Short-Posts on karl

Multi-Material Printing Hack for Prusa XL

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the same spirit as an earlier post, here is a quick hack I used to get my dual-headed Prusa XL printer to print with three materials at once.

While the technique worked, it may not be the best method, so proceed with caution.

The problem

I am trying to print a part that requires two different materials at the same time: ABS and TPU.

The shaded blue area is meant to be TPU/FLEX material. The shaded yellow area is meant to be ABS material.

Arris SB8200 Prometheus Exporter

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very short “announcement” post.

To beef up my home-lab observability stack, I’ve been working on a few projects to expose more data to Prometheus. Getting metrics from my cable modem has been on the “todo” list for literally years. There have been various metric exporters written in the past but they have either been archived/deleted off of GitHub or are otherwise inappropriate for my needs. So, I wrote my own.

Quick and dirty hack to extend the MK3S print area.

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This isn’t going to be a long post. I’m working on a larger project but hit a snag and I didn’t find any easy/obvious solutions online so I thought I’d share what I came up with.

Details will come later when the bigger project is ready to be released so you’ll have to forgive me for the lack of context. Essentially I have a large / multi-hour print that almost fits on my MK3s print bed but is too large to slice as is.

Two quick tricks for better HomeAssistant automations

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to believe, but the venerable Home Assistant project has just celebrated it’s 7th birthday with release .115! While HA does get better with each new release, it is by no means perfect :D. This post came about because of a new feature in release .115 and the subsequent limitations of that feature!

In the course of trying to integrate Home Assistant with all the things, everybody eventually hits some major limitation or bug and is forced to find some sort of workaround. Below are a few techniques that I’ve collected over the years to simplify some of my Home Assistant configuration and work around some of the platforms various limitations.

PoE at a distance caused terrible cat5 speeds

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick post for made in the hopes that some poor soul in the future will find it and save themselves some time.

Background

I’ve been experimenting with a few different ways to surface various home automation controls in the appropriate place and at a good time. One prototype host is deployed behind a small LCD under some cabinets in a high traffic area. This host is a raspberry pi 4 with a PoE hat. It boots a very stripped down version of Raspberry Pi OS into a web browser running in Kiosk mode.

Hello World

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Blowing the dust off the domain, trying Hugo out.

tap tap Is this thing on?