Hello Forum goers,
We are testing a new weekly short-form video on our socials that wraps up some fun and interesting stories in the maker world from the last few weeks. The video will come out on Fridays, but we are posting a topic here on Wednesdays to post the video’s sources and to collect any news from the community to potentially include in next week’s as well as just open up general discussion.
This week we looked at:
Jeff Geerling finally cracking his “external GPU on a Raspberry Pi” goldmine that he has been working on for several years. In the last few weeks, he has posted some incredible things such as running Portal 2 at 4k with a silky-smooth FPS and even 4k Doom Eternal at 10 to 15 fps. This is a really great step that has a huge amount of community projects and work behind it, and it’s fantastic to see that utilizing the power of an external GPU with a Pi is getting ever so closer. While running a few video games is a cool demo, there may be some uses in your home lab like video transcoding, AI acceleration and LLMs all being run off a humble Pi.
Nearly a year ago Stefan from CNC Kitchen released some of his work into stacking 3D printing layers like bricks. This weird structure produced stronger functional parts at almost no additional cost, so where is it? Why, like a lot of cool community discoveries like this, hasn’t it been implemented in slicers yet? Well thanks to a bit of digging by Geek Detour, it turns out it is patented. Well, it was by Stratasys until 2016, until it was re-patented in 2020 with Geek Detour claiming that the patent has many issues and shouldn’t have been accepted by the patent office. He is hoping to shed more light on this via the 3d printing community to help resolve this issue so we can see this helpful feature in slicers before the patent expires in 2040.
And a Maker by the name of Dr. D-flo may have just set the world record for the largest 3d printed benchy. The seaworthy vessel comes in at 10 ft (3 meters) and although it has been modified in a few places here and there, closely resembles the iconic shape of a benchy. He also took it one step further and 3d printed a benchy on his giant benchy boat whilst out on the water. If you don’t consider this to be a proper benchy, then the world record would belong to Emily the Engineer who created a somewhat less seaworthy but true-to-shape benchy a few months ago.
If you have any news from the maker world, feel free to post it below and we may include it in next week’s video, until then we will see you next week!
