Measure it’s resistance if in a pinch. If it is in the kilohms range it is a thermistor. If it is super low resistance, it is a thermocouple. 10k ohms is the most common thermistor used in nearly everything consumer related. Nearly all common thermocouples are the same type too. It has been awhile, but IIRC they are k-type. The main difference in function is heat range. The thermistor is for lower temps and is less linear across the range in the cheap common ones. The thermocouple is two different types of wire welded at a junction at the tip. The heat causes a tiny voltage potential due to the different metals bonded together.

At scale of mass manufacturing, the thermistor is a fraction of a penny, while the thermocouple is a few cents. However the thermocouple requires an analog amplifier circuit to function, so this adds complexity in electrolytics. A thermistor is stupid simple and only requires a resistive voltage divider and any voltage threshold trigger circuit, so like a zener diode, capacitor, and single transistor.

The packaging of the sensor is the only thing you are paying for, and that is just for its mechanical mount and position, maybe some heat mass stability. A thermistor cannot handle direct flame temps, but a thermocouple technically can. In practice only the packaging of the sensor will contact a flame in some cases. Thermocouples are more rare but usually in any appliances that use natural gas. Thermistors are the third or third and fourth connection in most battery packs and found in almost anything with heat or temperature sensitive constraints.

In a pinch, all you need is the same sensing element. A coat hanger or anything similar may be a way to improvise holding it in place… should you ever need it.

The other type of common temperature regulation is a mechanical switch that uses a bimetal strip that deforms to close contacts. These will not work with the other two. Any device you hear a faint audible click from when heating, is using this type of temperature regulation. Typically old dumb coffee pots, clothes irons, etc. Thermistors are used in most small devices with some type of digital interface and a battery or heat.

When I had my auto body shop, I got access to some estimating software for a short bit. I quickly spotted a pattern where if I looked at a job and honestly estimated, back of the napkin style, how long the job would take for each step, the software estimated 3 times that amount, but it took the long way around to arrive at the same baseline. The supplies were always doubled. This is how I look at every task now. Give it your best estimates and triple that time. assuming you understand the scope of the work, you’ll encompass around 90% of work tasks with the rest going over or under.

I have no confidence it will work or last. I’m not committing to anything either, but at a minimum I need the flattest image possible, meaning a square lens to object from a distance where perspective distortion is minimized. The largest camera sensor (silicon die) will produce the flattest image with less perspective distortion. Each image must contain a known measurement, such as a little machinist’s ruler or other. The point here is that the lines of known measurement must be as close to single pixel accurate as possible. I will not take the time to straiten or correct for errors, - if I have the time and feel like making something. The result will likely be ugly and might not work or last. I need to know the angles and sizes of those protrusions to utilize them like a dovetail. I do not trust anyone’s measurements, especially my own, and I have no desire to dial you up for the ‘measure thrice print twice, measure once unfinished dunce’ - rule. I need the Cartesian planes of X, Y, and Z, (right, front, top) at a minimum.

I probably do not have time within my project, but if I’m bored and waiting on a long print, maybe.

The cheapest fans available often have a lot of injection molded plastic that squeezes out of the gaps of the metal mold when the plastic parts are formed. Removing this may help some.

The cheapest fans now come with the small motor shaft embedded into the frame with a tiny ball of metal formed at the end of the shaft. The ball is what prevents the shaft and fan blade portion from coming out of the housing. This type of bearing and retention cause more friction than a design that uses a bushing and a small plastic retainer ring. They type with the retainer ring are usually floating in the magnetic field. The little plastic retainer ring on the shaft end is only present in cases where the fan is dropped causing more force than the magnetic field will hold onto. If a person such as yourself, presses on this type of fan at the fan blade hub, you will feel the magnetic field and see the hub deflect and then return to the center of the field. Spinning it will feel frictionless. With the ball shaft type, there is little deflection and it feels like a bit more friction when comparing two side by side.

With the ball shaft type, most of the noise will be coming from the friction and transmitted through the body of the enclosure. If you isolate the fan with some damping between it and the enclosure it will reduce the noise considerably. Damping the enclosure, and adding rubber feet between any table or surface may also help.

