Hi All,

Since the major outage at our hosting provider, all has not been well with the forums.

Primarily, the responsiveness of the forum pages is absolutely AWFUL as compared to before the outage. I have a support ticket in on this issue, but I imagine they still have other things to worry about.

Secondly, this morning I discovered that the admin side of the forums was not working at all, so I could not immediately approve a new user registration (Sorry alins, and welcome ). This appears to be resolved for the moment.

If I don't see any performance improvement over the next couple of days, I will fast track the process of moving to Linux-based hosting (we are currently on Windows hosting, for reasons that are mostly no longer relevant).

Please bear with us while I (and A2Hosting) work through these issues. We apologize for the sub-par forum experience at the moment, and hope to have this resolved soon.

Administrator

After seeing MrAcoustic's cool post on the MakerX Fair in Columbus, I figured I would look up the next Maker Faire for Pittsburgh, and post the information.

What I found was that the Pittsburgh Maker Faire went on hiatus in 2018, and that the producer (Children's Museum of Pittsburgh) is re-evaluating their role as producer for future faires.  Reference: https://pittsburgh.makerfaire.com/2018/0...g-in-2018/

Now, Maker Faire 2017 was in October, so assuming that is the normal time of the year for the Faire, there is plenty of time to announce a 2019 Faire, but it is not looking good in the Steel City.

An alternative site (http: //pghmakerfaire.com/) popped up in 2018, but is very vague, and does not list any dates for faires.  You can send them an E-mail for ticket reservations.  The lack of dates/locations, combined with some poor English on the site, makes me think that this is a phishing site to harvest E-mail addresses to SPAM.

Hi All,

We're not dead!!!

On the morning of April 23, our hosting provider (A2Hosting) had a major issue with some of their windows-based web servers. (For reasons that are less and less relevant all the time, I chose a windows hosting plan. This will likely change.)

Once they discovered that they had a problem, they took all their windows hosting offline, which included fabric8r.com.

This morning, April 25th, they were finally able to restore service to our site. We suffered roughly 52 hours of downtime due to this issue.

I believe that they had to restore this site from a backup, which they say should have been within 24 hours of the outage. I haven't spotted any missing posts or users, but please confirm that everything is as it should be. If something is missing, please re-post, or if a user was dropped, please re-register. It's extremely unlikely that your user is not present on purpose.

In due time, we will take steps to ensure we don't suffer a total communication blackout again. Hopefully, in the unlikely event something like this happens again, we will at least be able to show you a page saying why we're down.

If you have any comments or suggestions on this situation, please post them in the General Discussion section.

Thanks!
Administrator

Hi All,

I wanted to let everyone know about a maker fair in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, Saturday, April 6th.

It seems like it's going to be fairly large - bigger than my local one in Cincinnati.

Find the details at makerx.org

I'll be there - it's only 10am to 5pm, so I think it might be a stretch to see everything.

If you go, post about it. If you happen to know me, say hi if you see me

Stan

I just became the proud owner of a oneup and i'm looking for the old community port of marlin so I can add an LCD to it and have some code to play with.  Anyone have this saved somewhere?

Hi All!

I just got an email where someone told me not to tell anyone about it until March 26th.

But I did find what they told me to be very interesting .

I guess I can't say anything more, other than perhaps to note that I'm already making plans for them to take my money .

I think quite a few people checking in here will be very interested as well. But... I guess you'll have to wait until the 26th!

Check back - I'll let the cat out of the bag absolutely as soon as possible.

You heard it here first!

Stan

Hi All,

Just saw this, and had to log in and post about it. I'm a subscriber to the Veritasium youtube channel, and he just posted a video that reminded me how cool 3D printing can be.

I consider this a must see. Go forth and watch, you won't regret it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97t7Xj_iBv0

Oh, and you will probably want this link when you're done with the video

https://www.compliantmechanisms.byu.edu

Enjoy All!

EDIT: Removed the annoying youtube redirect from the link.

Hi All,

I splurged and bought a big 4k TV that I wanted to use as a monitor for my computer. I'm posting this to help others that might be in the same situation.

