I like knitting, math, and uplifting the proletariat.

Old account: @MxRemy@lemmy.one (if lemmy.one hasn’t died yet)

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Cake day: August 5th, 2024

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  • Oh, I should also have mentioned in the original post! Most of these pics/vids are of stuff printed on a low end printer with 0.6mm nozzle, not using high resolution settings. It’s all just stuff our patrons have requested, who are more interested in getting it soon than it looking SUPER nice. It can absolutely be printed with super high detail in mind instead.


  • The thing about the warping is, while most settings are nearly exactly the same as with PLA, there’s a few things that have to be the exact opposite. Once you get done fiddling with it, it actually prints like a dream. We even use it as our default material unless somebody requests otherwise. If it was unprintable, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Some stuff we’ve learned:

    • Bed temp turned completely off!
    • Use a fresh layer of a good 3d printing adhesive. (If your adhesive is heat activated, 35C should roughly be enough to activate without messing with the PHA)
    • If you have an enclosure, open it up as much as possible. I noticed I have a lot more warping in my enclosed printer than my unenclosed one.
    • Try out a few different fan settings. I personally have better luck with less fan.
    • Put a big giant brim on it. Maybe even one made out of a different material than the object itself, if you’ve got dual extrusion.
    • The higher the infill percentage and the more solid bottom layers there are, the more it will warp. So avoid that where possible.
    • Most slicers probably already print the first layer at a chunkier line width than the nozzle size, but feel free to jack up the line width even more.
    • Set the first layer pattern to concentric or Hilbert curve, evens out the distribution of forces that cause warping.
    • Finally, if all else fails… Rotate the object until it’s sitting on a really impractical edge, then print it in sort of a “cradle” of support material. BVOH or PVA if you’ve got it. Basically make as little of it touch the build plate as possible? I don’t like this option because it requires dual extrusion and is pretty wasteful.

    That all probably sounds pretty extreme but honestly these are worst case scenarios? Normally it just works. Maybe part of this also comes down to the fact that all the people making it have been refining their product for a while now to deal with the notorious warpy-ness, so it’s just not as bad as it used to be. We’ve used every brand we can find, Colorfabb’s AllPHA, Beyond Plastic’s BioPHA, Bosk’s Regen, they’re all pretty comparable. Here’s a vid of another PHA print in progress right now, one where we really didn’t even follow most of those tips above, and it’s going fine. It’s the second one of these.





  • Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There’s lots of good reasons to want to do this… Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.

    EXCEPT… It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it’s own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.

    A cursory internet search isn’t turning up anything about this, but I’m pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.