Won’t need internet any more soon. Or a phone. Fucked up world is not worth living in.

Did Taiwan renounce its claim as the rightful government of all of China?

When the first door is revealed, obviously the probabilities are unchanged. The almighty protagonist of human exceptionalism must choose the path to alter the winds of the fates. Pray the great Apollo smiles upon thy being. For speaking the word “same” is to alter the universe of satyr sophistry.

I don’t care to look it up, cause that ain’t the point of social media. What is the Monty Hall problem?

Most chips are made in China. This is bigoted nonsense. Just because some US billionaire is not in the middle means nothing. Every single one of your overpriced marketing ““brands”” is shipping stuff that says made in China somewhere on it. Nearly all chip packaging is done in Asia too, even for so called US companies. Silicon has been a global thing this whole time. The USA is mostly incapable of foundry logistics as these places use large quantities of hazardous materials you will mostly find mentioned under war crimes use. Having that stuff driving around in the primitive backwards USA is stupid dangerous. Rail connections are the only option and even this infrastructure is ancient unreliable garbage that results in bigger catastrophes. Buy Chinese. They are pro community far more than anything in the USA Flock fascist Epsteinian surveillance state. Chinese DRAM ain’t on the Epstein STI list.

My experience may or may not apply here… In automotive paint refinishing back 15+ years ago, 2 part epoxy primers are special. Most primers are (were) 2k urethane. These are similar to automotive 2k clearcoat in how they work. They both have similar thicknesses, leveling after wet coats, and to a lesser extent - drying properties. With drying properties, the surface levels within a minute or so but it forms a surface film and the back side remains tacky for longer. (Where they differ is that clearcoat takes much longer to fully cure, like weeks to months, while primer is workable within an hour or less.) Epoxy primers are high build fillers. They get hard as a rock and are a pain in the ass to sand down. The two main reasons for using an epoxy are for super rough large surfaces, and this the the relevant bit here, they are used to seal the surface.

In paint, there are a ton of nightmare situations. Like let’s say some brake fluid got on the paint in a crash, or some idiot used rattle can enamel on a car. Often what happens is that the repair I am doing is not the first time the panel has been repaired. While I would like to clean the issue completely and use typical 2k primers, the previous repair may have used epoxy and buried something terrible. I’m not going to strip the whole panel and have to spray additional adjacent panels to color match when I did not estimate this in the cost quote. Epoxy seals out EVERYTHING. With stuff like spray can enamel, the painted surface never cures. It remains reactive to the solvent of anything sprayed on top of it. If ABS trim or bumper covers are exposed to acetone, similar issues with reactions will happen, unless 2 part epoxy primer is used. Epoxy primer is impermeable in the context of automotive paint; it is the nuclear option. Everything else allows some solvents to pass through it over time.

If you have ever touched the paint of new cars and noticed the softness, that is uncured clearcoat that is still venting solvents in small quantities. This is also why jams painting inside of the seals is kept to a minimum clearcoat thickness. The thicker the clear, the longer it will take to fully cure. As an ex pro painter, that softness tells me a lot about a finish too. It actually starts forming around 5 minutes after the clear is shot, just after the fingerprint test does not pull a string when removed. That is the first moment when I am able to barely graze the surface with fingertips and not damage the surface. It is still very wet underneath at this stage.

Hopefully that illustrates how even the hardest of painted surfaces is still able to allow stuff to pass through it. If you want to stop that stuff, you need a paint that is made specifically to seal everything.

That said, the seals and other materials also need to be up for the task. Most of those are likely just dust seals. How you deal with corners is critical. Just look at stuff like Pelican cases.

Yeah. Got a kit of it from a thrift store years ago and try to use it in jigs to save printing when possible… 4.3mm bolt holes, 7×2.3mm square nut slots and 12.7mm pitch. I have it and M3 memorized.

It is just a cleanliness standard. It is not required. I spent a decade in the details of automotive paint. I only covered the surface basics for paint. What I call clean for paint is an order of magnitude more dirty than a surgeon, and they are orders of magnitude more dirty than a silicon chip foundry. When it comes to making plastic stick and look pretty, an automotive painter might be helpful for framing the scope of what is possible. All I can tell you is I have a Prusa and never have these problems, so I explained my experience and methodology as to why I do as I said. Again, sorry this upsets you.

