I think I’m going to lean into the FF E-mount world, which means giving up my D5300 + Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR (115 - 450 FF equivalent). Before kids, I used this lens for motorsports/landscape/travel. Post kids we don’t do a ton of that, so I’ve been getting along well with a pair of 35mm and 50mm primes....
Thanks for the reply! I weighed my 70-300 and it’s around 830 grams, making the Tamron 150-500 about a kilo heavier. I hope to be handholding and am reasonably young/fit, but I also know the weight could get annoying. A tripod at a T-ball game seems a little weird, which is pushing me toward more compact options. Maybe I should rent the Tamron for a weekend.
I’ve hand held and walked around with the 70-300 at a number of 8+ hour race weekends.
It seems like anything beyond 400mm is going to be in this weight class, so the question comes down to whether the extra 100mm (or 200mm for say the 200-600) is really necessary.
Thanks for the reply. Yup, I’m aware of the crop factor - that’s why I tried to pivot to FF EQ in my post. I started E-mount with an A7III and generally like the camera. But man, was it’s mechanical shutter loud in the museums and what not we usually go to with the kids. Its electronic shutter is also super slow. Used A9s are pretty cheap for what they are, so it was a no brainer to switch. A9 AF tracking and the blackout free shutter are also nice perks. If only Sony’s FF mechanical shutters were as quiet as Nikon’s on the z-mount…
Based on EXIF data I’m pretty confident I’ll be fine with a FF EQ focal length of 400mm, I just wonder how future proof it will be. Do you use your a6400 w/ 200-600 FF equivalent for sports?
You’re totally good. It never hurts to over communicate. If anything I was somewhat worried that I might have under communicated, lol.
When you used it for sports, what did you think? Did you find yourself wanting to use the entire zoom range, or did you not need to go all the way? I’m certainly not a pro, just a parent who enjoys taking photos.
When you said 400mm, did you mean FF EQ or after the APS-C crop? Haha
You talked about future proofing, I don’t know if this is relevant but I can say the larger stadium makes a significant difference, but also because they don’t let me hang out with the actual press on the field.
Yup, this looks like it will eventually be my hurdle if my kids stick with it long enough. I’m not sure that a ton of extra reach will really save me here.
At this point, I’m leaning toward a lens that tops out at 400mm, but I might ask the local camera store if I can get a feel for tamron’s 150-500. If it’s not that much more heavy in hand then I might give it a go. Sony’s 200-600 looks great, and isn’t that much bigger than the 150-500 when it’s fully extended, but I think it’s still going to not really be appropriate at a T-ball game.
As I’m graduating college in a few weeks, I’ll be losing access to my university’s free printers and filament. I’m going to build up a home lab with a couple printers where I can make goofy little mechanical projects as well as some components for my cars and stuff....
I’ve printed a decent amount of PETG from both Push Plastic and Atomic Filament. Both have been very solid/reliable, but I would probably give an edge to Atomic as far as quality. Their PETG has never let me down. On the ASA front, I’ve run around 9 kg of Polymaker ASA through my Voron with another 1.5 of blue and white sitting on two different 3kg spools. I ran 2 kg of their ASA through my i3 clone printing prints for my Voron. I haven’t had any problems with it, and it does occasionally go on sale for very attractive prices. I bought my last two spools on November 24th last year for $50.39 (for a 3 kg spool of blue) and $67.19 (for a 3 kg spool of white). Polymaker’s ASA does require what seems like a very low extrusion multiplier (I’m currently at 0.893), but you can print the stuff blazing fast in terms of mm^3/s.
Now that I know that both Atomic Filament and Push Plastic offer ASA, I might give them a spin when I need a refill. I don’t go through that much filament and don’t mind spending a little extra $$ for something that could result in less headache. I also like supporting American companies/manufacturers where I can.
Plastic beds? Steel beds? If steel, where did you get them? I made very cheap DIY beds using that wavy PVC roofing, but weed whacking the grass around them has put a few holes in them…
I’m going to be doing as you did around my beds this season and then put some mulch down to avoid this issue in the future.
Thanks! Nice work. PCV roofing is super floppy, but they’re holding up fairly well. This will be our fourth season.
