I must be one of the few people who passed by 2D printing almost completely and went for 3D printing.
I fixed that this week by finally getting a 2D printer to complement the hobby.
I must say, as someone who hasn't used or owned an inkjet printer in many, many years, the technology for the price you pay is quite impressive these days.
It's nice to be able to print some physical images I can hold in my hand for visual references to possible paint schemas etc. I want to try. Is still can't believe a Brother inktank printer like this only cost me R2500 and that the inktank tech on these things can give you 5000-7000 pages before you need a refill (which is also cheap, wow, how things have changed!)
That said, the problem I have is that I can sometimes go weeks without printing so the print heads dry out, many inkjet printers in my possession have died this way... so I almost dropped a wad of cash on a color laser printer. But then I realized, with printing costs this low and ink yields this high, all I needed to do is create something that can monitor when last the printer printed something, and if it's >=7 days then it should print a small color test image automatically.
So I got ChatGPT to work, and in no time this morning I have a python script that hooks into Home Assistant.
A custom HA event captures the datetime each time the printer status changes to "printing". Then each day at 10AM it checks of the last print event was >= 7 days, if so, the script will fire to do a POST request to my printer's login page, get a new auth token, then use the token and do another POST to the page where the color print test is.... I was pretty amazed when it worked. Would have taken me weeks to get the nitty gritty for this working on my own.
P.S.
The skull-paint experiment came out looking pretty badass.
Turns out I had an old heavy brass candle holder around with "wire-flap" springs that functioned like they were made for this thing. Definitely going to put this thing outside with some candles when Halloween comes around... I'm actually annoyed now, should have taken the time to use some putty etc. to smooth out the cut-lines. I now somehow need to replicate this effect but using grey instead of the yellow/earth tones the coffee gave me for an Allosaurus PETG experimental skeleton print I'm busy with.
These are the two color "tones" or paint schemes I want to replicate for my fossil collection.
Other than the "coffee experiment" I have no idea where to start with the grey, but meh.
(Apart from buying actual pigment powder, I'm wondering how well grinding up some pencil lead/graphite and adding it to white paint might work
)
