Open-source News

Rocket.Chat vs. Slack: Choosing the Perfect Team Collaboration App  It's FOSS

Yesterday I posted benchmarks of six Linux distributions on the HP Dev One, the exciting new Linux laptop launched by HP in collaboration with System76 that is using their Pop!_OS distribution. From those benchmarks one of the bizarre findings was that the Zstd compression performance on Arch Linux simply sucked, but some interested developers dove in and found the rather bizarre culprit why their Zstd performance is so poor in relation to other Linux distributions on the same version...

Closed Source vs. Open Source Hardware Drivers: Why It Matters  MUO - MakeUseOf

Notkia: Building An Open And Linux-Powered Numpad Phone  Hackaday

Mold 1.3 has been released today as the newest version of this high-speed linker that serves as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM's LLD...

AOM AV1 v3.4 Encoder Brings Better Performance  Phoronix

Google engineers on Friday released AOM AV1 v3.4 as the newest version of this open-source AV1 CPU-based video encoder...

For fans of the desktop-minded, easy-to-use Manjaro Linux distribution that is built atop Arch, the Manjaro 21.3 "Ruah" release was christened this weekend...

Development of a robust real-time synchronized data transmission technique from a Magnetic Observatory to an INTERMAGNET GIN | Scientific Reports  Nature.com

Linux Operating System Market Research & Clinical Advancements by 2030 | IBM, Ubuntu Linux, Linux Mint – Indian Defence News  Indian Defence News

The XP-PEN Deco L is a recently launched graphics drawing tablet with its Linux support backed by a user-space binary blob package. But thanks to some USB reverse engineering from a community developer and discovering the hardware's "magic data" needed for initialization, this drawing tablet will be supported by a proper kernel driver in the next Linux kernel cycle...

While this week marked the release of KDE Plasma 5.25, already there is a big shiny feature queued up for Plasma 5.26 to benefit those running the KDE Plasma Wayland session and relying on XWayland for X11 app compatibility...

KDE Plasma 5.26 To Allow Crisper XWayland Apps With New Scaling Option  Phoronix

The Bizarre Case Of Zstd's Very Slow Performance On Arch Linux  Phoronix

How Wordle inspired me to create a 3D printing wiki the open source way Adam Bute Sat, 06/18/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

You decide to buy a 3D printer. You do your research, and you settle on an open system that uses resin as its material. You spend a nice chunk of money, and after a few weeks of waiting, it finally arrives.

You unbox it. It's gorgeous. You do some small assembly, pour in the liquid resin, and you're ready to go. You fire up the software. It asks you to type in the correct parameters for the material. You check the bottle but you can't see any parameters. You check online, but still can't find anything.

A bit confused, you write an email to the manufacturer, asking if they could point you in the right direction. The manufacturer tells you they also don't know the parameters, but they are pretty sure they exist, and you should try to guess them yourself. Baffled, you start wondering whether this is really what resin printing is like, or if you've been duped by this company.

A bad game of Wordle

Unfortunately, this is really what resin printing is like. When you buy a new material, you have to do what's called resin validation. It's essentially making a guess for the parameters and adjusting the numbers based on your results. That's if your guess was decent and anything even comes out of the printer.

It's a lot like playing a game of Wordle, except none of the blocks ever turn green. All you can do is eyeball whether the print looks slightly better or worse with each iteration, and then try again. Finally, at one point you say “looks good to me,” and that's that.

Image by:

( Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

If that sounds like a deeply unsatisfying game to you, you'd be correct. It's also way too long, often taking days, and wasting a good amount of resin in the process. Resin is expensive. At least Wordle is free.

A little help from above?

So why don't these manufacturers, who know their material best, share the print parameters? Well, their arguments are somewhat reasonable. There are millions of possible combinations of printers and resins, and they can't possibly cover all of them. And even between two printers which are the same model, there can be tiny variations, which affect the numbers slightly.

But ‘slightly' is an important word. If users got a good baseline, they could easily adjust the settings if they needed to. At least it would be much quicker than starting from scratch. To be fair, some companies do give recommended settings, but it's hard to trust even these numbers. There are many crafty manufacturers who publish fake, untested settings, just to lure customers in.

The truth is that resin validation is expensive. Resin companies are almost invariably small businesses, strapped for cash, who just can't afford to spend on resin validation. So, they outsource this work to the end user. But this creates a kind of absurd situation in the resin printing world. Instead of one man at one company doing the validation work once, hundreds of people do the same work over and over again just to come to the same conclusion.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Makers to the rescue

So what does the maker community do? They try to fix the problem themselves. Reddit and Facebook groups are full of people happily sharing screenshots of a new setting they figured out. Nice gesture, but not very useful. Some ingenious community members created live resin setting spreadsheets that are updated based on user submissions. These are fantastic resources, and universally loved, but they too have their limitations.

