If at First You Don’t Succeed…

… at least document what failed and give the failure analysis a good effort. And then later on, you can “try, try again” or let someone else carry on with the work; they’ll have a good basis to start from.

We were talking about a project to use 10 W blue lasers to post-smooth 3D prints when I came up with this not-very-catchy catchphrase. The project itself is very much “in progress”, which is a nice way of saying that it hasn’t yet fully met its goals. But nonetheless I was entirely happy to watch not one, but two, videos where [I changed a thing] discussed the intricacies of laser-smoothing 3D prints, precisely because it sounds easy but absolutely isn’t, and because the problems were laid out so well.

I definitely take for granted how easy the slice-it-into-layers nature of FDM 3D printers makes path planning. After all, you can print interlocking knots, hinges, and even entire sections of chain mail as long as you only have to go one layer at a time. When you print this way, you never have to worry about the print head crashing into something that you’ve printed before, or being unable to reach into a small valley. To smooth two or more layers of a 3D print into each other, you are suddenly out of the comfy flatland. You have to worry about collisions, obstructions, and all the rest of actual 3D.

But those issues and more were carefully documented as [I changed a thing] went through his attempts at writing the software to drive the laser-augmented machine, and honestly that attention to the problems that were confounding him was worth a dozen “success” videos. In that sense, it worked on me a little like nerd sniping.

Those were my takeaways from the video series, then. One, it’s hard to do laser smoothing uniformly. But two, documenting the difficulties, considerations, and failures for your future self, or for others, is not just good practice, but can also encourage other people to help you with your project, or to take it on themselves. The more thought you put into how and why your project failed, the more bait you’re laying out for the next nerd. And that’s at least one part of what makes the open-source ethos work.