I haven’t been doing much printing lately, the usual hassles of life catching up with me.

I’ve printed up a few more of the earbud holders over the last few weeks, for people who are jealous of the ones that I gave out during Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago, I spotted this page over on thingiverse, which generates some nameplates. I thought that these looked like a lot of fun, and an easy way to print name-tags for the kids’ bags and stuff.

I printed out a few of them one evening while my wife was having a craft night with her friends. They loved them, so I ended up printing out lots of them for their kids as well.

Last week, I went through and updated the software toolchain – SFact, Pronterface and Marlin. It never fails to amaze me just how much improvement comes through in the software, over the space of two months.

The only other thing of note that I’ve printed out lately is some bracelets. Slightly strange story behind these – when I was speaking on the phone with my Mum a few weeks ago, she said that she had a dream that I’d printed her out a bracelet. So, to make the prophecy self-fulfilling, I found a design on Thingiverse and printed a few out for my Mum and daughters. Turned out very nicely.

I adjusted the size of the first couple of larger ones by playing with the ‘scale’ setting in SFact, but this didn’t work very well with the smaller bracelets. So I downloaded the OpenScad file, and modified the variables in that. That worked really well to generate the smaller bracelets.

The printer’s working really well these days, completely hands-off. I just hit ‘print’, then walk away. The printer even shuts itself down at the end of the print, and always produces nice results.