Maketober Day 17: Making a broken printer

Una my lovely 3D printer is what I call a “Schrodinger Device”. She’s got this title in honour of the celebrated “thought experiment” involving a box containing a cat and something that might, or might not, kill the cat. The idea is that right up until you open the box and take a look inside you don’t know whether the cat is dead or not. From a quantum perspective you can regard the cat as both dead and alive until you find out what has happened. The same kind of thing happens with Una. At any given time I may or may not have a working 3D printer. I only find out which is true when I try to print something. I’ve owned many such devices in the past, including a Mini Traveller that sometimes was a car and sometimes wasn’t.

Anyhoo, today when I tried to print a box for a LED panel that I’ve been playing with I discovered that Una is no longer a printer. I’ve spent most of the day proving that this fact is most definitely true. In this time I’ve replaced some bits, recalibrated others and cursed all of them. Oh well.