Printing Problems and Wireless Woes

Before attempting to print a part with a relatively large surface area, I had neglected to do a full leveling test of the bed to ensure that the extrusion tip was neither too close nor too far from the surface of the bed. In some places, it turned out that the tip was about a millimeter or so too close to the surface (i.e. it impacted the surface). This resulted in a sort of "jam" in which the plastic broke off inside the tip and couldn't be easily retrieved. A futile attempt at retrieval only resulted in the breakage of the tip. So 5 new tips were ordered from Amazon for ~ $13. Not too bad. When those arrived, the repair went well, but I accidentally spilled coffee all over my laptop keyboard while reading the assembly instructions. The laptop which had been running at the time immediately powered off or perhaps died; I wasn't sure, and feared the worst. The usual advice in such situations is to immerse the electronic device in some sort of desiccant material or a bag of dry rice, but I feared that would not be sufficient,  and decided more drastic measures were required. I put it in our oven, closed the door and turned the heat on at the lowest possible level (around 170 deg F), then turned off the oven after about a minute or so. Our oven heats quickly, so I think for future spills I won't wait quite that long. After about 5 minutes of leaving the laptop in the turned off oven, I took it out. It was still pretty hot so I waited about 10 more minutes for it to cool and then tried powering it up. Thanks be to God, it worked!

Unfortunately the remainder of the printer repair did not go quite as well that day. After installing the new tip, I powered it up and was surprised to notice the display dim and some curls of smoke waft up into the air... I had accidentally shorted out the two heating element wires near the heating cartridge tip and they were producing a small, intense flame. I unplugged the printer, but it was too late: both heating element wires had burned through. So 5 more heating cartridges were ordered from Amazon, again for $13.

For a few days, this aura of bad luck persisted as I switched over to the wireless communications and tried to get a working cell connection between my phone and the boat. The original plan was to use the cheap Android phone inside the boat as a wireless hotspot, that the boat's Raspberry Pi could use to accept incoming network connections over the Internet; in essence it would be a sort of mobile data server. For whatever reason though, I couldn't get the hotspot feature in the Android operating system to work properly. Support calls were made to Bell and the phone manufacturer (LG) to no avail. The manufacturer believed that because the phone was a US phone, that the hotspot feature would not work in Canada. They recommended doing a factory reset on the phone, which I did, but it didn't accomplish anything. A number of things were attempted, but eventually I just gave up, and decided to use my iPhone as the boat's hotspot instead. It connected to the Raspberry Pi without any issues. I'm a little bit nervous about losing my personal phone at sea, but that's what the "Find My iPhone" app is for right?

Even with the iPhone hotspot connected to the Raspberry Pi though, the server operating on the Pi was unable to accept network connections. My theory is that either the iPhone itself or perhaps Bell was blocking the server port from receiving data. This was pretty discouraging, as I had been assuming that the code that had been written over the last few weeks while testing on WiFi could also be used over a cell connection. I'm a bit out of my element with regards to configuring communications networks, and consulting the general wisdom on Google was not particularly helpful. I sort of felt that the server needed to be moved elsewhere, so I wrote a quick server program for my laptop just this morning that acted as a sort of relay. It accepted connections from both the boat and the "captain" on land, and acted as a sort of go-between, forwarding communications packets back and forth between the two. With some slight modifications to the boat software, this actually worked perfectly! So a good end to a tough week I guess.