHO.

And like you said, the plastic is bad to keep outside. If it wasn’t for the moisture, direct sunlight would deform most common materials.

Yeah, I got several replacement bits from them for no charge. It’s also super easy to get past their level 1 support if you present an issue clearly and with evidence. (… as opposed to being forced to perform every step in a level 1 playbook. (DiD yOu tUrN iT oN aNd oFf agAiN?))

I have been following the power loss recovery issues on GitHub for a while. They finally came out and said, on GitHub, that they can’t implement. It was super shady of them to just quietly delete that feature from their product page.

However: If your first layer is tuned correctly and you lose power long enough for the bed to cool down, the print (depending on the material) will likely pop off the bed anyway so power loss recovery is moot. IMHO, if the print is super important it should be supervised and attached to a beefy UPS.