Ways Not to Print in Two Colors on a Lulzbot Mini

I had such good luck swapping filament mid-print on my Prusa i3 MK3 that I thought I’d try the same on my Lulzbot Mini… with much less good luck.

This post lists the ways I’ve tried to swap filament colors at a specific point in the print, using my Lulzbot Mini and CuraLE 4.13.4 and OctoPrint 1.9.3. Your experience may be different – I hope so.

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Making a 3D Printed Name Badge, Version 2

A few years ago at the Portland Oregon 3D printing Meetup, someone suggested we should all make our own name badges so Shashi wouldn’t need to bring as many “Hello, My Name Is” paper tags to the Meetups. A few weeks later I made a badge and a post on how to create your own, using the tools of the time.

This updated post walks you though the making of your own name badge in FreeCAD 0.21, which is a lot easier than it was in earlier versions of FreeCAD.

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A FreeCAD Case Study: Designing a Light Bar Clip

A while ago we bought rechargeable light bars for our pantry shelves, and we love them. The only problem was that because they were held to the underside of the shelf by weak magnets, every time we bumped a light or dropped a heavy jar into the pantry, the light would clatter to the floor.

This post covers my process of creating, in FreeCAD, clips that would hold the lights securely. I’m really pleased at how they turned out.

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Debugging 3D Printer Thickness Errors

I recently found my 2016 Lulzbot Mini 3D printer wasn’t printing the sides of models accurately: when I tried to print a box and lid pair, the lid was too small to fit the box. This error worried me, because the last time that problem happened it was the fault of stress fractures in the Y carriage supports, which took a lot of time and money to repair.

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Adding a Link inside your Vellum Paperback

Links are very handy in eBooks generated by Vellum, but how do you add links inside your paperback? This post covers one alternative: QR Codes.

What is a QR Code?

A QR, “Quick Response” code is a 2-dimensional barcode, that can represent arbitrary text. In your paperbacks, you can use QR codes to embed URLs – links to web pages – for your web site and for your books’ pages on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, etc.

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