First, some context. My eldest child has been vending at a local growers and crafters market for a couple of years (they do lapidary and silversmithing.) Since we've gotten the cargo bikes they have gotten nearly as obsessed as I have.
So, the goal: build a trailer that lets them get to & from market by bike.
Now, I don't want to jump straight to the full thing. I want to make a couple junker trailers to work on my welding, learn #openscad, and get a feel for things.
In particular, I want to learn enough to get some sense of how to know what a safe load is for a given build. I can find info on tube sizing & thickness for traditional diamond frame building, but not so much for trailers.
#3Dprinting people: how do you do #3Dmodelling? I've been using #tinkercad and it's great for simple stuff but I feel like I'm already outgrowing it. What software should I learn? I'm considering #FreeCAD and #Fusion360 but I'm open to other suggestions. I don't want a ridiculous learning curve because I'm just doing hobbyist stuff, but I want something a bit more powerful that I'm less likely to hit the limits of.
Over the past few days, I made a design using the Part Design workbench in #FreeCAD. Then I discovered that I really wanted to make an SVG export. I ended up having to do a lot of work on the exported SVG to make it usable.
I've been playing with it a lot more as I've been learning, and realize that if I'd used the Draft workbench, I could have made this a lot easier. It doesn't make much sense now to start over, except that maybe redesigning something I've already designed is a good way to learn a new workflow, since I'm not having to make design decisions along the way.
@nobodyinperson#FreeCAD workbenches are sets of related tools that work together to create various kinds of objects. The interface is modal, and the workbench selects the mode.
Part Design is an opinionated, streamlined workflow that integrates most of what you need to make individual bodies, which might then be combined into compound Parts or Assemblies. The assumptions it makes that allow it to streamline the workflow, which can reduce implementation effort, are also constraints that make it limited in purpose. These aren't really bugs, they are streamlining. A classic example constraint here is that every operation acting on a Part Design Body must continue to be one contiguous body. You could not first model a bunch of separate pieces, and then add a feature that ties them all together into a single body as a later operation.
Using Sketcher / Draft / Part, by contrast, is a general, less opinionated, less streamlined workflow. It's a lot more like a GUI version of working in #OpenSCAD. Here, you could design many different pieces, then use boolean operations to combine them into a single manifold object. (Incidentally, you can even literally write OpenSCAD code; with some exceptions, FreeCAD can run OpenSCAD code as part of making models.)
These workbenches aren't exclusive. You can do a lot of mix-and-match. You can make a Part in the Sketcher / Draft / Part workflow, then use it as a base feature in Part Design, and do normal Part Design operations on top of that base feature. You can use Draft to create a ShapeString (text), then drop it into a Part Design Body and use it for Part Design operations.
Ultimately, they are just different sets of partially-overlapping tools. It's not so much "what workbench everybody uses" but more learning different workflows with different costs and benefits, which happen to use different workbenches. It's just different approaches to design.
3D Design tool for needy kids, the search continues.
We have old laptops to loan out to kids from poor backgrounds. They don't have internet. 2D design we have covered with #inkscape, and the laptops run #linux well (but not Windows). What I need is a 3D design program. Suggestions welcome.
If you want to teach programming or geometry at the same you could use #OpenSCAD (which would be amazing!), but kids might find it frustrating otherwise.
Heh - don't believe the hype about how fast the #Apple M2 Pro CPU is. For single-core numeric grunt, my about-to-be-retired i7-4790K box (built on an extreme budget in 2016 from 2014 parts) is still handily faster than this 1 week old Mac14,12 Mac Mini.
For example, one of my typical #OpenSCAD models renders in 2' 27" on the i7, but takes 2' 54" on the Mac Mini. That's a handy 18% faster on the CPU that Intel stopped making in 2017.
Wow, this offset(delta=0.001) trick just saved me a ton of time when importing problematic SVG files into OpenSCAD. Hoping this works for the majority of files with issues.
Building literal future perspectives with #OpenSCAD. 👌
I think I'm pretty much done with planning. Still have to refactor the code a bit so it spits out parts lists, but that's a problem for future-phryk. 🙃
Black are structural components, orange are OSB boards, purple are speakers, bright green are a planned 40" display and 19" rack, blue are the (existing) desk and the (planned) movable workbench and the pale green "L" on the platform is the yet-to-be-designed couch.
Added a 3D printer to the shop this week. Prussa MK3S, acquired second hand from a fellow who didn't successfully assemble the kit. It's now running beautifully. First useful items the next day. A bushing for my 5C drawbar which pulled 2 10ths out of my run out, and a press-on handle for the tube. Even just press-fit it provides enough traction to hold the work well. Both designed in #openscad. #machining#3dprinting#lathe
New plotter design is nearly done. This will be an H belt design with the parts running on 2020 & 2040 V slot extrusion
I've completed all of the design (in #openSCAD), but I still have more parts to print and testing to do before I'll share the design; it will be on #printables at some point. It should do A3 and it might scale up to A2, but I'm a little concerned about stiffness and racking in the cross arm
Once I worked out the orientation (and I only crashed into the edges of travel once) it was easy to configure. It's not complete because I haven't sorted cable management, most seriously I don't have a servo cable guide yet but that will come
After a very long break, I returned to my first hobby: electronics. Made a custom Micro USB cable with low profile boots for our game console project. #HobbyElectronics#OpenSCAD#Creality
Still gotta add a couple more reasonable echos so I get a usable parts list as output, but I now have an #openSCAD module I can just throw measurements into and get the frame of a load-bearing, free-standing platform as output. 🙂
I'm currently deciding whether to do a design in #OpenSCAD or #FreeCAD or maybe some of both?
I may convert an old 12-chord autoharp from my wife's family into a 21-chord unit by making narrow chord bars. If I do that, I'd like to try #3DPrinting the chord bars with integral TPU dampers, programmatically generated.
Button rank: Which of three rows should the button go on?
Notes: Which notes are in the chord?
Strings: Note names of every string, along with their relative station.
Name: Chord name printed into the bar.
Then I could remove from the model sections of the TPU damper part of the bar for every string corresponding with a note named in the list of notes for a particular damper, so that it doesn't damp the notes in that cord.
This feels programmatic, and OpenSCAD would be a rational choice. I know that one can program macros for FreeCAD, but it's harder to make FreeCAD macros part of a project instead of part of an installation as far as I know. On the other hand, I'd love to generate STEP files that express more semantics, rather than STL files, which argues again for FreeCAD. Maybe I could find a way to drive this from a spreadsheet in FreeCAD instead of with code. 🤔
Or maybe we should stick to the 12-chord version for now until we decide this is too limiting. 😀
@mcdanlj
You can open #OpenSCAD files with FreeCAD 's OpenSCAD Workbench and then do what ever you like (e. g. export as STEP) w/ the objects generated.
When I pull this code back into the main file, I'll have to remember to put a stopping condition on the distance between the original polygon's center and the subdivision's center. If they're too close, then stop.
Next up, having a branch grow towards the center of polygon.