I have not had problems with glass or PEI. Your other comments indicate you tried ABS. That will never work without an enclosure, and even then, it will not work particularly well on any Cartesian machine. Sorry that illustrative examples and abstractive reasoning are offensive to you.

It can coat the inside of the drier. Use Bounty paper towels as a control when in question. Bounty are often used in automotive paint shops for a few reasons, but they are trustworthy for composition. If the two plies are separated, they make a good strain filter. That is the primary reason they are used. They also tend to be lower lint though not perfect. A tack cloth is used in the booth with controlled filtered air flow either across or down draft, so it is not a concern for perfect paint.

One of the tricks of automotive painting is to add a couple of drops of Palmolive dish soap to the water bucket used with wet sanding. It makes 3M Imperial Wet/Dry sandpaper last several times longer and acts as a mild degreaser the whole time. Any residue is cleaned in the booth stage using a special Wax and Grease Remover solvent that is the least reactive of the painting solvents. While this solvent is used extensively, still the fact that Palmolive dish soap can be used at all indicates how it is clean, consistent, and chemically irrelevant. Automotive paint reacts with many chemicals but specifically silicon is the worst problem. It causes fisheyes aka little divot like holes to form in the clearcoat. In most situations involving contamination and adhesion, silicon is the main issue that will be very persistent. It is so bad in automotive paint that in the worst cases, we turn to adding an actual silicon solution into the 2k clearcoat and trying to guess what concentration will match the problem area to level it. Otherwise, the entire job must be stripped to the raw surface and start over. Silicon issues only show up in the final wet clearcoat layer shortly after it is sprayed and leveled.

The reason why I have written all of this is to illustrate this point: the silicon is essentially floating on every underlying layer. The solvent has wet the area and the silicon just floats to the top of some filler, 2k primer, sealer, top coat color and when it gets to the clearcoat it blows a hole through it. There are two solutions. Use a two part epoxy primer that is a pain in the ass to sand, or clean the the raw surface with lacquer thinner or virgin acetone. In automotive paint, those two solvents are dangerous for causing a ton of other contamination and reactions issues. However, these are the only solvents that will take off silicon without diluting it and making the problem worse. Alcohol is a joke with no place in the automotive paint world when I was painting. I got out before water based stuff ruined the industry by making refinishing exponentially more expensive. That is only the color coat and some primers, so there may be alcohol used in some way in these, but it will not involve cleaning. Tire shine is the main source of silicon issues in automotive paint.

I have the empirical experience to know what I am looking at with cleaning and solvents. Alcohol is okay for minor issues, but think of it as constantly diluting and wiping the problem across the whole surface. Eventually, just use some virgin acetone to actually clean the thing properly. Paint is just plastic too. Each type requires a different type of tooth to mechanically bond to. With printing, I use 600 grit to lightly knock the shine off of the print plate surface. I go lighter on the textured sheet, but I only use the textured sheet with PETG because it is the only one that takes the textured pattern completely without showing layer lines. I print weekly on average, and use acetone and sandpaper around once a year. When I use glue stick, I clean the plate with dish soap after. I use alcohol in between. You will need an enclosure for ASA, ABS, and any larger PC prints regardless of the sheet or glue. Two IKEA Lack tables with legs stacked using double sided screws, then a clear shower curtain liner, and some tack nails does the job for under $50.

I would never use towels from any drier that has ever had fabric softener used in it for automotive paint. That is a contamination nightmare for me.

llama.cpp is at the core of almost all offline, open weights models. The server it creates is Open AI API compatible. Oobabooga Textgen WebUI is more user GUI oriented but based on llama.cpp. Oobabooga has the setup for loading models with a split workload between the CPU and GPU which makes larger gguf quantized models possible to run. Llama.cpp, has this feature, Oobabooga implements it. The model loading settings and softmax sampling settings take some trial and error to dial in well. It helps if you have a way of monitoring GPU memory usage in real time. Like I use a script that appends my terminal window title bar with GPU memory usage until inference time.

