I suppose there’s an element of preference as well. If !myinterest@instance exists and is limping along with 80 subscribers and a post once a month, is that less discouraging? Maybe 300 subs and a post every other day is adequate? At the risk of scope creep, maybe the answer lies in more data and options to account for the preferences of those new to the Fediverse. I concede I don’t have answers though, and I’m obviously putting less work into it than you are.

Fight the good fight, friend. I need more posts about old TV shows and niche hobbies, so we just need more decent people, however they arrive. :-)

IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?

Sub : Community

• askreddit : asklemmy
• amitheasshole : asklemmy
• explainlikeimfive : asklemmy
• gaming : gaming
• pcmasterrace : gaming
• minecraft : gaming
• etc, etc.

Still Tuesday here, but I’ll jump in. Working on the CAD file for the 3D printed case of my next mechanical keyboard. For this one, I actually designed a super primitive PCB instead of hand-wiring all the keys, and it’s on its way from China. I’ll still need to wire the Raspberry Pi Pico myself, since I wanted to start by dipping my toe in to see if I could route the switches’ matrix and the mounting holes for the diodes I’ll need.

Yup. At this point, “locally installed, reliable, parametric modeling on Linux” = “FreeCAD, including Ondsel, and SolveSpace”. That’s it. Well, there’s code-to-CAD as well, which obviously retains parametric history, but goes about it very differently than a design tree.

For non-parametric modeling, BricsCAD and Plasticity enter the discussion. For parametric on the web, OnShape works very well but I hate their licensing scheme and the huge doughnut hole in their pricing model.

I think the guide I did at !cad@lemmy.world is still in pretty decent shape.

I actually settled on Alibre Design. Permanent license at half the cost of a year of OnShape for a slightly dated but very capable parametric modeler, and the free trial made Parametric modeling click for me in a way FreeCAD didn’t. It comes with a renderer of a similar class, though I haven’t tried that yet. Changing colors of parts has been enough for my needs.

FreeCAD has apparently fixed the topological naming issue, one of the big things that was keeping them so far behind the commercial suites. It’s already in the weekly builds, along with several other enhancements pioneered in the Realthunder fork, including UI enhancements and a default Assembly workbench. Version 1 is going to come out in the late summer or early fall, I think. Ondsel is FreeCAD but they have some venture funding to pay developers to work on the main project and to bolt-on an optional paid PDM system (download from their GitHub and you don’t have to sign up for anything). I had some crashing issues on both Windows and Linux when trying to import DXF files into either flavor, and as you say, there’s still that learning curve, but I can get a part done in it now if I need to.

SolveSpace can do some nice things and will teach you good techniques.

I had the same issues as you with OnShape, particularly since their free licensing is very weird, and in the worst case it implies that while YOU must use your designs non-commercially, no one else is similarly bound. It’s sloppy legal drafting, and that annoys the little black kernel of lawyerness still sunk down in my heart. Fusion has become the poster child for free feature erosion and price hikes.

BricsCAD Shape is a basically an AutoCAD clone warped and twisted to act like SketchUp, and it works on Linux. It’s meant to be the tease to get people into their full-suite ecosystem, but I couldn’t find any legal limitations on the free version.

Depending on what it is you’re scanning, the people mentioning Blender may have a good point.

Shapr3D at $300/year might also be a good option.

Finally, for your particular workflow, Plasticity at $150 permanent license may hit the exact sweet spot. Definitely try their free trial. Some of the other programs I tried are also interesting.

Our new zojirushi rice cooker plays songs. It’s weird and makes me wonder why the kitchen sounds like the laundry room.

Finished up my last hand wired keyboard the other day, and also the RPi powered Pokédex my daughter had wanted me to finish for her for quite a while.

It’s a crude little thing, especially the 3D printing — it was this project that convinced me I had to move on from TinkerCAD — but the software (not mine) works perfectly, the battery is big enough to power the Pi and she’s fond of it.

Bubblegum. 😞

The logistics of this confound me more than the childish decision-making.

