### How much filament is on the roll of plastic?

So my slicer software of choice (Simplify3D) gives me some estimates on filament length for a printed part. That's handy enough but my filament is wrapped around a spool and it's a little bit unclear exactly how long that length of filament that is left is before it runs out.

Weight the spool. (Scale gives me oz but if you have a grams scale that's a good thing.
Full spool is about 43 oz or so. (Multiply by 28.3493 to get grams if you need)
Subtract the weight of an empty spool. I got around 7.7 oz for this.

Result: I have 997 grams of plastic on a full spool. Good they sell in 1kg rolls.

So... how long is that left. Convert grams to volume. You get this from the type of plastic you're using.

 ABS PLA $.96 cm^3/g$ $.8 cm^3/g$

If you multiply that and the grams, you can get the volume in $cm^3$ for your roll.

Result: Full roll of PLA is about $800 cm^3$ and ABS around $600 cm^3$.

Lastly, how long is it? You just need to divide by the cross section area of the filament diameter.

So for 1.75mm filament (Lets convert that to cm to keep units the same). $.175/2^2 * PI = cm^2$

Result: $800 / ((.175/2)^2 * PI) = ~34000 cm$ or 340 meters for PLA.

### 3d Printing in American Fork

Been printing orders from 3dhubs for quite a while.  It's easy for anyone with an object they need printed to just upload it and get it printed out.  Come by and pick it up or I can mail it.

It's harder if you need something custom made.  You have to do the CAD work first.  Or course I can do that as well for you if you need something special.

Order a 3D Print

### Site Dust…

Been years since I updated things on this site. I thought I'd take a bit and get a new theme.

Pardon the dust for a bit while I work things out. Feel free to contact me if something on the site isn't working and you need it to 🙂

### Slow site lately

Over the last few weeks I noticed this site becoming steadily slower. Turns out I had an unusual amount of requests for /xmlrpc.php.. which in turn caused the server to use up all it's http processes answering bogus rpc queries for ping backs and whatnot that the nice script kiddies all over the world are trying to exploit I guess.

So... took care of that. Hopefully things are back to normal. I'll have to go back and re-evaluate if I actually want any of that functionality I guess.

### 3d printing services in American Fork

So the last project I worked on at work required some hardware enclosures, handles and a couple odds and ends that we decided to design ourselves and 3D print. So lucky me, I've entered the 3D printing arena. Been having enough fun doing it that I've started offering printing services to the local market.

### Writing binary data with Verilator

This is definitely one I know the masses are waiting to find out how to do. 🙂

So you are simulating a verilog design with Verilator and you want to output part of your design data to a file in binary format. (Example you're outputting an image.)

So lets say you want to do this:

``` fd=\$fopen("somefile.dat", "wb");
\$fwrite ( fd, "%c", data );
```

And you expect a file with binary data but instead you get a text file.

Well in Verilator you can embed c statements. So you can do this instead:

```   \$c( "fwrite( (void*) &", data,", 1, 1, (FILE*)", fd, ");" );
```

There. Fixed.