Ollama is another common project people use for offline open weights models, and it also runs on top of llama.cpp. It is a lot easier to get started in some instances and several projects use Ollama as a baseline for “Hello World!” type stuff. It has pretty good model loading and softmax settings without any fuss, but it does this at the expense of only running on GPU or CPU but never both in a split workload. This may seem great at first, but if you never experience running much larger quantized models in the 30B-140B range, you are unlikely to have success or a positive experience overall. The much smaller models in the 4B-14B range are all that are likely to run fast enough on your hardware AND completely load in your GPU memory if you only have 8GB-24GB. Most of the newer models are actually Mixture of Experts architectures. This means it is like loading ~7 models initially, but then only inferencing two of them at any one time. All you need is the system memory or the Deepspeed package (uses disk drive for excess space required) to load these larger models. Larger quantized models are much much smarter and more capable. You also need llama.cpp if you want to use function calling for agentic behaviors. Look into the agentic API and pull history in this area of llama.cpp before selecting what models to test in depth.

Huggingface is the goto website for sharing and sourcing models. That is heavily integrated with GitHub, so it is probably as toxic long term, but I do not know of a real FOSS alternative for that one. Hosting models is massive I/O for a server.

PLA will be better for hardware store and hobby junk. You cannot use automotive class finishes and expect them to last. Generally stick to one brand. Most paints are formulated for steel. ABS is the closest to steel in thermal properties. The expansion is the most important attribute. PLA has a different thermal profile so catalysed 2-part paints will not work very well long term. Rattle can enamel is junk by comparison, but it never fully cures like automotive paints. That property helps it stay in place longer in general. There are special adhesion promoters like bulldog for automotive stuff, but the thermal properties will still be an issue.

Pro automotive paint is 99.9% sanding and prep work. It is far more intense and rigorous than people realize. Perfection happens in the prep work. The actual paint is just a way of showing off that perfection. Mastering automotive paint is actually all about defeating yourself. Perfection is not subject to your emotions or expectations. It is right when it is perfect.

You want the highest pressure spray cans as possible. Also, if you do not used all of the can at once, flip it upside down and clear the nozzle by letting the siphon into the empty void and spraying. If you have a compressor that does not shoot out a bunch of oil or water, a cheap Harbor Freight pink gun with the nozzle of the can beside the spray gun will work wonders by atomizing the spray far more effectively.

You are solely responsible for vetting the software that you choose to run.

I do not review or care about the tools a person uses to create their projects. I appreciate the disclaimer when the person discloses their aptitude and confidence in their code.

Free software and Unix culture is a culture of hackers. Stallman’s very degree is in AI. Emacs is mostly a thing because lisp was adapted early on for AI development many decades ago.

Junk code is nothing new. X11 is notoriously bad, yet you likely have parts of it running on your hardware. Proprietary code is far far worse than anything a hacker posts as open source, yet you are running proprietary blobs on whatever device you are looking at now. Even if you are like myself with a libreboot machine, Leah readily admits that you need to run the core duo microcode if you want it to run right, and are not using that hardware for your primary device. The culture of antiAI is dogmatic nonsense. It is a tool, not a religion. It can be used harmfully or helpfully. I can’t fix stupid in anyone except myself. I do not fault anyone for what they run, the projects they share, or the background they come from. I encourage everyone to be positive and help their fellow hackers. I value participation and enthusiasm. Dogma and negativity are toxic.

I am ultra liberal. You have a right to all information, a right to skepticism, a right to error, and a right to protest in non violent forms aka the right to offend others. You do not have a right to infringe the rights of others.

This anti AI populism infringes the rights to all information and right to error if any administrative actions are taken. Your right to protest and skepticism is duly noted. If these become toxic in any ways that alter the dissemination of information, or toxic/harmful to the individual sharing information, I will remove the offending comments. If the person continues, I will escalate. I am only the janitor here. I clean up the messes. I do not matter, but neither does anyone else here. It is a community, and only the community matters. Garbage software is bog standard. Crusade against things that matter like proprietary software leveraged hardware theft and SaaS.

Thanks for sharing.

K&R?

Graduated pacman emerges… and we all know emerge is Gentoo. This one doesn’t compile.