• 32 Posts
  • 114 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • 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.


  • LED joysticks that can select from over 16 million color options. This might not be practical, considering only about 25 different color settings would have been sufficient.

    So the RGB leds come with 256 levels of brightness for each color. Don’t worry, article-writer, the company wasted zero extra effort on this “feature.”

    I consider getting one of these things every once in a while, but then I remember that I’ve pulled my hacked PSP out of the drawer like three times in the last ten years, and I shrug and move on. It’s generally more fun for me to plug a USB controller into my computer for retrogaming.











  • 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.




  • Americans absolutely have to own it, and many of us try to. America has consistently made awful decisions regarding race.

    The point is more that white Europeans are not special, and much of the perceived enlightenment from Europe is either top-down messaging from socially unassailable elites, or from societies that are homogenous enough that the economically insecure don’t (yet) blame their struggles on the tiny number of visible minorities in their community.

    Americans who “whatabout” any criticism from an imperfect messenger are probably not acting in good faith, but the inverse is worth considering as well.