On the Railcore discord today. elmoret is filastruder.
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That is awesome!!
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Loved the podcast. Don’t be nervous with speaking. It’s so entertaining, you are a natural.
I would totally take (and pay for) a CAD class taught by Ryan. I’ve always admired the parts for MPCNC years ago, and got the same feeling when I started printing the LR3.
Need more NEMA 23 and ball screws for my 1/2" water cooled spindle.
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Thank you, it was fun.
Maybe one day I will do some CAD tips and tricks videos.
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PLEASE!!!
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I just listened to it. A lot of that I knew and a lot I didn’t. Great to hear it. Thank you for doing that.
I hope you had fun. I knew you were smart. Now people are going to expect you to be charismatic too. 
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Thank you.
It would be nuts to do one in the same room as them. Maybe if we are ever at an event together we can do it that way…I’ll interview them.
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Rmrrf 2024?
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Ryan and I were just reminiscing privately about the ZXY and sandify. I thought I would share:
If anyone is interested in the history of sandify and the zenxy, it is in these forums:
@jamesd256 was a big part of the original sandify design. Ryan had the only zenxy (if you could call it that, he made the corexy version a little later). Sandify and zenxy had to be born and grow together. They were dependent on each other. It was a bit of serendipity that we were all trying to do this project at the same time. The first version was around post 115. There were a lot of ideas about how it could work or look until we had a draft. I’m really thankful to James for all the ideas and design that happened in those initial days.
And the date was 2017. These posts were converted from the old forum. A lot of the usual suspects are still here. It is amazing to think of the combined benefit we’ve all experienced from this shared past. It really is special to me.
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Kind of mind-blowing.
This thing has been going on long enough to where all the details are starting to get real fuzzy for me. Going back and seeing just a few of those posts is like being there all over again. I instantly remember the room it was in, working on the carpet. Duct tape to two “expensive” IKEA tables just to get the glass I wanted.
Something to be said about sharing the journey publicly. You never know when it will still be a thing so many years later. I have the first crown I drew, the first 3D carve I made in foam, the first aluminum block carves…WOW. Surreal. In the beginning, I thought I was just farting around on my day off. Then maybe it could help pay off the student loans, to screw it “I am going to quit my dream job”.
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Absolutely. Let me just take a second and wave at the future versions of all of us looking back in 5 more years.
The troubleshooting in public is really helpful. I am 100% sure each thread has 10x the number of people that have solved a problem quietly by reading our debugging steps. The development threads are useful in a different way, bringing in expertise from anywhere and then preserving the discussion for years.
We could have had an expensive team in a conference room debating the details. We would all have our own version of history after a week. We were forced to communicate in text, in (mostly) sorted threads, over a few days instead of a few hours. The costs of working that way are obvious, but the benefits are surprising. I don’t think that would have worked as well in discord/slack. And we wouldn’t easily be able to find the record 6 years later.
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I am still not sure why forums are not that popular any more. The city tried to force Mattermost on us for communication, but I pushed through and got them to open a forum as well where we can solve problems more easily. I gave them the link to this forum as proof that it’s working. 
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Discord came in swiftly…but if you look at them, they are all switching slowly to the forum plugin. You either get 10 conversations overlapping or 10 new “channels”. More and more I am seeing the forum, format taking back over. So I think now it is just the “free” part that makes them win. These are not free $800+ a year, but I like having the freedom we do. I like to link things internally and externally. You just can’t do that with discord. So I do think it will come back if this discourse style forum gets cheaper or easier to launch. Companies solely relying on Facebook though…how…
The hard part though is I have some ideas and I want to get all the input I can on them…but I do not want someone beating me to the punch with the info we come up with. I am not really sure the best way to go about that. I can break things down to general engineering questions but it is far more fun to build as we go…
Thank you for creating, funding and maintaining this forum.
Am on quite a few Discord servers, and personally…
- Dislike the tangents/noise/disorganization that results on larger servers.
- Appreciate people like being able to have quick adhoc conversations and get value from that connection and community-aspect.
- Appreciate Discord’s ability to allow text conversation to escalate to Video/Audo/DesktopSharing.
- Really dislike trying to find best solution for a specific problem. Discord can be a frustrating PITA when sifting through channels/posts polluted with streaming consciousness.
Thought you’re already using private forum Messages/Topics for R&D work (e.g. Kobalt Router development)?
Is figuring out who you’d want to include a challenge? And/or, is figuring out how/where to involve people the challenge?
I appreciate some companies will brazenly exploit/copy openly shared work, then minimally rebrand, then sell for profit. Ideally a fair royalty would be distributed back to the original creator(s) even in these situations. e.g. a x% royalty Fair Commercial license that sits between Non-Commercial and Commercial.
Personally, I’d be ok with signing an appropriately scoped limited non-compete NDA to help give you confidence/protection of ideas. Not sure how others feel about this approach? Maybe there’s better options?
GitHub repos can be private, and/or have discussions, issues, wiki and more if you want to fence some ideas until if/when you’re ready to share them more broadly? There’s a bunch of options for project focused Team collaboration (Notion, JIRA, Trello, Asana, Azure DevOps, etc…).
Personally, I like free Open Hardware/Software projects. But I appreciate that food, shelter, warmth, healthcare, etc… isn’t free, and costs. Scaling/growing a business costs even more.
Sorry for the tangents, 
Nice podcast!
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Yeah, I want everyone…but that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe I can do a private, logged in only users?
It is kinda that, it is also I want to take my time. Let’s say we came up with the best end mill ever, but things got busy around here for the holiday season and getting samples took longer than usual and I was super busy. We just need to dial in the last degree or two of angle of attack. Someone takes it upon themselves to just release what we have that is 90% done. Having some behind the scenes stuff allows for a more relaxed thorough exploration. Having people see it rushes things. I have tested countless dust shoes behind the scenes for both machines. I rarely show them most are probably better than what we have but just not exactly what I am going for…but then some dude, 
, jumps in and adds a clear first layer and fixes almost every problem I was having…so it is a trade off.
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FInally got a chance to listen to the podcast while packing the garage. I’ve said in the past, and still stand by it, Stephen is prolly one of the most excited about his youtube videos of any of the makers I watch.
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100%
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It’s funny how I’ve finally come the full circle - I found this place just before then and became a serious lurker - I wasn’t really interested in building anything so didn’t sign up, but wow you guys knew stuff I didn’t have a hope of ever learning. I was at the time intent on building a laser (ask me how that went?)
It’s a shame, as my current “research” shows - youtube is no place for unbiased reporting - perhaps I should ask a laser forum on facebook!! 
And there was Discus too which didn’t ever make the grade (it’s back to being a comments system I think) -FWIW I hate both of them with a vengeance - everything from dark interfaces to “smacks of the worst of twitter”.
I agree entirely on this - it’s why I make a goose of myself reporting on every little hiccup!
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Listened to quite a few of their podcasts, impressed with their podcasts plus your own episode.- I presume their interview with you was actually done before a few of the other ones where they mention you were released - or was their mechanics in some was informed by your design?
Found the long mill episode pretty interesting too - I presume they came along quite a long while after you. Was really confused by their name - they said CNC Labs a few times - by when I looked up LongMill it seemed to come up against a what I thought reseller called sienci.com - didn’t click until quite a while that that was their way of spelling CNC.
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No, but I had been listening to them all as they came out and some of the things stuck in my head. So I think I was referencing the previous episodes.
It’s a lot of CNC in a sentence, it can be a tongue twister. Pretty slick though. I listened to that one and was surprised at how different it was from my start. I guess having two people involved is very different. I dove in head first, they had school to finish as well as start a biz.
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