Well that sucks: 3D printing a mounting bracket to stow a third party turbo head on a Miele S2130 vacuum

So, my mum's got the Thermomix bug. So much so, she's even bought the German mob's vacuum cleaner. Her old Dyson has been relegated to the shed where Dad uses it around his workbench, and I picked up her old Miele.

Now, at some point, she'd gotten a third party turbo head for the Miele. The first one didn't work so well, but the second one does. It's a bit noisy, but functional. That said, because it's a third party head, it doesn't have the usual hook the Miele heads have. This means that when you are inbetween vacuuming things, you can't stand the wand up in the back of the vacuum, and instead have to rest it up against the wall, or drop it on the floor.

Having recently bought the Aldi Cocoon Create Model Maker, and only printed little models and puzzles to date, I had an idea about something practical. What if I could design a hook that would strap to the third party turbo head, allowing it to hook into the back of the vacuum?

Speaking GCode directly to your 3D printer in Linux when it requires a custom baud rate

I recently impulse bought a 3D printer from Aldi. The Cocoon Create Model Maker HE170707. It's a rebrand of the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Mini. I'm slowly learning how to use it, and how to interact with it.

To date, I've been slicing in Cura and then exporting to SD card, then loading that into the printer, but today I started playing around with sending GCode directly to the printer. Eventually I want to update the version of Marlin it's running, but before I do that, I want to see what settings/version etc. the printer is running.

Cura can see the printer, and can send it basic requests - but it won't show me the printer's responses to particular GCodes, which I want to see. The inbuilt USB to serial adapter the printer uses is locked at 250,000 baud and this isn't supported by minicom.

I did some Googling, and in the end, I found out that I could instead use picocom. It's a very simple, cut down serial terminal package.

WARNING: Don't send commands to your printer if you don't know what they do. Read the instructions first. You change things at your own risk!