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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Update: With some experimentation, I think I figured out what was going on. I had an extra 10K resistor in the circuit which wasn’t necessary. With both the resistor and the potentiometer in the circuit, I was only able to light up the red channel with the pot turned fully clockwise. Without the extra resistor, a full turn of the pot lit up all the channels and gave me the white coloration I was wanting. The green and blue channels weren’t lighting up because of the excessive resistence and the fact that they obviously power up at different levels. I was making the poor assumption that all of the LEDs would power on at the same time despite the fact that green and blue light require different energy levels.







  • While not open source, Fusion 360 has a free for personal use version if you are wanting a fairly easy to use CAD program. I had been using mostly Blender up until recently since learning how to use Fusion. I love being able to parameterize everything. Blender is awesome though in it’s own right. I use both for making functional prints depending on what I’m trying to do. I tried FreeCAD, but it definitely has a bit more learning curve than Fusion.


  • There are plenty of good budget printers these days. Most will work just fine out of the box (other than minor assembly) assuming you have done some reading and are ready to do some bed leveling. Even with fancier printers, you’ve got to be ready to trouble shoot and tinker. I have a couple Ender 3s that worked just fine out of the box, so I have no problem recommending them (though your mileage may vary). They’ve been modified since with auto levers and filament runout sensors for ease of use, but they worked fine to start with. If you go into it with appropriate expectations you’ll probably be fine with whatever printer you choose. Don’t go into 3D printing with 2D printer expectations. Tinkering will be necessary at some point.