Ender 3 v2 + Cura + Professional Firmware - Setup

For my future reference, here are the things I had to do to get an Ender 3 v2 tuned and ready after an extensive rebuild. Thanks past-me! Future-me appreciates you writing it down somewhere that you’ll be able to find.

After a spate of nozzle replacements and struggling with adhesion, I added a runout sensor, a new hot end, and a CRTouch. This sent me down a rabbit hole of software upgrades, and it is MUCH easier to use as a result.

I installed the Professional Firmware by mriscoc on GitHub. The features he collects are impossible to find in a better package.

I upgraded my screen firmware for which I needed to track down an 8GB SD Card formatted in a specific way. They’re becoming super rare locally, but photo stores should have them if you’re Amazon-averse. The firmware is in the source zip for the mriscoc firmware above for multiple different models. Use the test GCode included in the how-to before you move on. You want to make sure you have it right as the slicer setup is cumbersome.

Follow the recalibration steps to tune the hot end and bed PIDs. Then do the extruder steps calibration and maybe even zsteps. Then set your bed mesh and do Bed Tramming calibrations to get the perfectly level bed. This should resolve most calibration issues with your prints.

Now you're ready to work on your slicer.

The CRTouch requires gcode to be added to the beginning of the printer profile right after G28, auto home. Add “G29 L0 J” to test the bed level just before starting a print.

Was also able to get thumbnails on the new firmware and screen combo. This takes a script for your slicer to be placed in a specific spot, and your pc must have Python installed (on Windows, in a terminal, type “python3 -v” to see if it is installed; then follow instructions) along with supporting libraries (“pip3 install Pillow” if needed; I think this might only be needed for Prusa Slicer). The final step to view thumbnail jpgs is to change your filament color in Cura! If it is black (like the Pro PLA I was using from 3D Fuel) it will look like it is not rendering anything!

While I still am struggling with elephant foot and getting my calibration cubes to be strictly dimensional, this Professional Firmware got me printing fewer leveling passes with fewer problems overall. I level once a session now instead of after every print. I'll update if I get those last few issues handled. Wish me luck!

A Milestone in London

Work took me across the sea to London in 2014. I had lived in big Asian cities and driven through American metropolises. But this was my first Old World capital. I had a whole week of wandering around Shoreditch with Pokémon Go as my only tour guide where I took in the Calvinist Chapel and Kings Cross Station. I ate hand pies for breakfast and doner at midnight. I had a new job and a new relationship. London was a clean break. The last day was set aside for sightseeing, so I took the Tube to Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and finished at the British Museum. One stone among the many pilfered artifacts yanked me back to the past. A solitary stela about the same height as me was covered with three different scripts: Greek, Demotic, and Hieroglyphic. I had found myself in front of the Rosetta Stone, and I began to cry.

Despite repeated efforts from societies ancient and modern, scholars could not translate the scripts that were common on documents stuffed into sarcophagi or painted on temple walls. Adventurers traveling to Egypt brought mummies back home where some were ground up for pigment. Some were ground up for ingestion in quack medicine. And some survived to go on display. One of these came through Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839, and Joseph Smith, the frontier prophet of the growing Mormon church, bought them and the funerary documents that were found alongside for display in his hotel cum manor. These he claimed he could translate by the gift and power of God, and he pulled a tale of Abraham in Egypt from the papyrus like a rabbit out of a hat.

Growing up Mormon means you already have a complicated relationship with the word "translation". Joseph Smith claimed The Book of Mormon was revealed to him in glowing script using a rock in a hat in a remote-viewing style dictation. He corrected the King James version of the Bible for his Joseph Smith Translation. And now he translated his Egyptian papers into a tale of stars and planets and the throne of God. Of course it was all bunk.

Scholars were beginning to demystify the ancient world for real. Discovered in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was assisting in the deciphering of Demotic and Heiroglyphics by Champollion in 1822. So before Joseph Smith spun his tales of a Abraham placed on the seat of Pharaoh, we had workable translations of every Egyptian document in his possession, and a clear picture of actual Egyptian culture. Academia would classify the Joseph Smith papyri as common funerary documents guaranteeing the resident of the sarcophagus or tomb an audience in heaven. But to Joseph, the hieroglyphs were full of mysterious multi-layered glyphs that we could only properly understand through his divine inspiration. He even worked in American racism, claiming figures drawn all in black were slaves of the court and not their real identity: gods attendant to Pharaoh and the deceased.

