Lmst

Ok, interesting #CGAPrints / #Thrixels update today. The last few colours - brown, grey and dark green - have come out with noticeably crap quality, probably my printer needs some preventative maintenance after churning out thousands of the same part, but also I should probably build in more tolerance because different filaments are going to act differently.

I'll keep building this stockpile for early pixel art tests, but might revise for time investments in bigger projects. #3DPrinting

A photo of two squares of 3D printed tile mosaics. The one on the left is complete and features 16 different colours, the other is in progress and only shows about 11. Some of the tiles on the right one fit noticeably poorly.

A side-on photo of the 3D printed tile mosaic, showing the tops of some times crowding each other, forcing a sort of domino effect where each row of tile is forced slightly further and further apart.

Progress on #CGAPrints is slow due to life and other stuff. A full print of 1k #Thrixels is ten hours, basically a whole printer day, and I don't like running it overnight, so if I don't get a plate started in the morning it's not a day this project gets furthered.

I'm up to five packs done out of 16, so in theory I could have the rest knocked out in a week. Realistically it'll take longer, but momentum is slowly building up!

#3DPrinting

A photo of five plastic zip-lock bags filled with small, 3D printed mosaic tiles, one colour per bag. There's blue, dark and light red, purple and pink so far. They are labeled with the colour and type of filament.

A better photo of my 16 #CGAPrints filament collection, and my progress so far on turning them into #Thrixels for pixel art.

A photo of 16 different spools of 3D printing filament in two large plastic tubs. There are light and dark versions of green, blue, yellow, red, teal, grey, and magenta.

A photo of 3 small bags of tiny 3D printed parts. They are red, purple and blue, and the bags are labelled with the colour and name of each filament used.

Me: I don't need to print more than 500 of these at once.

Also me: Let's give a thousand of them a go at once.

Result: 1,024 #Thrixels printed at once, 100% yield, zero failures. Trust the process!

Here's a bit of my workflow. The long green thing is a breaker bar that slots over the top of a row of Thrixels and makes it easy to pop them off the raft without them going everywhere. And the swoopy scoop helps me collect them and pour them into labeled bags.

#3DPrinting @3dprinting@a.gup.pe @3dprinting@techhub.social

A photo taken inside a 3D printer, showing a completed print. It's a huge grid of tiny blue square parts, standing on an orange support raft.

A photo showing how the parts are removed and sorted. A long hollow green part is used to cover one entire row of parts and then leverage them off the bed, and a white scoop with some curvy details is designed to collect the parts and then pour them out again through a narrow channel for easy sorting and storage.

A photo of two clear plastic bags, one full of blue parts, the other purple. They are labeled "CGA#09: light blue - Bambu Lab Cyan" and "CGA#05: magenta - Atomic Perfect Purple PLA".

Five hours and 18 minutes is an awful long time to lay down 31 grams of PLA, but that includes the time to print the PLA/PETG support raft, and still works out to ~36 seconds per individual part.

I could fit somewhere around 2,000 total #Thrixels on a single plate on my X1, but I don't see a need to - 500ish over 5 hours of printing gives me plenty of time to do other things between plate clears, and more than that increases the risk of failures, which would cost more time. #3DPrinting

A screenshot of 3D printing program Orca Slicer showing a grid of 512 tiny rectangular parts lined up on top of a breakaway support raft. It shows that it will take almost 5 and a half hours to print this, while only using 37 grams of filament in total.

#Thrixels update. Currently tweaking the shape of the very top of the tiles, to maximise the amount of surface area taken up (so the tiles look like they fill the space) without overlapping and causing the base to bow. 39.76mm means there's 0.12mm of 'slack' on each side when compressed with calipers, which seems to be getting filled adequately, and there's no warping visible from the side. Couple more tests to reduce the gaps in tile corners and I think this design is done. #3DPrinting

A photo of a 3D printed mosaic of tiles, being measured for width with digital calipers. The reading is 39.76mm, showing the row of ten tiles almost perfectly fills the space available to them (each tile is 4 by 4 millimetres in size).

