OpenSCAD! My personal favorite 3D modeling software. Started using it a decade ago since it made sense to me as a coder and I've been too stubborn to use anything else.
Have you tried using "traditional" modelling tools?
I've been trying to learn how to model using Fusion 360. It's not clicking for me. Probably lack of practice. Wondering if OpenSCAD would be a better solution. Goal is to be able to design useful things for 3d printing..
It's probably the lazy way, but I found that after I understood just a few primitives (basics of sketching, extruding, constraints, and getting down some of the vocabulary) I can tell ChatGPT what I want to do (and often including screenshots) and it does a pretty spectacular job of filling in the blanks for me.
SketchUp always felt very intuitive to me. More so than Fusion360, which I think also suffers from being a clunky Electron app that’s trying to do too many things. I prefer FreeCAD to Fusion I think.
There are several monitors with aspect ratios close to square. I can't tell that exact monitor from the photo but there are several options on the market.
This is obviously far more advanced, but I still think its a shame that the old style thinkpad dock didn't catch on more. For those who arent aware, the docks on old thinkpads used to double as a stand (and a lock too actually), originally connecting via a custom connector at the bottom of the laptop and then over dual usb-c slots.
I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.
What I never saw in the wild but which was neat was the Powerbook Duo dock that pulled in the laptop like a front loading VCR tape, peak Sculley-period pointless complexity. It totally enclosed the laptop in a closed configuration, the idea being that you would put a monitor on top of the dock.
I had a dock for my Thinkpad X200. It was a chunk of plastic the same size as the laptop but it also had a bay for a disc drive (since the laptop didn't have one) and also had a pop-out connector for charging a second battery. Since it was the same footprint, it didn't take up any extra desk space and still allowed you to use the laptop's own ports too (except for power), it just made the laptop thicker. And you could even take the dock on the go if you really needed the extra I/O and disc drive. Pretty innovative design when docks at the time were just a big box at the rear of the assembly.
> I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.
Certainly with some of the older Thinkpads (going back 10+ years or more) it was only possible to connect two external monitors via one of these docks. (Then USB-A monitor adapters started to appear...)
Excellent that people work on ergonomics, especially for moving away from the centenary typewriter model, but remember that 15’ of streching-exercise , call it yoga - taichi (anything with more than 1000 years :D) goes further than hours of the perfect static ergonomics
If my math is right it seems the cost in material for the printed part is around $5 which seems ridiculously cheap for a custom-designed and adapted solution like this. Nice!
I wish the author had spent a few words extra to motivate why it needs to be in PETG filament for "heat resistance", is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory? I guess if it's in direct sunlight that might be exceeded, or perhaps if the laptop runs very hot?
To be fair, that's something you learn as soon as you start 3d printing.
Anything that experiences repeated stress and have any chance of getting over room temperature during summer should not be printed in PLA. And near a computer heating up, it sure looks like it's going to be higher than room temperature. Also pictures in a train exposed to sunlight via glasses are another reason for concern.
Compared to PLA, PETG has higher temperature resistance (by about 20°C), isn't quite as susceptible to stress, doesn't cost more and isn't any harder to print on modern printers.
Some people in the 3d printing community have totally ditched PLA and use PETG as a baseline because of that.
I use ABS as a baseline, it holds up well, is easier to sand than most other materials, and is soluble in acetone which gives you some nice methods for smoothing layer lines as well as adhering parts together. It requires a heated chamber though.
> is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory?
Not the author, but PLA has a glass transition temperature of around 60 degrees, which in layman's terms is when it starts to melt. However, depending on the quality of the printing process, layers start separating/the print is pliable significantly lower, at around 35-40 degrees. This means that in countries where you get 30+ degree summers, PLA is not really suitable for anything which experiences any kind of stress. I would hazard a guess that the standing laptop can cause quite a bit of stress when the train starts/stops.
It should be mentioned that as far as I can tell pretty much no one is selling pure PLA filament. They all have additives, so who knows what the actual glass transition temperature is for any random given filament. This has been true for a while too. Pure PLA has some properly awful properties, among which is it having pretty much no elastic deformation. Any amount of force will introduce microscopic cracks. The various additives reduce these kinds of issues and are therefore not really optional.
I used ASA for something I intended to keep in my garage, I live in Florida so summer gets hot. ASA is way more heat resistant than both. My water boiler uses the heat within the garage as part of how it warms water so my garage doesnt get too hot but it can still feel pretty bad in there.