Joseph Smith died at the hands of a mob after it was revealed he assaulted the wives and teenage daughters of his followers. It should have been widely known by then that he just made it all up. His banner of fraud was taken up and moved to Salt Lake City under the guidance of Brigham Young. It persisted in my family even after one of my great-great-great-grandparents kicked her husband out when he brought home an additional wife. And it resurfaced even after my grandparents moved to Las Vegas in the 1960s to work at the Nevada Test Site. As the city expanded, they hosted cocktail parties and took up smoking. It seems this belief was a hard habit to break.

By the time I stood in front of the Rosetta Stone, I was still a few years away from formally cutting ties with the church through resignation. I was still mourning a loss of community that many Exmormons feel. My upbringing provided no solace in that moment, and a cult is a group you cannot leave with your dignity intact. I felt cheated. The worst part of extricating yourself from a church you've been in since birth is that you are trained not to blame the leadership or the people in the past that lead you to that point. You are taught to be blind to faults in the institution. And you have to fight to even want to see the truth.

Standing there, I reflected on the past of the stone and myself. Incomplete information let bad men exploit my ancestors. Any of Joseph Smith's translations are a transparent fraud under even the most passing scrutiny. But someone on the inside is taught not to see, and they extract faith-saving salt from the sea of doubt, so the fraud continues. I am of the mind that you need to be ready to leave or all outside efforts to make you do so will only result in retrenchment. For this reason, I will ask friends and family that are still in the church and ask me why I left, "If the church was not true [to its Word], would you want to know?" Because there are no magic words that can undo the conditioning.

It was a slow drip of water that wore down my barriers. I had experiences in childhood of an abusive mom and step-mom enabled by their partners and ignored by clergy when we asked for help. I saw friends and family abused by the church for missionary work which turned out to be a tool of personal indoctrination at the expense of others health and safety. And my time at BYU was further damaging to my faith in the church looking out for the well-being of members. There was no epiphany on the road to Damascus. I stayed home from church to help deal with newborn child care, and my first week back after 6 months away was a revelation. The people making excuses for Joseph Smith were aliens. I was done, and I couldn't get back in the grooves of the wagon trail anymore.

You see the issues more clearly once you step away, but you are automatically suspect by those still inside if they speak to you at all. You are treated as a Cassandra at best and a Judas at worst. You lose your community of built in friends. You lose family closeness if your parents or siblings are church members. And the self doubt that drove you to question the church turns toward you. Leaving doesn't magically make everything OK. Knowing the truth doesn't make your life perfect.

So I stood there in front of that ancient stone and felt.  What was on it was of little import these days. Old laws and decrees. But what it meant was loss and waste, and also rebirth and truth. It represented every could-have-been stretching back through time to people who were not ready to listen. Every choice that pulled me further in took another equally protracted period to step out. The stone waited after being written as the languages on it died. It chilled in the field waiting for Napoleon's troops. And it waited for the secrets of its inscriptions to unlock an ancient world. And a modern life like mine.

In The Message, Ta Nehisi Coates recalls his visit to Goree Island and being moved by it even though he knows its true significance is wildly overstated. I know the the Rosetta Stone is not a religious object, but, as I stood in front of it, it embodied my journey. I hold it as a symbol of healing and informing and freeing. And so I cried in the old city around stolen artifacts and portraits and empire. I cried and knew that I had deciphered this piece of my history. I mourned what I could no longer change while celebrating the life that I would now live.

SOLIDWORKS PDM Database Server Errors in Event Logs

 Event Viewer is a great source of logs to show that something is wrong with your setup. Here is one esoteric error and how they were resolved:

Credentials are stored in multiple places and multiple tools. If an error appears in the Event Viewer every 10 seconds from SOLIDWORKS PDM Database Server with a message like Connect to server <ServerName>' Failed: (null) Unknown error 0x80040200 (null) or Login failed for user '<username>'. Reason: Could not find a login matching the name provided. [CLIENT: <local machine>], this means that the Database Archive Server connection is using the wrong account or the wrong password.

Launch the "Database Server Configuration" utility from the Start menu and correct the login to your SQL Admin user. The errors should stop.

The Internet at DEF CON 33 (and BOM to make your very own)

 And it came to pass that the Pope of the Church of Wi-fi, yeah, even Renderman, didst bless and consecrate The Internet in this the 2025th year of the common era (and 35 years after Tim Berners-Lee invented it) on August 8th, the second night of DEF CON 33.

And lo, DuncanYoudaho didst capture the consecration thereof in an image. In the self-same breath as the consecration, the Pope did also pronounce a holy quest upon him as a teacher doth chastise the student that readeth not the book but kind of fumbles through the book report anyway.