Rogue One is an okay war movie in Star Wars cosplay. It’s overrated, IMHO, though it’s better than the prequels or TROS.

lol

Did you, though?

You could also probably use Inkscape to get DXF files for both sides of the coin, making sure the size is right and that the path accommodates the width of your letters/strokes. Then, hypothetically, you should be able to import the files as drafts and then convert them to sketches with the press of a button (in reality, this crashes FreeCAD for me lately, but it could be a quirk of my setup). If you’ve already modeled the coin itself and use the new sketches to pocket into the existing solid, IIRC it should work okay. FreeCAD would not extrude a non-contiguous sketch into multiple solids, but I think it’s fine as long as the end result is still a single body.

She had a great day, except for tripping in the mud, and according to her, theory #1 was closer to the truth. A Floridaman knows, though. She has Gatorade running through her veins whether she likes it or not. 🤣

Excellent, reader cases always seem to cost way more than they should, espeically with how fragile they are.

Although, you should know you’re supposed to move over to another room to pretend your workspace is cleaner than workspaces ever are, LOL. Then, what are we rocking for the keyboard?

The nozzle is 2.4mm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kMwPnydkk

The nozzle itself is 2.4mm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kMwPnydkk

First, a little plug for !cad@lemmy.world because more traffic is welcome. The pinned post there is a fairly comprehensive list of viable 3D mechanical CAD suites. I’m a rank amateur with actual designing, but if you want someone to drone on at length about their business models and licensing terms, I’m your guy. (short version: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool, and fuck you.”)

Now then… I also came from TinkerCAD, and I actually think the grouping and alignment tools lifted from vector art programs are super intuitive, and they almost provide a sort of design history if you use them right, but there are so many things that can’t be done quickly in TinkerCAD, and Autodesk also nerfs it for reasons that are commercially sensible but not technically necessary.

Almost all parametric tools , and also most “grown up” (for lack of a better term) direct modeling tools can do the Boolean addition and subtraction that is at the heart of TinkerCAD’s “solids’n’holes” paradigm, often in a couple of different ways. For instance, to make your orange part there, I’d draw a 2D silhouette of the vertical view, then extrude (or “pad” or “pull”) to the height. Then I’d draw on that top surface, possibly with a reference plane set up first to avoid having the model too far up its own ass (i.e. the toponaming issue), making the shape that needs to be extracted. Then you can cut or extrude down into your solid. Most tools will know what you mean, but some might make you do use a distionct tool or manually do the boolean “difference”. You can then do the same with your hex grid, setting up a new sketch for that. Later, if (for instance) you wanted to have 12 holes or bigger holes, you’d just edit the one sketch. Your red part would be similar, but doing the back of it would involve extruding out from the new sketch. The power of sketch and extrude is, apart from the ease of implementing a parametric history, doing several things at one that would each have to be a manual hole in TinkerCAD.

Finally, there’s the simple matter of fillets and chamfers, which TinkerCAD doesn’t support as an independent function. Manually adding them gets tiresome real quick and is the “killer feature” that made me realize I needed to move on. Other tools like loft sealed the deal. TinkerCAD is capable of some really interesting parts, but not efficiently.

I’m guessing vase mode is your friend with a nozzle wider than your filament.

You mean the thing for hosting galleries because Lemmy can’t do that yet and Imgur won’t work on Mobile without an app? Yes.

As a social network? No, and even when I tried it wouldn’t let me switch my post’s visibility from unlisted to public, so I shrugged and used it as an image host as I’d originally intended.

Don’t worry about it. If the room was big enough, many of them didn’t see you, and half of the ones you did probably thought it was just a flex to show your annoyance with being dragged into a lunchtime meeting. In any case, 95% of people would laugh it off and forget it, and the other 5% are probably well within the “meet an asshole everyday” crowd. With the camera on, they at least know you were there in front of your computer. My coworkers might not always be able to say the same thing about me on some of my larger calls where I’m just there so our org “has presence.”