Back 3D Printing with Bambu H2D

After a few years frustration with my old Robo printer, I thought it was time to upgrade and talk about an upgrade. The New Bambu Lab H2D is amazing! Can’t say it is idiot proof, cuz you need a little 3D print knowledge to get everything working. But once it works. WOW! I’ve printed more in the first two weeks of owning this printer than I could with my last three, without major issues! No clog cleaning, no miss-fed filament and only a small amount of spaghetti.

Purchased the AMS 2 as well, for multi-color printer was worried after seeing reviews of the first AMS. But it makes multi color printing almost effortless.

Oh, yeah, it is fast, after bed leveling and warm up, it flies.

The software so far has been pretty good, getting used to filament selection, learning that the external roll is required and counts as ‘1’.. But after that, I am printing like a mad man. The one thing I’ve noticed about the software it give and estimate cost of printing. One of those things I always wondered about.

Expect great thing from Bambu Labs. Lets hope they keep the current trend going.

Oh I am going to look into upgrading to the 40 watt laser add-on. So far it isn’t showing up as an add-on option. Only for purchase. It would need to replace the glass sides and attached to current print head, but I could see. it happening..

Getting stuff indoors done.

Winter makes staying indoors, the more enjoyable choice. Been using the time to catch up on projects and cleaning our “problem” projects. Notably, two. The Robo 3d R1 printer and the laser engraver.

The 3D printer hasn’t wanted to print, no matter what I’ve tried. Pretty sure I had a post a while back on the subject. Starting testing it again, before it went to dump, reading posts for people having similar issue. Turns out it was my “new” filament that had gotten “damp” and needed to be dried. Crazy. So I bought new filament, the first in years. It came vacuum sealed.. And the Robo worked on the first try, I was amazed. Then started researching “damp filament”, found out you can get little heaters that dry out the filament. Again, amazing.

Purchased a little filament drier found on eBay for less than $50. Let it run for a few hours (12 hours to be exact), and FANTASTIC. Filament I haven’t been able to print with EVER, worked perfectly fine. So notch one up for the Internet. One Fix, Fixed.

The other project was moving my xTool M1, into my office and creating a venting system so my office and my house doesn’t fill with smoke. Even added power switches for both the blower and the Air Assist system. Did a few tests print and it works great.

Weekend well spent!

xTool M1 Laser

Having used laser engravers, or laser tools in the past, I wanted to get back into it. Having blown my laser tube in my old Chinese laser engraver (40 watt), and finding it cost almost as much as a new laser cutter for a new tube I held off buying a replacement. Found the M1 on ebay as a refurb, for almost half off, I jumped at it. Then spent $$ for the add-ons. Even with 10 watts, and easy to use software, it if very useful.

The Chinese engraver, required a thumb drive with their software to operate, and it was poorly translated to english. At least parts of it, a great deal of the software was still only in Chinese. It was usable, with a fight. Plus it required cool water to keep the tube cool. My mistake was forgetting about checking the water before use, after a nights freeze. So ice in tube, not good.

The xTool Creative Software, has its limits, not as much control as I was used to, but more than enough to get the job done. I am hoping they add features. OH and the software is Free, no thumb drive key.

The built in camera is a huge plus, I mean HUGE. Makes alignment and reusing scrapes much easier.

Looking into upgrading it to a higher power laser, which would cut down on the number of times I have to cut over the same time. Translation, faster printing.

Haven’t use the rotary, or the air assist. But I’ll get there.

Right now I am making project boxes for Raspberry Pi Pico projects, very handy tool for that.

ALFS.Com and GoDaddy Drama

Learning that is you don’t need to, don’t use GoDaddy to purchase and manage your domains. Their tech support is over seas, and is the worst. Been trying to resolve and issue with a disappearing domain for over a week. I’ve had ALFS.COM for over a decade, and one day I looked at my dashboard and it was gone. Checked my emails (I keep all of them) found I renewed back in Sept of this year (less than 5 months ago). So I contacted their support like always, using the chat feature (since I find, I can’t understand their english). Evening their text grammar and “cue card replies” very annoying.. After HOURS on the phone I thought we had it resolved. Get an email the next day saying I didn’t reply using the email address associated with the account.. And if you know anything about the history of Apple, they changed their email addresses over the years… from .mac, .icloud, to .me, etc.. Things like this have been going on for over 4 days now, back and forth… Basically GoDaddy stole a domain and resold it, and isn’t compensating me for it… Big Rip Off!

I’ll post updates.

Domain Information – found this.. I’ve owned since 1998.. Still shows hosted on my server..

Namealfs.comRegistry Domain ID1643101_DOMAIN_COM-VRSNRegistered On1998-07-22T23:00:00ZExpires On2026-07-21T23:00:00ZUpdated On2024-12-05T11:14:20ZDomain Status

clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited

clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited

clientRenewProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited

Name Servers

NS1.ON-REV.COM

NS2.ON-REV.COM

It appears that when GoDaddy started the transfer they stuck the “funds” in a AfterNic account they created. Of course not telling me the log in, or that it was done. After finding it and creating new passwords I was able to log in.. However the funds are in limbo. It appears they do automatic transfer on some unknown cycle. So have to wait. See if transfers… But at least, AT LAST I found the funds. With NO help from Tech Support.

