No courses on the 3D printing side really — I think I did go through one of the Prusa ones after getting enough free "meters" on Printables but I don't remember it telling me much I hadn't already learned. There is a blog post that has been posted here before that really covers almost everything important about design for 3D printing:
I really just ADHD'd the hell out of it, I suspect [0], and absorbed everything I read. I was in financial difficulty and things were expensive so it took me a couple of years to get me from "I'd like a 3D printer" to "this 3D printer is affordable but viable and even if I never learn design there are plenty of tools I can make with it that will save me money".
In that time I read everything I could about what I'd need to learn, convinced myself that I was not so clumsy and inept I couldn't maintain a printer. These days printers don't need so much mechanical knowledge to get started.
On the CAD side of things, I learned a bit of OpenSCAD, found it basically helpful to make one simple thing but also frustrating and disappointing, joined really useful non-public Facebook groups where people were working on similar things, decided to get properly into FreeCAD, and dug in with the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube (which actually are now organised into a course structure, but weren't really then).
The thing that motivated me mostly was having simple real things I wanted to make for a project I was working on (though my brain being what it is, I still haven't got round to that exact project...)
If you have a need for a thing you would like, and you're able to break it down into simpler projects, particularly if they are things you might find useful along the way, it's not very difficult to find the motivation to learn these two things.
The positive feedback loop is so strong, and 3D printing is such a concrete way to learn CAD and design because you get to hold your design so quickly: I designed this thing in CAD, I printed this thing, wow it works but I could improve this, I need to learn this new thing in CAD, I printed it, it works but… etc.
Pretty soon you find yourself staring at some real world object on your desk and modelling it in CAD for fun.
The really interesting thing is when you begin to understand that the design of things is fundamentally influenced by the tooling used to make them. When you grasp how 3D printing and injection moulding differ, for example, and start designing your own items with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, rather than just to look like an existing plastic part which was moulded, then you're really getting there.
[0] hilariously I am still not formally diagnosed. Though I'm pretty sure I could be diagnosed just based on these two comments.
Thanks so much. Going through some of these motions... installed OpenSCAD, made something basic which was easy. But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system. Last month I looked on Udemy and did part of Mango Jelly's course. It's a good one, I actually found out later that he has a bunch of stuff on YouTube.
I'm still reading the rest of this and your other comment, thanks so much. Inspirational.
> But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system.
The problem is exactly that, yes. If you want a simple shape and maybe to stick a thread on it (one of the first things I printed) then OpenSCAD has the basics and there are really interesting libraries.
But if you get into something complex, you end up building your own scheme and then constantly gardening it. The complexity never gets truly abstracted away because you can never truly work in a higher order way.
FreeCAD is a long way from perfect, but what it is, that you need, is a space where you can reason about geometry in a way that lets you learn. And if you want code-CAD, you can do it with python macros, or limited bits of OpenSCAD in that workbench, or you can use CadQuery/Build123D and generate STEP files for some of it, and then build on those.
I would still say I don't know CAD anywhere near as well as I'd like to. But I know where to start, I've learned the terminology, and I am able to think in CAD in a way I never expected to.
FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).
I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.
But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.
There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.
> Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines
I had to laugh out loud. I couldn't imagine such a system, that wouldn't be POSIX compliant. So I looked it up, and indeed, it's entirely possible. Debian doesn't necessarily include it.
Yup, me too. What’s funny is that your slashdot account can make friends (or enemies!) with other accounts, and there’s a limit of 200. Sometimes I spot comments of friends I made like 20 years ago.
I did a lot of iOS development. The layout of elements was done with Auto Layout, and I really had the hang of it. It was replaced by how SwiftUI does it, and I knew it would take me a couple of weeks to get the hang of it.
I often felt what I'd call frustration. Lots of times, I knew I could easily express solutions in the old framework. But I knew I needed to learn the new one.
It can definitely be frustration, as you keep re-assessing whether it's really worth switching to SwiftUI, and getting upset that something isn't as easy as it was the previous way, for you. I've definitely started switching to a new library and then ultimately stopped because it was too frustrating. What I thought was going to be a better library for me, wasn't. Other times I've learned a new library and felt mostly delight, as I'd discover it was set up in ways that solved all my old problems, and I could see how much time it was going to save me in the future.
Also, you can feel frustration on a daily scale, without feeling frustrated on a larger scale. E.g. you know you want to learn SwiftUI, but today you're running into roadblocks with it, and you need to figure out whether to step back from it today and come back to it tomorrow, refreshed and having slept on it.
If there's anything frustration can be confused with, it's often resentment. E.g. when switching to SwiftUI doesn't actually help you achieve any goals of your own in any direct way, and you feel like Apple is creating busywork with some arbitrary deprecation or migration.
Often, you may feel both -- resentful that Apple is forcing you to learn something new, and frustration that learning the new technology is harder than you'd expected, or not providing the expected benefits, and therefore possibly not worth it at all, or at least not worth it today.
I'm an avoid motorcyclist and have followed additional safety courses. These placed 90% of all accidents in cities. What do you mean by city driving being the easiest?
In a city, you'll never have to worry about the "road" you're supposed to follow being a dirt track that barely looks different than the muddy fields on either side.
In a city (especially in SoCal and the American Southwest, which is, AIUI, where all the self-driving cars are today), you can be nearly certain that the various mapping companies have accurately plotted the roads and destinations, and if you're trying to get to a popular Finger Lakes winery, you won't be directed down a limited-use seasonal road that's entirely covered in ice.
In a city, you can be pretty well guaranteed that there are speed limit signs anywhere the speed limit actually changes.
Just off the top of my head, as someone who's lived 40 years in the rural Northeast.
I have a Steam Deck and it’s definitely more janky than for example an Xbox. It’s not bad! But do not expect the same level of polish. Small example, there’s often a need to dial back the graphics quality. Or the text is too small. Or the screen recording is a hassle.
I’d be hard pressed to call the Xbox UX “polished” in any way, but I do get what you mean. Though as long as it allows me to play my games with as much ease as the games themselves will allow, then I’m good—I just do not want to be bothered with the “PC” part of this equation.
I don't know if it's fair to compare a Deck to a proper full-sized console - especially things like font size being too small, which of course is likely to happen more on a handheld.
