On April 1st, I always try to add a little joke to the DokuWiki website. In the past we had upside-down headlines, a flying duck you could shoot and pink unicorns. This year we had Nyan cat:

Some people asked how this was done, so here's how (including the code).

So I have an android tablet for a couple of weeks now and it's time to do a little review. Before I start let me answer the question I got most often when I said I want a tablet: What would you use it for?

Alright, a tablet for me is not a replacement device in any way, shape or form. It fills it's own niche. It will not replace my desktop computer which I use for serious work. It will not replace my Netbook which I use for serious work when traveling. It will not replace my phone which is my connection the always and everywhere.

The tablet is a casual consumer device to me. I use it in bed and on the couch for browsing, reading, watching YouTube and gaming. I do all those things with other devices but not as convenient as with a tablet. Oh and for reading comics in digital form a tablet is really the only choice.

I will probably also use it for navigation when on vacation and by that I mean manually reading/scrolling maps, not automatic/voice navigation. Having a larger screen makes that a bit easier than on a phone and might be able to completely replace paper based maps.

So on to the device I bought…

I just replaced my own My Two Cents comment system with DISQUS. The reason is simple: spam. Over the last months comment spam increased so much that it became a pain to manually clean it every time. I'm not sure if someone bothered to break my CAPTCHA or this was all cheap manual spam. I guess the latter.

DISQUS should hopefully be better at automatically recognizing spam and is also easier to moderate for me. It also has a few advantages:

• you now can get notified on new comments by email and RSS
• reactions elsewhere on the web (eg. on twitter) should be captured here as well (not sure if this works)
• you can log in with a whole bunch of identity providers

There are also some disadvantages:

• JavaScript needs to be enabled for reading and writing comments
• MonsterID is no longer supported

I'm looking forward to your (non-spam) comments

They say one of the first thing people do when they get a 3D printer is improving it. I guess that's true…

As I wrote last week, a fan for cooling the printed parts is essential when printing bridges, overhangs or just smaller parts. Until now I had some temporary fan salvaged from an old CPU. It worked but needed constant adjustments and had to turned on manually instead being controlled via g-code.

So I began my quest to add some cooling fans directly to the Huxley's design.

The first question was if the Huxley's electronics can control a fan. After some discussion in the eMaker forums it turned out that at least the RepRapPro version with the Sanguinololu electronics does have the fan control built in by default.

A fan can connected to the outer pins of the connector marked “PWR2/Bed”, just between the power connector to the right and the hotend connector to the left (See photo).

For mounting the fan to the Huxley I found a nice and simple solution at thingiverse: eMaker Huxley Part Cooling Fan Mount by “richgain”.

This works great, but blows air towards the print from one side only. This wasn't good enough for certain prints I tried. I needed airflow from the other side as well.

The cool thing about richgain's solution is that the fan moves up and down with the x-axis and thus always points to the top layer. I wanted this for the other side of the print, too. This meant I needed some solution to mount a fan on the x-motor side.

After some thinking I had an idea of a bracket reaching above the x-motor. Now I just needed to model it. I made my first attempts in FreeCad which started out good but then the darn application kept crashing and I gave up.

Instead I tried Tinkercad, a WebGL based, simple CAD tool that works directly in the browser. It's really easy to use and 15 minutes later I got my model.

Details for using the mount bracket are available at Thingiverse now.

This means I published my first thing on Thingiverse and my printer now has a dual cooling system controlled via gcode. Excellent

Since my last post about my RepRap Huxley 3D printer, I had some more time for learning how to improve the print quality.

Here's a progress update…