Rock has the perk of not slowly decomposing, but if you ever change your mind it’s a massive PITA to get rid of. We have a few beds of crushed marble that I would prefer to convert to mulch, but we would have to pay someone to take the marble. We don’t have a great place to just stash it.
I ran some PVC through them at 1/3 and 2/3 to prevent them from blowing too much, put a slice of Trex on the outside at the PVC ends, and pinned them with a much smaller diameter section of PVC.
All in, each 4x8 bed was probably around $45 to build. I’ll probably replace them at some point with something nicer, like your metal beds. Some of the beds are bowing out some and I have a few of those weed whacker chips to deal with.
In progress pic below. The rebar is for tomato support on one side (Florida weave) and bean/pea on the other.
It’s the raw steel rebar you can buy at big box stores, just with a quick layer of paint. Epoxy coated sounds like a much better idea, but I have no idea where I would find that. They’re holding up really well, with just some spotty surface rust where I didn’t get great paint coverage initially. Rebar is very flexible at these lengths, so I tied the tops together and also tied the two rows together to prevent everything from flipping around so much.
And yeah, I often get overly ambitious with the quantity of things I grow, but going up helps in that regard. In addition to this bed, we have a large (8 foot tall, five foot wide) arch between two other beds that cukes, mellons, etc climb.
We had some volunteer pumpkins grow out of our compost pile and up the deer fence last year, so I’m going to intentionally use the fence for more growing area this season.
Hi guys, made the jump to lemmy today and wanted to share a few pictures of my cats I’ve taken. I bought the camera a couple years ago for macro photography, primarily surveying moth populations, and busted it back out recently....
Note that a lot of servers cap file size and don’t have a great way of telling you that your upload was blocked/denied due to file size. This is especially annoying while mobile since there aren’t great easy workflows for realizing and/or saving with lower quality.
Made a FreeCAD tutorial for making this container: https://makertube.net/w/mg7rdKStSUua7AhnAt1RoM I have to warn you that I made a bunch of mistakes and it may be really hard to follow.
Mistakes are how we learn. What learnings have you made? What process did you take to get there? That would be worth writing down for others.
We tend to focus too much on “this is how I succeeded in <thing>” and don’t talk about all the false starts along the way that taught the skills to succeed.
Do you think this is something I could combat with higher chamber temps? I’ve been putting off swapping my acrylic panels for ACM and installing radiant insulation, but if it will help…
Using my hot end thermometer as a chamber thermocouple (hot end fan on high), 75mm above the bed and in the centerish it looks like I’m hitting around 50 °C after 45 minutes or so. I doubt it’s getting much hotter in there.
My bed is already fairly low at 100 °C, but I could try 95 °C after the first layer as you said. I can also lower my extruder temp some, but ambient is still going to be way cooler than the plastic coming out of the hot end.
Thanks for the reply. I have a z end stop and use z_calibrate to automatically set offset. I may have printed a small part on my my bed magnet once…
My issue was not adhesion with the metal build plate, it was the print warping and taking the build plate with it (look at pic again, the build plate is lifted about 1" on both ends).
I could try taping the build plate down, but that would probably just move the failure point elsewhere…
The printer is enclosed, but it’s 350mm cubed and the enclosure consists solely of acrylic panels. I have an under bed filter and two additional bed fans. This gets my chamber to 53 °C after an hour of preheating. I am strongly considering swapping to ACM panels and adding a layer of internal radiant insulation. I have the materials, just haven’t spent the time to do it yet.
How hot does your Qidi chamber get?
I imagine there is a ceiling as to how large an ASA part you can print, but I hope this isn’t it.
In my experience, the grass will inevitably start growing up from the bottom. This will be our fourth year with 12" raised beds and I’m having to dig up grass roots around some of the edges of three of them.
Any suggestions before trying again after a reset? This is my first go round changing nozzle diameter. I went from a 0.4 mm nozzle to a 0.6 mm nozzle....
Polymaker ASA is what I’m currently using. You can grab 3 KG spools on Amazon for as low as $50-60 depending on the color (new via prime) if you keep an eye out.