Glass transition temperatures are a little bit misleading, but from personal experience even leaving a PLA print in direct sunlight under even a little tension will cause it to warp in as little as 30 minutes if you aren't careful.
Quite cool! I wonder if it doesn't wear down the laptop hinges to keep it at 180 degrees opened in an upright position. Could print some clamps for the sides to reduce strain if that's the case. Though that'd only work for laptops that actually _do_ open 180 degrees, according to TFA, not that many.
I have a "car desk", which is just a little expandable contraption you hang on the steering wheel, then you can place your laptop on it. I wouldn't call it ergonomic per se (the right external keyboard could probably fix that), but using it for about one hour per week, it works well and doesn't cause any issues I'm aware of. The driver seat is not a place where I previously could get any work done, so the bar is a bit low.
Getting computer work done inside a vehicle is not easy if comfort is a requirement. Driving posture is not generalisable.
The ergonomy of most laptops (and keyboards in general) is poor. The modern laptop that is most ergonomic is the "2 in 1" design, which can be folded and used as a tablet.
For a programmer, an ergonomic keyboard with a trackball, connected to a 2-in-1 portable in tablet mode, might be easiest to assemble from common components for working during travel.
Well, with the steering wheel desk contraption, the monitor is placed in front of the wind shield, looking there is what the front seat is designed for, so that part is neat.
The keyboard however, is over the steering wheel, and while the arm placement is _similar_ to holding the wheel, it's a bit awkward, typing on a keyboard and operating a steering wheel are just quite different movements.
I _think_ it'd be ergonomic if I had some kind of keyboard and mouse/trackpad solution elevated on my lap, but the steering wheel gets in the way of a standard lap desk pillow thing. It'd have to be split.
For my one hour per week I haven't bothered yet. But I do think I could come up with something that'd have similar strain to just driving the car. Which, yeah, is probably not as ergonomic as a good desk setup to begin with.
> Getting computer work done inside a vehicle is not easy if comfort is a requirement. Driving posture is not generalisable.
I had a similar situation to the GP in that I only ever used my laptop in a car for an hour or two a week. In my case it was whilst one of my offspring was doing some sports related thing that I had to drive them to.
Most of the time I'd just take a book to read but sometimes I'd like to tinker with some programming thing in that time.
More often than not there was a nice cafe to sit in, or a nice bench somewhere in the sun, or a viewing gallery that meant I could watch rather than staring at my laptop. But not all venues were the same.
Some had nowhere to watch or nowhere to sit in the warm or dry, and nowhere suitable within a short drive, and so I'd default to sitting in the car experimenting with seat angles/etc to get into a position that wasn't awful.
Not owning my own car meant I was often driving something different each time which added to the fun. (RIP UK Zipcar.)
Yeah, driving kids to stuff is my use case too. I did the cafe thing for a while, but I didn't like the overhead of going there, ordering etc. For some reason I'm pretty productive in weird environments (trains, airplanes etc), so it's always a good opportunity to just get some stuff done I'd otherwise be distracted from. I'd probably sit outside in a bench if I was in a warmer, dryer climate.
Another option is to plug in AR/VR glasses, which solves the head tilting problem in trains. There are plenty of options around ~500 EUR/USD nowadays, which might be worth it for people with a daily commute.
AR glasses are perfect for this. Best if you can configure your laptop to give you a video signal while the lid is closed, which seems to be luck of the draw.
> I have a "car desk", which is just a little expandable contraption you hang on the steering wheel, then you can place your laptop on it.
I remember one of those on Amazon with like a thousand reviews that were all meme reviews about using it whilst driving. Cant find the exact one, but it was one of those many Amazon products full of joke reviews.
Hp has a lot of "convertible" laptops that open the full 360 if you want, usually with a touchsreen and two cameras so they can optionally be used as a tablet.
She should have a look at the Huawei Matebook. You can transform the screen into a big desktop sized screen. The only thing missing is a stand that brings it to an ergonomic height.
Or, she could sit down and think really hard about what she needs, come up with a neat technical solution, and share her thinking with a community that loves this stuff.
In today's industrialized world you cannot come up with great technical solutions in isolation, ignoring commercial offerings. E.g. if you want a square or circular display and the industry only offers rectangular 16:9 and 4:3 then good luck building your own display ...