Yeah, he was admonished with much reproachment to not share the graven image of the consecration until such time as the quest was fulfilled. That all the world wouldst see and hear and follow in the path. And this was the quest:

"DuncanYoudaho, if ye be a loyal servant of The Internet, teach those who see the image of this blessing how they also might obtain an Internet of their very own. Yeah, promulgate and proclaim the BOM that thou didst fulfill when making The Internet."

And so if thou wisheth to make this Thine Internet, obtain the shards of circuitry, and resistors, and switches, and hookup wire, and make ye an earthly copy of what is now The Blessed Internet!

Instructables

I made The Internet thanks to a great Instructable. The parts list has atrophied a bit with time, so I’m reproducing a BOM here with more modern selections. When in doubt, they’ve probably got better step by step instructions, so head there. What I did not do (and wish I did) is take the advice to make curly LED hookups and stand-offs.  Making the wires as tight as they are has lead to almost every solder joint breaking. The Internet has required constant maintenance which various users have graciously done and received stickers in return, most recently, Chip from Aviation Hacking Village.

Parts List

• Hammond 1591XX Series enclosure in a chosen size (Mouser/Digikey) or a similar looking enclosure - The plastic enclosure of The Internet uses a Radio Shack ABS project box. As these are no longer available in large quantities, I found a similar project box in the Hammond 1591XX Series enclosures.  These come in black, have a detachable bottom with rounded exterior edges, and come with PCB mounting holes inside the case for easy attachment of the strip board components.
• Red LED inside chrome-plated enclosure (Mouser/Digikey) - Pay particular attention to the voltage. Higher voltage LEDs will need more batteries.
• NE555 Timer (Mouser/Digikey) - The through-hole TI model is linked here. This is the grand-daddy of them all. The IC that birthed all other blinky lights. Kneel and say thanks. And provide at least 4.5V to power it.
• Resistors: 330Ohm, 2x 1M Ohm - The 330Ohm resistor can be changed to tune the blink to your liking.
• Battery Holder(s) for at least 6V power. 
• Hook-up Wire, Solid Core.
• Strip Board sufficient for mounting the components and attaching inside the case.

Equipment

• Wire Strippers
• Soldering Iron and Solder
• Double-sided Tape
• Screw Driver for case and PCB Screws

Steps

• Get circuit working on Strip Board or Bread Board.
• Cut 8mm hole in case for light
• Cut hole in case for switch. I put mine on the side of the box 
• Make stand-offs and long curly q's for LED, switch, and batteries
• Make final solder joints to hook everything up
• TEST IT 
• Screw down the Strip board to the box
• Affix the batteries to the strip board (I had to wire the 4x AA holder down as it kept breaking loose)
• Close it all up and test it again
• Get it demagnetized by the Elders of the Internet, or find another Pope of the Church of Wi-fi to bless it for you. 

Pinout stolen from NE555P Datasheet

 

Circuit Design

 

Pictures of The Internet

 

And the Lord did grin...

Currently, The Internet was handed off to members of DC404 for an East Coast Adventure. If Flat Stanley returns to DEF CON 34, I'm sure it will come with plenty of stickers. 

The Legend of the Murder Hobos

Spoiler alert: The real prize is friendship.

At R00tz Asylum, an official DEF CON event for kids, Facebook’s security team was running a CTF. The scene matched most rooms at DEF CON: intense staring at screens, poking at punny challenges, and no one really talking to each other. We chatted up our neighbors, Sodapop and p0wnyb0y about the con, the badge, and the contest. We realized the organizers encouraged teams, but no one else was talking. Pooling our resources, a 7 and 9 year old shot to the top of the leaderboard and took home the prize: 2 Chromebooks, and a con-friendship.

A chat at Toxic BBQ in 2018 lead to another team-up. Tinribs and I were Vegas locals looking to change up our DEF CON experience.  We took on the inaugural Dungeons@DEFCON with our 12 year old kids. Styled as the Murder Hobos, we won the Psychoholics-lead, D&D themed, CTF-style classic crypto challenge through cooperation, luck, and shenanigans, and we came away with the win and a black badge for our team of four. As far as we can tell, the kids are the youngest black badge holders in history. Grifter commented to The Dark Tangent during closing ceremonies, “What I like about a couple of kids winning a black badge is how much it’s going to cost Jeff. For life, baby!”

But we had a problem: only 4 of the 6 Hobos had a black badge, and so the next chase began. The very next year, family obligations took me away from DEF CON, so the Murder Hobos stormed Dungeons@DEFCON again but fell to the inimitable Fellowship of the Token Ring. Post-Covid, another run at D@D (with FOTTR contributing puzzles and CrookedFingers our Dungeon Master) ended with a second place finish. FOTTR decided to host their own contest, and Spy v Spy was born. With a thrilling finish, CamelCase bested the Murder Hobos by unlocking the dead drop minutes before P0wnyb0y arrived. Victory was elusive, but we couldn’t give up.

