Wesley's Tool-Box

While a lot of people were celebrating the turn of the year on the night of the New Year's Day, I was putting the rest of the outer panels on Makibox and making adjustments on the panels that were already installed. With that, the assembly of the printer was complete. However, the work is far from over.

Continuing from where I left off yesterday, I proceeded to put the rest of the Makibox A6 HT parts together. The X and Y axes that will accommodate the printing head was installed. This part was fairly easy. The rest of the parts that needed to be assembled were the stuff that fed and printed the plastic filaments, and the cover panels. Read on to see how they look like.

After the Christmas festivities died down and the kids were put to sleep, I got to work on building the Makibox A6 HT. The kit had an assorted array of plastic and metal parts, as well as some pre-built parts like the main circuit board and nozzle. It also came with a detailed (but slightly buggy) assembly instruction.

If things went smoothly, I would've finished building it and had some time to sleep. But apparently that would not be the case. Hiccups along the way dragged down the build speed, and I could only finish about half way through before getting one hour of sleep and going to work. If you want to hear what happened, keep reading.

Makibox, the start-up project that aimed to deliver usable but low cost ($300 for a heated bed version) 3D printer, appeared in February 2012. Hoping to get one by the end of the year, I ordered one on September 1, 2012. Unfortunately, the project saw significant delays.

It finally did arrive at the end of the year, on December 24. It's just that it arrived one full year later than expected, in 2013. Nevertheless, it was a nice Christmas gift. This unit may be the first Makibox to arrive in Korea.

I'll be assembling this over the weekend, after Christmas holidays are over. Stay tuned.

I've reported about the server losing connection after a bit of idling time yesterday, and the culprit was the power management settings. Surprisingly, my Mac mini was set to go into power saving mode just ten minutes after idling. I'm not sure what kept it up before, but it certainly isn't kept awake now. So I set the setting to never go fall asleep. Now the connection doesn't drop.

I thought this was the end of troubles, but it turns out that the server now takes a long time to respond after several minutes of idling. Once it responds, subsequent pages load just fine. I haven't found out why this was the case, but I know it's not a DNS lookup issue because there's no delay while there is network activity on the Mac.

So I devised a way to work around this issue by automatically causing a small network activity every minute. After opening Terminal:

crontab -e

[Press "i"]

00-59 * * * * /sbin/ping -c 1 -n google.com > /dev/null/

[Press "Esc" button]
[Press "!wq"]

And that's it. Once this is done, the system starts doing a ping once every minute silently. So far, it's working nicely and the website loads fine regardless of idling time.