So far it's looking like all the conditions I need to meet to get the voltage checker implemented are coming along nicely. I have the board being fabricated and already have all of the parts in hand. I breadboarded the circuits and they are all functioning nicely and the driver is coming along pretty well.

One thing I'm looking at exploring in the near future is FPGAs because with the price coming down, I feel they are going to start becoming more popular soon. I used to just love designing logic using gates when I was a teenager and in fact created a programmable robotic arm based on an EEPROM to store the data and TTL gates. It probably had about 25 chips on the board including LED display drivers and such. I have disassembled it since then because my skills have improved a lot, but I do still have some pictures of it. I mention this because I may start a project using one if I think of a great use such as building one of my old circuits I designed with many gates, but never got around to making.

I decided to give my 3D printer another try. I started by literally cleaning off the dust and replacing the heated bed screws with some screw knobs I got off Amazon that were much easier to adjust. This had been one of my annoyances with the printer since the beginning. I then leveled the bed, but realized I shouldn't have done it while it was hot because the screws got hot too, so I used some pliers and it was pretty easy.. After that I tried a print, but no luck. After some more time uninstalling software from the computer because it was so slow, I found the culprit to be Synergy. I'm not sure which version it was because I purchased the newer one, but it's possible I never updated it.

I installed Ultimaker Cura and while trying to copy some settings from slic3r, I noticed it was set to 3mm filament which would cause under-extrusion. I flipped it back to 1.75 and gave it another go and this time just a little too much extrusion. I can work with that. I measured and adjusted the extrusion steps in the firmware and tried again and it turned out great. It actually makes me a little teary because I was really getting to the point where I was really feeling limited by not having a working 3D printer and I could tell it was so close to being in my grasp.

On a similar note, it appears an updated version of the marlin firmware was released about a week ago, so I'll have to compare settings when I have a good hour and plug them in and update it.