#CGAPrints Release Candidate 2. Magenta is now Atomic Filament's Perfect Purple, and a slightly lighter shade than in RC1. Cyan is also a little brighter in real life (it's devilishly difficult to take this photo meaningfully, so trust me on this).

I think it's time to line up some filament and print a thousand-odd #Thrixels of each colour, then do some test sprites to see how these colours actually work together!

#3DPrinting #retrocomputing @3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe

A photo of a 16 colour palette shown on a computer monitor, next to a grid of 3D printed mosaic tiles representing the same set of colours.

So what's the big idea? Here's the big idea - these boomerang pieces get glued to a final surface, ideally a pre-cut wooden sheet, and aligned using a set of base pieces, whether completed with #Thrixels or not. I need to find a bit of scrap wood and do a test assembly.

I also need to go back to the drawing board on the base pieces and the slots those tabs fit into, because for some reason they're back to not fitting correctly. Two steps forward, one step back. #3DPrinting

A photo of some 3D printed parts on a flat wooden surface, they form a sort of grid.

The same pieces with two square pieces clicked on top, showing they are a frame for a grid of these squares.

Ah, that's better. It's gotten enough layers in that it's up to switching to a different colour for the top layers, and it's making an interesting pattern. This is two hours into a four hour print, and by the end of it I should have 25 new #Thrixels bases to play with.

A photo taken from inside a 3D printer, partway through a print, showing a grid of white squares with a roughly textured top. Some sections are partially coloured blue as the printer has just changed filaments and is now printing with a different colour.

Not only does this look like there is no seam at all, when you insist to your brain that there definitely is one, its best guess is a row or two away from where it actually is.

The sense of satisfaction I'm getting from this is on par with building a complicated gaming PC from scratch, and doing all the cable-tying before pressing the power button and finding it boots and works perfectly the first go. I am ridiculously happy with how this project is unfolding. #3Dprinting #Thrixels

A photo of a mosaic of 3D printed tiles, they are randomly white and blue. It appears to be a completely seamless 20 by 10 block of tiles.

A photo of the same mosaic tiles, split into two 10 by 10 squares. The join was exactly in the middle, but it was practically invisible when the two halves were together.

I regret to announce I have invented voxel teeth.

In better news: That's 512 v2.0 #Thrixels successfully printed at once - not the most individual parts I've ever printed together, but not far off it, either.

These are at a 0.16mm layer height, while the originals needed to be at 0.12 to work reliably, so that + the simplified geometry makes for a much faster print. Four hours for ~30g of parts sounds slow, but that's still under 30 seconds per individual part!

A photo taken inside a 3D printer, showing a finished print of hundreds of tiny white square tiles. They vaguely resemble a field of square teeth growing out of the printer's bed.

So, clearance is a fun thing to get right in #3DPrinting. If you have a 10mm cube, and a 10mm hole for it to go into, it won't fit - 3D printing is just too variable a process for things to work like that. You'd need to build some clearance in - probably 0.25mm on each side, so you'd end up with a 9.5mm cube; my #Thrixels have a 0.1mm gap between the tiles and the part of the baseplate they grip to.

But stuff gets weird when you go small - like single digit multiples of your nozzle width small.

Image of a 3D model of a 1 centimetre cube above a 1x1cm hole in a part.

This was always my vision for #Thrixels - modular bases that clip together in a way that allows the tiles on top to just seamlessly... tile... to form a pattern. The tiles are very easy to locate and snap in, there's enough room in there for bigger patterns to not collide and warp apart, not a single individual tile popped off in repeated drop tests, and while a ton of dimensional tweaking obviously remains, all the core functionality is suddenly there.

This has been a good day.

#3DPrinting

A photo of some 3D printed mosaic tiles, and their bases, which clip together.

