What creative projects have you been working on?

I have a Creality Ender 3 v2. I bought it over the cheaper versions because it came with a number of nice upgrades like a heated glass bed, silent stepper motor drivers, and adjustable belt tensioners. The hardware was pretty great, but the biggest letdown has been the firmware. It came with an ancient version of Marlin, and although Creality offers newer versions on their website, it seems like none of those versions actually worked. Thankfully, you can build your own firmware really easily, so I updated it and got some nice 'free' upgrades.

But the biggest failure of this 3D printer has to be the controls it comes with. It's nice enough, but it's basically a black box; there is no way to make any modifications to it without starting from scratch, and the hardware it's built on is based on a very strange Chinese ASIC that doesn't seem to be particularly well documented. But the worst part is that if you have the printer hooked up to an OctoPrint server, the screen will stay on even if you power down the printer because it draws power from the USB connection.

So I decided to make it redundant so I could toss it away.

I bought the cheapest touchscreen I could find on amazon (It looks like this was the one.) and installed it on the Raspberry Pi that I was already running OctoPi on. And now it's running OctoDash and the screen is set aside in case something were to happen to it.

Of course, this being the cheap route, things weren't actually that simple. The first problem I had was with trying to get it to work at all. There wasn't really documentation on it; there was only the instruction to download and run a script from a github repository. And that script wasn't particularly well documented. Running it made text display, but I couldn't figure out how to get any kind of graphics running on it. Presumably it would have worked if I connected a keyboard and run the startx script from there, but that wouldn't be terribly helpful. Even trying to set it up to automatically log in to the graphical environment left the display showing a text terminal.

I'm a linux guy, but this isn't an area where I have any form of expertise, so after googling I found an easy, if unelegant solution in the form of a simple program called raspi2fb which copies the contents of one framebuffer to another. There was no binary package available, but the program was simple enough that the entire process of getting it to run was fairly painless. I'm sure there was probably a very simple elegant solution as well, but this was a simple project that I did on a day when I was home sick, so an easy solution was best.

I actually tried to use TouchUI first, but it wasn't great for a number of reasons; mainly it required setting up the desktop environment with a browser, which required a bunch of packages to be installed and would take up much more system resources, which I feared might interfere with printing. Beyond that, that interface really doesn't work that well unless you have a fairly high resolution screen, which this certainly is not; I had to zoom out to 50%, and at that level it was very difficult to read any text.

I've started to work on a EP with a vocalist, some kind of folk/ambient/electronic collage. We already did two tracks together so if we managed to do a couple more we should be able to put something together. We have one track well on the way (if you have some feedback). It's gratifying but I also find the exercise quite draining at times, it doesn't come easily.

I write a substack about how branding impacts our lives. So far, I've seen decent growth (started with 100), now at 390. It's been fun, but very challenging in growing it. It's also been great to have something to work on that's all my own, as opposed to the work I do in my 9-5.