Did you happen to look into Open Scan? It’s reasonably open and is PI based. I don’t know a ton about them, but it seems like a viable alternative at first glance.

I suggest printing a fresh temp tower. My bet is that temperature or retraction is off (have you fiddled with retraction lately) or the filament is super wet.

Is this a new spool or an old spool? Have you printed this blend of PETG before? What does a temperature tower look like?

I don’t see this being practical beyond a “neat” any time soon. Because it relies on thermal expansion and contraction it won’t be very fast to cycle. It’s also physically pretty long/wide, so a more traditional IC or microcontroller would likely be a better choice unless it’s super thin.

This is still cool, but I am failing to see a practical application.

If/when they’re able to print transistors it will be a lot more interesting.

This is pretty cool.

This is the how-they-done-it paragraph. Essentially, they printed mechanical logic gates by taking advantage of a conductive filament that grows/shrinks as it heats and cools. Cool!

The conductive filament the researchers used is Electrifi by Multi3D, which is PLA combined with copper micro-particles. A segment printed in this filament is normally very conductive due to the densely-packed particles, but as temperature increases (beginning around 40° C) the polymer begins to soften and undergoes thermal expansion. This expansion separates the copper particles, causing a dramatic increase in electrical resistance as electrical pathways are disrupted. That’s pretty neat, but what really ties it together is that this behavior is self-resetting, and reversible. As long as the PLA isn’t straight up melted (that is to say, avoids going over about 150° C) then as the material cools it contracts and restores the conductive pathways to their original low-resistance state. Neat!

I live in the Midwest. We have these all over as a weather alerting system. They test them monthly at a fixed time, but I could see this triggering someone - especially if they didn’t know it was coming.

You got a lot of replies on the modeling side of things. It’s not clear if you have a printer, so let me quickly hit on that.

There are a bunch of different 3D printing services you can use to print things, including local (at your library potentially or a maker space) as well as commercial.

3D printera fall into big buckets:

• melt the material as you go. The most common version is FDM. FDM printers can make somewhat fine detailed prints, but their forte is making larger things with larger details
• deposit a layer of material and fuse it via light. This can be done with a powered material and a laser (SLS) or a liquid resin and a light source (SLA). This method produces much higher detailed prints, but has a bigger barrier to entry. SLS printers are expensive, but can produce large and very durable prints. SLA printers have affordable home versions, but their build volume is somewhat small, their parts will require post processing to finish (rinsing, during), and you will have to deal with responsible disposal of the used resins and solvents. Resin prints are hard, but can be a bit brittle

If you’re going to be purchasing the prints, I would go SLS. You’ll get fine details and the parts can be nylon (or even metal) so they’ll be durable.

If you’re printing at home, SLA is probably the way to go.

As a recent modern Mac user, this experience is so bizarre and is always a little different.

I grew up on macs (thanks mom) and built a PC as soon as I had my first real job in highschool. I recently bought a MacBook for the promise of battery life and cool running. If only it was easier to get my arm windows laptop to boot Linux…

My printer and filament live in my basement. We have a dehumidifier down there set to 55%. Some filament spools take a year plus for me to go through and I’ve never dried any of them. I have not noticed a meaningful change in print quality, but I also rarely go from an old to a new spool of the same material back to back.

I printed mostly PETG and ASA with some PLA thrown in.

But it looks like achieving proper dependable watertightness might be a whole side project of its own.

This is the case, especially if you want watertight prints right off the printer. Post processing (eg coating, smoothing, etc) are another approach. Post processing also seems like it would be more consistent print to print.

Genuine question: do they make money from AOSP being used on third party devices? Obviously they get revenue via the Play store, but you can avoid that by either installing something like graphine or an alternative store (Fdroid, Amazon, etc).

How about the spaghetti detective?

I love me some 3D printing, but if you need a fast gasket I would buy a roll of gasket material and cut it to size. Most auto parts stores stock a variety of materials for this use.

Gasket mating surfaces can be… extremely fickle, especially when one of the two sides is stamped sheet metal or even plastic. Too little torque on the fasteners means there won’t be enough clamping force, which means leaking. Too much torque on the fasteners will dimple the stamped or plastic part, which means leaking.

If you’re using this in a low temperature application with beefy mating surfaces, TPU could work fine I guess. It still seems like more effort to get a dimensionall accurate enough design than to grab a roll of gasket material and an exact blade.