kylebrodeur/microfactory-node-lora-v2
Microfactory Node: 3D Printer (LoRA v2)
I trained this LoRA to bake Chief Engineer O'Brien's judgment into Gemma 4 E4B. The live node still reads from the lesson ledger; this adapter is what happens when I try to put that ledger into the weights instead.
What it does
Give it a print job — material, geometry, room temperature and humidity — and it returns structured Advice JSON:
- Settings: nozzletemp, bedtemp, retractionmm, fanpct, firstlayerfan_pct
- Risk regions: where on the part, what risk, why, anchor hint
- Reasoning: what transfers from prior knowledge and why
Training
I kept rank low and epochs at one on purpose. v1 used r=16 for three epochs on deterministic targets and parroted the same settings for every input. This run sacrifices raw capacity for actual attention to the job.
Dataset
I generated the training set by driving the base model across a grid of 4 materials × 5 geometries × 3 temperatures × 3 humidities (train), with 2 temperatures × 2 humidities held out for eval. Each example is a chat-format pair: system prompt describing the job → structured Advice JSON response.
I kept targets noisy — temperature=0.7, top_p=0.95 — so the model cannot memorize a single template. v1 proved that deterministic targets and a high rank just produce a parrot. Noise forces judgment.
Usage
from peft import PeftModel
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("google/gemma-4-E4B-it")
base = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
"google/gemma-4-E4B-it",
dtype=torch.bfloat16,
device_map="auto"
)
tuned = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, "kylebrodeur/microfactory-node-lora-v2")
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Your prompt here"}]
inputs = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, return_tensors="pt", add_generation_prompt=True).to(tuned.device)
out = tuned.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=512, do_sample=True, temperature=0.7)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))Safety
This adapter proposes settings. It does not validate them. A deterministic Spine clamps every proposed value against hard material bounds before any printer sees them. The LoRA gives the opinion; the Spine has the veto.
Iteration history
v1 taught me what not to do.
Limitations
This adapter is narrow by design, and it will fail loudly outside that narrow band.
- Materials and geometries outside the training grid — The grid covered four materials and five geometries. Hand it an exotic filament or an unusual geometry and it will guess confidently. That guess is extrapolation, not recall.
- Humid PETG stringing — Small Gemmas can return perfectly valid JSON with bad physics. During early driving I saw a lesson recommend slightly higher nozzle temperature to fight humid-PETG stringing, when the correct move is lower. Schema validation does not catch that. The human reads the plan before it runs.
- Multi-tool or multi-material prints — These were not in the training grid. Expect invented tool-change behavior.
- ABS without an enclosure — The model may propose settings that ignore chamber drafts. The Spine clamps individual values, but it does not model enclosure physics.
- Mechanically risky combinations — Very small layer heights paired with aggressive retraction can pass JSON schema and still fail on the bed. That is why La Forge inspects and the human decides.
- No live sensor feedback — It predicts from precedent and stops. It does not see actual bed adhesion, layer curling, or nozzle state. The printer and the human close the loop.
- Single-epoch, low-rank LoRA — It has not deeply rewritten the base model. Ask it something far from 3D printing and it answers like base Gemma. That is intentional.
Try it via GGUF (Ollama / llama.cpp)
A quantized GGUF of this adapter, merged into the base model, is published as `kylebrodeur/microfactory-node-gguf` · `microfactory-node-v2.gguf` (5.1 GB, q4km) and on the public Ollama registry:
# Public Ollama registry (one-liner)
ollama run kylebrodeur/microfactory-node-v2
# Direct from HF Hub (template/system/params auto-applied)
ollama run hf.co/kylebrodeur/microfactory-node-gguf:microfactory-node-v2.ggufSee the full publishing runbook for the merge → quantize → upload pipeline and the QAT-trained v3 sibling (`microfactory-node-lora-v3-qat`).
License
This adapter inherits the Gemma license from its base model.
