I would have said “s-5 electronics”, but it looks like the business closed :(

If you can dig up one of their kits they were pretty solid.

I also work in automotive. Most of these cuts are usually a “your org must meet <x> target” type thing. How each org does that is… usually not well coordinated or consistent. People are absolutely spared because they’re likeble, easy to get along with, and reliable even if they’re not an all-star. Nepotism, as well as face time with leaders, can often play a role.

I’m starting to reach middle aged fart territory. No one really knows what they’re doing and we’re all just making it up as we go along. Don’t take things too seriously, be curious, ask questions, and try to be helpful. At some point you’ll probably find other people starting to ask you questions. If you find yourself here, you’re on the right track. Eventually, more people will begin to seek you out for information, advice, etc.

I feel this in my bones. Even before the recent round of restructuring we’ve had a significant about of turnover. Our infrastructure is a massive rube golberg machine with multiple houses of cards built on top of it. Institutional knowledge was never written down and it has been leaving the company at an accelerating rate over the past 5 years. Tons of “new blood” making lots of assumptions on how things work is resulting in… humorous end results.

I am a product manager that loves coming up with detailed specs. How else will I actually get what I want? If you care about some specific behavior/outcome you must specify it. This logic is lost on my leadership.

Agree! OP was probably pretty close to the bird to get this amount of detail/resolution.

100%! Despite their reputation for being fickle, I found phalaenopsis (phalaenopsii? phalaenopsises?) to be pretty hardy.

Apple is almost the tale of two companies.

From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.

Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.

What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.

They look happy, so yay!

Maybe this varies geographically, but our town’s libraries are directly funded by the town. We recently improved a millage for renovations. I hope they would be pretty insulated from… sillyness.

There are a decent number of lurkers here. Honestly, we wouldn’t be here unless we thought our drinking was at least somewhat problematic but that doesn’t mean we’re all ready to quit (hi).

In my case, I have a hard time stopping once I start. I do a decent job with pacing as my goal isn’t total inebriation, but I drink more nights a week than I’m happy with and if I start in the afternoon on a weekend I’ll easily drink 4-6 beers which isn’t a crazy level but it’s more than I would like.

I’ve had a few dry months over the years, but have never really mustered the desire to stay sober long term. Going into a dry month knowing it’s only a month made it easier for me.

Do you know why you drink? Do you do it in social situations because that’s just what you and your friends do? Do you do it after a particularly long day? Do you do it to turn the volume down on your inner monologue? Is it simply a ritual? Is it a coping mechanism for an underlying issue?

IMO figuring out why you drink, and trying to tackle that, is much more effective than beating yourself up about the fact you drink. You can even talk this out with your wife as she’ll hopefully want to help.

For me, my drinking is related to a mix of a particularly long day, turning down my inner monologue, and ritual. Thankfully, the last two of those gave a few easy substitutions. Tinkering/working with my hands and reading (books, long form articles, etc) are great ways of quieting down my inner monologue. Seltzer water and decaf tea (due to usually doing this in evenings) are good ritual substitutions. The trick is finding a good way to deal with a long day - especially when I just want to veg. I’m still working on that one as some of the easier mechanisms for me, like video games, don’t work as a parent is difficult. I can nurse a beer while doing the bed time routine. I can’t completely disappear.

Beyond asking yourself why you drink, it’s probably a good idea to find an active community to engage with. There are lurkers here, so if you’re willing to post more you’ll likely find people like me who jump in the comments. You could seek out something physical/local or another virtual space.

Speed

Print duration is dependent on two components:

• How fast is your print head moving? I run velocities/accelerations similar to you partially because I have a 350 which is pushing the limits of 2020 extrusion and 6mm a/b belts as well as…
• How much filament you’re laying as the print head moves. This is influenced by your nozzle diameter, which in turn influences what kind of line width and layer height you can expect. It’s also influenced your extruder’s ability to melt plastic (eg volumetric flow). For ASA/ABS I limit volumetric flow to 35 mm^3/sec, or PLA I limit to 25 mm^3/sec, and for PETG I limit to 20 mm^3/sec

My print speed is often limited by volumetric flow - not the actual speed of my print head, so I haven’t bothered chasing higher ceilings. Granted, tend to print I print large/chunky/functional things so my goal is to lay down as much material as possible. If you’re chasing lots of fine detail, a smaller Voron can go faster than what I have but isn’t going to be that much faster than where you are now.

Print Quality

Thanks to a combination of CoreXY (rigidity) and Klipper (pressure advance, input shaping), I have basically zero ringing/ghosting show up in prints. It is worth talking about quality expectations though. Harsh lighting can reveal that layer lines are not perfectly aligned layer to layer. Not sure if this is a Voron thing or is it’s just more obvious now that my layers are a lot more noise free.