My dream is where the the laptop itself has a similar design. Where when you open the laptop, the screen gets raised by about a foot. I can't really conceive of times when I need the laptop screen low, so one wouldn't need all the extra frame and parts needed in this mod.
I haven't conceived the exact mechanism for it, but it would be fun to try and do it for the Framework laptop.
The new one (full display under keyboard) is super interesting. I think they presented it at CES.
Previous one had I believe like a companion display occupying ~1/3 of the keyboard side which looked pretty neat. I wish frame.work had an option like that -- seems way more feasible than Lenovo's contraption with motors and flexible screen, though not sure if it would be possible given the space budget.
Sounds nice, but how do you keep it from falling over? The higher screen makes it top heavy, and the way screens are tilted back also makes it lopsided. It will want to fall backward, and it will be worse on surfaces that aren't flat and solid, like your lap.
I guess one approach is weight distribution. Make the screen as light as possible and shift as much weight forward (near the space bar) as possible. I'm just not sure if it would be enough. You could also go with outriggers (like a crane or boat), but that's ugly and doesn't help with the lap situation, which is where you need help the most.
For something like this, where you need durability, lightness, and heat resistance, you just can't be at ABS. If your printer can't print it, I think it's worth getting it printed somewhere else (after prototyping with other materials). Just the reduced weight alone will be worth it, let alone the fact that ABS is nigh indestructible.
PETG and ABS have similar stiffness. Both are fine at the temperatures involved here.
PETG is easier to print and deal with. ABS puts out some bad fumes that require actively exhausting the printer outside if you're trying to print in the house.
ABS is harder to print. Getting good layer adhesion is hard. It's more prone to warping. You want a heated chamber, ideally.
PETG is a fine choice for this. Going to ABS wouldn't change anything.
Also FYI, most people prefer ASA over ABS for printing because it's a similar material with better properties almost across the board.
PETG is nowhere near as light or heat-resistant as ABS, so it's a nice option only when you don't really care about the characteristics of what you're printing.
> Yes, it's hard to print well, but it's the best-performing material when you need light, durable material. That's the tradeoff
It is not the "best performing material". There are several options which exceed its properties even further, but are increasingly expensive and harder to print.
Engineering is about being good enough. PETG is good enough in this case, and also cheap and easy.
Using PETG was a good choice. There's a spectrum of 3D printing materials. Not sure why you've chosen to die on the ABS hill. ABS isn't even in favor relative to ASA, FYI.
I'd cut off the numberpad of my laptop, center the touchpad and what's left of the keyboard. That would be my ergonomic setup.
That laptop served me well but it was a compromise between several factors. I think that at the time there were only an handful of 15" laptops without a numberpad and probably it's still like that. I eventually had to give up on that to get other features.
while I aplaud the very well thought out and implimented design for a computer interface
(it has very strong space ship vibes)
there is a fundamental flaw in the premise, in that ergonomics implys some optimisation of the physical(cardio) effort(impact, strain) and comfort of useing a tool, which is impossible while hunched over a static device making very small partial body movements. So this set up will very likely optimise well for speed run missions,but the cost will actualy be greater pressure and strain on a persons body overall, and the only answer for that is to fully detach, relax, exercise, and rest between missions.
That's a really interesting concept. Either once they open source their build (or I get over my innate laziness) I could use something like that for my build at home (more of a horizontal stand style thing, looking at the monitor) - my laptop's primarily my second monitor at home with attached KB.
More fuel to help convince my wife the printer isn't a waste of money xD
I guess for simple objects, 3D printing is already sufficiently useful.
I'd still like it to be much cheaper and simpler though. My own tinker
days are over; I kind of want to depend on what is cheap and reliable;
or at the least very reliable. I honestly can not warrant time investment
when things don't work or break down in yet-another-component of my already
way too many components heavy living conditions here. 3D printing should
be so simple that one never has to think about it. Or print a surrogate
3D printer, to have as a backup device. But what about the materials? I
guess plastics dominate.
"It just works" has become true for the top brands of consumer 3d printers in general. They are not simple devices (and neither is a 2D printer), but I don't think they are more complex than they need to be. It's just that they have been iterated enough that they are now mature. But a 3d printer that can print a complete backup of itself is not going to happen in our lifetimes. They are the price they are because of high volumes, off-the-shelf components, injection moulded parts, etc. You cannot make a good 3d printer yourself for anywhere close to low cost of buying a complete one, even if you 3d print as many parts as possible yourself.
