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Mothers are, ultimately, the best “makers” on this planet. I write this from the vantage point of a man that has a great and loving mother and a pregnant wife who is the mother to my 2 boys with a 3rd on the way. As I see multiple frustrated Reddit posts about unlevel beds, extrusion issues, and prints going otherwise awry; I think about how those inconveniences trifle in comparison to swollen feet, morning sickness, and 9 months of utter exhaustion.

So, what better way to honor these ultimate makers than with something heartfelt and made by us? There have been many posts over the last 10 years or so about the “Top 10 3D Printed Gifts for Mother’s Day” including this one from All3DP. At the core though, all of those articles are just inspiration for what you can do for your mom.

The ideas below are meant to inspire and spark a memory of a special connection with your mom. For example, my mom is really into beekeeping. I am planning to make something like this bee feeder and this honeycomb picture frame (with family pictures included, of course).

Hopefully, you can find something that fits the bill on Thingiverse or MyMiniFactory but otherwise take a look at making your own creation with Tinkercad. They are genuinely easy to use, and you can make your mom something that nobody else in the world has!

TH3D Studios's EZPi Pro V2 now comes with The Spaghetti Detective preinstalled, and is available as a secure plug-and-play octoprint setup if you're looking for one. It's been a pretty cool road getting here, though, and it started back in...

Wait, hold on, disclosures​

The Spaghetti Detective and TH3D have no monetary relationship with each other. We and they both sponsor Octoprint, and there's a Teams chat where we ask each other questions we might have about each other's products and services, but no money changes hands between us and no links attached to this article are affiliate links.

I also own this one of their shirts in purple, but can you blame me?

Now on with the story.

As I was saying, it started back in​

January of this year. Tim Hoogland, owner of TH3D, reached out that one of customers was trying to set up The Spaghetti Detective on an ezpi using their EZCam, it wasn't working for that customer, and he hoped to furnish whatever information we needed to troubleshoot and make sure our software worked with TH3D's camera.

Wade Norris of TSD suggested that, since TSD isn't in hardware and TH3D is, he "realize[d] this might be a really great collaboration opportunity." Tim agreed, saying "I think we can help each other out. I am working on a new image for our Pi kits, and one thing I could do is bundling your plugin in the Pi," asking if there were any OS-level customizations that would improve the TSD experience on EZPis, and we were off to the proverbial races.

But that's not really the beginning​

For the past several weeks, since we announced the giveaway, The Spaghetti Detective's community has responded to the challenge with enthusiasm and creativity. More people than we ever expected printed Wekster's awesome model and tagged us and Wekster, and because we have such an involved, enthusiastic community, we have given out thousands of free Detective Hours. We love all of the prints, but after the jump are a few of my personal favorites, along with the winner announcement and winner selection process.

There's a game I like called Dark Souls, made by From Software. It's an action RPG known for its difficulty, and it has spawned its own subgenre of games, though most imitators miss the most important part about Dark Souls: Everything that goes wrong, even if it's not your fault, went wrong for a reason you can learn from and avoid the next time. Every failure gets you better at the game. 3D printing is like that. As you see above, in the prints since my successful first print, I've had a lot of print failures. Let's go into why they failed, how I know how they failed, and how I fixed them.

A lot has happened since my last post. To start, on Sunday, March 7, we finally passed the thirty million Detective Hours milestone. The Detective has kept vigilant watch over your prints for almost 3,500 years of time. While she was busy watching your prints so that you don't have to, this is:

What you've been up to​

You guys have been sharing a series of beautiful prints of The Detective on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and we're floored by the response. Every day, there are new shares and we've got more Detective Hours to give away. Please keep it up - the usernames to tag are below, and we'll give you 200 free, never-expiring Detective Hours for every print you share where you tag Wekster and us.

What I've been up to​

Five days ago, Wekster contacted me to let me know that he had split the bust model for full multicolor printing. Below, I've included zips of the STLs for the multicolor base and the new, fully multicolor detective.

Since then, I've been trying to print her. This is how that went:

We're excited to announce that there's a new 3D-printable model of The Spaghetti Detective available for printing, designed by the great Wekster (if you don't know him, check out his stuff. He designs some of the coolest models you can print). At the end of this blog post, there are links to download it and information about how you can get 200 free Detective Hours for printing it, sharing photos of your prints, and tagging us and Wekster. You might even win a whole year of Pro service on us. Share and enjoy!

Creality Ender 3 is one of the most solid and affordable 3D printers you can get. And OctoPrint is undoubtedly the best solution for monitoring your prints with a webcam.

This brief tutorial is meant to help someone who is interested in using a camera with their 3D printer to take advantage of OctoPrint's amazing monitoring capability with an inexpensive Pi Camera. This setup will work perfectly for The Spaghetti Detective too.

The first thing I realized soon after I owned a 3D printer was that prints can take a long time. The second thing I learned was that they can fail. I was concerned about leaving the house while a print was in progress and quickly discovered that others had recognized this problem and solved it. There are several methods to achieve this, I am going to describe what seemed to be the best solution for me. I will mention the software and hardware that is needed but defer to the many excellent YouTube videos available on the actual implementation of these. The focus here will be to document the steps and provide some tips that I learned in getting it all working. The printed parts were specifically for the Ender 3 V2 printer but most of the information is not printer specific.

The solution I chose involved purchasing a Raspberry Pi computer and installing OctoPi on it. This allows you to use OctoPrint to control the printer from your computer. OctoPi is an image that is put on an SD card and resides in the Raspberry Pi computer and provides the link between your computer and your printer. The Spaghetti Detective is a plugin available to be installed in OctoPrint. While it will work on older versions, I purchased a kit that included the Raspberry Pi 4B. The Raspberry Pi has a port for a “native” camera and USB ports where you could plug some other webcam in. I chose the Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2 as it was inexpensive but had decent specs. I mounted the camera on the z-axis cross beam which meant I needed a longer cable to insure it reached the top of the printer. All the mounting hardware was printed from items I found on Thingiverse (or to be honest were links in the YouTube videos I watched).

We recently stumbled across a new company in 3D printing right near us called Closed Loop Plastics. After learning more about their 100% recycled plastic filament we were ecstatic to give it a try and share our experience.

The Spaghetti Detective came out of beta about 1 year ago. Since then, The Detective has watched more than 19 million print hours for the 3D printing hobbyists. That is on average 49,625 hours a day!

And sometimes next week, we will cross the mark of 20 million watched print hours.

Those who joined TSD family early enough would probably remember we had a celebration (socially distanced and perfectly safe😉 ) when we crossed 10 million hours back in April. We will do a similar one this time too. This means the chance to get 50% discount off Pro account but you need to work for it. We will make the rules simpler than last time:

What is OctoPrint Tunneling?​

OctoPrint Tunneling is a secure way to access the full OctoPrint UI even when you are not on your home network.

The Spaghetti Detective provides the access to the most critical functions - webcam feed, pause/cancel, changing heater temperature, etc. However, we understand there are times when you want to access other OctoPrint functions while you are not home, such as using its PSU plugin to turn on/off power supply to your printer.

So we built OctoPrint Tunneling to make it possible for you. 🚀🚀🚀

Is OctoPrint Tunneling secure?​