At DEF CON 33, I was trying to play it cool and relax. When we absorbed ourselves in a contest, we’d look up on Sunday afternoon at closing wondering where the weekend had gone. I was thinking I should take it easy. But it was not to be so. Spy v Spy had returned, and it had a compelling hook: souvenir slabbed playing cards when you completed incremental challenges. Sodapop and P0wnyb0y registered right away, and we were at the top of the leader board the most of the con. We cracked crypto, fabricated loaded dice with other teams, and chased dead drops for two days.

When the final round started, we made the cut, but didn’t know what we were up against. It was rumored one team had 12 people! So we unwrapped the challenge code book and got cracking. Sat at the disused Warlock Gamez booth, we were right in the walkway and kept getting interlocutors asking what we we’re working on (some of whom, we found out later, were actual spies from other teams), and they got a gruff reply. It was serious. Tinribs and Sodapop cracked numbers stations, P0wnyb0y decoded RTTY, and we found the spy. The final answer was phoned in over Discord while I walked back from the other end of the conference.

As I approached, I saw a confluence of people around the contest table. Tinribs was walking towards me shaking his head.

“Too late, we were a minute too late.”

Crestfallen.

“Just kidding. We got it.”

Elation. Joy. I screamed several expletives at him.

Around table was an excited mix of teams and organizers asking about clues and solves, tips and congratulations. Fox from the Whiskey Pirates may have teared up a bit, but so did we.

These contests and conferences are largely excuses. To get us off screens and in front of each other. Make friends and build community. Share skills that are weird and unique and unavailable in any concentration. Sometimes through competition, but also cooperation and conversation. With the win in hand, there was one final question.

The news came the next day: be at the main stage at 3pm. Victory, finally, after a 6-year chase, the Hobos all had black badges. After a whirlwind weekend, we were back on the main stage. None of the kids are children anymore. But we’re already planning our next escapade rather than retirement. FOTTR wants us to make our own contest. And I really want to share how we got here again. And maybe hang out with other puzzlers outside of one weekend per summer.

Cheers,

DuncanYoudaho

How I Juice Limes in My Countertop Cast Iron Citrus Juicer

 Got a question on Reddit as to how I juice limes using my generic countertop cast iron juicer. I picked this up from a McMenamins bartender in Kalama, WA. Speeds up the juicing, gets more juice out, and makes it easy to press every last drop out.

First, cut a coin off one end:

Then add a small slice across the line about a quarter of the way into the lime. This opens it up a bit:

Stand your lime up on the juicer plate and crank it:

That’s it! You can also press the lime shell a bit to make sure all the juice gets got. I’ve only ever observed a teaspoon or so left behind, however.

Edit: I tested the above remaining juice on several limes. Between 1/6 and 1/3 oz Lime juice is left behind on thin skinned limes. Thicker varieties leave almost nothing.

Jacking It, and by It, I mean Cider

I made Applejack from cider I laid down 3 years ago from local SW Washington fruit. Its destination is a Jack Rose cocktail (included below).

These days, Applejack is basically Apple Brandy distilled from cider (Lairds Bottled in Bond is the best), but it started back in the olden times being “jacked” from cider by leaving the barrels outside in the winter and skimming off the ice. Each freeze would remove water and leave behind alcohol and tailings.

Over the past month, I used the same mug I use for making clear ice to deep freeze, top down, an 8-pack of leftover apple-marionberry cider (thus the color). Each day, I took the frozen slush, dumped it into a shaker, and strained it using a Hawthorne strainer with a tight coil. It took about 4 days per 16 oz to get it down to where it would no longer freeze, about 2 oz remaining each time. A final trip through a coffee strainer removed remaining sediment from the collected product.

That process resulted in 375ml of rocket fuel you see here. A a final test, I tried freezing it one last time. As every child that tried to replace a tipple with water in their parents’ freezer vodka has learned, high enough ABV stops freezing. This one didn’t even have ice crystals after 48 hours. Tastes like a strong liqueur. Hoping I got it above 35%.

The destination cocktail is a grenadine-lemon-applejack combo, the Jack Rose. Have some leftover cider of your own? Give it a shot. Toast the pilgrims as you tip one back!

1. 1 1/2 oz Applejack (Lairds Bottled in Bond or homemade, adjust based on ABV)
2. 1/2 oz Homemade Grenadine (Morgenthaler recipe)
3. 3/4 oz Fresh squeezed lemon juice

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coup

Garnish with a lemon wheel