It is, but I mean: Many of us do just exactly that with 3D printers.
We get a new 3D-printing machine and install our own build of Marlin on it, or move it all over to Klipper. Sometimes that involves replacing the entirety of the brain-box controls and that's just par for the course.
At its root, it's only some stepper motors, fans (more motors), sensors, and heaters that are used in very particular ways.
That's pretty similar to a Cricut machine, isn't it?
Because closed source 3d printers grew out of an open source community, it's pretty easy to do this, and you get a pretty similar experience on most printers. Unfortunately, cricuts are not like that. There are a couple projects attempting this but afaik they offer a pretty rough experience.
Nice! I've had very good luck with most (not all!) of the Biqu boards I've used, at least in printing space. I've also had great (100%) luck with warranty claims.
If you're really launching into this thing, then: I came across a set of ifixit sorta-teardowns[1] on a Cricut machine earlier today. It showed what appeared to be relatively-small 4-wire motors (often with gear trains shown, which does matter), which strongly suggests that 2-pole steppers are being used. That's easy enough.
The TMC5160 on the Biqu Rodent seems like a strange choice for this job: The 5160 is a high-current dude that's meant more for grunt than precision. The availability of grunt doesn't necessarily outlaw the ability to be precise, but it may not necessarily represent an ideal set of tradeoffs.
Perhaps a board with smaller stepper drivers may be better-suited. After all, if the motors are small and they've got gear reduction on their outputs, then: They don't need much grunt to make the bits move move in predictable ways.
The photos also showed that some/many/all of these motors have optical encoder wheels. Perhaps they're optional in a build with a custom brainbox (we do usually get along fine without that kind of feedback in printing), but their presence is certainly interesting.
And: There were nowhere near enough connector pins shown on what was described as the motherboard for all of this stuff to happen. That's concerning.
It all combined to strongly suggest to me at that time that the ICs that drive the motors might be located elsewhere in the machine, and that there may also be some servo feedback that happens in stock form.
---
That concludes my brain-dump on what I think I know about Cricut machines. Take it as you will. :)
And: The FluidNC Board Mapping Wizard is an amazing tool. I will save this for future use. Thanks!
Indeed, a retrofit would need something with hardware quadrature position tracking, and motor driver bridges. Servo control loops can get fussy, would likely take time to draft a custom PCB to handle the wiring harness, and some fiddling to prevent PID spin-up under dynamic load.
Avoiding pricey FPGA and mcu with special peripherals, a pico might be a good place to start for other reasons:
Replacing the entire Circut complexity might just reduce the overall materials cost. Might try a scalpel blade mounted to a spring-loaded spindle bearing on a 3D printer gantry over the weekend. A purely mechanical solution costing under $10 would be fun to bypass the entire ecosystem. =3
The modern equivalent is "Just" use Fable or Sol to reverse-engineer the protocol, then write new control software that works locally the way you want to work, using the file formats you want to use.
There is no longer any reason to put up with hardware like Cricut that doesn't do what you want, or that includes artificial dependencies on remote servers. If worst comes to worst, then yes, have the clanker write a new controller.
One of the YouTubers who benchmarks vibe-hackery tried getting GLM 5.3 to reprogram an older iPod Nano. [1] Something like "I just plugged in an iPod via USB. Turn it into a GPU status display." It got pretty far but couldn't close escrow.
Possibly. But i wanted a machine to play with, not to tinker with. At that point it’d be wayyy cheaper and easier to just convert an old CR-10 printer into a vinyl cutter
I think "reflect top to bottom" is intended to mean "swap top and button". A mirror reflects left, right, top and bottom perfectly.
It's front and back that it swaps.
Someone saying that a mirror swaps left and right is comparing it to a photograph, and only because we, as bipedal creatures, really prefer to orient images of other humans with heads up.
Someone saying that a mirror is swapped left and right is because they rotated themselves 180 degrees about the vertical axis to face the vertically aligned mirror. If they used a horizontal axis instead, they would have swapped top and bottom. And if the mirror is horizontally mounted on the floor, anything goes. You'd probably say it swaps up and down, which is front and back from the mirror's point of view.
You can host arbitrary files on it but Neocities isn't really intended as a file host along the lines of Dropbox. It's more for hosting general-purpose web sites.
I can answer this, since I have a new car with this camera and polarized sunglasses.
MOST of the time it's good about telling when I'm looking and when I'm not, out of maybe... 5 alerts over the previous 8 months all, but one occurred when I was in fact looking away for one reason or another. Likewise when it's correct my lane-keeping it's been right about me drifting.
Given how inattentive I see other drivers being, on their phones for example, and taking into account that I'm (based on my record) a good driver who is attentive... I appreciate these additions. I doubt that they make us less safe, we just dislike anyone or anything telling us how to drive, because "we already know what we're doing." The subjective experience of being distracted however isn't usually so clear-cut, it FEELS like you're paying attention.
Note: This is a new model Lexus, so I expect this represents that brand as well as Toyota, but beyond that I don't know.
There is no way that training people not to worry is making us all safer. I don't even like how new cars have this thing where they will automatically hold the brake once stopped even if you let go. There is no way it's a net good to train people that running cars just stay where you put them like an inert object does.
The result for me has been pretty predictable, I'm getting a kind of corrective feedback so I drive in a way that prevents that feedback. The practical result is that imo I'm a better driver, I'm more aware of my lapses in attention, my tendency to overcorrect to the right, and so on.
I'm yet to experience a downside, this isn't like using "Autopilot" or some other situation where a machine is taking over for me. I don't see why our skills or caution would be lessened by exposure to realtime feedback.
