The Cat's Meow

After seeing some of the other mobile device stands folks made, I knew that one of the first things I wanted to try was a cat-themed one for my wife…


Yes, I left the masking on one kitty as an accent. I thought it made the design pop a bit.:sunglasses:

I’m pretty happy with it, but made a few boo-boos. Luckily, I was able to use :glowforge: superpowers to fix one of them.

Boo-boo #1: Forgot to take into account material thickness when I resized the SVG in the GFUI. When the print was complete, tab A did not fit into slot B. This is where the :glowforge: superpower came in handy. I drew a simple rectangle in Affinity Design and exported it as a SVG. I placed the faceplate on the GF bed and dropped the box over each slot and sized them to slightly enlarge the slot so the tabs would fit. A quick 12 seconds later, I had wider slots.

Boo-boo #2: Forgot that optical placement has precision limits. Keen-eyed observers will note that the base doesn’t align exactly with the face. When fixing the slot sizes, I was shaving a couple of hundredths of an inch off of each side. That worked fine, but I was working at the extreme left edge of the placement area and ended up with about 1/8" displacement side-to-side.

Boo-boo #3: Under-estimated weeding time. The print itself took 25 minutes. Weeding took 30. 'Nuff said.

I :heart: my :glowforge: !

63 Likes

Wow, that’s really nice.

Thank you so much for sharing your boo-boo’s as well :slight_smile:

9 Likes

I think it is great. Because you made it and know about any flaws, that is all you see. Well I see that cool lighter color cat. Great job. :relaxed:

10 Likes

I love the effect of leaving the masking on one cat. Great effect!

13 Likes

that is awesome… So excited to be able to do little fixes like that.

10 Likes

Gorilla tape is your friend to pull the masking :slightly_smiling_face:

9 Likes

well done

2 Likes

On my shopping list. :grin: I knew that I needed to pick some up (and masking and magnets and X, Y, & Z), but this all got amazingly real this week.

8 Likes

I got the idea when I got to this point…

36 Likes

I really like the design and I’m glad to see your process so that we all get to learn. Thanks

5 Likes

I started to just draw on the back and use the trace function, but chickened out. Next time.

10 Likes

Thanks for sharing the process, I especially found your “fix” to miss sized tabs encouraging. hopefully the alignment problems on the edge of the bed will get tuned in soon.

6 Likes

Oh squeeeeee! Lovin’ the boo-boo kitties! :relaxed:

3 Likes

You had me at “cat.”

I love it!:two_hearts:

The contrast of the one kitty makes the piece so special. If the masking ever comes off you will have to paint it in.

7 Likes

Adorable! Love the contrast. You might also peel one cat, paint it, then peel the rest for a more permanent solution if you re-print.

18 Likes

Glad to see they are dialing in this feature. Much better accuracy than early pre-release machines!

5 Likes

I love this!! It’s super cute! Great job!

1 Like

Okay, that is super cute! I bet your wife loves it!

2 Likes

Mine is getting better with no hardware changes so at least some of this is software.

This is why I just don’t get how some people don’t get the huge advantages of doing the heavy lifting on the cloud.

7 Likes

Because some of us use OctoPrint that runs on an RPI locally and gives the same benefits with no disadvantages. We upload our files to 3D printers from a web browser anywhere while watching them on a live stream. We don’t need an internet connection if we are on the same network as the machine. Software updates announce themselves in the GUI and we chose when to install them. It is then just one click and a service restart. We can roll back to an older version if we want to as well.

An RPI isn’t as powerful as the cloud but it can do machine vision with OpenCV and it can slice 3D files so it seems powerful enough to do what GF promises to do.

I imagine splitting the work between realtime stuff running on the machine and the rest of the processing in the cloud is quite difficult, especially things like machine vision and real time focus. Much easier when you have a high bandwidth low latency connection to a local host.

I think the main reason for using the cloud is to keep the secret sauce secret.

1 Like