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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Very good stuff. I didn't buy mine on Amazon for that exact reason (I don't like Amazon and I like dealing with the manufacturers directly) so our reasoning is opposite :) I don't trust Amazon reviews and I would not like dealing with Amazon in case of an issue with the machine. Manufacturers tend to have a support track for stuff they sell directly and they don't bother much with customers that bought through Amazon.

As for the enclosure, I'm going to do a whole separate section on enclosures this is more or less a placeholder, I'm still waiting on a sheet of 2C04 Acrylic to use as the window (the transparent piece in there right now is temporary). Good point about the glasses, the ones that come with the cutters usually royally suck.

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While you're making recent comments, as a tangential aside, old mice with scroll wheels make semi decent X-Y position recorders for moving surfaces that the mouse guts+scroll wheel can be sprung against so the wheel rolls as the object moves.

You will have to hack some old mouse driver code to interface and determine which USB mouse input(s) are of interest.

It's a kludge that saved me time over a long three day weekend with no shops open years back when I was putting together a laser scanner project.

Eventually we had a proper stepper moter, for proof of concept it was an "uncontrolled" motor with a mouse scroll wheel counting clicks for rough "good enough" position feedback.

That's a hilarious hack, I have a whole crate full of old mice so definitely will have to try this. Worst case it will allow you to automatically e-stop the machine if it encounters an obstruction. For instance: sometimes the air assist will flip a piece up and the laser head during high speed traversal will run into it. That requires immediate manual intervention right now, it would be nice if that happened automatically.

:-)

It was an Aha! moment for me when I looked a crate with old mice - they have rolling wheels and click buttons with plenty of sample drivers for counting wheel turns, <onclick> <clickrelease> events, etc.

Ain't pretty - but it works until a better version comes along.

>I didn't buy mine on Amazon for that exact reason (I don't like Amazon and I like dealing with the manufacturers directly) so our reasoning is opposite

...For everything?

>Unless you know a dealer of the following products that you personally trust, buy on Amazon and sort by "Avg Customer Review"

The 'following products" were inline fans and goggles and enclosures. And I stand by that.

In terms of primary hardware I agree if you have a reliable manufacturer. I avoided saying "Buy a Falcon2 (22w minimum) from Creality because almost everything else is overpriced or shit" because I didn't want to ruffle feathers even though it's true.

Also I understand if you don't link or mention any of the (potentially critically important to your readers) information I provided you in your article because you ignored it all past the second line to virtue signal about Amazon, cheers comrade!

Sorry?

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