Cars have had that feature ("hill hold assist") for 20+ years now. Even longer for high-end models. There can't be all that many vehicles left on the road that don't have it.
Besides, you could make such an argument for any safety feature: "I don't like how new cars have ABS brakes. We shouldn't be training people that you can just slam on the brakes on a slippery surface and expect the wheels to not lock up..."
... "I don't like how new cars have seatbelts. We shouldn't train people that they can just crash into things and not have their face go through the windshield"...
If you had put any thought into either of those, you might have come up with some argument that actually applies. Neither of these equates or relates at all.
OK. But it's essentially the same concept. Just that auto hold will go a step further and apply the park brake to hold the car in position indefinitely rather than just for a few seconds.
There have been many deaths over the years where drivers forgot to engage the park brake, then stepped out and got run over by their own vehicle. Including, sadly, Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin. If his car had had Auto Hold then he would very likely still be alive today.
The only scenario where this could have a negative effect on safety is where you, the driver, were used to driving a car with the feature but got surprised by its absence when driving an old car. But as I facetiously illustrated in the post above, this is not a valid argument against new safety features. Any accidents that this scenario might cause are far outweighed by all the ones that will be prevented in the long run.
Nowadays cars engage the electronic parking brake (and P on the gear selector) when you open the door. Which has caused another crash, there's a video of a lady stuck at a rail crossing who was screaming she couldn't get the car going, she had opened the door and in the panic didn't notice the car did all that.
Anton Yelchin's death was more annoying, it was a design defect that pushing the gear lever all the way to the top didn't put it into P (like cars of the 80s, of even 50s), the gear lever acted more like a 4-way button, and drivers needed to push it twice (or 3x?) to go to park. Unfortunately his car was probably not new enough to have auto-park when driver door is open. His family got a settlement from the manufacturer..
You have not illustrated anything about the validity of any arguments. You have only expressed a feeling and said some things that sound like reason to you.
Which to be clear is all I did myself, but I did say it that way honestly. "there is no way that..." doesn't pretend to supply any proof, just the reasoning.
Neither of your attempted counter-examples actually amounts to the same sort of reasoning.
Except in a way you are also right and that rightness actually supports my point. I would equate you seatbelt nonsense with bicycle helmets, where it is quite up for grabs if they have been a net positive, because both the riders and the drivers are falsely trained to think the cyclists are safer and don't need to worry as much. There are not many real studies, and the few that exist, you can make them say whichever side your emotional belief wants.
But I wasn't quite going there. Operating a vehicle is operating a vehicle. Until such time as the driver, or rather mere user, bears absolutely no responsibility, like riding the bus or a train , or maybe an elevator, then "there is no way" yes a simple assertion, that it's good to train everyone that they are riding in elevators where they only need to maybe press one button to say what they want but beyond that it's out of their control and so out of their responsibility what happens after that, because we do not actually live in that world yet.
In my experience (Tesla), attention monitoring works well even when I'm wearing sunglasses. The camera can still see my eyes even through dark polarised lenses.
It may depend on the sunglasses, however - other people report problems with sunglasses that have mirrored lenses etc.
Sometimes I wonder if Tesla also has a much better software stack than most other manufacturers. IIRC, Tesla has had interior cameras in their cars for years now and I haven't heard about major issues stemming from it.
The camera was not actually used initially. With the old Autopilot software, attention monitoring was (and still is?) exclusively done with steering wheel torque sensors. Our camera got enabled when we purchased the FSD upgrade. I do agree the software is good, however: it's both more effective and much less naggy/annoying than the old "hands on wheel" method.
It still falls back on the torque sensor (requiring hands on wheel) if it thinks you're not paying enough attention, or if it can't see your eyes for whatever reason.
And I guess Tesla must have enabled the camera for all new vehicles now, at least in Europe, given that it's required.
Yes, exactly. Water occupies the least volume per unit mass (equally, per unit molecule) at 39F. As it cools further, it paradoxically begins expanding in volume (as the polar ends seeking out their opposites in other molecules introduce a loose order to the liquid randomness).
Then, suddenly, at 32F/0C, water's real miracle happens. All the loose molecules click into place with other molecules - well, nearly all, because ice cubes aren't monocrystalline, typically, but those spare unmatched ends of molecules at crystal interfaces are still trapped by their other ends, and any single molecule unable to "find" a match for either strongly attractive end will still be trapped as well into solid-matrix mechanics. At most, those solo unmatched molecules become slight diffaction points for phonons (sound-energy propagation), but they are in fact so rare and so slight that they are generally undetectable. (The crystal faces are made of millions of unmatched molecule ends, and have therefore much more effect.)
Other polar molecules can act similarly, but water is astoundingly smaller than most others - so its molecules "find" their matches more easily, as they don't need to "rotate" much mass to line up - and is much less flexible as a result (so the alignment on the two-molecule level forms a more rigid body than, say, a polar sugar, and the volumetric effect is more pronounced).
No.. they're not. Do you understand random (the apparent or actual lack of definite patterns or predictability[0]) or compression (reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy[1])?
I could write a program to generate the first 100MB of pi in a couple kilobytes. That certainly counts as “data compression” but isn’t useful outside this particular problem instance.
That's like a teenage "i am very smart" thinking. I mean sure we can look at some string of random bits and say "that looks random" but you can't just generate any old string of random bits to replace it (which would be the only 'pattern' that could be leveraged for compression here). If it's encrypted it'll also appear random, and therefore not be compressible, but you have to encode every byte exactly or the message won't be decryptable.