A completed test mosaic, just some rectangular shapes, on a set of four bases clipped together in a square shape.

Finally catching a bit of free time for hobby stuff, so I'm testing some ideas I had for #Thrixels V2.

I'm still very proud of my original work, but it had very complicated geometry, was slow and difficult to print, and its limitations meant that any time I wanted to start a big project with them, it just went straight into the too-hard basket.

Here I'm shrinking and stabilising parts while increasing footprint area for reliability, and testing a fix for large projects warping. #3Dprinting

A close-up photo of some 3D printed parts, still attached to the bed. They are small 4x4mm square tiles, with a roughly square base that is open at two corners. They were printed in blue PLA on a raft of green PETG to get them to stick reliably during printing as they have only a tiny surface area to cling to.

A screenshot from 3D modelling program Rhino, showing the tiles' 3D model arrayed in a grid.

#CGAPrints update: Release Candidate 1? I took some time today to test-print some colours that arrived this week, and they seem pretty close. This is the first time I've compared a full batch of #thrixels against colours on a real screen - what do you think?

All 16 colours are different brands and types of PLA, so given access to the complete palette, basically every printer should be capable of making some form or other of CGA pixel art.

#3DPrinting @3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe #retrocomputing

A photo of some 3D printed tiles, in 16 different colours, arranged next to a laptop screen showing the Wikipedia article about the Color Graphics Adapter, IBM's first colour graphics card, and the 16 different colours it was capable of displaying. The colours match up between the 3D printed parts and the table on the screen quite satisfyingly.

#CGAPrints update: Push Plastic's Dark Teal PLA has entered the chat. Massive thanks to @filamentcolors for helping me get some of this to Australia without spending a fortune on shipping (despite the very best efforts of UPS)!

This stuff is almost exactly the right colour and shade for CGA teal, but is surprisingly matte for a plain PLA colour, doesn't love Bambu's default ironing settings, and jams at the back of my AMS, so this stuff will be exclusively reserved for making #thrixels.

A close-up photo of a mosaic of 3D printed tiles, grouped in different colours. A new colour has appeared in the top right, and it's a dark teal.

A close-up photo of a sticker spruiking FilamentColors.XYZ on a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon 3D printer.

I'm proud to announce the first public release of #Thrixels, my system for #3DPrinting pixel art! After several months of work, I think it's finally ready to inflict on other people - please give it a go if you're interested, and let me know how you get on with it.

https://www.printables.com/model/843125-thrixels-a-system-for-3d-printed-pixel-art

Boosts, suggestions, and any other feedback would be highly appreciated!

@3dprinting@techhub.social @3dprinting@a.gup.pe

A photo of a 3D printed mosaic representing the Arecibo Message, a 23x73 graphic transmitted into outer space in 1974. It's made up of multiple different colours, which are shown in small piles on the right. On the left is a 30cm ruler for scale.

@timixretroplays neato! Tell me more about these Thrixels. I can't find much info about them anywhere!

#thrixels

Having a nice relaxing evening with a kit of #Thrixels I've built up - featuring the coolest non-gaming-related pixel art I know of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

#3DPrinting

An overhead photo of a 3D printed pixel art kit in progress on a desk. On the left is an A4 print-out of a tall, narrow pattern, with a short metal ruler marking the current row. On the right is the kit itself, with about 16 rows completed, and small piles of coloured tiles nearby, ready to go in.

Lastly, slicing some 3D models for printing. A plate of my #Thrixels went from taking 2 minutes 20 seconds down to *57 seconds*, Frank Deschner's Designer Moon Lamp dropped from 16 minutes to 8 and a half, and the worst case I found was slicing a very large Hilbert curve model I made, which dropped from 1:15 to 44 seconds. A 40-60% improvement!

3D slicing is an interesting mix of single- and multi-threaded tasks, and this CPU upgrade basically halved the time it takes to do each one. 5/🧵

#Thrixels

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