3D Printing Level Up

I have been 3D printing things for about a year now, but it was only this past week that I finally figured out how to prevent molten plastic from pooling on the heating block and dropping onto my prints, sometimes ruining them. The key was to properly install the guide tube and extruder tip, and take care to make sure that they were tightly butted up against one another. To do this, the extruder tip was first tightened into the heating block, and then backed off a couple of turns. Then the guide tube was screwed into the other end as far as possible. The extruder tip was screwed back in and tightened as much as possible against the guide tube above it. This was all done (carefully!) with the printer's pre-heating routine on, in order to match actual printing conditions. I got all this from a website, which unfortunately I can't remember or seem to find now. I've searched the Internet about this particular problem before, but only this site offered a logical solution to the problem that actually worked.

I was able to print a nice enclosure for the camera that should actually be waterproof now. Here it is on top of the new enclosure that I spent the last 2 days getting ready so that it could replace the one that I accidentally melted last week:

I also cleaned up the wires a bit on this side of the boat. Previously they were just loose, single insulated cables crammed into a cable gland on the enclosure. The white cable above is a piece of Ethernet cable that now does the same thing with a bunch of extra wires for future functionality. I also routed this cable and others on the opposite side of the boat in some plastic hot water heater tubing in order to avoid getting it snagged. I'll need to get some pieces to secure this tubing onto the sides of the boat at some point.

A bit of software was completed this week too - the Android Boat Captain software was modified to request lower quality images when a Bluetooth connection was used, and work was begun on the iOS version of Boat Captain.