Just in the last year or so you can get a $600 printer with a heated print chamber and heated material box that keeps the material from absorbing moisture. This takes them to an extra level of "just working".
There's a small learning curve, and things like lifted prints occasionally happen, but in this post that is literally one sentence describing the problem and another sentence describing the solution. There's good community support.
Plastics not only dominate, metallic 3d printing is not close to being ready for home consumer use, it's $50k for an entry level machine and it still arguably requires a basic machine shop for finishing to be very useful.
But there is still a wall many people hit with 3d printing. When it comes time to design something and not merely print an available file, it's hard to know where to start if you don't already have hands-on experience using CAD or at least an introduction to carpentry or something similar. But this is true of most tools, be it woodworking tools, or visual studio. It takes experience to go from an idea in your head to a series of parts that will assemble together. There will be times, especially in the early days of tweaking dimensions and reprinting things.
In summary, if you want to design things yourself and count this as tinkering that you don't want to do, it's probably not going to be an enjoyable hobby. If you just want to print things like curtain rings and brackets to hold your screwdrivers on an ikea pegboard, it's virtually tinker-free these days.
I learned CAD specifically for 3D printing. It was SolveSpace that made it click, it's simple enough that you can see what any other package is trying to do.
Huh? 3D printers haven been cheap and reliable for a while now. You can get an Bambulab A1 mini for $200 USD and it’s a work horse. If things break, get a new part online from them and it’s usually plug and play. I’m north of a thousand hours on my P1S and it’s still going strong.
Every time there's an article on HN about 3D printing you have a flock of people who have obviously not looked at a 3D printer in 10 years come and spout absolute nonsense.
As you're saying, modern printers are simply click and forget. I haven't had any maintenance or fix to do on my P1S in 2 years.
Add DJI "revenge investing" in Elegoo and one has the Centauri Carbon which is almost impossibly inexpensive, and which triggered a series of price reductions which landed me a 4-colour 3D printer at an impulse-buy price over the Christmas holiday to add to the Centuari Carbon which churned through a roll of PLA left over from my setting up an Ordbot Quantum roughly a decade ago in less than a week.
Looking into getting an additional 3D printer so that I can have 9+ filaments loaded and not need to swap spools around....
Yeah, the irony is the CCP is a major holder in both companies.
I wish Prusa could work up a way to make a machine to directly compeat at the low-end, but as they have noted in blog posts --- they can't even source the bare components of the low-end printers even in very large quantities for what the now entry-level printers from China are selling for.
OpenSCAD! My personal favorite 3D modeling software. Started using it a decade ago since it made sense to me as a coder and I've been too stubborn to use anything else.
Cool stuff, you might already be using this but this roundedcube function has drastically improved the quality of my prints: https://gist.github.com/groovenectar/92174cb1c98c1089347e
Have you tried using "traditional" modelling tools?
I've been trying to learn how to model using Fusion 360. It's not clicking for me. Probably lack of practice. Wondering if OpenSCAD would be a better solution. Goal is to be able to design useful things for 3d printing..
It's probably the lazy way, but I found that after I understood just a few primitives (basics of sketching, extruding, constraints, and getting down some of the vocabulary) I can tell ChatGPT what I want to do (and often including screenshots) and it does a pretty spectacular job of filling in the blanks for me.
SketchUp always felt very intuitive to me. More so than Fusion360, which I think also suffers from being a clunky Electron app that’s trying to do too many things. I prefer FreeCAD to Fusion I think.
It depends what you are creating but for all I do Openscad (3d printed components in the lab) is very usable.
Anyone know what the monitor is in the blog author's home setup?
https://www.ntietz.com/blog/my-portable-ergonomic-setup/
Specifically this image: https://www.ntietz.com/processed_images/keyboard-3.e1480955e...
I can't find the info in any of the blog posts and can't get anything useful by zooming in on any of the images.
There are several monitors with aspect ratios close to square. I can't tell that exact monitor from the photo but there are several options on the market.
This LG model is popular: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor
Benq announced a new 3:2 monitor today: https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html
This might be it: https://www.eizo.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/
it's the LG DualUp
Link for faster results: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor
Could be an Eizo EV2730Q? Only square screen I know of.
This is obviously far more advanced, but I still think its a shame that the old style thinkpad dock didn't catch on more. For those who arent aware, the docks on old thinkpads used to double as a stand (and a lock too actually), originally connecting via a custom connector at the bottom of the laptop and then over dual usb-c slots.