First layer

Automated gantry leveling (Klipper will get the bed and gantry to be ‘perfectly’ in plane thanks to 2.4s being able to mechanically move the four corners of the gantry independently - trident does similar, but moves the bed instead), a klicky probe and a Z calibration macro, and bed mesh make my first layers extremely consistent print to print.

One caveat: because the printer is enclosed and big (if you go for a 350), if you print sequential objects without letting the printer fully heat soak, the first layer will progressively get a touch higher and higher between prints as the printer expands in the z-axis.

I replied to another post with a list of mods, so take a look at the other comments in the post for some out of box mods.

As a 350 owner, be aware of two things.

First, big bed = big chamber = heat soak takes a while and you have a lot more surface area to lose heat from. If you want to print big ABS/ASA parts you’re going to want ACM panels, a better sealed/insulated front door, and potentially a radiant layer inside the printer.

Second, the big printer limits your rate of acceleration some compared to a smaller CoreXY. IMO if you have a big printer to print big things you’re probably not going to have small/finely detailed parts that often. Those are the kinds of parts that will go a touch slower. But honestly 5k acceleration is orders of magnitude faster than most bed slingers can achieve and 10-15k is only a 2-3x increase so you’re not giving up that much.

Other than than, no regrets about the 350.

I assume you mean “what mods do I recommend out of the box”?

1. Klicky. I personally think tap adds too much mass and klicky is great
2. Magnetic panel clips to make it way easier/faster to get the panels on/off
3. An under bed filter with carbon. I’m using “the filter”. Even if you’re not going to print ASA/ABS the extra chamber heat helps eliminate warping on large PETG parts s
4. If you’re going to be going to be building a larger printer and print ASA/ABS skip to ACM panels. Also do #5
5. The fridge door is so much nicer than the stock double doors, but isn’t something you need to do out of the box
6. You’re probably going to run into wire breaks in the cable chains - especially the x and y chains. An umbilical makes that much more unlikely. You don’t have to have to USB or CAN to do this

… Off the top of my head, those are the big ones

I’ve had mine going for three years and they seem to be holding up as well as the cheap poly grow pots, so woo. I keep my starts in a tray to keep the extra water and keep the bottoms moist if I miss a watering.

I got CNC parts from microcenter. They had the chaotic labs kit in a differently branded box for significantly less $$ than available on the web. The QR code for documentation inside the box went straight to chaotic labs and the parts look to be identical.

As with anything, do some level of research before you buy.

Clearly you’ve never used a Mac. It wasn’t until 2024 that you could snap windows, they have a built in dark mode but the word processor that ships with their computer requires you to use a dark page template if you want black background/white text, and lord forgive you if you want to take a screenshot.

For context, I can run prints on my 2.4 what would take something in the neighborhood of 4 times as long on my old ender 3.

I would put the difference even higher between my 2.4 and my old i3 clone, but I’m also running a 0.6mm nozzle and print with 0.9mm extrusion width / 2 walls and 0.3mm layer heights. My limiting factor is volumetric flow, which I’ve found to vary between materials (ASA = way easier to print fast than PETG).

You have four paths to get parts for a Voron:

• self source all the parts individually
• get kits for the things you want and self source what you want to be picky on. For example, here’s a motion kit
• configure a kit from someone like West3D
• buy a BOM in a box. There are a couple of brands that do this

I personally went the West3D route. It seems like the LDO and formbot BOM-in-a-box options are popular. If you live near a microcenter they offer smaller kits if you want to mix and match or use a brick and mortar. Self sourcing tends to be expensive due to our collective tendancy to buy higher quality than necessary parts and shipping.

Yes, you will be building the thing from a ton of parts. Yes, it will take you a while. If you’re comfortable building things there’s nothing particular hard about it. You absolutely will not need to solder. Most kits come with premade wiring harness and there’s plenty of complete wiring options available even if you buy components. Depending on your goals, you might need to customize your wiring some. This means crimping, which isn’t hard per say but you’ll probably need to buy a crimper or two and dial in the right amount of squish for your terminal and wire gauge combination. Too much force and you’ll wind up severing the wires. Too little and the terminal will come off the wire. Again, not hard but you’ll probably need to do it a few times before you develop a feel and get consistent.

Solo cup (or generic equivalent) starts! I do the same thing. Way cheaper than buying “gardening pots”, but you do have to put holes in them.

I have a very cobbled together grow light getup for my starts, but have thought about trying to make an enclosure around one of my raised beds to get the temp up earlier and push the season out.

As long as they’re not wilty life is good!