This blog post by ‘RepRapper’ nop head has it all. First, someone mentions something that piques your interest. Then, you set about with a question, a thesis: “to quantify the cooling effectiveness of various fan and duct combinations by sampling the airflow at a grid of positions around the nozzle.” And ultimately develop solutions to investigate your question, while learning new software along the way, incorporating hardware that is otherwise laying around, and even make modifications to hardware to suit your design needs (removing that jumper from the FT232RL FTDI board was simple and effective). Oh and throw in a Futurama reference for fun, because you can! Lastly, share and publish your results with a larger community of like-minded makers to help everyone’s understanding of the tech and its potential. Awesome.

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