The mix of ASA and a higher flow printer as resulted in a lot more fickle prints though, but this is also true for PETG. Things like EM vary some as a function of speed, so I’ve found that I need to print all my features at a similar speed.
This is a hardened steel nozzle. 260 looked a little rough, but 255 looks pretty good. The temp tower got knocked off the bed at 235. It does look like I’ll need to bump cooling a touch. Currently working on a retraction tower.
If stringing is a problem consider increasing the speed of your filament retraction (not distance)
I’ll have to give this a go after this retraction tower prints. On the last one I printed there was basically no difference on any of the settings once it got above 0.2mm of retraction. In my time with the rapido, any filament left in the nozzle will ooze out if its left hot but it doesn’t string that badly.
You may also want to turn off z-hop. Sounds wild I know, but it does help- by not lifting the nozzle during a rapid move, it “wipes” the nozzle clean as it moves off the part and reduces stringing. Realistically you shouldn’t use z-hop at all unless you have a part with a very small cross section that keeps falling over when the nozzle wipes across it.
Yup, I’ve run into this realization too - that’s part of the reason why I was thinking to have z-hop on for this print
Which ofc, the big print I see in the photo looks like it will have zero stability problems, lol.
Adding two more bed fans, for a total of 4 (2 loose bed fans, 2 fans in my filter) and getting a bang on first layer (yay klipper_z_calibration) seem to have really helped with warping. I do have some ACM panels that I want to swap on to bump chamber temps up more, but I haven’t taken the time to print new magnetic inserts for them yet.
What kinds of problems have you had? It’s been OK for me. Sure, it’s harder to print than PETG but it’s also ASA. I do find myself wondering if it’s the material or my setup at times though. So far I’ve run about 7 kg of the stuff. You can find a bunch of it in my post history.
I think I found what was happening. Z hop was off and as the nozzle traveled at warp speeds over the print it was touching the prior layer ever so slightly. I think it snagged the infill in this print. Trying again with a hotter extruder and z-hop on.
It’s printing in an acrylic enclosed Voron 2.4. Zero warping.
Thanks for the reply. I haven’t had clogging issues with it, but I have had some whispy stringing until I lowered my temp a touch. My preferred filament house (Atomic Filament) looks like they’re offering ASA so maybe I’ll give them a shot. My biggest issue is warping and I can’t imagine that other brands are going to be that different. I finally got great bed plate adhesion but my last print pulled the magnetic surface up.
Recommended focal length for outdoor youth sports?
I think I’m going to lean into the FF E-mount world, which means giving up my D5300 + Nikon AF-S 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR (115 - 450 FF equivalent). Before kids, I used this lens for motorsports/landscape/travel. Post kids we don’t do a ton of that, so I’ve been getting along well with a pair of 35mm and 50mm primes....
What's your go-to "Bang for your Buck" filament brand?
As I’m graduating college in a few weeks, I’ll be losing access to my university’s free printers and filament. I’m going to build up a home lab with a couple printers where I can make goofy little mechanical projects as well as some components for my cars and stuff....
Progress growmies! (lemmy.world)
Additional info in comments.
Photoshoot with my pals (lemmy.world)
Hi guys, made the jump to lemmy today and wanted to share a few pictures of my cats I’ve taken. I bought the camera a couple years ago for macro photography, primarily surveying moth populations, and busted it back out recently....
Heart Shaped Container FreeCAD Tutorial (pawb.social)
Made a FreeCAD tutorial for making this container: https://makertube.net/w/mg7rdKStSUua7AhnAt1RoM I have to warn you that I made a bunch of mistakes and it may be really hard to follow.
I've got a mix of good, bad, good, bad, and good again news/progress (lemmy.world)
This is a follow up from my spaghetti post a few days ago....
In progress pic of my new metal raised beds! They are 4' long 2' wide and a foot deep, got 6 of them! (lemmy.world)
Chonky nozzel + decent amount of material = opportunity for lots of spaghetti (lemmy.world)
Any suggestions before trying again after a reset? This is my first go round changing nozzle diameter. I went from a 0.4 mm nozzle to a 0.6 mm nozzle....