[ Backlog - This log was adapted from my Patreon, to fill in the details about how this project has developed over the years. Check the link for the full post, and if you appreciate this project, consider supporting it! ]

Hey there strangers! You haven't heard from me for a few months, but I've got some exciting updates to share! I've spent this whole summer getting ready to sell my house in Portland, so that I can live in the Magic Tool Bus full time, and devote more of my time and energy to building open-source trash eating robots!

That process has taken up pretty much all of my time, and so I haven't had much progress to share with you. But this month, I've been getting ready to give the Hackaday Prize my very best shot, by making the documentation for the Trash Printer Version 3 as complete as I possibly can.

I first got the Trash Printer printing real objects in the Spring of 2019, and so for 4 years I've known that real, useful objects can indeed be printed directly out of waste plastic. But being able to shred up and print my trash ultimately doesn't make much of a difference in the world - the Trash Printer is really only a "disruptively useful" idea if OTHER people can do it too, and that's where I've been stuck.

The previous iterations of the Trash Printer, Versions 1 and V2, were both very difficult to set up, and required the use of third-party CNC gantries that I had modified to fit my extruder. That made making full, complete documentation for the whole project tricky. With the development of the Version 3 printer, I knew that I finally had a design that I could make full, complete, easy-to-follow documentation for, but I still wasn't quite there yet.

Now, I'm finally getting there! The Hackaday Prize is judged in part by how well a project is documented, and whether or not other people can realistically replicate it. Winning the Hackaday prize (or any of the 5 finalist prizes) would not only mean that I would get a lot of money to keep hacking on the project, it would also mean that a TON of people would hear about it, and potentially want to build their own.

My dream has always been to see the Trash Printer "go viral" - to have other people build their own and then modify and improve the design, so that together we can figure out what we can make out of trash, and build an open library of parts that we know are printable. If we all have more or less identical machines, then the parts that other people are able to print are parts that I know that can print too - we can just swap GCODE files!

I've been working on the Version 3 prototype since 2020, and so the one I have was built slowly, bit by bit, and I've forgotten a lot of the details for how I put it all together. So in order to make sure that other people can build one, I've been building a new one entirely from scratch, and livestreaming the whole process to Twitch.

This is the first time that I've gotten my livestreaming setup working well enough to stream a whole build, and now that I've got that down, I'm going to start adding in live audio from the "Twitch" channel in the Patrons-only Discord, so that my Patrons can ask me questions as I build in real time.

This new iteration of the V3 design is built around a smaller 16" x 30" service cart, instead of the original 24" x 36" version, so that I can fit it in the Magic Tool Bus and travel around showing it off and teaching people how to build their own. The parts required for the "mini" version are exactly the same, the only difference is the length of the leadscrews and rails.

Livestreaming a build is a great way to make sure that I capture all the of the bugs and issues that I run into, and so that I don't skip any steps. It can also be a little embarrassing, like when my work table fully collapsed on day 2, but it keeps me on my toes and makes sure that everything I do is captured and automatically published, which keeps my perfectionism at bay.

I'm currently about 80% done with the new build. I've been waiting for some new parts to come in, and will hopefully do the final part of the build, which will include the electronics, wiring, and programming, on Sunday. If you go to my Twitch page, you can see all of the previous streams, and if you follow me, you'll get notifications whenever I go live. 

That's all I've got for you for now, look out for the full V3 Trash Printer documentation in next months update!