10 Million Hours That Demonstrate Maker's Heroic Fights Against COVID-19

April 27, 2020

In just a couple of days, the number of hours that The Detective has watched will cross the 10-Million mark.

This incredible milestone, first and foremost, is a clear demonstration of the heroic actions taken by the makers around the world to fight against COVID-19. In the past two months, TSD users have been printing Personal Protection Equipments (PPEs) days and nights. The daily print hours on TSD has more than doubled.

This milestone is also the direct result of TSD's contribution to this collective fight against COVID-19. Yes it costs us significant amount to serve those hours, but as a member of the 3D printing community, we want to help out since we are lucky enough to be doing just fine during the time of this pandemic.

To celebrate this incredible milestone, as well as to give our users some dopamine while we are all stuck home, we will give away some goodies and prizes.

The Spaghetti Detective on Jetson Nano - A complete installation guide

April 19, 2020

MidnightLink

Reddit user MidnightLink took the time to write and post an awesome guide on Reddit. Re-posting it here with his permission. Thank you MidnightLink!

Hey all! The other day I decided I wanted to run a dedicated TSD server at my home as I have 4 printers that I want to monitor, and no real want to send out a bunch of info to an unknown server. Looking into the options, and not wanting to have my PC on 24/7, I picked up a Jetson Nano and started working on getting it ready.

The instructions on the official GitHub for doing this are very lacking, and a lot of the commands don't work properly. (docker-compose for example is a MASSIVE pain as it's not native to ARM64, and there are a decent amount of missing dependencies) so here is the complete guide on how to set up your own Spaghetti Detective server on a Jetson Nano!

3D printed cotton face mask? Read on...

April 1, 2020

Steve Wynveen

This is a guest post by Steve Wynveen. Steve Wynveen is a mechanical engineer that is a technician at heart.

Background

As you are probably well aware, there is a shortage of PPE for hospital and other medical field staff. Froedert & Medical College of Wisconsin have posted plans for people to sew 100% cotton face masks. Several other patterns for sewists exist as well.

The Froedert ask for public help:

https://www.froedtert.com/stories/new-unused-personal-protective-equipment-other-supplies-gratefully-accepted

The Froedert mask plan:

https://www.froedtert.com/sites/default/files/files/2020-03/MaskInstructions_V2.pdf

3D Printing makers acting to help the world fight against COVID-19

March 25, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

3D printing hobbyists in The Spaghetti Detective community banded together to print PPEs for healthcare workers in their local community to help them fight COVID-19.

3D printing and virus are two things that usually don't intersect. But now when the world is upended by the coronavirus crisis, they do - in a way that not many people would expect.

The Spaghetti Detective is a 3D printing platform with tens of thousands of active 3D printing hobbyists.

When the coronavirus is attacking, they act together to save the world.

How? By designing and 3D printing thousands and thousands of face shields and masks and donate them to hospitals and healthcare workers who are in separate need of protective equipments; or by 3D printing things like door opener for touchless operation; or by simply showing gratitude to people who are fighting on the front lines.

Update on 04/05/2020: Since the start of the pandemic, TSD users have more than doubled the hours they print every day. This graph tells it all:

If you have a 3D printer, put it to good use by joining tens of thousands of us in the fight against coronavirus. If everyone one of us prints 10 face shields or masks a day, we will have an unmatched capacity of producing millions of protective gears in a very short amount of time.

Join us in this banded effort!

Unlimited Detective Hours will be available only to Shop subscribers

March 2, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

Effective March 10th, 2020, the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack will no longer be available to Pro subscribers. It'll be replaced by a 2000 Detective Hours / month Pack at the same price.

The Pro subscribers who have subscribed to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack on or before that day will not be impacted. You will still get to enjoy unlimited Detective Hours no matter how many hours you print each month. This is our way to say "Thank You" to anyone who supported us in our early days!

Shop subscribers can still subscribe to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack. Please contact us if you are interested.

5 million hours and counting

February 19, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

February 19th, 2020 is a special day for The Spaghetti Detective. It is the day when The Detective watched her 5,000,000th print hour.

I clearly remember when I put The Spaghetti Detective beta online about the same time last year. I opened the server log to wait (patiently) for the 1st user to sign up. It took hours (thank god it was not days).

I clearly remember the dopamine run when I saw in the server log The Detective was called upon duty to check the very first webcam image for failure.

And I clearly remember when we reached 1000 print hours. It was a little more than 1 months after the beta launch. I went home and opened a bottle of champagne. But with or without the alcohol, my brain didn't have the capacity to just imagine what 5,000,000 print hours would look like.

And now, a little less than 1 year after the beta launch, 5,000,000th print hour is here. That doesn't even include the print hours watched on the private servers. This is a clear indication for the level of enthusiasm our fellow 3D printing hobbyists have toward The Spaghetti Detective.

Thank you everyone for being part of this amazing ride, for helping each other in the discord forum, for reporting bugs and helping us fix it, for bearing with the imperfection of our AI model, and for writing to us to simply cheer on the team.

The Detective wouldn't be where she is today without you, our lovely users!

Cheers,

Kenneth Jiang, Founder @ TSD

The Spaghettilapse Contest

January 25, 2020

Mitch Bardijn

TSD's first The Spaghettilapse Contest is here. Everyone can participate. Winners will get free Pro accounts + DH packs, and get mentioned in our next newsletter (and backlink to your own home page if you'd like)!

What is The Spaghettilapse Contest?

It is as simple as 1-2-3:

You upload Time-lapse videos to The Spaghettilapse Contest Facebook Group.
You get as many likes as you can, optionally by sharing your posts with friends or other Facebook groups.
The 3 time-lapses that get most likes will win. Winners get free TSD Pro account + free DHs.

The Story of ProtoPrintr

January 24, 2020

Trevor Johnson

In 2012, during the beginning of my senior year in college, I was also working in an Engineering group for the U.S. Air Force. In our Engineering group, the need for a rapid prototyping capability was high, but at the time, there were no affordable solutions that fit the requirements of our group. I spoke with my engineering director, and presented the idea of designing an FDM 3D printer for my engineering senior project, to fit our needs for the office, with our office funding much of the project. My director approved of the idea, so I proposed this project to my college, which was also approved. That was the beginning of how “ProtoPrintr” was born.

Remote G-Code upload and printing - a tutorial

January 8, 2020

Mitch Bardijn

Remote G-Code upload and printing is available now. It was a little later than we promised. But we launched other features such as print job notifications (email, Telegram, and PushBullet) a lot earlier than scheduled. Guess we can give ourself a B+ on our score card? 😉

This is a short and easy-to-consume tutorial on how you can use this feature. Please give us feedback by commenting at the bottom.

We Screwed Up And Got The Pricing Wrong

December 8, 2019

Kenneth Jiang

We screwed up. Quite badly. We did the math wrong when we tried to calculate the cost of hosting TSD servers, and we underestimated the cost to serve webcam streaming by 50%.

The price we set for Pro plan was way too low to even cover the cost of servers and network bandwidth. Throwing in other miscellaneous items such as the cost to send emails and text, we were unfortunately not on a healthy path to keeping the lights on for everyone who loves TSD but doesn't want the hassle to run a private server.

Therefore, as much as we want to make TSD affordable for everyone, we had to make a tough decision to raise our price for Pro plan. The good news is that significantly more users than we expected subscribed to the Pro and Shop plans. As the result, we only need to raise the prices by about 25% to fill the gap.

The new pricing will take effect on December 16th, 2019.

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