Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 week agoThanks, yeah, I like the idea of an enclosed printer so that I can print outdoors and not get my living room full of fumes. Is that a reasonable thing to want to do?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
On a warm and dry day? Maybe?
But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren’t strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.
As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent… many that you print yourself.
It isn’t the same as a proper exhaust system but… ain’t nobody doing that.
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Hmm, ok, so much for that idea. I had hoped it wouldn’t depend much on ambient temperature and humidity. Thanks.
Do you recommend any FOSS CAD software for designing parts? I’ve played with OpenSCAD a bit and maybe that suffices, but I wonder what else there is.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.
Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.
OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.
solrize@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Thanks, yeah, my friends use Fusion 360. I don’t have a working Windows machine right now but maybe I can set something up or run under Wine.
Yeah right now what I want to do is duplicate a shower door guide which is a 3 inch plastic part with some specific grooves and a screw hole. It’s incredibly hard to find the right one online or tell that it’s right. Home Depot doesn’t even have that kind of thing in their store any more. I do at least have a reasonably intact one that I can measure with a caliper.
Yikes, a 28 minute video, but I guess I’ll watch it during some downtime at some point. Thanks again.