I don't think this was limited to Thinkpads, where I worked heavily used laptops that had similar features but were Dell laptops.
The laptops had connections at the bottom that clicked into the docks/stands, which you could connect external screens/peripherals.
I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.
What I never saw in the wild but which was neat was the Powerbook Duo dock that pulled in the laptop like a front loading VCR tape, peak Sculley-period pointless complexity. It totally enclosed the laptop in a closed configuration, the idea being that you would put a monitor on top of the dock.
I had a dock for my Thinkpad X200. It was a chunk of plastic the same size as the laptop but it also had a bay for a disc drive (since the laptop didn't have one) and also had a pop-out connector for charging a second battery. Since it was the same footprint, it didn't take up any extra desk space and still allowed you to use the laptop's own ports too (except for power), it just made the laptop thicker. And you could even take the dock on the go if you really needed the extra I/O and disc drive. Pretty innovative design when docks at the time were just a big box at the rear of the assembly.
> I saw plenty in corporate environments but I think people mostly wanted to use a larger and better screen than what was available on a laptop at the time.
Certainly with some of the older Thinkpads (going back 10+ years or more) it was only possible to connect two external monitors via one of these docks. (Then USB-A monitor adapters started to appear...)
Now we just plug in a USB C or two into any manufacturer’s laptop or phone.
I like this way better. Despite the docks feeling cool as hell.
Excellent that people work on ergonomics, especially for moving away from the centenary typewriter model, but remember that 15’ of streching-exercise , call it yoga - taichi (anything with more than 1000 years :D) goes further than hours of the perfect static ergonomics
why not both
both is good
Definetely both! Thanks!
Very cool, nice effort and a good write-up!
If my math is right it seems the cost in material for the printed part is around $5 which seems ridiculously cheap for a custom-designed and adapted solution like this. Nice!
I wish the author had spent a few words extra to motivate why it needs to be in PETG filament for "heat resistance", is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory? I guess if it's in direct sunlight that might be exceeded, or perhaps if the laptop runs very hot?
To be fair, that's something you learn as soon as you start 3d printing. Anything that experiences repeated stress and have any chance of getting over room temperature during summer should not be printed in PLA. And near a computer heating up, it sure looks like it's going to be higher than room temperature. Also pictures in a train exposed to sunlight via glasses are another reason for concern.
Compared to PLA, PETG has higher temperature resistance (by about 20°C), isn't quite as susceptible to stress, doesn't cost more and isn't any harder to print on modern printers.
Some people in the 3d printing community have totally ditched PLA and use PETG as a baseline because of that.
I use ABS as a baseline, it holds up well, is easier to sand than most other materials, and is soluble in acetone which gives you some nice methods for smoothing layer lines as well as adhering parts together. It requires a heated chamber though.
ABS also emits potentially toxic, and certainly unpleasant, fumes, so you need a good carbon filter and ventilation system!
> is the regular PLA limit of ~55 degrees Celsius not okay for a desktop accessory?
Not the author, but PLA has a glass transition temperature of around 60 degrees, which in layman's terms is when it starts to melt. However, depending on the quality of the printing process, layers start separating/the print is pliable significantly lower, at around 35-40 degrees. This means that in countries where you get 30+ degree summers, PLA is not really suitable for anything which experiences any kind of stress. I would hazard a guess that the standing laptop can cause quite a bit of stress when the train starts/stops.
It should be mentioned that as far as I can tell pretty much no one is selling pure PLA filament. They all have additives, so who knows what the actual glass transition temperature is for any random given filament. This has been true for a while too. Pure PLA has some properly awful properties, among which is it having pretty much no elastic deformation. Any amount of force will introduce microscopic cracks. The various additives reduce these kinds of issues and are therefore not really optional.
I used ASA for something I intended to keep in my garage, I live in Florida so summer gets hot. ASA is way more heat resistant than both. My water boiler uses the heat within the garage as part of how it warms water so my garage doesnt get too hot but it can still feel pretty bad in there.
Glass transition temperatures are a little bit misleading, but from personal experience even leaving a PLA print in direct sunlight under even a little tension will cause it to warp in as little as 30 minutes if you aren't careful.
In addition to heat resistance, I find that PETG handles stress and resists stretching out way more than PLA
It becomes pretty weak even on a hot day in the sun and in a hot car can melt (not into a puddle but into al dente pasta).