I bought a Vizio V505-G9, available at my local Costco, BestBuy, and I'm sure other places. I had to dig quite a bit, but I eventually convinced myself that it had full support for what I wanted to do.

In order to drive the TV from the computer, I needed a video card that supports 4k/60Hz at a reasonable price. I decided the option most likely to work was an Nvidia GeForce GT 1030. The important thing to know about this card is that there are two versions with the exact same name. Sometimes even the same price. But one works significantly better than the other. The distinguishing factor is the type of video ram used on the card. Some versions use DDR5, and others use DDR4 - though they are all called GT 1030. You have to look at the details. The DDR5 version scores much higher in many benchmarks, and people are questioning how the manufacturers can get away with the naming confusion. Check your specs, get DDR5.

I have a windows machine, but I elected to try to get it running on my linux (ubuntu MATE) box first. I installed the card, plugged in the cables, and had 4k immediately. However, the highest available frequency was 30Hz.

Then I begin a quest for 60Hz .

I figure it's one of three things: The video card drivers, the HDMI cable, or settings on the TV.

For linux newbies like myself out there, I went off on some tangents before finding something easy. (tl;dr: don't do this first thing ) I found a driver download on nvidia's site, which is a '.run' file. In order to try to run this, I had to chmod the file to allow it to be executable. Once I did that, I tried to execute it. A first error occured because I neglected to use 'sudo' to allow the file to run with administrator permissions. After fixing that, another error occurred, saying that I was still running an x-server. Great - I had very little idea what that meant, but I found some instructions on the internet. They were very confusing, not all applicable to my situation, and generally I thought they would break my machine beyond my ability to repair it.

I consulted a friend, and while I could have continued down that path, he mentioned a better way. In Ubuntu, there is a 'Software and Updates' utility (not to be confused with the ridiculously similar 'Software Updater', and slightly less similar 'Software Boutique'). This utility has a tab labeled 'Additional Drivers'. Opening the tab loaded up several driver options for my new video card, including a recent version of the (proprietary) nvidia drivers. I selected that driver, and it took care of the whole install process without a hitch.

Unfortunately, everything worked great. Except I was still stuck at 30Hz.

I had a nice, but older HDMI cable that I wasn't certain would handle the bandwidth required for 60Hz. Apparently there are cables rated at 10Gbps, or newer ones rated at 18Gbps. Some newer cables claim support for HDCP 2.2 (facilitating newer digital rights management schemes). Maybe I needed one of those.... but first I decided to check my TV settings for the twentieth time, to try to see if I'd missed something.

While I was looking at HDMI cable specs, I noticed that some cables claimed to support both 30 and 60 Hz 'at 16-bit color depth', and gave some numbers like 4:4:4, and 4:2:0. I haven't found out what those mean yet, but I did remember that the Input Settings on the TV had options for 'Full UHD Color' and 'Full Chroma 4:4:4'.

I thought, hmm, this looks vaguely similar... so, I changed the settings to turn on both of those things - and lo and behold, 50 and 60Hz options appeared in my display settings dialog.

I switched to the available 60Hz rate, and everything seems to be working!

I am very pleased with my new setup. Now I have to choose a window manager of some sort for linux to get things set up as 4 HD monitors on the same screen. And I have to see if I can get an HDMI switch and hook up my windows box as well.

I'll update here if anything interesting happens. Good luck to anyone out there trying to do something similar.

Stan

Edit: Oops, I totally forgot to mention that I was able to find the DDR5 version of the GT 1030 for $53 at my local Microcenter. They had several open box ones at a reduced price. They are usually in the neighborhood of $80.

I have had my ThreeUp for a couple of years now and done some upgrades to make it a pretty decent printer.  My big issue now is that I have lost my backup of the arduino code.  Does anyone know where I can download this for the ThreeUp with dual z-drive?

Thank you.

After nearly a year of delays and lack of communication, my Kudo3D Bean is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.

We'll see how it turns out.

Stan