They are messy, rarely updated, and there's no way to tell whether the settings actually work. And because anonymous users host them, they are sometimes turned into spam, or randomly deleted. Most recently the biggest community spreadsheet was unexpectedly deleted, erasing years' worth of crowdsourced data with it.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

Making a resin setting database

I'm a bit of an egghead myself and I really enjoy organizing things. I had the idea to collect all these settings from manufacturers and communities, and put it on a nice website. I registered the domain makertrainer.com and used two awesome open source tools to build the site: MediaWiki and DataTables.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

I made it a wiki so that anyone could contribute, but made certain spam or vandalism could be easily undone. I also added some buttons to allow users to vote on whether a setting worked or not. I posted it in some communities to see if people would find it useful, and the response has been overwhelming. I didn't realize this at the time, but I accidentally created the biggest resin setting database on the internet. Users kept spreading it on social media, blog posts, YouTube and so on. With so many people submitting new settings, the database grows larger daily.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

The fact that people are so enthusiastic shows just how much of a void there is for documentation in 3D printing. There's a lot of practical experience scattered amongst makers, most of which is never written down or shared publicly. Everyone needs to do a better job recording practical knowledge in addition to theory. Otherwise, the next generation of makers will commit the same mistakes again. The database is a small contribution in this regard, but I hope it can continue to grow, and make 3D printing just a little easier for everyone.

3D printing is a lot like a game of Wordle. I aim to solve the puzzle by creating crowdsourced documentation and databases.

Image by:

Opensource.com

3D printing What to read next Open source tools to make your Wordle results accessible Solve Wordle using the Linux command line This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

How to Fix “A JNI Error Has Occurred” in Minecraft on All Versions  Beebom

Wine 7.11 is out as the newest version of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Popular Linux Distro Ubuntu spotted running on a Google Nest Hub  Chrome Unboxed

NVIDIA today published the 515.49.05 beta driver as their first Vulkan beta driver update for Linux in one month and also their first re-base against the R515 series. As part of that re-base to the new series, this is the first Vulkan beta driver now supporting NVIDIA's new open-source GPU kernel driver...

This post originally appeared on the LF Energy’s blog. LF Energy is a project at the Linux Foundation that provides a neutral, collaborative community to build the shared digital investments that will transform the world’s relationship to energy.

The energy sector is amid a huge transformation that will impact the entire world and grid operators need new innovations to match those needs.

That’s why we’re especially excited to see the recognition awarded Antonello Monti, Director of the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems at RWTH Aachen University and group Leader at Center for Digital Energy, Fraunhofer FIT, for his leadership with SOGNO, the “Service-based Open-source Grid automation platform for Network Operation” of the future.

Monti received the second most prestigious award given by the German government, the innovation prize of North Rhine-Westphalia. Awarded annually, this prize recognizes outstanding achievements and excellent research.

We are so proud of the work Monti, who also serves at the Technical Advisory Committee Chair for LF Energy, and Markus Mirz have undertaken. We also want to extend our congratulations to the many individuals, companies, and the European Commission who funded the original work for SOGNO (meaning “dream” in Italian).

SOGNO is an LF Energy project that is creating plug-and-play, cloud-native, micro-services to implement our next generation of data-driven monitoring and control systems. It will simplify the life of distribution utilities by enabling them to optimize their network operations through open source to deliver cost-effectively, and seamless, secure power to customers.

A breakthrough innovation is that SOGNO introduces the idea of grid automation as a modular system in which components can be added through time. This is in opposition to classical monolithic solutions, which weren’t constructed with today’s energy landscape in mind.

Today, as more renewables come onto the grid, the flow of energy moves from just one way, which was true in the past, to both ways on and off the grid.In the future, power system networks will be composed of assets whose profiles may shift between loads, resources, and the ability to provide flexibility back to the grid.

Reinforcing the current system is not sufficient to deal with the increasing complexity of distribution systems. Rather, we are at the cusp of needing deployment of advanced distribution management systems that can be implemented as centralized but even better as distributed architecture.

We reiterate our deep gratitude and support for this project, and the people and entities who’re making it happen.

Read here for more information

The post The SOGNO Project Wins Prestigious Award for Focus on Modular Grid Automation appeared first on Linux Foundation.