Quite cool! I wonder if it doesn't wear down the laptop hinges to keep it at 180 degrees opened in an upright position. Could print some clamps for the sides to reduce strain if that's the case. Though that'd only work for laptops that actually _do_ open 180 degrees, according to TFA, not that many.
I have a "car desk", which is just a little expandable contraption you hang on the steering wheel, then you can place your laptop on it. I wouldn't call it ergonomic per se (the right external keyboard could probably fix that), but using it for about one hour per week, it works well and doesn't cause any issues I'm aware of. The driver seat is not a place where I previously could get any work done, so the bar is a bit low.
I believe there‘s likely less wear in that position than any other angle you might use it at.
Fair, didn't think that one through :D
Getting computer work done inside a vehicle is not easy if comfort is a requirement. Driving posture is not generalisable.
The ergonomy of most laptops (and keyboards in general) is poor. The modern laptop that is most ergonomic is the "2 in 1" design, which can be folded and used as a tablet.
For a programmer, an ergonomic keyboard with a trackball, connected to a 2-in-1 portable in tablet mode, might be easiest to assemble from common components for working during travel.
Well, with the steering wheel desk contraption, the monitor is placed in front of the wind shield, looking there is what the front seat is designed for, so that part is neat.
The keyboard however, is over the steering wheel, and while the arm placement is _similar_ to holding the wheel, it's a bit awkward, typing on a keyboard and operating a steering wheel are just quite different movements.
I _think_ it'd be ergonomic if I had some kind of keyboard and mouse/trackpad solution elevated on my lap, but the steering wheel gets in the way of a standard lap desk pillow thing. It'd have to be split.
For my one hour per week I haven't bothered yet. But I do think I could come up with something that'd have similar strain to just driving the car. Which, yeah, is probably not as ergonomic as a good desk setup to begin with.
> Getting computer work done inside a vehicle is not easy if comfort is a requirement. Driving posture is not generalisable.
I had a similar situation to the GP in that I only ever used my laptop in a car for an hour or two a week. In my case it was whilst one of my offspring was doing some sports related thing that I had to drive them to.
Most of the time I'd just take a book to read but sometimes I'd like to tinker with some programming thing in that time.
More often than not there was a nice cafe to sit in, or a nice bench somewhere in the sun, or a viewing gallery that meant I could watch rather than staring at my laptop. But not all venues were the same.
Some had nowhere to watch or nowhere to sit in the warm or dry, and nowhere suitable within a short drive, and so I'd default to sitting in the car experimenting with seat angles/etc to get into a position that wasn't awful.
Not owning my own car meant I was often driving something different each time which added to the fun. (RIP UK Zipcar.)
Yeah, driving kids to stuff is my use case too. I did the cafe thing for a while, but I didn't like the overhead of going there, ordering etc. For some reason I'm pretty productive in weird environments (trains, airplanes etc), so it's always a good opportunity to just get some stuff done I'd otherwise be distracted from. I'd probably sit outside in a bench if I was in a warmer, dryer climate.
Another option is to plug in AR/VR glasses, which solves the head tilting problem in trains. There are plenty of options around ~500 EUR/USD nowadays, which might be worth it for people with a daily commute.
AR glasses are perfect for this. Best if you can configure your laptop to give you a video signal while the lid is closed, which seems to be luck of the draw.
What’s your minimum resolution?
> I have a "car desk", which is just a little expandable contraption you hang on the steering wheel, then you can place your laptop on it.
I remember one of those on Amazon with like a thousand reviews that were all meme reviews about using it whilst driving. Cant find the exact one, but it was one of those many Amazon products full of joke reviews.
Hp has a lot of "convertible" laptops that open the full 360 if you want, usually with a touchsreen and two cameras so they can optionally be used as a tablet.
She should have a look at the Huawei Matebook. You can transform the screen into a big desktop sized screen. The only thing missing is a stand that brings it to an ergonomic height.
Or, she could sit down and think really hard about what she needs, come up with a neat technical solution, and share her thinking with a community that loves this stuff.
Glad she didn't go shopping.
In today's industrialized world you cannot come up with great technical solutions in isolation, ignoring commercial offerings. E.g. if you want a square or circular display and the industry only offers rectangular 16:9 and 4:3 then good luck building your own display ...
Work with what the industry offers.
I think you mean the Matebook Fold?
