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Comment by s1mon

3 days ago

As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.

I’m just a hobbyist 3D user but I feel like I have good experience, been using Autodesk Inventor then Fusion since early high school…

I saw the level of detail in the model and am shocked. If this is truly their first experience with CAD/CAM they are a natural.

For example - here’s my home built camera. It’s massively more simplistic: https://blog.maxg.io/phase-one-swc/

  • BTW, if you want to design some models for 3D printing but the only thing you know to do is to code, you can use OpenSCAD & program the obejcrs into existence:

    https://openscad.org/

    Also recommend using the BOSL2 library with OpenSCAD - it turnes an already very powerful tool into something insane:

    https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2

    • Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing. I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).

      I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.

      I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.

      LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.

    • Just got a 3D printer and was curious what the best practice was for generating objects in code and then outputting to a printer.

      Thanks for sharing!

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Agreed, both the pcb and 3d design was very well done. I'd love to do something similar (on a smaller camera lol)