This has been in the works for years, but I might finally be happy with how this is turning out. Everything just snaps together perfectly, joins up seamlessly, and I'm finally confident I can reproduce these results indefinitely.

There's still some minor tweaks to make, some extra brackets and supports and thing, but I'm confident in saying the basic system is 100% complete.

#Thrixels v2 is a go.

#3DPrinting @[email protected] @3dprinting

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

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

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 @[email protected] @3dprinting

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

#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 @[email protected]

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