Surely the other missing thing is that it only runs a proprietary OS that nobody except Chinese companies develop apps for?
Or a Lenova Yogabook 9i?
That's what I want, except it has the wrong stylus tech and the keyboard lacks a Trackpoint....
My dream is where the the laptop itself has a similar design. Where when you open the laptop, the screen gets raised by about a foot. I can't really conceive of times when I need the laptop screen low, so one wouldn't need all the extra frame and parts needed in this mod.
I haven't conceived the exact mechanism for it, but it would be fun to try and do it for the Framework laptop.
Lenovo recently showed a laptop with a screen extending upwards:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkbook/thinkbook-p...
There's also the Asus Zenbook Duo that has two screens (one under the removable keyboard): https://www.asus.com/uk/laptops/for-home/zenbook/asus-zenboo...
The new one (full display under keyboard) is super interesting. I think they presented it at CES.
Previous one had I believe like a companion display occupying ~1/3 of the keyboard side which looked pretty neat. I wish frame.work had an option like that -- seems way more feasible than Lenovo's contraption with motors and flexible screen, though not sure if it would be possible given the space budget.
Sounds nice, but how do you keep it from falling over? The higher screen makes it top heavy, and the way screens are tilted back also makes it lopsided. It will want to fall backward, and it will be worse on surfaces that aren't flat and solid, like your lap.
I guess one approach is weight distribution. Make the screen as light as possible and shift as much weight forward (near the space bar) as possible. I'm just not sure if it would be enough. You could also go with outriggers (like a crane or boat), but that's ugly and doesn't help with the lap situation, which is where you need help the most.
I haven't thought of these issues at all. Weight will certainly need to be balanced. TFA was able to solve it, so I would imagine it is possible.
Or Apple can just allow macOS on iPads and all will be ok
Apple is doing the opposite, locking down macOS and make it more like iOS.
Do you want to be the one to update macOS applications to work with touch screens?
I want this to happen to bad
and will help reduce e-waste
For something like this, where you need durability, lightness, and heat resistance, you just can't be at ABS. If your printer can't print it, I think it's worth getting it printed somewhere else (after prototyping with other materials). Just the reduced weight alone will be worth it, let alone the fact that ABS is nigh indestructible.
PETG and ABS have similar stiffness. Both are fine at the temperatures involved here.
PETG is easier to print and deal with. ABS puts out some bad fumes that require actively exhausting the printer outside if you're trying to print in the house.
ABS is harder to print. Getting good layer adhesion is hard. It's more prone to warping. You want a heated chamber, ideally.
PETG is a fine choice for this. Going to ABS wouldn't change anything.
Also FYI, most people prefer ASA over ABS for printing because it's a similar material with better properties almost across the board.
PETG is a nice option w/o the same fumes and which has less of a need to vent outside.
PETG is nowhere near as light or heat-resistant as ABS, so it's a nice option only when you don't really care about the characteristics of what you're printing.
PETG has a higher density than ABS.
Its heat resistance is also not that far behind ABS.
ABS is harder to print well. Warping and layer adhesion problems could make it perform worse than PETG unless everything was tuned properly.
Yes, PETG has higher density, so it's much heavier for the same volume, exactly what the author doesn't want.
The heat resistance isn't far behind, but that still means it's behind.
Yes, it's hard to print well, but it's the best-performing material when you need light, durable material. That's the tradeoff.
> Yes, it's hard to print well, but it's the best-performing material when you need light, durable material. That's the tradeoff
It is not the "best performing material". There are several options which exceed its properties even further, but are increasingly expensive and harder to print.
Engineering is about being good enough. PETG is good enough in this case, and also cheap and easy.
Using PETG was a good choice. There's a spectrum of 3D printing materials. Not sure why you've chosen to die on the ABS hill. ABS isn't even in favor relative to ASA, FYI.
I'd cut off the numberpad of my laptop, center the touchpad and what's left of the keyboard. That would be my ergonomic setup.
That laptop served me well but it was a compromise between several factors. I think that at the time there were only an handful of 15" laptops without a numberpad and probably it's still like that. I eventually had to give up on that to get other features.
For my home laptop I ended up going for 13" specifically to avoid off centre / number pad layouts.
I'm sure there are plenty of better options if money is no object but it was mainly for light gaming, personal projects, video editing etc.
