This is a guest post by Steve Wynveen. Steve Wynveen is a mechanical engineer that is a technician at heart.

Background​

As you are probably well aware, there is a shortage of PPE for hospital and other medical field staff. Froedert & Medical College of Wisconsin have posted plans for people to sew 100% cotton face masks. Several other patterns for sewists exist as well.

The Froedert ask for public help:

https://www.froedtert.com/stories/new-unused-personal-protective-equipment-other-supplies-gratefully-accepted

The Froedert mask plan:

https://www.froedtert.com/sites/default/files/files/2020-03/MaskInstructions_V2.pdf

3D printing hobbyists in The Spaghetti Detective community banded together to print PPEs for healthcare workers in their local community to help them fight COVID-19.

3D printing and virus are two things that usually don't intersect. But now when the world is upended by the coronavirus crisis, they do - in a way that not many people would expect.

The Spaghetti Detective is a 3D printing platform with tens of thousands of active 3D printing hobbyists.

When the coronavirus is attacking, they act together to save the world.

How? By designing and 3D printing thousands and thousands of face shields and masks and donate them to hospitals and healthcare workers who are in separate need of protective equipments; or by 3D printing things like door opener for touchless operation; or by simply showing gratitude to people who are fighting on the front lines.

Update on 04/05/2020: Since the start of the pandemic, TSD users have more than doubled the hours they print every day. This graph tells it all:

If you have a 3D printer, put it to good use by joining tens of thousands of us in the fight against coronavirus. If everyone one of us prints 10 face shields or masks a day, we will have an unmatched capacity of producing millions of protective gears in a very short amount of time.

Join us in this banded effort!

Effective March 10th, 2020, the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack will no longer be available to Pro subscribers. It'll be replaced by a 2000 Detective Hours / month Pack at the same price.

The Pro subscribers who have subscribed to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack on or before that day will not be impacted. You will still get to enjoy unlimited Detective Hours no matter how many hours you print each month. This is our way to say "Thank You" to anyone who supported us in our early days!

Shop subscribers can still subscribe to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack. Please contact us if you are interested.

February 19th, 2020 is a special day for The Spaghetti Detective. It is the day when The Detective watched her 5,000,000th print hour.

I clearly remember when I put The Spaghetti Detective beta online about the same time last year. I opened the server log to wait (patiently) for the 1st user to sign up. It took hours (thank god it was not days).

I clearly remember the dopamine run when I saw in the server log The Detective was called upon duty to check the very first webcam image for failure.

And I clearly remember when we reached 1000 print hours. It was a little more than 1 months after the beta launch. I went home and opened a bottle of champagne. But with or without the alcohol, my brain didn't have the capacity to just imagine what 5,000,000 print hours would look like.

And now, a little less than 1 year after the beta launch, 5,000,000th print hour is here. That doesn't even include the print hours watched on the private servers. This is a clear indication for the level of enthusiasm our fellow 3D printing hobbyists have toward The Spaghetti Detective.

Thank you everyone for being part of this amazing ride, for helping each other in the discord forum, for reporting bugs and helping us fix it, for bearing with the imperfection of our AI model, and for writing to us to simply cheer on the team.

The Detective wouldn't be where she is today without you, our lovely users!

Cheers,

Kenneth Jiang, Founder @ TSD

TSD's first The Spaghettilapse Contest is here. Everyone can participate. Winners will get free Pro accounts + DH packs, and get mentioned in our next newsletter (and backlink to your own home page if you'd like)!

What is The Spaghettilapse Contest?​

It is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. You upload Time-lapse videos to The Spaghettilapse Contest Facebook Group.
2. You get as many likes as you can, optionally by sharing your posts with friends or other Facebook groups.
3. The 3 time-lapses that get most likes will win. Winners get free TSD Pro account + free DHs.

In 2012, during the beginning of my senior year in college, I was also working in an Engineering group for the U.S. Air Force. In our Engineering group, the need for a rapid prototyping capability was high, but at the time, there were no affordable solutions that fit the requirements of our group. I spoke with my engineering director, and presented the idea of designing an FDM 3D printer for my engineering senior project, to fit our needs for the office, with our office funding much of the project. My director approved of the idea, so I proposed this project to my college, which was also approved. That was the beginning of how “ProtoPrintr” was born.

Remote G-Code upload and printing is available now. It was a little later than we promised. But we launched other features such as print job notifications (email, Telegram, and PushBullet) a lot earlier than scheduled. Guess we can give ourself a B+ on our score card? 😉

This is a short and easy-to-consume tutorial on how you can use this feature. Please give us feedback by commenting at the bottom.

We screwed up. Quite badly. We did the math wrong when we tried to calculate the cost of hosting TSD servers, and we underestimated the cost to serve webcam streaming by 50%.

The price we set for Pro plan was way too low to even cover the cost of servers and network bandwidth. Throwing in other miscellaneous items such as the cost to send emails and text, we were unfortunately not on a healthy path to keeping the lights on for everyone who loves TSD but doesn't want the hassle to run a private server.

Therefore, as much as we want to make TSD affordable for everyone, we had to make a tough decision to raise our price for Pro plan. The good news is that significantly more users than we expected subscribed to the Pro and Shop plans. As the result, we only need to raise the prices by about 25% to fill the gap.

The new pricing will take effect on December 16th, 2019.

The Spaghetti Detective has come out of beta! With improved AI accuracy, and shiny new user experience such as the sleek 25-frames-per-second webcam streaming, we are open to all 3D printing enthusiasts now!

We get it. Even if you have The Detective on the watch for you, you won't have a complete peace of mind until you see the webcam feed with your own eyes. That's why we just built the video feed and it's now in alpha testing. You can earn DG credits by enrolling in the alpha testing and reporting bugs to us!