To keep the meeting on track
3D Printers:
Printers doing well, Ultimaker 2 back in operation.
Use PrusaSlicer for Ender 5 printers, use Cura slicer for the Ultimaker 2.
We may install a Raspberry Pi with Octoprint on the Ultimaker 2, but it's not top priority.
More permanent camera solution has to be come up with, and likely mounted on a corner so we get more of the bed and don't end up with silly false positives for The Spaghetti Detective (like cables on the lab tables being detected as spaghetti!)
Extruder drives on the Ender 5's will likely have to be changed to a different design as these do not have good tension control and are shredding filament needlessly. Thinking some sort of dual gear drive would be good.
We're thinking of experimenting with different buildplates so we might be able to get away from using the painters tape. Not sure what solution we're going to use yet, but there are many out there.
Antonio has made a monumental effort to train people to use the printers more efficiently, document materials, temperatures, slicer settings, and speeds, and has done a lot of work to keep tabs on the printers, yay Antonio!.
We are working on a schedule on what tweaks and upgrades we will make to the printers, and we need to know what our budget roughly is for procuring filament/stuff. We intend on doing incremental upgrades that will eventually allow us to print exotic materials such as Carbon Fiber, Nylon, Polycarbonate, Wood PLA, and glow in the dark filament without determent to the hotends. I am considering contacting Microswiss directly to see if we can get a good deal by being a hackerspace. They have an amazing kit for the Ender 5 printers that changes them to a direct drive extruder with a all metal hotend (and dual gear drive extruder) of their design which would allow us to run hardened steel nozzles of good quality, but I am on the fence about it as the boden tube design is lightweight, has proven itself to be amazingly reliable on the stock parts, and the entire hotend assembly as it stands could be considered a total loss and replaced cheaply whereas the microswiss one could not. One of the hardened microswiss nozzles costs more than the entire stock Ender 5 hotend with nozzle, heater cartridge, thermistor, heatbreak, wiring, and PTFE tube assembly.
Perhaps we might build a 3D printer that's only for exotic materials??