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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.

    I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).

    Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.




  • Which workbench do you mean? Are you okay with basic sketch/extrude, part design works well enough, but as you say constraints can be a pain. Tbh just assume you’re working with the points for the most part - polylines work fine for slightly more complicated shapes.

    My “formal” CAD training was Dassault Systeme’s CATIA V5 training manual, so I tend to default back to that. For basic geometries, use basic polygon shapes/combinations of those, for anything more complex I tend to use a polyline and sketch out a rough shape, then fully constrain to the dimension I need. If the geometry goes all to hell then stop and just use the mouse to grab a point and pull it back to where it should be before you go any further and then constrain it. (My sketches tend to be noisy with constraints just FYI).

    Mangojelly’s guides on YouTube will get you pretty far (though he doesn’t constrain as much as I personally would, I suspect this is just because he’s demoing techniques rather than giving best practice at all times. he knows the software/techniques super well and is great at explaining it).

    Based on Mango’s recent video there are a ton of enhancements for sketcher constraints on the latest dev branch, so hopefully they’ll be on main soon too.

    If it’s assembly constraints, the only assembly workbench I’ve used is assembly3 - it works kind of how you’d expect an assembly workbench to work, but you do need to hold its hand a bit. I’ve gotten into the habit of, import as step, rename part, add to list of parts, use linear translation with the mouse to get the part roughly where it needs to be and then start applying constraints to put it where I want it.



  • Not trying to pick a beef with Steve at all, very much respect his work. Or you for that matter. The question here is about workhorse PCs not gaming PCs. Gaming is a niche. Dell will absolutely sell you parts, or eBay or third party resellers. You’ve mentioned in your own post you can absolutely upgrade the GPU and PSU with standard consumer parts (even in a custom build you’d need cables specific to your modular power supply), even CPUs are upgradable within limits (again, with the exception of modern Ryzen when have you been able to upgrade more than 1 generation of CPU for a given socket?)

    I’ll 100% agree Dell don’t conform to typical consumer standard parts that custom/small run builders use in a lot of cases, but to say they’re not upgradable or repairable just isn’t true. If someone was complaining their BMW gearbox wouldn’t bolt onto their ford engine without some modification they’d struggle to find anyone who finds that a remotely strange situation.



  • All respect to Steve, but in this regard he’s wrong - the parts might be proprietary in a lot of regards, but these machines are repairable af, they’re just not aimed at the average consumer. Local site support will rock up to your desk and stick a new display adapter in for some extra monitors or take them away and swap out broken parts and have the same PC on your desk next day. Big enterprises buy these machines precisely because they’re repairable and upgradable and getting stock typically isn’t an issue.