That's basically what I'm telling folks. My MBP16 is fantastic in that regard. I use the integrated touchpad only
while I aplaud the very well thought out and implimented design for a computer interface (it has very strong space ship vibes) there is a fundamental flaw in the premise, in that ergonomics implys some optimisation of the physical(cardio) effort(impact, strain) and comfort of useing a tool, which is impossible while hunched over a static device making very small partial body movements. So this set up will very likely optimise well for speed run missions,but the cost will actualy be greater pressure and strain on a persons body overall, and the only answer for that is to fully detach, relax, exercise, and rest between missions.
I've never seen ergonomics, or the subset of the field known as physical ergonomics defined this way. Can I ask where you found this interpretation?
That's a really interesting concept. Either once they open source their build (or I get over my innate laziness) I could use something like that for my build at home (more of a horizontal stand style thing, looking at the monitor) - my laptop's primarily my second monitor at home with attached KB.
More fuel to help convince my wife the printer isn't a waste of money xD
I guess for simple objects, 3D printing is already sufficiently useful.
I'd still like it to be much cheaper and simpler though. My own tinker days are over; I kind of want to depend on what is cheap and reliable; or at the least very reliable. I honestly can not warrant time investment when things don't work or break down in yet-another-component of my already way too many components heavy living conditions here. 3D printing should be so simple that one never has to think about it. Or print a surrogate 3D printer, to have as a backup device. But what about the materials? I guess plastics dominate.
"It just works" has become true for the top brands of consumer 3d printers in general. They are not simple devices (and neither is a 2D printer), but I don't think they are more complex than they need to be. It's just that they have been iterated enough that they are now mature. But a 3d printer that can print a complete backup of itself is not going to happen in our lifetimes. They are the price they are because of high volumes, off-the-shelf components, injection moulded parts, etc. You cannot make a good 3d printer yourself for anywhere close to low cost of buying a complete one, even if you 3d print as many parts as possible yourself.
Just in the last year or so you can get a $600 printer with a heated print chamber and heated material box that keeps the material from absorbing moisture. This takes them to an extra level of "just working".
There's a small learning curve, and things like lifted prints occasionally happen, but in this post that is literally one sentence describing the problem and another sentence describing the solution. There's good community support.
Plastics not only dominate, metallic 3d printing is not close to being ready for home consumer use, it's $50k for an entry level machine and it still arguably requires a basic machine shop for finishing to be very useful.
But there is still a wall many people hit with 3d printing. When it comes time to design something and not merely print an available file, it's hard to know where to start if you don't already have hands-on experience using CAD or at least an introduction to carpentry or something similar. But this is true of most tools, be it woodworking tools, or visual studio. It takes experience to go from an idea in your head to a series of parts that will assemble together. There will be times, especially in the early days of tweaking dimensions and reprinting things.
In summary, if you want to design things yourself and count this as tinkering that you don't want to do, it's probably not going to be an enjoyable hobby. If you just want to print things like curtain rings and brackets to hold your screwdrivers on an ikea pegboard, it's virtually tinker-free these days.
I learned CAD specifically for 3D printing. It was SolveSpace that made it click, it's simple enough that you can see what any other package is trying to do.
Huh? 3D printers haven been cheap and reliable for a while now. You can get an Bambulab A1 mini for $200 USD and it’s a work horse. If things break, get a new part online from them and it’s usually plug and play. I’m north of a thousand hours on my P1S and it’s still going strong.
Every time there's an article on HN about 3D printing you have a flock of people who have obviously not looked at a 3D printer in 10 years come and spout absolute nonsense.
As you're saying, modern printers are simply click and forget. I haven't had any maintenance or fix to do on my P1S in 2 years.
Add DJI "revenge investing" in Elegoo and one has the Centauri Carbon which is almost impossibly inexpensive, and which triggered a series of price reductions which landed me a 4-colour 3D printer at an impulse-buy price over the Christmas holiday to add to the Centuari Carbon which churned through a roll of PLA left over from my setting up an Ordbot Quantum roughly a decade ago in less than a week.
Looking into getting an additional 3D printer so that I can have 9+ filaments loaded and not need to swap spools around....
First time I heard about DJI investing in Elegoo. That’s super interesting
Yeah, the irony is the CCP is a major holder in both companies.
I wish Prusa could work up a way to make a machine to directly compeat at the low-end, but as they have noted in blog posts --- they can't even source the bare components of the low-end printers even in very large quantities for what the now entry-level printers from China are selling for.