CrowdStrike Nightmare

Overnight Microsoft’s subcontractor readied their servers to push updates. However one update was added to list that wasn’t ready for primetime, and it caused issues world wide when computers couldn’t startup.

The fix was to remove the problem file and rebooting, easy. Unless your computer had BitLocker enable. Thus making it very difficult to gain access to the files that needed to be removed. Hopefully you have a copy of your BitLocker key, to unlock your drive. People that enabled BitLocker and didn’t keep a copy of their key, maybe locked out of their drive.

After you have the BitLocker key:

C: (return)
cd \Windows\System32 (return)
cd drivers\crowdstrike (return)
del C-00000291.sys (return) dir C-00000291.sys (return)
exit (return)

WD My Cloud – Don’t Buy

My brother-in-law was given a last gen version of the My Cloud, so I figured I’d give one a try. Ended up purchased a Refurbish one directly from WD. 2TB for $89, not that bad. And I played with it for a few days.

Don’t let its external USB port fool you, it is basically useless. Basically WD’s idea was if you plug a external drive in, it would just move everything off of it, in to the drive. That didn’t even work.

You can create local user accounts, I was able to make 1. Which I can use to access the drive over my network. Much like Apple’s Time Capsule, but much more limited. Basically useless.

HOWEVER, it will let you backup photos and files from your phone. But, since WD was hacked user data was lost, why would you want to do this!?

Unless you have NO computer skills, and no where else to backup your phone, I would NOT recommend this device.

UPDATE: Had attempted to share an attached external drive, the idea being to use the My Cloud to host Plex server (it has an app for it). But it appears to be blind to attached external drives, HOWEVER, it sees thumb drives.. It basically just copies the thumb drives contents to itself. Which can be handy since I don’t trust thumb drives beyond a few months of use. … I have it coping files right now, lets see if I can manage what is copied to the drive once it is complete.

UPDATE: The coping and sharing of data from thumb drives appears to work fine. But it is a very limiting use of this device. It should be able to do so much more. And it appears to time out often when attempting to access remotely (I have 1 gb internet, over fiber and I test often. So it isn’t my internet access. And it is plugged directly into my router.)

Portable Imaging

Over the last few months, we’ve developed a need to image computers away from our SCCM Imaging Server so I’ve tasked myself with coming up with a solution. So far there are two, one is Ventoy and the second a “iodd” drive. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

After overcoming challenges with both systems Ventoy has come out ahead.

This is the Iodd2531 USB3.0 HDD SSD Virtual CD-ROM Enclosures – Made in Korea purchased from Amazon ($85.00). Basically it is a portable hard drive case with a little computer built in. It comes in two firmware versions exFAT and NTFS, both should work equally well and shouldn’t affect results. The instructions are a bit of a challenges due to language barrier. I installed a 1tb SSD, formatted as NTFS as per my firmware, created a “_iso” folder and placed some ISO’s in the folder. Making sure your computer has Secure Boot disabled in bios, you select the iso you wanna boot from using the selection switch/button on the side. Boot computer using F12, select the drive, and wait.

Ventoy, works pretty much the same way, but easier.

We installed 500 gb SATA SSD drives, in POSUGEAR 2.5” Clear External Hard Drive Case ($6) just for uniqueness.

Then you download, install and run Ventoy. It’ll setup your select drive for use. You then add a folder called “_iso” and copy your iso’s to the folder. As with Iodd drive, you have to disable Secure Boot in the bios. Again, just boot using F12, select your drive. The system will boot and display a list of bootable iso, for your selection.

The hardest part was figuring how how and when to partition and format the iso data drives, and how to disable Secure Boot.

MQTT Data Flowing

Finally got MQTT data flowing in and out, over the internet, not just on my local network. Router isn’t the easiest thing to figure out. Had to turn off DMZ and forward ports manually to each server. Now web site traffic and data flowing to correct boxes.

MQTT – Finally!

After a few months of off and on again trying to get my data parse, collect and displayed the way I wanted it. I finally found a little tid bit of info that pointed me in the right direction.

rtl_433 -F “mqtt://192.168.1.15:1883,retain=0,devices=Pipedream/TempSensors/[protocol]/[id]” -M utc

As you can see I am using rtl_433 to receive data from various sensors around the buildings. It gets sent to our MQTT Broker for redistribution to computers that have subscribed to selected topics. Since we have a few sensors of the same model we use [protocol] to group those sensor together, but each sensor has its own feed.

Funny thing is we are now finding sensors, we didn’t know about. We will be watching the data being collected and see if we can figure it out.

Below are the sensors we need to figure out (what they are) 211 and 17. All the rest (so far) we can already id and parse the data correctly.