Indiscriminate photos #10

Some shots from  Hilton Head Island ,  the South Carolina Aquarium, and the Georgia State Railroad Museum.

Indiscriminate photos #9

Some shots from Spring 2021.

A Raspberry Pi Zero W and HQ camera case

Earlier this year I got into playing around with Raspberry Pis and the official camera modules to monitor my 3d printer. About a month ago I published this python script that will let you live stream h264 directly to multiple browsers simultaneously  from any raspberry pi equipped with an official camera module. At the time I wrote the script i had only experimented with the official V2 camera module as that was the latest module supported by the picamera api. I’ve been wanting to try out the HQ camera since it was released earlier this year, so I posted a question on the official Raspberry Pi forum about the compatibility with picamera, and was assured by an engineer it should work fine as long as i allocate a little more ram to the gpu.

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3D printed AA battery holder

I have a lot of photography and videography gear that uses AA batteries. I prefer AAs over the built in Lithium batteries a lot of gear comes with now, because you can get them anywhere and they can be shared across devices. I’ve owned a lot of different AA battery holders/containers over the years, but I’ve never really been happy with any of them.

I’ve faced a few issue with holders I’ve owned, but only two are of any real consequence. The first issue, is that they are almost always a flat or rectangular container that requires a dedicated spot in my camera bag. The second and more annoying issue, is that ever single container only allowed the batteries to be stored in one orientation, usually with the positive contact facing up.
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Custom FDM printing thread profiles for fusion 360

3D printing common 60° V thread profiles can be a frustrating experience. To generate an accurate profile thread needs to be printed in the vertical position, but this leads to overhangs of 60°, and that can be problematic to print. How problematic it is depends on a few factors, the filament in use, the print speed, and how much cooling is employed. The most common ways of guaranteeing a good print, are increasing cooling, or decreasing print speed. Increasing cooling can cause bad layer adhesion if taken to far, and slowing down the print speed can drastically increase print time.

A lot of people work around the issue by using custom thread profiles. Depending on what cad software you use, this can be easy or a very daunting task. I’m a Fusion 360 user, and I find it to be a fairly tedious task. To try and avoid manually creating a thread every time I want to print one, I decided to do some research a few weeks ago, and see if custom profiles can be loaded into Fusion 360. I found this Autodesk support article that explain how to load custom profiles. It’s kind of a hack, but it works well.

Given that custom profiles are possible I sat down and wrote a simple PHP script that generates the needed xml files for fusion. To ensure that the profiles are strong as well as easy to print, I chose a trapezoidal profile. The script generates 5 profiles with thread angles ranging from 50° to 90° (65° to 45° overhangs). The profiles also use a simpler and more generous tolerance system. The Fusion 360 xml files as well as the php script to generate them can be downloaded from the GitHub repository. If you are so inclined, you can easily update the script or json configuration file to generate completely custom thread profiles.

30mm dia, 10mm pitch 90° thread angle